Dispatches From Babyville

Like most two-year-olds, my daughter cannot abide winter gear. I can’t know for sure why hats and mittens are so anathema to her, though I can speculate. From her reaction’s epic proportions, I surmise the stakes are pretty high, so maybe it’s an object permanence issue and she believes that when she puts the mittens on, her hands cease to exist.  Or it could be that the mittens prevent her from cramming Goldfish into her mouth like it’s closing time at the cheddar cracker bar. Whatever the reason, my daughter, affectionately known in these parts as Terza, will not keep hats and mittens on. Not if I sing like Elmo, not if I ply her with cookies. Not for any reason.

For a while I made the rookie mistake of believing that I could solve the problem by buying the right stuff. I tried hats that velcro under the chin and hats with long yarn braids on the sides that you can tie in Houdini-proof knots and hats with bear ears and bunny ears and cat ears. I even tried a rainbow-colored, fleece jester hat that virtually screams, “THIS IS FUN! THE OPPOSITE OF TORTURE!” You can guess what my success rate was, based on the number of capital letters I just used.

Fail. Total fail.

I think her record time for keeping a hat on was about thirty seconds. Ditto with the mittens. She can’t manage to insert a spoonful of yogurt directly into her mouth half the time but man, can she get around knots.

So, we tried collaborative problem-solving. I ended up doing most of the heavy lifting, outlining the problem, proposing possible reasons why this problem existed (maybe the hat is too tight and constricting?), summing up her needs (to feel comfortable) and mine (to protect her from frostbite) and possible solutions (use a hood in lieu of a hat!), Her contribution? The word “No” and it’s many variations, including, “No I WON’T!” and “I no LIKE IT!” and even “No way Jose!”

Now, an aversion to winter gear is all very well and good when it’s forty degrees or thirty degrees, or hell, even twenty degrees. But when the temperatures get into the single digits, it’s a different story. When it gets so cold that scientists coin special phrases to describe the weather–phrases that involve the noun “vortex”—I can’t tolerate Terza’s intolerance of winter gear. Not when she and I have a daily drop-off walk that takes twenty minutes. We do more trekking than the Greely expedition, and if I learned anything from watching that harrowing documentary, it’s: if you don’t come prepared to the Arctic, you’ll all end up eating each other.
“Just wait until she gets cold enough,” everyone likes to say, “She’ll put those hat and gloves on then.”

It is sound reasoning, to be sure. Logical. It is however, utter horse-crap, at least in my daughter’s case. I know because I tested the theory. The temperature dropped lower and lower, until it was hovering at five degrees, just above zero, and I told myself, “Now, we will hit her breaking point, She’ll be so cold, she’ll immediately beg for hat and mittens.” We walked outside, and even though I was wearing leather gloves and a wool hat with a down hood pulled up over my head, my hands and ears went numb within a minute.

Not only would Terza not wear her mittens, she baited me into shedding my gloves every two blocks so that I could attempt to yank hers back on again. As soon as I’d put my gloves back on and secure the wind cover onto the stroller, I’d see she’d already pulled off her mittens again—the allegedly “toddler-proof” mittens which zip up the sides and velcro closed at the wrist. After a few rounds of this Sisyphesean game, I decided to just give up on the mittens, and attempted to persuade her—all while standing on the street corner, fighting the gale-force winds—to please, PLEASE, tuck her hands into the cozy, criminally-fluffy stroller sleeping bag I’d zipped her lower half into. What I got was her default response: “NEVER!”  And screaming, of course. Endless screaming, which wasn’t surprising considering her fingers were probably shooting with pain from the unbearable cold.

That is when I realized that the people who told me she’d wear the gloves when she got cold enough do not know toddlers. Toddlers don’t have a terrific grasp on cause and effect. The logic of “If you don’t wear your mittens, your fingers will be cold” is very persuasive to a five- or seven- or ten-year-old, but totally meaningless to most two-year-olds.

Terza was obviously thinking “It is freezing!” and “I deplore mittens” but could not understand that these two things were correlated in any way. So, she wailed and wailed and looked at me like, “For God’s sake, woman, I’m freezing to death out here. Do something! And while you’re at it, get those hideous mittens out of my face!”

It’s enough to make a girl dream of living in Tampa.

“So let her get frostbite!” you might say. But think for a second about what an imposition a case of frostbite would be on my already hectic schedule.

Look, I get it. There are some things—many things—beyond our control as parents. Some behaviors that can not be modified despite bribes, punishments, distraction techniques, and the force of reason. One of the hardest things I’ve learned to do as a parent is accept this and just let it go, let the natural consequences unfold.

And then, other times, I don’t let go. Other times, I resort to duct tape.

In a moment of inspiration, I strolled screaming, kicking, totally indignant Terza into the nearest hardware store, bought a roll of duct tape and duct-taped those mittens right onto the sleeve of her jacket. Then, when she was helpless to stop me, I yanked the red, fleece-lined, bear-eared hat on her head. Cruel, awful, overbearing me. She was warm, did not require medical attention, and retained the use of all her digits.

Sometimes the only choice you have as a parent is between crappy and slightly less crappy. Between screaming with frostbite and screaming without frostbite. So you choose the lesser of two crappys. And you wait for spring. ◆

Nicole C. Kear is the author of the memoir Now I See You (St. Martin’s, June ‘14) and the mom behind the blog, A Mom Amok. You can find more info about her and her work at nicolekear.com.

Parenting in New York City is not for the faint of heart. Sure, there are conveniences that come with city parenting, and I ponder these frequently when I need a pick-me-up: Cheap takeout! Twenty-four-hour corner delis! Elevators in buildings! But the list of parenting tasks which are extra complicated or onerous or aggravating is long.  Next year, for instance, I’ll have three kids in three different schools, making morning drop-off an epic expedition that would chill the blood of most suburbanites.

The upside of this is that city parents tend to develop grit. You don’t just give up when you encounter an obstacle, because if you did, you’d never leave your (tiny) apartment.

I’ve always been a tenacious kind of person, and parenting has only strengthened this personality trait. For the most part, the tenacity’s an asset. Occasionally, though, it’s a liability. Sometimes my single-minded, stubborn determination backfires on me.  Such as was the case with our last apple-picking adventure.

My parents used to take my sisters and I apple-picking every year, and it’s something David and I have been doing even before we had kids. Every October, we drive an hour north to our preferred orchard, and every time, we come home with a big bag of apples which we then make into an apple pie. It’s a tradition.  I’ve loved this tradition even before I read a bunch of very persuasive articles about the tremendous value of ritual in family life, which led me to believe that doing specific stuff as a family on a regular basis is the most important defense for my kids against a later ills including but not limited to drug and alcohol abuse, teenage pregnancy, truancy, imprisonment, depression, and general calamity. Consequently, my family now observes an annual Fourth of July Rocket Launch, a Day-Before-School-Starts Retro-Movie Night, Charades Fridays, and Sloppy Joe Mondays, to name a few.  But apple picking is one of our oldest traditions, one we unanimously enjoy.

My son, affectionately known in these parts as Primo, age nine, is Quality Control. He has never and will never eat an apple, or any other kind of fruit, but that doesn’t stop him from demanding excellence insofar as the harvest is concerned. He has a keen eye, spots the best apples, and makes sure they land, un-bruised and impeccable, in the bag.

My daughter Seconda, age seven, is the Taster. She eats enough apples while picking to justify the high price of the bag we leave with.

My baby, Terza, age two, is the Poster Girl. Her job is to be picturesque and adorable and she executes this with aplomb.
Last year, we had an extra busy October and couldn’t get to the orchard until the end of the month. When the appointed Saturday came, Terza developed a double ear infection with accompanying fever. A course of antibiotics was started and by the next morning, the fever was gone.

“So,” I said to David early that Sunday, “Do you think we should try to go apple picking today?”

“Well, her fever’s gone,” he observed.

“And it’s only an ear infection.”

“And she’s running around playing.”

“She’ll have fun.”

“She’ll sleep in the car.”

“We’ll bring Tylenol.”

Like me, David is indomitable. He is the guy who chisels the tunnel out of prison. There is no stopping him.

“Who wants to go apple picking?” we asked the kids.

“Me!” they cried in rare, wonderful unison. Thus, it was resolved: to the orchard!

But as soon as we strapped Terza into her car seat, the day took a turn for the worse. By which I mean, the screaming commenced.
It was difficult to trace the origin of the screaming, since she frequently bellows when strapped in her car seat. So we were confident she’d settle down. Besides, we couldn’t abort mission after all the effort it took to load the kids in the car.

Corralling three children into a car for a day-long excursion takes roughly the planning and energy required for a space shuttle launch.  The packing of the diaper bag with snacks, wipes, toys. The making sure everyone goes to the bathroom. The finding of the shoes. The breaking-up of sibling fights when shoes can not be found and foul play is suspected. The impossible latching of seat belts buried deep under the over-crowded boosters in the backseat. The going back in the apartment to retrieve forgotten items. Once you do all this, there is no turning back. Certainly not for a little crying which frankly, just comes with toddler territory.

But on this particular day, it wasn’t just a little crying we ended up facing. It was a record-breaking amount of crying. Terza screamed ceaselessly until her wails made nails on a chalkboard seem like wind chimes. We offered her lollipops and snacks and pacifiers and iPhones and these things would cause her screaming to downshift to a vehement whine but the sound just never stopped.

After a half hour of toddler yelling, my brain felt positively addled and I yelled: “ICE CREAM! SHE NEEDS ICE CREAM!” to David.

“WHERE?”

“JUST PULL OVER AS SOON AS YOU SEE ANYPLACE REMOTELY RELATED TO ICE CREAM!”

It was a stroke of luck that had us passing by a Dairy Queen several minutes later. We all poured out of the car, yelling “ICE CREAM ICE CREAM” in desperate conciliatory tones at the baby who could not hear us through the massive wall of sound emanating from her mouth.

The sound mercifully ceased as soon as we shoved an ice cream cone in her hand. While she was distracted, we strapped her back in her car seat, cone dripping vanilla blobs onto her lap. Yes, she’d be covered in a sticky coat of ice cream, but it was a small price to pay for silence.

I buckled my seat belt and asked David if we should consider turning around.

“We’re more than halfway there,” he said. “And if we turn around, she’ll still have to be in the car for another forty minutes.”

“Plus, I’m sure the orchard will cheer her up.” I concurred.

“And she’s quiet now,“ he concluded.

I believe the term is “mutually enabling.”

The ice cream bought us another five minutes of peace, which left only twenty minutes of screaming before we reached our destination. The change in scenery of the orchard earned us another five minutes of silence before that novelty wore off and the whimpering began again. It started soft but I knew it was only a matter of time before the crying would escalate.

“Quick!” I told the kids, “Grab apples!”

“But these look all bruised,” Primo protested.

“No, no! All good!” The scream treatment had forced me to communicate telegram-style, in short phrases that would fit into the three-second pause in between wails, when Terza paused to breathe.

“But I haven’t even tasted this tree yet,” Seconda complained.

“It’s great!” I chirped, trying not to sound frantic. I plucked apples off the dwarf trees with such a velocity that several of them flew out of my hand in the process.

Within ten minutes, our bag was full.

“Yay!” I cheered, “We did it!”

“But we only have Red Delicious!” Primo objected, “Aren’t we going to get Granny Smiths? And Fujis?”

The baby had thrown herself on the ground, which was essentially a blanket of rotting, worm-ridden apples, and was kicking her feet and thrashing back and forth, yelling, “I NO LIKE IT!”

“No time,” I barked.

There is always time for a commemorative photo, however.

“Smile!” I shouted. As if that was possible.

In the photo, David is grimacing with the effort of trying to keep hold of the baby who is flailing around in fury. The kids are standing on either side of him, Seconda’s eyebrows are furrowed and her mouth is open, as she makes an annoyed remark about how the baby ruins everything. Primo is holding the enormous bag of hopelessly imperfect apples, looking aggrieved.

The photo won’t ever be framed and displayed proudly on our mantle. It won’t be posted on Facebook. But I’ll put it in our album, hoping it serves as proof later on that David and I were good parents, or at least that we were crappy parents only accidentally while trying really hard to be good. If nothing else, it will document that we provided the kids with tradition. Ample, occasionally harrowing, tradition.

Nicole C. Kear is author of the new memoir Now I See You (St. Martin’s Press); you can find out more info at www.nicolekear.com.

except from NOW I SEE YOU
(St. Martin’s, June 24, 2014)

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When Rosa took her first steps, my instinct was to push her back down.

I didn’t do it of course.

Still, the fear that filled me was powerful and persuasive.

“You are screwed!” Fear cackled. “Good luck with that.”

Immediately, Guilt popped up, sounding eerily like my mother.

“What kind of a mother lets Fear in, at a moment like this?” she chastised, clucking her teeth, “Some people should never have kids.”

Then, just in the nick of time, Joy rushed in, doing back handsprings and waving her pompoms madly, and soon I was shrieking and applauding, oohing and ahhing, and repeating incessantly “What a BIG GIRL!” which is precisely the protocol detailed in the Milestones section of the Mother of the Year Handbook.

This will be fine, I thought to myself, I can handle this.

I was, of course, dead wrong. I couldn’t even begin to handle it.

The problem wasn’t just that Rosa was learning to walk, it was that in doing so, she was coming into her own, blossoming into the girl she was destined to be.

People have different names for the category of child my daughter fit into as a toddler. Laissez-faire folks called her “a free spirit,” artistic types considered her a “firecracker”, the practical-minded thought she was “high-maintenance” and old-school disciplinarians deemed her a “hellion.” But the phrase just about everyone agreed on is “a handful.” When Rosa was between the ages of one and three, you could count on someone observing, “Wow, that one is really a handful, huh?” every single time we stepped outside.

I was spared having to think of a reply because I’d be too busy grabbing her by her collar before she stepped into oncoming traffic, or yanking her back from petting a dead rat, or knocking a shard of glass out of her hand before she swallowed it.

Don’t get me wrong. From the start, I loved my daughter’s exuberance. I was awe-struck and inspired by her spirit. Which is why it was really too bad that I had to spend every waking second trying to crush it.

What else could I do? I wanted to keep the kid around, after all. Shielding that whirling dervish from harm would have been an uphill battle for a parent with all their primary senses intact, much less a mom who was losing her vision. The deterioration of my eyesight had been slow but steady since my diagnosis at nineteen with a degenerative retinal disease; by the time Rosa was mobile, I’d lost all my peripheral vision, so that I was like a horse wearing blinders—except not just on the sides, but on top of my eyes and below too. If I wasn’t looking directly at Rosa—nice and close, too—I wouldn’t catch whatever new trouble she was in up to her elbows. Take the tunnel vision, thrown in a kid with zero impulse control, factor an older sibling into the equation, and what you get is one big problem.

It’s not a problem unique to visually-impaired people. In fact, everyone that has more than one child but still only one set of eyes encounters the same challenge. Every parent has, at one point or another, lost track of their child in some crowded, public space, whether it’s a playground or a zoo or a supermarket—not in a serious way, not long enough to call the authorities or anything, but long enough to make you scared, sick-to-your-stomach, bargaining-with-God scared. It happens to everyone. It’s just that it happened to me on a regular basis.

I hadn’t run into too much trouble keeping up with Lorenzo, even with my tunnel vision, but he was a clingy kid with a strong Back-to-Mommy boomerang.

Rosa was another story entirely. Before she could walk, she cleaved to me, but only because I was her ride. Once she got mobile, she was off like a bottle rocket, and I swear I could hear her hissing, “See you suckas!” as she whizzed past, shimmering golden hair flowing behind her like melted metal.

So if Rosa vanished from my field of vision it was reasonable to assume that she was making tracks for the playground gate, and after that, who knew where?

Sometimes though, Rosa vanished from my field of vision by just sitting down or taking a few steps away from me. Then she’d fall into one of my blind spots, which kept growing larger and less manageable like a run in a stocking. She’d be gone, even though she was just an arm’s length away. The only way to prevent this from happening was to never, ever take my eyes off her, not even to look at my watch, not even to retrieve a dropped sippy cup.

Unfortunately, this made me what I’d learned from the Park Slope parenting listserv was called a helicopter parent. A “Helicopter Mom“ is one who hovers, like a helicopter, over her child, providing constant supervision and surveillance. The opposite is a “Free Range Mom,” who gives her children the freedom to explore, manage themselves, and make mistakes.

My mother has a different word for the latter, and like much of her lexicon, it’s not fit for print. According to my mother, you don’t just hand over freedom to kids; you keep a vise-like grip on their freedom until they wrest if from your cold, dead hands. And even then, you haunt them until their dying day, hovering over them from the afterlife.

When I hear fellow parents hearken back to the good old days when they were kids—how things were different then and they could walk to school alone, could play stickball in the street, could run to the corner for mom’s cigarettes—I am dumbfounded. I didn’t even get to take candy from strangers on Halloween. My mother not only chaperoned our trick-or-treating in Bensonhurst, she chauffeured us to it, driving us from one family friend’s house to the next. And even then, she checked our candy before we ate it, because while one could be fairly certain Nonny’s 87-year-old neighbor didn’t put razor blades in the Twix, one could never be positive.

“Don’t you trust me?” I’d protest, desperate to escape her force field.

“Of course I trust you!” she’d exclaim. “It’s everyone else I don’t trust!”

One of the biggest perks of becoming a mother is that you get to show your own mother how much better you can do the job. When I was pregnant, I thought that one of the ways I was going to do this was by affording my children the freedoms I hadn’t been given. Let them learn from their own mistakes. Give them space to grow.

And I might have, too, if it hadn’t been for my eyes. I might have shaped up to be one cool, confident, relaxed mom, standing on the sidelines at the playground, sipping my latte while chatting about gluten-free snacks or whatever the hell SuperMoms talk about, looking up every so often to locate the kids, but generally doing my own thing and letting them do theirs. Sounds dreamy. I bet my hair would have been fuller and my skin clearer and my ass tighter, too.

Instead, I ended up a greasy-haired, baggy-eyed, wilted-ass ,helicopter mom.

I suppose there are worse things.

Except that hovering is too gentle a word for what I did. “Pursuing” is more like it. As soon as I set those kids free, my goal was to catch them back up again, which entailed endless Keystone Cop chase scenes on the playground.

I don’t get to select a parenting style, I realized, I don’t have that luxury.

As I gradually lost vision, I gradually lost choices, too. It was always little, trivial things, none of them important except when you put them all together. I didn’t get to choose whether to wear heels or flats anymore; it was hard enough handling stairs and curbs in sneakers, much less teetering on four-inch stilts. I’d stopped wearing eye shadow after the third time a friend pointed out it was a bit, um, uneven; now I was forced to go bare because it was better than wearing a clown face. If it was a rainy day I couldn’t opt to take the kids to their doctor’s appointment with the car; it was always the bus.

One little concession that didn’t feel little at all was not being able to choose what kind of watch to wear. The Swiss Army watch my grandmother had given to me at college graduation had been getting hard for me to decipher and when I’d gone to Target to replace it, I’d found there was exactly one watch with numbers large enough for me to read and it was about the biggest eyesore in manufacturing history: An oversized round watch face studded with rhinestones, with a pink pleather band. The only choice I had was whether I’d hide it under my sleeve or wear it with pride, as if it was a fully intentional fashion choice.

I chose the latter—with the watch, at least. As far as my parenting was concerned, I was still trying frantically to keep the ugly truth of my blindness hidden under my sleeve. Little hints of it kept peeking out though, like when I knocked the toddler down, and I knew I couldn’t keep it under wraps for much longer. The trouble was, after so many years, the hiding gesture had become instinct.

Pull the sleeve down. Cover up.

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Nicole C. Kear’s memoir, Now I See You, comes out June 24th by St. Martin’s Press. You can order the book and find more info at nicolekear.com.

I love the start of spring. Who doesn’t?  Even the mildest winter brings its share of discomfort and inconvenience, but after a Polar Vortex Special like the one we’ve just had, after the months of suiting up like an Artic explorer, of traversing filthy mountains of sidewalk snow, of combatting epic, legendary cases of cabin fever, well, after all that, the first stirrings of spring are nothing less than magical.

But I have another reason to celebrate the spring, and it’s one that not many people share. Spring means the start of long days, the seemingly endless parade of hours saturated with sunlight—and not only do I like light, I need it, lots of it because I’m night blind.  Truth be told, night blindness is the tip of the iceberg as far as my eyes are concerned; there’s also the whopping case of tunnel vision, the color blindness, the myopia, and the nasty, non-removable cataracts. I’m legally blind, courtesy of a degenerative retinal disease called retinitis pigmentosa, and, as you can imagine, this impacts my life in a bunch of ways.  I don’t drive fighter jets and I don’t stitch up facial lacerations.

And I’m not a big fan of the dark . . . or the semi-dark . . . or the dark-ish. If a place is even approaching penumbral, it’s a safe bet I do not want to go there.

Some low-light destinations are easy to avoid—particularly once you have three children—and in doing so, you forfeit your nightlife. Without the slightest effort, I can steer clear of the very hip, very dark bars where I passed many an hour in my twenties.  I haven’t seen the inside of a nightclub since, well, since they were still called “nightclubs.”  Similarly, I hardly ever find myself in the countryside, or Hades, or Iceland in winter.

Other dark places are impossible to avoid, though, and for these, I’ve had to develop practical strategies to make sure I don’t lose an appendage, or a child.

Topping the list is movie theaters. When you’re in charge of a gaggle of kids and you live in a place where it’s mercilessly cold half the year and mercilessly hot the other half, matinees are Mommy’s little helper. Of course, being struck totally blind upon entering the theater makes the experience considerably less enjoyable.  I’ve suffered enough embarrassing mishaps (sitting on a grandpa’s lap, sitting on my children’s lap, sitting on a chair that wasn’t there, also known as the floor) to have learned a thing or two.

First lesson: get there before the lights go down. Typically, I’m the kind of person who is so chronically tardy that I will call a friend, not if I’m running late, but if I’m on time. When it comes to the movies, though, our asses are in the seats as soon as the last movie empties out. Once we are settled in, nobody moves for any reason. Primo wants popcorn? No dice. Terza’s thirsty? She’s got saliva, doesn’t she? Seconda has to pee? She should’ve thought of that the ten times I asked before we entered the theater. Builds bladder muscles, anyway.

All the rules and restrictions don’t make for a freewheeling, fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants good time, but we get in and out in one piece and we get to watch a motion picture.

Then there’s the Museum of Natural History. The place is aces and I’ve been going every year since I was in first grade, unpacking my lunch in the cafeteria that always smelled of old fish sticks. These days, though, unless I have an eagle-eyed adult companion with me on kid duty, there’s no way I step foot inside. The dinosaur rooms are fine, but the Hall of North American Mammals is as dim as an old lady’s parlor with the curtains perpetually drawn, to say nothing of the oh-so-moody Hall of Ocean Life. I’ve heard there are a squid and a whale down there but you could tell me it was a Sasquatch and a wallaby and I could not refute you.

Of all the dark places, the toughest to avoid is the entire out-of-doors after sunset.  In the summer, it’s no huge impediment, since night doesn’t fall until nigh on nine p.m. But when the day begins at seven and ends just past four, the dark is always right around the corner. In winter, I understand the plight of closeted werewolves, desperate to get inside before the sun goes down.

I, do, of course, have several options. I could use a mobility cane.  To explain why I don’t use one, I’d have to write an entire book, which I did, conveniently enough, and you can read it, starting in June.

I could also use a flashlight. It would, however, have to be industrial-strength and hands-free, so really, what I’d need is a miner’s headlamp. I’d consider these if Target released a line by Missoni, in multicolored woven textiles. As they do not, I will have to pass.

I could huddle in my apartment, comfortable and constrained. And I do, from time to time, especially when the temperature gets sub-Arctic. But this is New York, the city that never sleeps, and I’m just not that kind of girl.

So, I adventure out, dark or no dark, and I stick to the well-lit avenues and I curse the famous, beautiful trees that grow in Brooklyn, which are annoyingly light-obscuring, and I ask my kids to give me a heads-up when there’s a big crack in the pavement, or a fleet of rats ahead, or a garbage can strewn on the sidewalk.

And I dream of spring.

Then one day, it’s here. Flowers beginning to bloom at my feet and birds hazarding a chirp overhead, and sunlight—warming, brightening, revealing sunlight—streaming down on me morning, noon and into the night.

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Nicole’s memoir, Now I See You, comes out June 24th by St. Martin’s Press. You can find out more info and preorder a copy on her website nicolekear.com.

Recently, I went swimming in sewage. Even for those who enjoy extreme sports, I don’t recommend it. Sewage stinks, in all senses of the word.

Let me say right up front that there is a moral to this story and that moral has nothing to do with climate change or infrastructure failings. The moral is: Listen to your grandmother. Even if she is neurotic. Especially if she is neurotic. You shouldn’t listen all the time, obviously, or you’ll end up a shut-in, so listen only when she is right. How do you know when your overbearing, Doomsday-prepping grandmother will be right? That’s just luck.

It was the end of September, and I was strapping my six-month-old into her stroller so we could pick up her big siblings from after-school, when my grandmother called, as she likes to do, to tell me it was raining. Nonny acts as my own personal weather advisory system, alerting me to hurricanes, flash floods, icy sidewalk conditions, and heat waves. I blew off her warnings, as I like to do, dismissing them as the ravings of a lunatic.

“Is gonna be a looooot a rain,” she cautioned, “Tunderschtorms.”

“We’ll be fine,” I assured her. “We’re not going to melt in the water.”

“Leave de baby wit me,” she pleaded.

“Fine,” I conceded. Nonny lives seven blocks away from us, conveniently located near my big kids’ after-school.

Within ten minutes, I was dropping the baby off at her doorstep, and it was apparent already that she’d been right about the rain. It was pouring, the kind of rain which falls not so much in drops but in sheets. Cataclysmic thunder and lightning exploded overhead, making an End-of-Days light show.

“OK,” I told my grandmother as I passed off the baby, “I’ll be back soon.”

“No!” Nonny gasped, “You can’t go out!”

“What, am I gonna get hit by lightning?” I joked. As if replying to my hubris, a peal of thunder erupted outside the window, the subtext of which was clearly, “Keep it up, lady, and see what happens.” Then, for extra measure, the rain was replaced by hail—large chunks of hail—which made a racket on my grandmother’s metal patio set.

Nonny held the baby tighter and shook her head.

“What?” I asked, “I have an umbrella.”

That umbrella might have been useful had not the wind tunnel of Fourth Avenue blown it inside out within five seconds. I got pummeled by hail all the way down to the intersection of Fourth Avenue and First Street, at which point I stopped noticing the hail because I was confronted with bigger problems.

The curb was flooded with the nastiest-looking and most vile-smelling water I’ve ever seen: grayish brown, littered with floating bits of garbage. I looked to my right and realized why.  A manhole had popped off the street, sending a geyser of sewage spewing into the intersection.

Trudging through the puddle, which reached my mid-calf, wasn’t the most pleasant experience of my life—what with the slimy bits of refuse clinging to my bare legs—but it was still significantly less revolting than the time I stepped inside the carcass of a dead rat in Central Park, which is the barometer by which I gauge grossness. And, it was over fast—until I got to the next intersection on Garfield Street where the water level was even higher.

“Gotta love city living,” I grumbled as I waded through, consoling myself with the thought that I was almost there; the kids were just a block away, across Fourth Avenue. But once I’d crossed the mammoth puddle, I saw that getting across the avenue—without an ark at least—was not going to be pretty.

The sewage was lapping in waves over the sidewalk, and on the street, the water reached the car bumpers. Huge black garbage bags were floating down Fourth Avenue, just as if it were a river. I hadn’t passed a pedestrian in a few blocks, but as I stood there, somewhat stunned, a middle-aged woman walked by, mincing her steps as if that might keep her legs from getting coated in toxic sludge.

“This is just naaaaaasty,” she grimaced, “and it’s worse that way. Do NOT go that way.” She pointed across Fourth Avenue.

Then she pulled an iPhone out of her purse and started snapping pictures so people would believe her when she told them about it later, I presumed.

I cowered under my umbrella, holding the rim so it didn’t blow inside out, and weighed my options. I could stand there and wait for the sewage to drain, but, I thought as thunder boomed overhead, only if I was OK with getting electrocuted. I could turn around and wait at my grandmother’s until the storm died down—the kids would be OK at after-school for another half hour—but I’d have to trudge back through the massive puddles I’d just crossed. Besides, I was nearly there, just a block away, and I’d come this far. It was just a puddle, after all. It wasn’t Scylla and Charybdis.

I tucked my diaper bag securely in my armpit and stepped forward, slowly making my way to the crosswalk.

“Ugh blegh crap blegh,” I moaned as the water crept up to my knees.

I crossed Fourth Avenue, the six lanes virtually empty, but instead of the water level receding when I got to the other side, it got higher. Within a few steps I found myself waist-deep.

A gaggle of mechanics in uniform stood under an awning further down the street, watching me.

“Hey lady, get out of there!” one yelled, and then another elaborated, “It’s sewer water!”

“I’m TRYING,” I bellowed back as I tried to move forward against the weight of water. It occurred to me that maybe I should give up walking and start kicking but that option, though expedient, seemed insane.

If I had the baby with me, I thought, she’d be doggie paddling in sewage right now. Nonny was right.
Just when it seemed the mechanics would have to send a tire upstream so I could float down the street, the water level dropped and I was on dry land again.

I speed-walked the rest of the block to the kids’ after school program, yanking up the waist of my skirt because it was so sopping, it was sliding off my hips. My skin wasn’t just wet, but gritty. I tried not to imagine little cartoon bacteria characters crawling under my skin, a devious-looking e. coli, a cackling staph, whatever-the-heck germ causes typhoid fever and cholera, doing a conga line across my epidermis.

It was official: swimming in sewage was worse than stepping in rat guts, if only because it was a far more immersive experience.

As I walked into the storefront where Primo and Seconda were waiting, I spotted a rack of T-shirts for sale—which was fortuitous, since by my estimation, I could tolerate about sixty seconds more of being in the sewer clothes before I went cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. In sixty seconds, I would be stripping down naked and it would really be preferable that there be another item of clothing for me to wear at that point because otherwise my children would never be able to show their faces at after school again.

I grabbed the biggest T-shirt I could find, and emerged from the bathroom two minutes later wearing a gray XXL whose hem made it as far as my mid-thigh. A shirt-dress, I reasoned.

“Oh hi Mommy,” my seven-year-old, Primo said, hardly lifting his head from his work, “Did you see the rain?”

“As a matter of fact, I did.”

Seconda, my five-year-old, stared at me: “Mommy,” she asked, “where are your clothes?”

“They were compromised,” I replied, “A little sewage problem.”

Then Primo looked up and began to guffaw: “No offense, Mommy, but you look like a crazy person.”

It was only later, in the shower at my grandmother’s, when I really looked like a crazy person, as I scrubbed my lower half like Lady Macbeth with her damn spot.

Finally, though, I felt satisfied. I had no open wounds and I hadn’t drunk the stuff; I just might avoid cholera after all.

What I would avoid, with certainly, was Fourth Avenue during flash floods. You know what they say: swim in sewage once, shame on you . . .

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You can read more of Nicole’s misadventures in Mommyland, and beyond, in her forthcoming memoir Now I See You (June ’14, St. Martin’s Press) and on her blog A Mom Amok).

My kids put the “din” in dinner.  I don’t mind the cacophony, most of the time. Being a city girl, I’ve always found the sound of silence deeply unsettling and if I had to choose, I’d opt for a vibrant racket over a tense, quiet meal any day. Of course, if there were a middle-of-the-road option, a little-light-conversation-peppered-with-soft-chuckling option, I’d go with that.

But when you have three firecracker children—aged eight, six, and one—and one high-strung Italian grandmother—aged eighty-three—any family gathering is likely to be loud. Particularly when this gathering happens at your grandmother’s one bedroom apartment, which it does, in our case, two or three times a week.

My grandmother, Nonny, could out-cook Mario Batali. Stick the two of them in front of a hard surface with fire, water, flour, and tomatoes and she’d have him begging for tricks of the trade within the hour. When you pair her skill in the kitchen with her indefatigable work ethic and a post-retirement lack of work, what you end up with is an open invitation to dinner.  I like to think it’s a win-win situation—that she benefits from the arrangement by seeing her great-grandkids and feeling purposeful—but really it’s me who wins twice, being able to give my kids a home-cooked meal without having to cook any of it myself. And the only price I have to pay is a raging headache.

Nonny sets the volume level for dinner and her lowest setting is “blaring.” This is not because she is hard of hearing—she can perceive a child’s sniffle from fifty feet away: “I TOLE you to put a schweater on dat baby!”—it is just because she, like every other member of my family, only knows how to communicate via shouting.

“WAT KINDA PASTA YOU WANT?” she bellows to my eight-year-old son, affectionately known as Primo, who is doing his cursive homework at the coffee table.

You’d think this kind of yelling would be impossible to ignore, but Primo’s accustomed to it by now and does just that.

“Primo!” I call from the couch, where I’m attempting to change the baby’s diaper, “Primo! PRIMO!”

Finally, I extend my foot and nudge him, which gets his attention.  “Yes?” he inquires casually, as if we haven’t been shouting his name for three minutes.

“YOU WANNA RAVIOLI OR TORTELLINI?” Nonny repeats.

“Tortellini! Tortelllni! Tortellini!” my six-year-old, aka Seconda, chants as she tears through the living room.

“But I want ravioli!” Primo protests.

“BUT RAVIOLI MAKE ME NAUSEOUS!”

“BUT SHE GOT TO CHOOSE LAST TIME!”

“EE-AI-EE-AI-OOOOO!” yells the baby, Terza, not be outdone just because she lacks all vocabulary. She is frantically trying to roll off the couch to escape the crushing indignity of having a fresh diaper put on.

In the middle of the debate, Nonny’s home phone rings, so loudly it surely wakes at least a couple of dead people over at Green-Wood.

“WHERE’S DA PHONE??” Nonny shouts. I’ve tried to get her to screen her calls, have tried to demonstrate that the answering machine will take a message, but she is not comfortable with this laissez-faire approach. As soon as the phone rings, she drops everything to find it—no small feat considering that Terza’s life’s mission is to hide the handset. Once she tossed it in the garbage. Once, in the freezer. Usually, though, it’s behind the couch.

“GET OFFA DA COUCH!” Nonny orders, “I GOTTA MOVA DA COUCH!”

Which she does, despite me yelling, “You’re going to break a hip!” She locates the handset, just as the answering machine picks up, which means we get to hear her conversation on speakerphone.

“OH MARIA!” she shouts, “CIAO BELLA!  CHE ME DICI?”

“OH VERA! INDOVINA CHE E SUCCESSO CON QUELLO FIGLIO DI PUTANA!” her best friend Maria shouts back, at which point I hit the off button on the machine.

Ten minutes later, the pasta is ready (ravioli—we had tortellini the night before), the places are set, Nonnie’s deeply entrenched in the story of Maria’s good-for-nothing son-in-law who had an affair with a younger woman, and also, it is suspected, has a gambling problem. My husband, David, walks through the front door as I’m strapping the baby in her high chair and pulling her over to the crowded kitchen table, which seats three comfortably but is forced to seat six.

Primo is sitting to my right, providing Ein Klein Nachtmusik.

“Just a city boy,” he croons, “born and raised in SOUTH DETROOOIT—”

“Its MY turn to sing!” Seconda runs up to the table and furrows her brow to form her patented Hell-Hath-No-Fury-Like-A-Little-Sister-Skipped-Over face.

“It goes ON and ON and ON—“

“Someday you’ll FIND it,” she bellows louder than one might think possible for a child with her size lungs, “The RAIN-bow con-NECT-tion—”

“MAKE HER STOP! SHE’S ANNOYING ME ON PURPOSE!”

“NO, HE’S ANNOYING ME!”

The baby lets forth a barbaric yawp which I take to mean, “Dude, they are BOTH annoying me,” and frankly, I could not agree more.

“NO SINGING!” I proclaim, “NO ONE IS ALLOWED TO SING!” Then, envisioning the kids relaying these words to their therapists in fifteen years, I hasten to add, ‘Until further notice!”

“MADONNA!” Nonnie shrieks, the phone cradled under her ear as she sprinkles Parmigiano on the ravioli: “She should spit in his face! She should throw him in the street like an animal!”

So much for a little light dinner conversation.

“So, kids,” I say, taking a deep breath and channeling the spirit of June Cleaver, “what’d you do in school?”

Then the singing is replaced with talking. From the way the words pour of my children, you’d think it was the first words they’d spoken after taking a year-long vow of silence.

“No, no, Horrorland is a series he developed much later. This is something TOTALLY different. I am talking about Night of the Living Dummy which is a Goosebumps classic. I can’t believe you never read that Dad, I just can’t believe you never heard of Slappy the dummy!!”

“Disgraziata! Stronzo che non e altro!”

“It was a COCKROACH!!!! I am NOT kidding you! Right in the middle of Center Time! Well, it’s really called a ‘water bug,’ actually, that’s what my teacher said. And then all the kids starting screaming like this: AAHHHHHHHHHHH!”

“AHHHHHHHHHH!” parrots the baby. This much, she can say.

“The baby’s interrupting me!” Seconda protests,  “And that is VERY rude.”

Somehow, even with all this talking, the children manage to eat, though I can’t say the same for myself, since I’m refilling plates of pasta and forcing people to eat their spinach and wiping up juice spills and handing out napkin after napkin. Oh, and feeding the baby.

Terza, a year old, is not a big fan of food: At every bite, she clamps her mouth shut, arches her back, and shakes her head violently back and forth like a person having an exorcism. it sometimes feels like she is in the clutches of  a paranoid delusion that I am trying to poison her food. If she could talk, I am fairly certain she’d say: “Do you think I’m BLIND? I saw you sprinkle arsenic on these beans—and don’t you even TRY to tell me it was salt! I may be a baby but I am no moron!”

In order to feed her, David and I have to, literally, put on a show. With puppets.  With one hand I make funny little gestures with the wizard puppet, and then when she’s laughing I shove a spoonful of spinach in her mouth with the other hand. Half the time she’ll be outraged and spit the spinach out right in my face, but half the time she’ll chew it suspiciously, agree to swallow, realize she is ravenous and beg frantically for more. Even if the kids weren’t hogging the dinner conversation, I couldn’t take part since I’m focused on tricking the baby into not starving to death.

Feeding the baby is not just stressful but messy, since in her fight-to-the-finish she hurls large handfuls of pasta and spinach and fruit all over the kitchen/living room. Including in my hair.

“MOMMY!” laughs Primo, “You have [chortle chortle] BANANA [chortle chortle] in your HAIR!”
Seconda throws her head back and laughs, too. The report of it sounds vaguely like a shotgun.
“HA HA, ha, HA HA, ha, ha ha, HA!”

The baby’s not sure what the joke is, but she’s always up for a good guffaw, so she crinkles her nose up and laughs, a little tinny giggle.

Everyone is laughing in a loud, discordant chorus, even David and I. Only Nonny abstains and that is because she is too busy yelling expletives, which are thankfully in Italian: “PUTANA! VAGABONDO!”

The children are quiet when eating dessert, so I use this opportunity to shovel as much food as I can into my maw as quickly as possible because it’s getting late and if I don’t toss these kids into bed soon the threadbare fabric of my sanity will rip to shreds.

Then I make a show of putting some dishes in the dishwasher and Nonny yells: “PUT DA DISHES DOWN! I tole you I don’t lika da way you do it! Please just letta me do it!” So instead, I pester the kids into collecting their homework and headbands and My Little Ponies and beloved comic books that don’t seem so terribly beloved when they are abandoned on the floor by the bathroom.

Dinner is over. It was delicious—I think. Really, I’m guessing because I didn’t taste much as it shot down my gullet. Regardless, we spent precious time together. Yelling about whose turn it was to talk mostly, and listening to Nonny advise her friend on retribution tactics, but still, together, all of us. Side by side. Breaking bread.

If I could lower the volume a few notches or dial down the chaos, I would. But then, I’d probably miss it too. Not the ulcer I’m likely developing, but the fullness of it all. Full mouths, full stomachs, full hearts.

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Read more of Nicole’s adventures in Mommyland—all of them loud—on her blog A Mom Amok at amomamok.com.

Spring! The season of new life and rebirth! Unless, of course you’re a goldfish in our home, in which case spring is a time of death, plain and simple. Last spring, the death knell rang for the pet we’d come to know ironically as Survivor-Fish, as he joined his brethren on the other side. The good and bad news is that there were a lot of brethren to join—at least four fish from our house alone.

It’s not that we don’t take good care of our goldfish. Our fish are exceptionally well-maintained; their bellies are kept full, their water is changed regularly and the landscape of their tank is designed to please, with shells and rocks and ceramic scuba divers. Our house is a marine life paradise…except for the occasional, but fatal, close encounters engineered by our daughter.

Seconda likes to sleep with the fishes. Literally.

Let me clarify up front that Seconda, who is five now, hasn’t slept with a fish in years. The fish-out-of-water missions were executed way back in the days of yore when she was three, and thus, a raving lunatic. Also in her defense, her acts, though fatal, were motivated by good. She thought her pets might like a cuddle.

See, Seconda loves animals. I don’t mean that in a generic sense, like she casually enjoys them or finds them amusing. I mean that she feels a profound affinity for them, even more than what she feels for human beings. Her love of animals does not discriminate on the basis of species either. One summer afternoon at the Mermaid Day Parade, I turned to find Seconda’s tiny shoulders draped with a gigantic, green-and-black snake. Not a stuffed toy but a real, live black mamba or anaconda or some such terrifying viper. My husband, David, was snapping a picture of Sec’s smiling face while the animal’s owner, who was holding a bucket full of snakes (not, I’m guessing, the approved way to transport your serpents in public), gave my daughter instructions. He was probably telling her something along the lines of, “That’s great, perfect . . . just don’t make any sudden movements or he’ll shoot you full of deadly venom faster than you can say ‘Coney Island Freak Show.’”

Another time, I took Seconda with me to pick Primo up from a friend’s house, and I found her sitting criss-cross-applesauce next to an empty cage as two pet rats—big, gray, beady-eyed—darted up and down her arms. I watched aghast as she leaned over and kissed one of them on his furry head.

“Can we get a rat, Mommy?” she asked, her blue eyes full of optimism,

“Pleeeeeeease?”

Since she was old enough to speak, the child has pined for a pet; she craves a furball sidekick, some loyal, adoring, non-verbal companion. Of course, I want to fulfill this dream of my daughter’s. But part of being a good parent is knowing your limits, and I know that having to feed and clean and hold another living creature—to say nothing of walking it and collecting its poop in little baggies—would put me over the edge of sanity.

Which is how we ended up with fish.

It wasn’t my idea to adopt Swimmy the goldfish; he was produced out of a magician’s hat at my son Primo’s fifth birthday party. But, I did agree to keep him, mostly because I had no choice. It ended up being a moot point, because within three days, Swimmy was, well, no longer swimming. His replacement, Bandana, was belly-up within a few days too. Beethoven, the beta fish, made it almost a week.
“What the hell are we doing wrong?” David, my husband, lamented after we’d conducted our third burial at sea via the toilet bowl.

“They are goldfish,” I replied. “They’re not known for their longevity.”

“Well, I can’t stand idly by as all these fish die,” David said. “It’s hard on me. It’s demoralizing.”

The next day, David went back to the pet shop and brought home a state-of-the-art aquarium filter and two new fish.

“I think the others might have been dying of loneliness,” he explained as he poured them from the plastic bags into pre-treated tank water.

He might have been right. Mr. Black, so named by Primo because of the cluster of dark scales near his fin, and Mr. Orange, so named by Seconda because he had no distinguishing characteristics whosoever, lived one whole week, then two, then a month. David waxed romantic about the value of companionship. I figured it was the filter. Three-year-old Seconda checked on her pets every morning before nursery school and every afternoon when she came home. She fed them, with David’s supervision, every night.

“Just a little pinch,” David reminded her, lifting her up to reach the uncovered tank which we kept on a high dresser in the kids’ bedroom, “Remember, if you feed the fish too much, they can die.”

Two months passed, then four, then six, and Misters Black and Orange thrived—which is to say, did not die.

Then, one afternoon when Seconda was about three-and-a-half, I noticed that I hadn’t seen or heard from her in awhile. Usually she was impossible to ignore, tearing through the apartment with a baseball bat or drawing on the furniture with Magic Marker. But on this particular afternoon, she’d been quiet. Too quiet.

I got up from my computer, and walked past Primo playing Legos in the kitchen, into the kids’ bedroom. Nearing the bunk beds, I slipped on a puddle of water.

“Seconda?” I ventured uneasily.

A blanket-covered lump on the bottom bunk shifted.

“Seconda,” I repeated, pulling the blanket to reveal my daughter, knees drawn to her chest, with no clothes on. “Where are your clothes?”

“They got wet,” she replied.

“How did they get wet?” I asked, getting shrill.

“Promise you won’t get mad?” came her reply.

Never words that bode well.

“He’s just such a cutiepie and I just wanted to cuddle him!” she said in a rush, “So I—I—I put him on my pillow.”

I strode over to the tank and there, floating belly up, deader than a doornail, was Mr. Black.

“Seconda!” I cried, trying to keep from shouting, “Why? Why did you take him out of the tank?”

“The thing is,” she took a deep breath, “Mr. Black is so shiny and cute and I really, really, really wanted to feel what his scales felt like and I just thought it would be so nice for him to snuggle with me in my bed so I climbed on top of the toy chest and then I climbed on top of the dresser and then I just scooped him up with my hand and guess what? Fish are really slimy. I didn’t know that. Did you know that? So then I put him on my pillow and we snuggled and it was so fun and he really liked it. You know how I know that? Because he did a little dance! Like this—”

She threw herself on the floor, made her body rigid, and flopped around in an impressive impersonation of a fish gasping for breath.

“And then I heard you coming so very fast I threw him back in the tank but then he stopped swimming. Maybe he doesn’t like the water anymore. Maybe he wants to stay on my pillow.”

“Seconda,” I said slowly, “Mr. Black is dead.”

She ran to the tank and cried: “No he’s not!”

“I know it’s upsetting, but yes,” I replied firmly, “he is.”

“No, Mommy, he’s not!”

“Would you just listen to Mommy?” I snapped. “The fish is dead. For good.”

“But Mommy!” Seconda cried, “He’s swimming!”
I looked up at the tank to find Mr. Black, indeed, swimming. Not very energetically and with sporadic upside down visits to the surface, but still, definitely alive.

“It’s a miracle,” I gasped.

I sat Seconda down right then and there and explained to her as clearly as I could that fish can not live outside of water. I told her that she must never, ever take the fish out again. I had her repeat back what I’d said to be sure she understood.

“I must never take the fish out of the water or they will die,” she intoned solemnly. It was very convincing. Hell, she probably really meant it at the time. But a few weeks later, I was putting laundry away in the kids’ dresser and noticed that Mr. Black was belly-up again.

“SECONDA!!!” I shouted.

“I DIDN’T MEAN TO!” she shouted back over her shoulder as she ran to hide under my bed.

“You killed the fish!” I shrieked, “AGAIN!”

I pulled her by her hand to the tank so she could face the consequences of her actions. And as we stood there, silently watching Mr. Black float on the surface of the water, something unexpected happened. The fish flicked his tail.

“He’s alive!” she shrieked jubilantly. “He came back to life again!”

That’s when we started calling him Survivor-Fish.

Despite his apparent possession of superpowers, David and I knew Mr. Black wouldn’t make it through another close encounter. So that night, David gave Seconda a stern talking-to, and afterwards he told me, “It’s OK, she gets it. She won’t do it again.”

Which made him very surprised when she did a week later. This time, it wasn’t Mr. Black but Mr. Orange who was floating at the surface. I stood there waiting for Mr. Orange to spin over, flick his tail, make his little fish belly expand, but there was nary a movement to be seen. I waited a good five minutes before pronouncing the time of death. This time, there’d be no resurrection. This time, dead was dead.

We had a ceremony for Mr. Orange in the bathroom. David wiped away tears as he flushed the toilet.

Seconda was silent as she watched the fish spiral down out of sight.

Then she said: “But how will he get back into his tank?”

It was at that moment that I realized the kid was only three years old. No amount of explanation would make her understand the sequence of events leading to Mr. Orange’s untimely demise. So, after the funeral, David and I moved the fish tank into the living room, where Mr. Black, who appeared forlorn and had taken to playing dead (we think as a survival strategy), could be monitored. Then we bought a nice, sturdy lid which snapped tightly over the top. And like magic, Mr. Black lived for another two years, until last March when he finally met his maker, through no fault of Seconda.

David maintains Survivor-Fish died because of complications resulting from his adventures on land, but I like to think it was of old age. I like to think Mr. Black has been reunited with his old, dear friend Mr. Orange in Fish Paradise and that right now they’re regaling the other fish—Swimmy, Bandana and Beethoven included—with wild, wonderful stories of life with Seconda

“And I was just like, ‘HEY, EINSTEIN! MOVE THE TANK!’ But you know humans, they’re just so dense,” Mr. Black is probably saying. “Ah, what are you gonna do? Kids will be kids, right?”

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To read more of Nicole’s adventures in Mommyland, visit her blog, A Mom Amok, at amomamok.com.

By the middle of January, I’ve packed up all the Christmas ornaments, wrestled the fake tree back into its box and tossed the leftover candy canes into the trash. Last to go are the holiday cards. As I archive our family’s card by sliding it into the file folder right in front of last year’s, I can’t help but remember the behind-the-scenes drama which went into the making of the card, a drama which is as much a tradition for our family by now as the card itself.

It starts with me, in early December, unearthing a Santa hat and clearing the memory card on my camera. “C’mon kids, we’re gonna take a picture,” I announce, tossing their holiday apparel at them.

This is, of course, not the whole truth. We’re not just going to take a picture. We are going to take the Christmas Card Picture. That’s a whole different ball of wax.

“What kind of picture?” asks my eight-year-old son, known in these parts as Primo. Then he glances down at the plaid buttondown shirt I’ve handed him and a look of dread comes over his face, “Why are you giving me my party shirt, Mommy? Is it—it’s not—are we taking our Christmas card picture?”

I zip my five-year-old, Seconda, into her red taffeta party dress before replying, “Yes.”

Seconda spins around to face me.

“No!” she gasps.

“Awww mom,” whines Primo, like a rotten kid in a sitcom, “do we have to?”

“Do you have to?” I shoot back and just like that, the fiasco is underway. The mere phrase, “do we have to?” is all it takes to get me started. Hell, I’m still mad from last year’s photo shoot.

“What do I ever ask from you kids?” I lament, like I’m doing an impression of my own mother, except I’m dead serious, “Nothing! Just a few decent pictures of you all together, just twice a year, on Halloween and Christmas—”

“And Easter,” Primo points out.

“OK, and Easter.”

“And my communion,” he continues.

“That was a one-time thing!”

“And the baby’s baptism.”

Already, I’m at a six on the Mad Mommy Scale. Already. And we haven’t even turned the camera on yet.

“Just get outside!” I hiss as I usher them out the door, hoisting the baby, eight-month-old Terza, onto my hip.

We always take the pictures outside because the natural light eliminates the possibility that I’ll go through all the trouble of the Christmas card photo shoot and end up with blurry or shadowy or backlit pictures. I learned that lesson the hard way in years one and two of Primo’s life.

Shooting on the bench in front of our building means we get good light, but it also means we are on public display, which is unfortunate because my parenting during the Christmas card photo shoot is not something I want witnessed by an audience.

“Can I have an M&M?” Seconda asks on the way down the stairs.

“No way,” I reply, “You know the drill. Take a good picture, get an M&M.”

“Uuuuuugh,” she groans.

In theory, taking a decent picture of my children shouldn’t take more than four, maybe five minutes. You sit still, you smile for the camera, you get a heaping handful of M&Ms. Everybody’s happy. We get on with our day. It doesn’t have to be a living nightmare.

This is the same pep talk I give the kids year after year, and every time I believe it can be this simple.

Part of what makes our photo shoot so difficult is that my kids haven’t gotten much practice posing for pictures. For the most part, my husband David and I prefer slice-of-life candid shots, the kind of photographs that capture a real moment in time, that tell a story. I mean, who really wants canned pictures of kids with forced smiles plastered on their faces? Me, that’s who. Two or three times a year, I want those fake smiles and unblinking eyes and arms slung around each other’s shoulders. It’s a lapse in my taste and my sanity, but I can’t help it. I want the perfect Christmas picture. I want pictures that could be mistaken for the stock photographs which are pre-set in frames when you buy them, which Seconda is always confused about (“Why are you buying pictures of these strangers, Mommy??!!”).

Because when I make my Christmas card, what I am really doing is making a little commercial of my family. I want the commercial to be pretty and shiny and happy and touching so that everyone who views it wants to go out and buy a family exactly like mine.

Unfortunately, my kids are not particularly adept at making this kind of commercial. It takes a lot of hard work, a shameful amount of bribing, and the better part of an afternoon to get them picture perfect. Each tiny step takes ten times as long as it should.

The first step—sit on the bench—goes like this: Primo perches on the back of the bench and Seconda sits on the ground. When I correct them, they switch and Primo’s on the ground with Seconda on the back of the bench. Then Primo lays down on the bench and Seconda beats him senseless for stealing her spot. Then Primo kicks her in the guts. Then, mass hysteria.

When they are both sitting next to each other on the bench, I have to insert the baby into the equation. This is, of course, no simple affair. They both want to hold the baby. The baby, on the other hand, wants to be held by no one. She screams on Primo’s lap. She screams on Seconda’s lap. I take a few Baby Screaming shots, thinking we could go for a funny Christmas photo this year. But inevitably, the baby’s hand is blocking one of the kid’s faces, or the kids are hitting each other behind her, and that takes the picture from funny and cute to depressing and troubling.

The baby can’t be bribed with M&Ms. To make the baby happy, I have to do the Mommy-Be-Stupid-and-Crazy Show in which I jump up and down making monkey sounds or stick my tongue out and spit continuously for a full minute, all while trying to hold the camera steady.

This works, and the baby starts smiling. But at that exact moment, Seconda decides she’s had enough and wanders off set. Then Primo figures, “Hell, if she’s leaving, I am too,” and jumps off the bench while he is holding the baby. I have to lunge to catch Terza, dropping the camera in the process and letting forth a pretty ferocious, R-rated string of expletives.

“Lets try not to KILL ANYONE during this photo shoot please!” I shriek.

“Well, it’s your fault for torturing us!” Primo shrieks back.

“Torture?” I bellow, now at least an eight on the Mad Mommy Scale, “You wanna see torture?”

We’ve been outside for ten minutes and do not have one decent photo.

“Kids,” I growl, “I can do this all day. All! Day!”

They know I mean it, too, so they head back to the bench for round two. This time, I let the baby hold a rattle so she’s distracted. Now it’s all about getting the other two not to make totally weird faces. Seconda is eerily photogenic, but she always ends up looking irate. And while it works for Vogue Italia, “furious fiveyear- old” just doesn’t work for our Christmas card.

Primo has a bunch of possible weird faces. There’s the “I’m trying to look really sweet but look like I am doped up on opium with my eyes half-closed” expression. There’s the “I’m trying to look excited but my eyes are popping out of head and my nose is flared like a fire-breathing dragon” expression. And then, of course, there’s the “I’m trying to look pensive but I look like I’m on the toilet” expression, which let’s face it, all of us fall prey to.

So I stand there with my camera, trying to coach him: “Smile! No! Not like that! Less teeth! Ah, no, no, no. that’s the dragon look. More teeth again. No! No, honey, no! That’s the opium look, that’s the worst one! OK, forget smiling. No smiles! STOP SMILING! Good, yes, OK, Oh God, Oh no. That was the toilet look. Ok, let’s take five.”

We huddle up and I give the kids an M&M to keep their heads in the game.

“We can do this,” I tell them,“ We are not inventing the camera. We are not even taking a photograph with a manual camera. We are just taking a picture. Easy peasy.”

Then the kids try, they really do, but the baby’s tired and I’ve confused Primo so much he can’t control his facial muscles anymore, and then the neighbor’s dog wanders into the frame and drools on Seconda’s dress, during which the baby grabs his ear and bedlam breaks out.

I shout, “It’s a wrap!” and toss M&Ms to anyone with a pulse and wonder if there’s a bottle of wine I can uncork post-haste.

“Ok, that was good,” I reassure the kids as we walk up the stairs, “You guys did good.”

Which is stretching it.

Later that night, I check out the fruits of our labor and am royally disappointed. I spend a few hours trying to crop creatively, and eventually decide that rather than a card with one great picture, I’ll make a card with four or six lousy ones, the idea being to inundate my recipients with so many images, they won’t be able to give any of them real scrutiny.

I click and drag and add some punchy copy and then, with a sigh of relief, I hit “Checkout.” And I forget about it.

But when the box of cards arrives in the mail and I take a look at what we’ve created, something miraculous happens. The pictures aren’t awful at all. Sure, Primo’s eyes are kind of droopy in that one, and yes, a large portion of the baby’s forehead is cut off in this one, and Seconda’s smile is pretty goofy here, but when you see it all together, it’s great. Better than great. It’s my family. Definitely not perfect. Not the family everyone, or even anyone else, would buy. But just the way I like them.

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To read more of Nicole’s adventures in Mommyland, visit her blog at amomamok.blogspot.com.

“Guess what’s happening this weekend?” I asked my husband on a recent Friday evening.  We were folding laundry, each of us tackling our specialties — he pairing socks and I stacking sheets.  “Ugh,” David grumbled.  I didn’t fault him for sounding unenthusiastic.  After 10 years of marriage and two (soon to be three) kids, he was familiar with my tendency to cook up overly ambitious weekend plans, plans which always hinged on his manual labor and stamina for double-parking.

“Go ahead,” he rallied, “tell me what’s happening this weekend.”

“The medieval festival!” I squealed.

“Am I supposed to be excited about that?”

“Every year we want to go.”

“We do?”

“And every year, we have something else to do.  But not this year.  This year, we’re wide open.”

“Great,” replied David, with enough sarcasm to rival Archie Bunker.

“It will be great,” I told him, “It’s at the Cloisters and you love the Cloisters.  Primo will go crazy for the quidditch match.  Seconda will get to wear a princess gown.  Everyone will love the jousting.  And — fanfare please — it’s free.”

David’s facial expression had not changed during my hard sell.  It was still programmed at the maximum setting of “Beleaguered” and “Dubious.”

“This time, I’ve done it,” I went on, “I’ve found the perfect weekend activity.  Fun for the whole family.”

“It’s going to be mobbed,” David groaned.

“Mobbed?” I laughed, shaking the wrinkles out of a Lord of the Rings twin sheet, “I highly doubt it.  I mean, how many people want to go to a medieval festival? Its so…esoteric.”

“What are you talking about?” David replied, “Medieval festivals are incredibly popular.”

“Well, maybe that’s true in Tennessee,” I said, never missing an opportunity to remind David that I’m a native New Yorker and he’s not, “But in the city, it’s a niche thing.  It is not going to be ‘mobbed.’ Trust me.”

If at this point in the story, it is dawning on you that I am
a.  Kind of a jerk
b.  Domineering
and
c.  Woefully ignorant
you are correct on all counts, at least as far as this particular outing was concerned.

Because there were 60,000 people at that medieval festival.

That’s not an exaggeration or a speculation.  It’s the statistic NPR reported, which we heard in the car Sunday morning while waiting to get off the Henry Hudson Parkway at the Fort Tryon Park exit for 45 minutes.

My enormous stupidity became clear to me within the first minute or two of traffic, when I leaned out of the window and asked a cop who was re-directing cars if there was some sort of accident or something.

“What, this?” he replied, gesturing at the gridlock, “Nah, it’s just festival traffic.”

The way that he tossed that phrase around so casually tipped me off to the fact that this was probably going to be an afternoon to remember, just not the way I’d planned.

We probably should’ve turned around right there, but you know how it is when you’ve already sunk time and energy into something.  You feel like you have to see it through to the finish, no matter how excruciating it is for everyone involved.

After 10 minutes of traffic, the kids were wilted.  After 20, they were whining.  After 45, they’d devolved into a bunch of snarling, feral animals.

“I’m hungry!  I’m tired!  I’m hot!  I’m so hot!  I’m so so so so so hot!” yawped my five-year-old known in these parts as Seconda.  My daughter, who has a drawer full of princess dress-up which she insists on wearing to all sorts of occasions at which princess garb is not appropriate, decided that on this occasion, where everyone else would be wearing princess gowns, she would be donning a full-body fleece tiger costume.

“Please Mommy, I beg you, listen to reason!” shouted seven-year-old Primo in a Harry Potter cloak, “This is the most boring, awful adventure you’ve ever forced us to go on!  I WANNA GO HOME!”

David said nothing, just sat behind the wheel stony-faced as the waves of whining crashed on him from the back seat.  I’m sure he was too busy fantasizing ways to kill me to bother with “I told you so.”

“Ok, so you were right,” I conceded, “But don’t worry.  I’m being punished for my hubris with morning sickness, not to mention being preggers with no place to pee.”

It was clear that the kids would internally combust if they had to stay in the car til we found a parking space so David dropped me and Ye Old Sourpusses off and said he’d meet up with us once he found a spot.

I hope you enjoy the prefix “Ye Old” because you’re about to hear a lot of it.  It’s the just-add-water way to turn regular stuff into medieval stuff.  I caught onto this trend after walking 10 steps and seeing signs for “Ye Old Information Booth,” “Ye Old Lemonade Stand” and “Ye Old Costume Shoppe — officially liscened Harry Potter items.”

“Ok kids, lets get excited!“ I ordered as we picked up a map, “Who wants to see a quidditch match?”

“Me! Me!” shouted the kids, perking up.

Unfortunately, as the schedule of events informed me, we’d missed that while we were waiting in festival traffic.

“Don’t worry,” I assured the kids, hurriedly scanning the schedule as Primo’s face scrunched up in preparation for a crying fit, “Look!  We can see jousting soon!  Jousting!  With real horses! Hooray!  Hooray!”

If you’ve ever been pregnant, you understand that using that many exclamation points drains your entire day’s worth of energy.  This is why pregnant women should get a pass excusing them from excessive enthusiasm.  They should also get excused from carrying five-year-olds on their backs.  I was stuck doing both.

With a grouchy tiger slung over my back and the saddest Harry Potter impersonator in the tri-state area attached to my hand, I trudged through the hordes, observing points of interest along the way.

“Look!  It’s Ye Old Barbeque Shoppe!” I shrieked, “Oh my God, would you look at the size of those turkey legs!”

I’m not sure what kind of a turkey they kill for that meat, but from the look of it, it’s possible dinosaurs are not as extinct as I’d thought.  The people gnawing on those drumsticks needed two hands to raise the hunks of meat to their mouths.  Being pregnant, the smell of sizzling animal flesh caused two equal and opposite reactions in me, making me gag and salivate at the same time.  Deciding which reaction to act on was a moot point since the line at Ye Old BBQ Shop was approximately 100 people long.

On we trudged, through a sea of men in tights and buxom ladies swathed in crushed velvet.  As impressive as the size of the turkey legs, so was the intricacy of the costumes the festival-goers were wearing.  I anticipated gowns of the variety I purchase from Target for Seconda — polyester, with Velcro tabs on the back, $19.99 or less.  These gowns, though, were the real deal, stuff that looked like it cost as much as my wedding dress, with buttons down the back and accouterments to boot.  And it wasn’t just the women either — the men were just as finely appointed, plumes blowing in the breeze, ornamental swords hanging from their waists and vests, more vests than I’d seen since 1985.  The kids weren’t terribly impressed, but I enjoy seeing people get Ye Old Freak On, so the costumes were the highlight of my afternoon.

That, and the zeppola we devoured at Ye Old Fried Dough Shoppe, where we paused for nourishment.  As I waited for the long line of Guineveres and Sir Lancelots in front of us to be served, I tried reaching David on his cell but got no answer.  He hadn’t left a message or even a text, which was odd because it had been almost an hour.  Even on a bad day, parking doesn’t take that long.

But I had pressing business to attend to, namely dividing one overpriced zeppola equally enough that my rugrats didn’t maul each other in a battle over who had the bigger piece.  Newly invigorated by the grease coursing in our veins, we hit the trail again, just another couple of pilgrims on the road to Canterbury… or a pop-up jousting stadium in Washington Heights, as the case may be.

With minutes to spare, we located the stadium, and it seemed as though the day might not be such a bust after all.  Until we realized there were no seats.  Because, of course, 60,000 other people were interested in watching the festival’s main event too and they were bright enough to get there a bit early.  Not only were there no seats, there was no room to peer in on the sidelines because surrounding the entire perimeter of the stadium was a crowd of bystanders four or five people deep.

“Oh no, Mommy, oh no…” groaned Primo, alerting me to a major meltdown in the works.

Seconda, a pile of dead weight on my back, was too hot and tired to even form words.  She just moaned.

I called David again, but was directed straight to voicemail.  Had the man stopped for a Jamesons on the rocks on the way over from the parking spot?

“Ok, so maybe this wasn’t the best idea,” I conceded as trumpets blared to signal the beginning of the jousting we wouldn’t see, “Sometimes even Mommies make mistakes.”

Primo looked at me with an expression which roughly translates to “Duh.”

“But you know what we can do?” I announced, “We can get another zeppola!”

After I’d paid the man at Ye Old Fried Dough Shoppe the last of my ducats, I tried David on his cell again, and this time, he picked up.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“What do mean?” he retorted, “I’m in the (expletive deleted) car, looking for (expletive deleted) parking.”

“No!” I gasped.

“Yes,” he replied, “Oh yes.”

“But it’s been two and a half hours.”

“That is something I am keenly aware of.”

“Well, we’re done now,” I assured him.

“How convenient,” he said, “I’m about to turn the corner — for the five thousandth time.”

By the time the poor man drove us back to Brooklyn and found a spot to leave the car, he could hardly move his right leg.  We decided to let the kids blow off some steam and give David a chance to rehabilitate his gimp leg at our favorite local patch of asphalt near the handball courts, across the street from the playground.  It’s a perfect destination because, since it has no amenities or attractions, no one is ever there.  David and I leaned against the fence, drinking cups of coffee from the bagel shop and watching the kids pretend to be vampire zombies devouring each other’s brains and blood supply.  An autumn breeze picked up, clearing away our crankiness, airing our attitudes out.

On the walk home, Primo said, “See, Mommy?  I told you we don’t need to go to Manhattan for a good time.  Sometimes, you have more fun when you don’t look for it.”

Wise beyond his years.  I think I’ll promote him to Head Coordinator of Weekend Festivities.

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To read more of Nicole’s adventures in Mommyland, visit her blog at amomamok.blogspot.com.