Park Slope Reader

dispatches

Running Free

By Filed Under: Dispatches From Babyville Tagged With: , , , , , ,

When I saw a ball coming towards me as a kid, my first thought was: “run.” Not towards the ball but away from it. If the ball was big enough, I might use it to sit on while reading a book. That was about the extent of my experience with balls. I was the archetypal bookworm, knocking over huge displays of breakfast cereal at the grocery store when I walked right into them while reading. One can certainly be both a bookworm and a sports star, just not if one is me.

Though I didn’t know him at the time, my husband was precisely the same way. He was neither asthmatic nor French, but I do imagine him as a little Proust, scribbling feverishly in a notebook, crying for his mother and lingering over cookies. It’s no surprise then, that our children, aged 11, 9 and 4, are ball-averse story junkies.

In general, I love that my kids share one of my great passions. It allows for easy bonding and there’s always someone to talk to about the latest This American Life podcast. Our shared, sedentary interest is also very convenient on those days when I am thoroughly, ruthlessly exhausted – which is to say, pretty much every day.

When they were young (and still with my preschooler) hypnosis via story-telling was the only way I could distract my kids into doing things they didn’t want to do, such as eating, sleeping, going to the bathroom, walking places, and, occasionally breathing.

The one drawback, though, is that the fine arts of reading, writing, talking and listening do not afford children a ton of physical exercise. And as everyone knows, daily physical exertion is necessary for a healthy lifestyle. Perhaps more importantly, daily physical exertion is necessary for sleep.

This is an important fact when you consider that in addition to being ball-averse, my kids are also sleep-averse. The level of exertion necessary to wear my kids out is extraordinarily high, which is somewhat ironic. It is as though jet fuel courses in their veins instead of blood. Physical romps which cause other children to fall alssep on the subway ride home have no affect whatsoever on my children’s level of alertness. I have no explanation for this. I do, however, have a remedy, namely: Run them ragged.

When you’re trying to think up ways to thoroughly drain the charge out from your kids’ batteries, the first thing you think of is: balls. So, recently, I bought the biggest ball I could find and I dragged my children to a nearby basketball court.

“Play with this ball!” I instructed, like I was a mom from Mars impersonating a human. “Throw it in the basket! It is fun!”

And they did, for two and a half minutes. But they soon tired of the endeavor. Sometimes the ball went in, and sometimes it didn’t and either way it seemed to feel about the same.

So I tried a new game.

“Chase it! Get it!” I instructed, throwing the ball away from my kids. In the dog community, I believe this game is referred to as “Fetch” and it’s a huge hit. It’s less popular well with human children. 

I did not, however, give up. I took the dog game one step further, unleashing our family’s ace in the hole –imagination.

“Let’s pretend the ball is a dog who’s running away from us!” I told my four-year-old, bouncing the ball away from her. “Fido, you naughty little doggie! Come back here!” And, lo and behold, she ran after it, chortling with glee. But ten minutes later, the novelty had worn off.

“Run, run, run!” I exhorted the kids.

“Why?” they asked.

“You’re kids!” I reminded them. “You don’t need a reason to run! It’s supposed to be what you do. A wolf howls. A bird flies. Children run.”

And that’s when my 11-year-old said: “Let’s play tag.”

As a child, I was not a huge fan of tag. I was too busy inventing soap operas for my Barbies to enact, and gossiping with my imaginary friends.

I wasn’t a big fan of tag as a child but I am a big fan now. It involves constant, ceaseless running, which dovetails nicely with my maternal agenda. It is a game that both an 11-year-old and a 4-year-old can enjoy. And it requires no equipment, making it totally free.

But the real reason I love tag is that it’s one of those games you can only truly enjoy in childhood. You reach a certain age, and the appeal just evaporates. I like a good chase scene . . . but only if I’m watching it in a blockbuster while sitting down and shoving popcorn in my mouth. The kids, though, want to be the stars of the chase scene. It’s exciting. It’s invigorating. It’s high stakes.

I sat on a bench at the park and watched the kids play tag. It was a stunning early summer morning – the sun warming but not yet oppressive. There was a delicious breeze that rustled the leaves and almost made me feel as if I lived in the countryside. My kids each bent down on one knee and stuck their feet together.

“Bubble gum bubble gum in a dish, how many pieces do you wish?” my son began – but my littlest one interrupted him. She is wont to pipe up whenever the opportunity presents itself and frequently even when it doesn’t.

“Let me do it! Let ME say the words!” she insisted. And then: ”Daffy Daffy duck eating apple pie. He sat on a rock and he cried because it hurt his butt! You’re it!”

This last bit was directed to my nine-year-old, who accepted the mantle of “It.”

And they were off.

I sit on the bench and watch them run, their matching golden manes glinting in the sun. Their feet – big and little – pounding the pavement hard. Their arms pumping.

“I’m gonna get you!” my daughter, “It,” shrieks, panting
and laughing.

“Ahhhhhh!” shriek the others, looking over the shoulders, a thrilled grin stretching taut the muscles of their mouths.

They laugh as they run. And I laugh too, from a vicarious exhilaration. They’re alive and ignited and just so free.

And also because they’ll sleep come nighttime.

Nicole C. Kear is the author of the memoir Now I See You (St. Martin’s Press, 2014). Her chapter book series for children, The Fix-It Friends, will be published by Macmillan Kids’ Imprint in spring 2017.

THE MOTHER’S DAY MINDFIELD

By Filed Under: Dispatches From Babyville Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

In my first few years as a mother, I totally fell for the Mother’s Day hype. It’s very name, and the Kay jewelers commercials that run constantly, led one to believe that it’s a day in which those who constantly cater to the needs of others finally have their needs catered to, the one day among the other 364 in which mothers are given their due, honored for the terrific martyrs they are.

Awesome idea. Stellar. Too bad it’s a load of malarkey. I should clarify here that I’m a holiday person. I make homemade costumes for Halloween and throw elaborate themed birthday parties for my kids. I hurtle myself headlong into Christmas, like a moony teenager falling in love for the first time. Once, when my kids and I boarded a bus only to discover the meter was broken and no fare required, I declared it “Free Bus Day” and we sang jubilant songs on the theme, on and off all day.

I like celebrations. And I especially like celebrations in which the person being celebrated is me.

I respect, but do not understood, folks who try to ignore their birthdays, people who forbid their spouses and co-workers to make a big deal. David, my husband, is one such person, and it caused some arguments in our early years together.

[pullquote]

I’VE RECONCILED MYSELF TO THE FACT THAT I WILL NEVER GET A WHOLE DAY OF HUGS AND KISSES AND GRATITUDE.  BUT I CAN GET FIVE TO TEN MINUTES. 

[/pullquote]He has a particularly strong aversion to surprise parties, which I discovered when I threw him one for his twenty-third birthday in our living room. I convinced him to take a nap, and while he was sleeping, I hung streamers, sneaked out the German Chocolate Cake I’d spent two hours baking according to his mother’s recipe, and ushered in the guests. When everything was ready, I woke him from a dead sleep by crying: “The kitchen sink! It’s flooding! Come quick!” Still half asleep, he stumbled into the living room in his boxers and T-shirt and when everyone yelled “Surprise!” he about-faced with nary a word and marched right back into the bedroom.

Looking back, my surprise party plan was not as well-conceived as I’d thought. I nailed the surprise part—the party part, not so much.

Of course, in marriages we give our partners what we want. I have been waiting patiently for several decades for someone to throw me a surprise party—for my birthday, Mother’s Day, International Women’s Day, even Free Bus Day, I’m not picky.

Sometimes, I wonder if maybe David has been planning a surprise party all this time, and he’s just playing a long game, so that I’ll be absolutely flabbergasted when it happens. It’ll be Mother’s Day in my seventy-sixth year of life and David will contrive for me to play mah jong with my girlfriends (by that time, I will have started playing mah jong and calling my ladies “girlfriends”). But when I arrive, instead of being greeted just by Ethel and Martha and Frances (my friends’ names will age along with them), I’ll be greeted by a room packed full of friends, my children, my grandchildren, maybe even the barista of my favorite coffee joint, who’s always thought of me as a mother figure. The mayor might swing by for a minute, say a few words.

There will be not only a chocolate fountain but a prosecco fountain and a marble bust in the exact likeness of me. This will all be possible because one of my three kids will have become a billionaire, having invented the cure for the common cold. After everyone yells “Surprise!” David will turn to face me, leaning on his walker, and he will say: “All these years, you thought we were slacking off, but we were really planning this. Happy Mother’s Day “

And I will finally feel satisfied on Mother’s Day. I will finally feel adequately honored.

It is no surprise that on a recent Mother’s Day, David’s card to me read: “I love you. I hope you have a great day. Just manage your expectations.”

For my part, I think my needs are fairly simple. While I would certainly enjoy a ticker tape parade, I don’t expect one. All I want are heartfelt, homemade cards from each of my children, some kind of dessert with so many calories it’s illegal in some states, and the privilege of choosing the afternoon’s activity.

Of course, I can’t help but hope that, on this one day, my kids will tone down the bickering, or even eliminate it—for one day, how hard is that? I can’t help but dream that they might toss me a moment of gratitude, in the vein of, “Thank you for your joie de vivre and the priceless gift of hope”—that, and maybe pick up their dirty clothes off the bathroom floor.

I always tell my kids that “practice makes perfect—or at least, better” and this is true of Mother’s Day celebrations, as well. Over the past eleven years, David and I have gotten better at hopping around the Mother’s Day minefield, without detonating any explosives.

The primary lesson David had to learn was that it is his job to oversee the children’s card-making. This came as something of a surprise to him. It was a little like watching the sausages get made.

When the kids were in nursery school or Pre K, this was a non-issue because their teachers made the construction of such cards mandatory. Those cards were the best, the Rolls Royce of Mother’s Day cards. Quality materials, like heavy weight card stock and tempera paint, were used. Time was devoted to the enterprise. The cards were both funny and sweet, including phrases like: “Today, I wish for you a donkey!” and “I lov u mame beecaws u ar nis and pretee and giv me candee.”

But when the children were either too young for too old for nursery school, they fell into a dead zone of cardlessness. A two-year-old will not think to make a card for her mother. A six-year-old will think to do it but lack the follow-through to make it happen, hatching extraordinary plans and then getting distracted, permanently, by a stale gummy bear under the couch. Thus, there was one Mother’s Day early on in which I waited and waited for the official Presentation Of the Cards and alas, I waited in vain.

“Why didn’t you have the kids make cards for me?” I asked David.

“That’s their responsibility,” he countered.

Then I let forth a bitter laugh. An “Oh, to be as ignorant as you!” chuckle.

“Why do you think you get Father’s Day cards every year?” I asked. “I stand over them and make sure they do it. And not just a two-second scribble either. I make them go back and revise and give you the good stuff. Acrostics, Haikus. Drawings with verisimilitude.”

So David started overseeing card construction. He doesn’t have the natural ability of a Pre K teacher, and I’ve yet to receive a sonnet, but he gets the job done.

I’ve learned a thing or two myself. I’ve learned to lower my expectations. The lower, the better. If I could bring those expectations to street level, and then pulverize them underfoot, that would be ideal. As it stands, I’ve managed to get them from Sky High to about Fifteen Stories High, which isn’t half bad.

I’ve reconciled myself to the fact that I will never get a whole day of hugs and kisses and gratitude. But I can get five to ten minutes. And the good news is, I don’t just have the chance for these moments on Mother’s Day. Because I’m a mother every day.

Much as I’d like to shout “Action!” and instantly call up Hallmark moments, these moments tend to happen spontaneously, sometimes at the most inconvenient times. I’ve noticed children get very lovey when it’s way past their bedtime or you’re in the middle of talking to someone else about something very important or when you really, really have to go to the bathroom. No matter when they occur, I try to savor the tender moments. I have a whole folder full of heart-melting, no-occasion notes from my kids, as well as drawings of me and them holding hands in a field of flowers and hugging in a room full of cats and smiling while standing next to Frankenstein (mysteriously, I am always wearing a pearl necklace, though I do not own one. Pearl necklace, I’ve learned is the signifier for “Mother”).

That’s to say nothing of the moments we share for which there is no paper trail. The early mornings when my three-year-old clambers into my bed and nuzzles in my shoulder. The bedtimes when my nine-year-old will curl up next to me as I read Little Women aloud. The sporadic, sudden hugs from my eleven-year-old who is so much taller than me that my head nearly rests on his shoulder now.

String these moments together and you get one hell of a Mother’s Day. n

Nicole C. Kear is the author of the memoir Now I See You (St. Martin’s, 2014), and the forthcoming chapter book series for kids, The Fix-It Friends (Imprint, 2017).

Picture Book Pitfalls

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Does this scene seem familiar? You’re curled up in bed or snuggled in a rocking chair or sitting on your stoop on a beautiful fall afternoon and you’re reading Bread and Jam for Frances to your child. You are feeling incredibly good about yourself because you know that reading builds a lifelong love of literature and ensures that your child will be adequately attached to you so that they won’t get strung out on heroin or drop out of high school or get ill-advised tats on their ankles.

Your child is leaning against you and it’s wonderful to smell that good, clean kid smell and also wonderful to know you are the best parent that ever existed, so exceptional you may, in fact, win Mother of the Year. Because you could have opted for a shorter book, maybe Sendak or Willems, which would have left you a few minutes to send emails, but you opted for this one because, well, they just grow up so fast.

You are admiring Hoban’s writing style—so simple, yet so satisfying, the literary equivalent of comfort food—and you are feeling delightfully charmed by Frances, who is not only the only badger you’ve ever encountered in children’s literature, but also the best. And then it happens.

Frances sings.

Of course she does. That badger will sing about anything. She will sing about eggs and tea sets and jump rope. Yes, it’s a part of her precocious appeal and yes, the songs are great—funny and smart and pithy. A part of you wishes Taylor Swift would release an album of Frances covers. But the fact remains that they put an undue onus on you, beleaguered mother, who did not get formal songwriting training at Julliard.

There you are, reading happily, until you crash right into those block quotes which instantly kill your buzz and trigger the following inner monologue:

Oh, come on. A song? Really. Now? Did the Hobans bother to give me a clue as to a melody that might work here? Did he insert a helpful footnote, clarifying that if you’ll just sing to the tune of “Oh Susanna,” you’ll be on cruise control? Something like:

“Why are there so many

Songs inside picture books?”*

*sing to the tune of “Rainbow Connection”

No, of course they did not.

I could speak the lyrics, as if it were a poem. That’s perfectly legit. We move the plot forward, we get character development, and without the stress of composing an original soundtrack. Still, I can’t help feeling like I’m giving everyone short shrift here. How hard is it, anyway, to sing a jaunty little tune? It’s not rocket science.

I’ll just pick a very basic melody; say, “The ABCs” or “Row Your Boat.” We’ll give that a shot.

And look at that, it’s a disaster because I’m not a direct descendant of Pete Seeger, and thus, it’s not that easy for me to match Frances’ lyrics about soft-boiled eggs to the tune of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” It would be easier, really, just to improvise a new melody. You know, like the jazz giants did. Like Coltrane.

It seems like it would be easier, and yet it is not. Because as soon as I’ve sung one line of Francis’ incisive lyrics, I forget the melody I just came up with. You could call it “avant-guard,” if by that you meant “unbearable.”

So, I’ve exhausted all options, which means the only choice now is to imagine WWNNPD—what would non-neurotic people do? They would say: Who cares? It’s not like my daughter will notice. She probably thinks I sound like an angel and am beautiful too, because she is young and innocent in the ways of the world. And I get an A for effort, which still puts me in the running for the Mother of the Year, which, despite the fact that it is a fictional prize I know does not exist, I still have my heart set on. Not quite what non-neurotic people would do, but as close as I can get.

Repeat this monologue at every new mention of a song in a picture book. You get the idea. It’s draining.

It’s not the most pressing problem to plague families today, I’ll admit. Yet you’d think there’d be a hack for this. Or, better yet, an app. Yes, what we really need is an app in which you can search for picture books featuring un-scored lyrics, and then play an original composition for each tune, courtesy of some actual Julliard grad who, no doubt, could use the work.

Anyone?

Nicole Caccavo Kear is the author of the memoir Now I See You (St. Martin’s), now available in paperback. Her children’s series, The Fix-It Friends, comes out in 2017 by Macmillan Kids – and will not feature any original songs.

Dispatches From Babyville: Baby Steps

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The morning after Lorenzo was born, I was lying in my hospital bed, cradling the baby in my arms and gazing at his sleeping face when he suddenly started to choke. On thin air. He hadn’t been nursing or anything, he just went from slumbering in that unreachable, newborn way to gagging.

I lay immobilized for a second or two and then I raced into the hospital hallway, holding Lorenzo and yelling: “Help me! Someone! My baby is choking!”

I was fully aware of how ridiculous this sounded and what a spectacle I was making but my panic overrode any sense of decorum. This was life and death.

A middle-aged nurse strode over. She was solid in her scrubs, and she walked like she meant business. Within a few seconds, she’d grabbed the baby out of my arms like a sack of beans and whacked him on the back, twice, with what seemed like excessive force. I winced as I imagined his spinal column shattering. But he remained in one piece, as erect as a newborn can be, and his gagging was replaced with bawling.

“That’s normal,” the nurse explained, handing the baby back to me and paying precious little attention, I noted, to supporting his head. “He’s just gagging on his amniotic fluid. They do that sometimes.”

She said it casually, like it was supposed to make me feel better. In fact, it had the opposite effect. I’d been prepared to protect my son from all sorts of choking hazards—loose change, hot dogs, paper clips—but later, in a few months, when I’d had a chance to hone my mothering skills. I’d never thought I‘d need to start now, right out of the gate, and that I’d have to also worry about him choking on stuff that was already inside of him. The very stuff that had shielded him from harm for the past nine months.

All of a sudden, the enormity of the enterprise before me slammed down on my shoulders. Holy Mother of God. There’d be things I would fail to protect him from. And not just the stuff I’d already, very diligently, worried about like clipping off his fingertips instead of his fingernails because I couldn’t see details that small. There was a whole world, a whole galaxy, of other stuff that I couldn’t protect him from, stuff that hadn’t even occurred to me, stuff I didn’t even know about. What the hell was I going to do now?

What I was going to do was hang my head and cry, the which I did right there in the hospital hallway, in my no-slip socks and pink polka-dot pajamas.

“You mean he’s going to do it again?” I sobbed, “and there’s nothing I can do to stop it?”

Without missing a beat, the nurse put her hand on my shoulder and ushered me back to my bed. She seemed so unfazed by my sudden crying fit, it gave me the strong suspicion that that hallway had seen far worse mental breakdowns. Working in maternity was probably pretty similar to working in the psych ward, except with bigger maxi pads.

“It’s going to be all right,” she promised, “A little gagging won’t hurt him.”

“But what if—” I sputtered. “What if he chokes so much he can’t breathe?”

“He won’t,” she replied. “I’ve never heard of that.”

That wasn’t sufficient reassurance for me. There was all sorts of shit you never heard about until it happened to you and then it was too late. I’d never heard about retinitis pigmentosa and yet, here I was, unable to see the tissue she was holding out to me until she finally shoved it right in my hand.

I blew my nose and took a deep breath.  Too late to back out now.

“Tell me what to do, exactly, if it happens again,” I pleaded, “Step by step.”

“There’s only one step,” she replied, “Just give him a good old whack on his back.”

“But how will I know for sure that his airway is clear?” I pressed.

The nurse looked over in the direction of my roommate who was buzzing her call button insistently from behind the room’s dividing curtain. I’d been privy to my roommate’s every sound for the last twelve hours and despite the fact that I hadn’t caught a glimpse of her, I’d put together a pretty detailed profile: Polish, first baby, C-section, not much luck nursing, prone to sudden meltdowns herself. From the sound of the call button, there was another breakdown in the works, which meant mine had to be wrapped up.

“Look,” said the nurse, “if the baby’s crying, you know he’s not choking. So I guess if you really wanted to be sure his airway was clear, make him cry. Give his big toe a good squeeze—that’ll aggravate him.”

“OK,” I affirmed, “Got it.” If I have any suspicions that the baby is choking, any at all, I should make him cry.

Which is why I spent the first month of my infant’s life annoying him relentlessly.

I’d look over at the bouncy seat, where Lorenzo lay still, silent, and peaceful. Though this is most mothers’ dream, it was my call–to-arms. Why was the baby so preternaturally still? Clearly, he was not breathing. Likely, it was that damn amniotic fluid causing trouble again. Who knew how long he’d been like this? As I sat pondering, his brain might be losing oxygen! No time to undertake the subtle investigative measures I’d learned in infant CPR class like watching his chest rise and fall; I couldn’t trust myself to see the ever-so-slight movement of his chest anyway, my vision was so poor. No, no, this emergency called for the squeeze-the-toe test, approved by medical professionals as the quickest, most effective way to confirm baby’s respiratory health.

I’d squeeze the toe. He’d scrunch his placid face into a scowl and commence caterwauling. Mission accomplished. The baby was breathing. And, now royally pissed off.

Over and over again in the first weeks of my baby’s life, people were assuring me that if I trusted my mother’s instinct, I’d be fine and over and over again, I was finding that was a load of horse-crap. Maybe other mothers, ones with all their primary senses intact, had functional maternal instincts, but worry and a severe lack of confidence had caused mine to short-circuit. None of this mothering business was coming naturally. I needed a detailed instruction manual to do everything and sometimes, even that didn’t work. It was a classic case of the blind leading the blind.

From Now I See You by Nicole C. Kear. Copyright © 2014 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press, LLC.

Nicole C. Kear’s memoir, Now I See You (St. Martin’s Press): Order now the book and find more info at nicolekear.com.