Growing Girls (22 page)

So this, so far, is it: Michael and Anna. Tritan and Victoria. The two happy couples of kindergarten. You can tell that Tritan and Victoria are still in the honeymoon stage, with Victoria only recently getting in trouble for yanking Tritan around by the neck. Michael and Anna have moved on to spats. She got mad at him yesterday; she said he stepped on her foot and would not apologize. He continued to refuse to apologize, despite his mothers insistence in the parking lot after school. “I didn’t
do
anything,” he said. “And she tried to
kiss
me.”

Anna vehemently denies the charges.

It’s hard to know where this relationship will go. Last night I overheard Anna talking on the phone to the cousin she hasn’t seen since summer. “I have a boyfriend,” she announced casually. “His name is Michael. He has black hair, and his pencil box broke.”

Tritan and Victoria have already consulted each other on the costumes they plan to wear to Michael’s Halloween party. He’s going to be “an amazing superhero,” and she’s going to be “a beautiful Barbie bride.”

Anna wants to be a duck.

Michael’s mother has expressed her concern.
“A duck?
Are you sure she doesn’t want to be Cinderella or something?” She says Michael is having trouble holding in his heart the truth that Anna is actually going to attend this party.
His princess is really coming to his house?

Yes, and she’s going to be a duck.

He’s going to be Spider-Man. I have expressed my concern. Anna has been afraid of Spider-Man since she was two. It is as close to a phobia as anything she has. Last summer she noticed a picture of Spider-Man on our Rice Krispies box, and she took the box outside and flung it in the compost pile.

I’m looking forward to going to Michael’s Halloween party. An amazing superhero and a beautiful Barbie bride. You can see potential there. But a monster of a Spider-Man and an oblivious duck? I just don’t know.

holy days of obligation

Our ducks were two-day-old ducklings when we got them and somewhere along the line maybe we did something wrong. Maybe that’s why they’re stupid. All grown up now, nine handsome and rigorous characters, these ducks still can’t find our pond. They hang out together in the barnyard, desperately slopping about in any available puddle, the horse trough, a wayward bucket, when just over the bank—about a sixty-second waddle away—is a pond full of lily pads and bugs and cool spring water.

With patience and forgiveness we have escorted them to the pond. We have chased them there and tried to explain. Each time they simply quack neurotically, fitfully, and hightail it back on up to the barnyard.

One hot week I got to feeling sorry for them, so I filled up
our little Barbie swimming pool, which they loved. But Alex said I was probably just enabling them so eventually we dumped out the water and went back to chasing them over the bank.

“I’m done worrying about this, ducks!” I shout out my window. “I don’t even
care
anymore!” If they want to be dryland ducks, so be it. I have provided for them a suitable wetland habitat. I have shown them the way to it. I have done all I can do.

Still, they look so pathetic down there on the driveway, fighting over space in a pothole filled up with rain.

Alex took the girls to the swim club, as a favor to help me get through what is left of this, my rotten day. The idea was to give me some quiet time, some work time, a good three-hour chunk to tend to all the stuff I never got to, on account of the day rotting. It was a kind gesture on his part, it really was, but the fact of the matter is I now feel even worse. All I can do besides worry about the ducks is think of Alex and the girls at the swim club. I think of splashing and frolicking on this sticky night, laughing as the girls play with the plastic blow-up dolphins I won for them last night at the church fair. One of the dolphins is orange and the other is green and I won them by knocking the teeth out of a big, wooden mouth with the little beanbags they gave you, three for a dollar.
Go, Mommy! Yay, Mommy!
I figured out that if you just whacked the mouth hard enough with the beanbag it didn’t matter where you hit it because the
force would make the whole display jiggle and the teeth would fall out from the vibration. Not once until long after my victory did it occur to me that this technique might be considered cheating (the point of the game was to
aim)
, especially there at a church fair where all proceeds more or less go toward salvation. No, I just fired the
beanbags, fwoom, fwoom, fwoom
, and when the teeth fell I jumped victoriously, took the orange dolphin as if it were my God-given right, and then I repeated the whole thing for the green dolphin.

“Go,
Mommy!”
I said, putting the power of suggestion firmly and distinctly right there in the hot summer night air. It’s important to sometimes help your children see you as the phenomenon that you are. “Go,
Mommy! Yay, Mommy!”

The girls did not repeat the mantra, but it hung there, sure it did, like a little tag-along balloon.

Go, Mommy. Yay, Mommy. Have a beer, Mommy. Go soak your stupid head.

Rotten day. This is the way your brain works on rotten days. Little imaginings go from sweet to sour and lead you straight down that spiral staircase of self-loathing.

Last night I had a dream set at Gym Dandy’s gymnastics studio, which is where, in real life, Anna and Sasha take tumbling classes on Tuesdays from five-thirty to seven-thirty. Two hours is a long time to stand around a gymnastics studio, let me assure you, but Anna is too old for Roll Tots and Sasha is too young for Kinder Tots, so I had to sign them up for separate classes. In the dream I showed up at Gym Dandy’s at the usual time, but it turned out I had forgotten all about the fact
that this was the night of the big gym show. All the kids but mine were dressed in their lime green sparkle outfits, ready to perform. “Wait!” I said, insisting that I could be back in twenty minutes with the outfits, if they would be kind enough to afford me one chance to be the hero. I bolted, zoomed home, grabbed the bag with the outfits, but then on the way back I got lost. Around and around in circles I went, as the clock ticked. Then I looked in the seat beside me and noted that the bag I had grabbed did not have green sparkle outfits in it, but rather green
butterfly costumes
. Wrong bag! Wrong outfits! Now I was lost, late, and without sparkle outfits, a perfect trifecta of motherhood malfunction.

I’ve had dozens of test-anxiety dreams in my life, those nightmares everybody gets when you show up for school having forgotten all about the big exam, or you show up for work having forgotten all about the big presentation. I believe this one to be my first test-anxiety dream: Mom edition.

I couldn’t get back to sleep so I put on CNN and soon enough had to try to stop thinking about the fourteen-year-old girl swimming in the Florida panhandle who had just met a most violent death in the teeth of an eight-foot-long bull shark.

Hmm, I thought. Hmm. Then I sang my ABCs, trying to lull myself back to sleep. Then I tried counting backwards from one hundred by threes, which I can never do, so I went by ones, and then the rooster started crowing and so of course the birds started chirping and then I could smell the coffeemaker going, which Alex sets up to start automatically at six.

Whatever. How many recent nights have I spent this way?
How many nights so full of drama and information and failed attempts to go backwards by threes and ABCs and spiraling thoughts of inadequacy? Increasingly the thoughts are not of things I’ve done to fail my children, but of all the holes. The missed opportunities. The afghan I never knitted when they were tiny. The “life book” I never started in the “scrapbooking” class I never took to learn how to lovingly mount their first lopped locks of baby hair. The photos I never took of them frolicking in fields of daisies with puppy dogs yipping and yapping about. The kites we haven’t flown on the sunny beaches filled with laughter and happiness. We’ve done plenty of these sorts of beautiful things, but not nearly all of the other specifically beautiful things I seem to have on my list; how do you know what is enough and how do you stop yourself from feeling that nothing ever is?

I might be hanging out with the wrong people. If I spent more time with my friends from work instead of my new mom friends, maybe I wouldn’t have a to-do list so crammed with fantasies. This morning, after the night of insomnia, I saw my new mom friends and that’s when things really went downhill. It wasn’t their fault. I love these women. Zoe’s mom, Kaitlin’s mom, Victoria’s mom, and Tritan’s mom. These women have their own actual first names, which I have never had the courage to use. I am not entirely sure these women exist outside their roles as mothers; when I am with them I don’t either. We have been circling around each other for about three years, ever since our kids started preschool. We’d bump into each other in the parking lot, at Valentine’s Day parties, and later as
one or the other shyly suggested we all sign our kids up for soft-ball, gymnastics, dance. You do enough of these things together, you bond.

We decided to sign the kids up for a little summer day camp and today was the first day. I trudged up there with Anna with my bleary eyes, the world already feeling all heavy and too much. It turned out that the camp, which was run by the church that runs our school, was a whole lot more Jesus than what I thought it would be. Upon entering, Anna received a “Shape up and ship out with Jesus” T-shirt and then Captain Jesus showed up to take the kids aboard the USS
CHRISTline
, but not before inviting the parents to attend the Captain Jesus Dinner Cruise on Wednesday night at six-thirty featuring Hawaiian Ham Salad and a Surprise Island Dessert.

“Wow,” I wanted to say to my new mom friends, and “Whoa.” But I didn’t know any of them well enough to seek spiritual advice. What sort of religious indoctrination were our children about to receive? Would they undergo exorcisms in the basement? Would they be asked to handle snakes? The charismatic bent was never anything I had run into at school. One of the things I like about having my girls in Catholic school is that I went to Catholic school so I know all the prayers and I’ve already done plenty of work around doubt, anger, and forgiveness, so I have some sense of how to steer. But I’ve never been aboard the USS
CHRISTline
. No, I have not.

Zoe’s mom had sent Zoe to the camp the year before and had loved it. She was still all gung-ho, so I found myself trusting her and kissing Anna and shooing her along inside, then
closing my eyes and just praying, which under the circumstances seemed oddly conflictual.

“So how about we go to Bob Evans for breakfast?” Kaitlin’s mom said, in the parking lot. Everyone said yes to Bob Evans, except me. I had to work, I said. I had deadlines, I said.

“But you have to eat!” Victoria’s mom said.

“I already had my banana,” I said, pathetically. I didn’t quite know how to explain that a Bob Evans breakfast would fill me to the point of needing a nap, as opposed to even a hope of a good day of writing. Nor did I think my work habits to be of much interest to anyone, so I said goodbye, drove off, called Alex on my cell phone.

“Yo, Captain Jesus has invited us on a dinner cruise aboard the USS
CHRISTline”
I said.

“Whoa,” he said. And “Wow.”

God bless him.

“What kind of camp is this?” he said.

“I think pretty innocuous,” I said, reassuring him that I didn’t think Anna’s soul was about to get co-opted by some loonies. “I’m thinking they just went a little overboard with the need for a theme.”

“All right,” he said, generously. His Jewishness and my Catholicism have coexisted with remarkable peace and tranquility, but the obvious fact is he does the bulk of the compromising.

“All my new friends went to Bob Evans for breakfast,” I said, and I must have sounded forlorn.

“You should go with them,” he said.

“You know I can’t,” I said.

“Yes, you can.”

“I have calls to make, a million e-mails before I even get started on my chapter.”

“You can take an hour.”

“I’ll never get anything done if I eat a Bob Evans biscuit,” I said.

“You can have a coffee,” he said. “And they probably have fruit there.”

“Yeah.”

I hung up, kept driving toward home, wondering how a person could feel this miserable about not going to Bob Evans, and if anyone else ever did. I was sick of being a working mom. Career shmameer! I wanted to be a regular old mom. I wanted to be a beefy lady choosing the one-stop-shopping convenience at the Super Wal-Mart. A lady with three screeching kids tugging at her shorts and a baby in the shopping cart and a case of Slim-Fast underneath that she would swear she would drink instead of any more of those damn SpaghettiOs.

Those kinds of moms, I thought, now those are the kinds of moms who knit afghans and make life books and mount locks of baby hair. Why am I answering the call of a nagging, stupid career, instead of just being one of those kinds of moms?