For Renewable Energy, Tap a Mother's Guilt

I was listening to a segment on the Obama administration's plans to create renewable energy sources on The Diane Rehm Show as I was driving downtown this morning when it hit me: if you could bottle up all the mother guilt in the United States, you would never need to drill for oil again. You'd have all the renewable energy you could ever use.

The reason I was stuck in traffic, looking for a parking place near the Verizon Center, instead of (a) walking Mavis with a friend, as scheduled, and (b) getting ready for a doctor's appointment is that Julia's daycare class had a field trip to see "Disney on Ice" and suddenly I was going. 

Back when I was dating, the etiquette was clear about who came first: you did not bail out on a girlfriend to make plans with a guy. Even the doctor/patient relationship leaves no gray. Cancelling an appointment at the last minute as I did means that I will have to pay for it. But child/friend etiquette has never been spelled out to me. Was it okay to leave my walking buddy in the lurch for Julia? 

My guilt about not accompanying Julia on the field trip was fueled by a couple of things. If I had been in town last week, I would have signed up to chaperone and there never would have been any question about where I belonged. But as I watched Julia walk away toward the Metro holding the hand of one of her teachers, I felt horrible, not least because she wanted me to go and if we're lucky enough to win the public school lottery next month, Julia will be in real school next year. How much time I spend with her won't be my decision, it will be strictly regulated by the District of Columbia. 

Also, I find that with my dad sick and every phone call to or from Atlanta one that turns up another unsettling health condition for me to process, I am walking around brimming with tears at all times. I need my mother, but the best I can get right now is the satisfaction of being present for my children. So when the teacher called from the subway platform to say that they found an extra ticket, I hesitated less than half a nano-second. Even that pause seemed too long in response to Miss La Juan's plea, "Julia really wants you to come."

At the show, Julia sat on my lap and we shared a big box of popcorn and there was no question for me about where I should be. But when it ended and I had to go find my car, I again had to leave her. This time, she was bound up in Miss La Juan's arms, crying.

A few days ago when I was about to go to the airport and I was telling my mother goodbye, she hugged me hard and said, "I love you more than you can know." 

"I'm a mother, too," I said, "and so I do have some idea." 

In preparation for Valentine's Day, each child in Julia's class was asked to say how much they love their mothers (maybe the dads get the cards??). Borrowing from one of our favorite picture books, Guess How Much I Love You, Julia answered, "I love my mama to the moon." 

I'm not sure why a mother's love is tinged with guilt, but I know that I've got enough of both to get Julia and me to the moon--and back.

Tuesday Night Fever

Washington, as anyone over the age of 16 minutes can sense, is suffering from a collective anxiety these days. You'd think that our nervousness might be over the deficit that's 12 zeroes long or the full-out war in the Gaza Strip, and of course good people are fretting over both. But neither the debate over the economic stimulus nor the need for a cease fire in the Middle East is the No. 1 preoccupation in town.

At the moment Washington is not about politics with a capital P but rather a form of office politics, the central question being how far away your personal planet is from the center of the solar system--a.k.a. the president. This distance determines not just your career but also your social life, where your kids go to school, and soon, I'm sure, which rescue league your dog comes from. 

All this is to say that whether you're a Bush person or an Obama person, what you're most likely thinking about right now is how best to position yourself. After all, what Republican wants to be the one to turn out the lights as the Bushes decamp for Texas? And what Democrat wants to be left behind at the non-profit that's been a holding tank for the past eight years when there's an actual country to run instead of merely to theorize about? The anxiety is so high among some of these government wannabees that they need a stunt double* to perform the extreme and, in a few cases, extremely embarrassing, maneuvers they're trying to secure a job in the new administration. There's also a secondary mania over snagging a ticket (or two, because who really wants to go alone?) to the inauguration itself. 

Our family is so outside the outer loop of the Beltway that we're just thinking about the same things we always dwell on: what garbage bag, doll's head, potpourri pouch, Star Wars Lego has Mavis chewed up and has she peed and/or pooped in Sam or Julia's room or simply thrown up?

Still, we're all excited about January 20th, when we may get to see the 44th president sworn-in on a Jumbo-tron somewhere down on the Mall--or, more likely, on a little TV in the warmth of the Five Guys Burgers and Fries at DuPont Circle if walking to the Mall turns out to be more Sissyphean than pleasurable. (The we here means my sister, Betsy, not Ralph, who's working.)

But come Inauguration Night, hey, we're (Betsy and me again) grabbing the sequined ring and going to a ball! It's being thrown by a friend of ours, and we're dressing up to go spend an evening in high heels with our closest buddies. It might not be celebrity-studded, but it will definitely be fun. 

"It's a lesser ball," I've told those who're interested. "Truthfully," I say, "it's probably your least ball." At least that's what I thought until I was set straight today by a friend, who explained that a ball is an official event, meaning that's it's being hosted by Barack Obama or Joe Biden, while a gala is an unofficial one. 

"In that case, I guess that makes my event a gala," I said. "

"Your event is nothing," she answered.

I'm not sure, but I think what she was saying was that if I were a planet, I'd be Pluto. And yes, I think she knows that Pluto has been demoted.

*My niece recently told Sam and Julia that actors use stunt doubles for kissing in movies because, you know, they might otherwise get germs--or they might already be married.

Phoning Home--and Elsewhere

I've always thought the expression "phoning it in" was too glib; too coldly technological, but in the past few weeks I've come to see the advantages of telephone as proxy.

That's because I've recently had the opportunity to play the roles of mother, daughter, wife, worker bee, in-law, and aunt both in person and via cell. The morning I arrived in Atlanta a week before Thanksgiving to spend a few days with my parents without the distraction of kids and siblings, my mom had contracted a stomach flu so severe she was lying in the emergency room of the local hospital on a glucose drip. Out went our plans for ladies' lunches and holiday shopping designed to get my mom, my dad's 24/7 caregiver, out of the house. Instead, while she sipped chicken broth or slept, I took over her nursing duties (albeit far less proficiently than she handles them). My dad, who can do little for himself and requires constant care, is nonetheless the essence of courtesy and consideration. His middle-of-the-night requests for a blanket or cough syrup were invariably blanketed in apologies. And despite the circumstances, I loved spending time with him. But as I was trying to get back to sleep after one of those wee-hour wake up calls, I thought, Being a daughter is the hardest job I have right now. 

How could I think otherwise when, during my five days in Atlanta, all I heard from home were cheery phone messages in which Ralph would say, "We love you," followed by a tiny and distant-sounding echo of "We love you" and then an even tinier and more distant voice, "We love you," like so many stair steps. Separated by hundreds of miles and connected only by speaker phone, even Mavis, our not-quite-housebroken hound with a nose for a crumb, began to seem like a contender for best-behaved dog. As a friend of Ralph's and mine whose job keeps him on the road about 250 days a year, says, "The longer I'm away from home, the less my wife and I have to talk about." It's true for us, too. At least I don't recall Ralph's mentioning any suspicions about Sam and head lice over the phone.

Arriving back in Washington, it was a different story. I returned to D.C. sick with the same bug as my mom, but, as bad luck would have it, had to steer Sam into the school nurse's office for a lice check the very next morning, a trip that, as you know from my last post, resulted in a frenzy of washing--hair, clothes, and, just to be safe, Mavis. Meanwhile, the phone was ringing with grateful--and sympathetic--calls from my parents over what I'd just left behind in Atlanta and what had just greeted me here. Feverish, chilled, and wiped out from all those lice, I found myself thinking, Motherhood is the hardest job I have.

You see where I'm going with this. But it's not because I believe that absence makes the heart grow fonder. In fact I think true love is tucking your daughter into her toddler bed, stroking her soft cheek, and whispering into your sleepy girl's ear how much you love her just as she drifts off--all the while wondering if lice lurk in her halo of hair. 

No. We women with aging parents and children who are just getting started, with a job to hold down and a household to run and a husband to stay connected to can't be in two or four places at once--even though I'd like to. The phone just helps you forget momentarily that you're not.

 

Family Bed: Taking It Too Far

Here's a update to an earlier post about what sleep--or lack thereof--is like around our house.

When Mavis jumped up on our bed and settled herself as close as she could get into the crook of Ralph's knees at 4:48 this morning I got the brilliant idea that what we need is not a king-size set up like we have, but an accordion mattress--one that expands as the need arises--much like a dining table to which you add more leaves for company. 

That's because when I went to sleep around midnight, it was just Ralph and me, taking up a concentrated amount of space in the middle of the bed--about the size of a double. When Julia joined us around 3:00 a.m., splayed out in the middle, we expanded to a queen. By the time Mavis came along, I was hanging off the edge like Cary Grant clinging precariously to some president's nose on Mt. Rushmore in the great Alfred Hitchcock movie North by Northwest. Maybe we needed a California king at that point.

Like dreams, most ideas you have in the wee hours don't really hold up when daylight comes. But I'm sticking with my accordion bed invention. Anyone up for investing?

Why You Shouldn't Make a Llama Nervous

So Ralph just read my previous post on spitting. He says that ballplayers spit because they get nervous. "If you watch them," he said, "they start to pace. It's very animalistic."

"Dogs don't spit," I said, looking at Mavis.

"Yeah," he said, "but llamas do."

Per Chance to Dream

If sleep is the new sex, then an uninterrupted night's sleep has got to be the equivalent of great sex. And in my house, at least, the former seems harder to come by than the latter. For the past three years, despite all the arguments against the family bed, we've had one--and, often, two--children sandwiched between us. Besides the problem of overcrowding, our children spin in their sleep, meaning that I'd often wake to a random foot poking me in the eye. Sometimes we'd sneak off to one of the empty beds on the unoccupied third floor. But we never went a full night without being caught AWOL. 

So when we were on vacation last month in a Cape Cod cottage the size of a fried clam platter, we sent the children packing to their own room. Never mind that we could lay in our bed and practically reach them across the hall, the separation was still a gargantuan step. After years of conditioning, I didn't sleep spread-eagle, but I did occasionally brush against my husband in the middle of the night. 

Still, weaning the kids from our bed hasn't resolved the bigger problem of sleep deprivation. I'm generally such a sound sleeper that an ice-cream truck could park on my mattress and I might not turn over. Years ago, when one of my roommates got locked out of our apartment, she tried for hours to penetrate my personal sound barrier, banging on the door and calling, and I never did wake up. So why are those same deaf ears attuned to the tiniest tot sigh? Several times a night, I respond to the siren call of a scared 37-inch-tall girl in a flowered nightgown, who appears at the top of the stairs needing to be led to bed and patted back to sleep. When I was three and similarly frightened, I would go stand over my mother, saying nothing but simply willing her to wake up--and she always did.

And my daughter's cries aren't the only noise I'm sensitive to. Since Mavis the dog came into our life six weeks ago, her whining at odd moments like 2:32 a.m. or 3:33--to pee, to play, or because she wants company--gets me up again. You see where all this is going: Mavis has ended up occupying the prime real estate abandoned by our children. I'm thinking/hoping that this nocturnal commotion can't last forever. But by the time everyone settles down, will I think of sex as the new sleep? Who knows? It's late, and I'm being summoned.

Tell Me a Story

With two jobs, two kids, one marriage, and a teething puppy, life is hectic enough in our own family to have to worry about the jobs, marriage, and kids of another--particularly someone I'm unlikely ever to meet. But like many people I know, I've become obsessed with all things Sarah Palin. Partly, my impulse is the same that Southern writer Walker Percy described when he said we watch airplanes land just in case they crash. So I'm attuned to YouTube, the Huffington Post, Daily Kos, etc. etc. to learn the latest on Bristol's pregnancy, Sarah's rumored extramarital affair with Todd's ex-business partner, Troopergate--even Levi's makeover from grunge hockey player to Greenwich prepster--in case any of these makes Palin crash and burn, whisking her off the national stage that she was so recently air-dropped onto.

Deliciously scandalous possibilities aside,  we're still susceptible to people's stories, real or not. It's how we categorize people and file them away; it becomes shorthand for how we think. So Palin is reduced to the hockey mom who married her high-school "guy;" McCain, the ex-POW who spent five years in a box; Obama, the candidate raised by a single mom striving to give her son the tools to get ahead in life; and Biden, just a regular Joe. 

The stories that captivate aren't all political, of course. Consider my previously mentioned puppy. During the weeks this summer that I spent searching petfinder.com and other sites online for a pup, the only thing worse for me than a dog with a stupid name like Chewey and a boring story was a dog with no name and no story at all. Our pet's tale involves a dramatic West Virginia rescue, a doting mom, a dead-beat dad, hearty mixed-breed stock, and a litter of dumpling-like, playful, curious, innocents "who know only good in the world." 

Once we got her home, we changed her name from Biscuit to Mavis to reflect her country-girl roots. It turns out, though, that while Mavis is extremely sweet, she's probably not too different from the dozens of other puppies I bypassed. I'll bet they like to contemplate a butterfly just as Mavis was billed to do. 

Let Mavis's story be a cautionary one. In politics, as with house pets, the winning candidate should not be the one whose story tugs at the heartstrings. It should be based on the issues. Which presidential candidate do you think would learn to be house-trained first?