Q & A

Kids are naturally curious, so they ask questions. It’s cute and fun when it’s a question you can answer, like "Where does the rain come from?" or "Why does bread dough rise?" But too often my children ask me questions I just don’t know the answer to. I hate that; I feel like I’m in school, failing an exam.

"Mommy, what keeps airplanes up in the air?"

"How do they grow more seedless grapes, since they don’t have seeds?"

"Did you wash my gym uniform? What’s for dinner? Why does the laundry room smell like fish?"

When they ask me those questions, questions that I feel, deep down, I should be able to answer, but can’t, my first reaction is to panic, feeling helpless and defensive. This stage is brief; I quickly move on to the next step, which involves evasive maneuvers. Here are a few answers worth trying:

"It’s all part of the wonderful, mysterious world we live in."
or
"You’ll learn that next year in school."
or
"Go ask your dad."
or
"Hey, who wants a cookie?"

Yesterday, my kids and I were driving home from the store when my seven-year-old daughter asked me one of those questions.

"Mommy, why is the sky blue?"

I was still in test anxiety mode – wait, wait, I know this one, I think I learned this once – when I was rescued by my ten-year-old son, who, looking around with great interest, gave the best answer to that question that I have ever heard.

"What guy?"

This guy.

The Fonz is Cool (and So Am I)

It’s official. The votes have been counted, the decision has been made, and the award has been presented.

I’m officially "Totally Uncool."

The committee that gave me this award is the same group of children that have, for the past fourteen years, regularly given me the coveted, "Meanest Mom in the World" position, so you can see that they are thoughtful and discerning. (It has recently come to my attention that there may be other mothers who are also receiving that particular designation, so perhaps it’s not as prestigious as I once believed.)

But unlike my previous award, which I was actually rather smug about, this new title has left me sputtering and indignant. How can they say I’m not cool? What right do they have to insist that I am not up on popular culture? I bet a lot of people think ‘Abercrombie and Fitch’ is a law firm.

Yes, it’s true that I thought Jessica and Ashley Simpson were two of Marge and Homer’s animated children. And maybe I should have realized sooner that Paris Hilton is not a hotel that shows up in the news a lot. And, okay, perhaps I looked a little foolish when I said, in answer to a teen who told me that he really liked YouTube, that I hadn’t heard their newest album yet.

But, come on! Me, uncool? Out of it? I can play the first part of "Stairway to Heaven" on the guitar. I know how to play record albums backward to hear subversive messages. I can find bad words hidden in the ice cubes in magazine ads. Hey, I can do Rubik’s Cube!

Apparently, so my sources tell me, the things that made a person cool in the 70s and 80s don’t cut it anymore. It’s a new century – a whole new millennium – and my poor kids have to live with a mother who doesn’t even text message.

It is a normal, almost required part of growing up to be embarrassed by your parents. (I remember being horrified at the thought of my friends seeing me with my mother, but that was completely different. She really wasn’t cool.) Still, it’s ironic that these kids who think I’m embarrassing are the same children whose hands I used to have to hold tightly when we went out so that they wouldn’t publicly demonstrate that the contents of their noses could be used as a source of food.

So, I’m taking this "uncool" business in stride. I’ve been around long enough to know that everything comes back around, if you wait long enough. Like that purple suede mini skirt that my aunt kept in the back of her closet for thirty years until it was in style again, my day will come. At some point in the future, there will be a real demand for a person who can tell you the members of the group Wham!, can curl her hair so it looks like Farrah’s, and who knows that if you have a pink and gray plaid wool skirt, you should wear a gray blouse and a pink sweater vest with it. Oh, and the blouse should have a big bow at the neck.

Oh, yes, my day will come again. So I’m not a cool mom. Maybe I can manage to be a really groovy great-grandmother.

Ah, the 1980s: Perhaps not the best-looking decade for many of us

Not Just Another Tuesday

Today we celebrate the sixth anniversary of the terrible terrorist attacks on our country. I remember that day, how it started out like an ordinary Tuesday, with me scurrying around to get my oldest three kids ready for school, and cleaning up the kitchen while the younger three watched Sesame Street. Then my husband called me from work, telling me that something was going on and I should turn on the news.

I remember how quickly we went from innocence to horror. I was pregnant with my seventh child, and I stood watching the buildings in flames, rubbing my swollen belly, wondering what this meant for the world this child would soon enter.

A few days later, as I drove into town to do some shopping, I turned down a road I don’t usually drive on. It was a lovely, tree-lined residential street, and every house, on both sides of the road, had an American flag proudly displayed on its lawn. My eyes blurred and the thick, confused, sad feeling that had been my companion for days disappeared as I drove slowly past them all. We had not lost hope.

The question I asked that frightening Tuesday – what does this mean for the world my children will live in? – has still not been answered. During the past six years, we have seen a lot of terrible and confusing things. But I have seen a lot of wonderful things, too, acts of kindness, and intelligence, and bravery. I am not happy with a lot of what is happening, but I still have hope. It is that hope that will get me out to vote today, because today, Patriot’s Day, is also the primary election day in my town’s local elections. Exercising my right to vote is a small but fitting way to honor those who have worked, and fought, and even died to make sure I keep that right. Six years later, we still have a voice.

Oh, Grow Up

This week we had two events at our house, the kind of occasions I might devote a scrapbook page to, if I were at all inclined toward scrapbooking: my youngest child started kindergarten, and my oldest child bought his first car.

With two such landmark events occurring within days of each other, I could hardly help but think about how my family is changing. The youngest just started riding the school bus, and the oldest just stopped, but it comes down to the same thing: my kids are growing up, and as they grow up, they are moving away from their parents, finding independence from me.

My children are all pretty close in age, so for ten years running I was always either pregnant or nursing or both. It seemed like I always had one who needed to be fed, one who smelled bad, and one whose nose was runny. They were nothing but a series of hyperactive body openings. During this time, whenever I dared go out in public, I was regularly approached by older women who admired my little flock, then wistfully said, "They grow up so fast."

I got a bit tired of hearing it, because it seemed like a fairy tale to me, wishful thinking that was obviously not true. How could this all be going by so fast, I thought, when it seems like three weeks from breakfast to lunch? I looked forward dreamily to a far-off day when they would all be walking, toilet trained, feeding themselves – even going to school.

And now it happened. It really did. It turned out the fairy tale can come true, and in some ways it does seem like it went by fast. There are things I wish I had done, or done better, while they were little, but it’s too late.

Some months ago, I found my five-year-old studying himself carefully in the mirror. "I’m getting grown up," he announced. "Grown-ups usually have hair in their nose, and I’m getting some."

Oh, if only it were that easy. Growing up involves much more pain and trouble than ordinary nose hair can bring. I'm still working at growing up myself, 40-something years in, and now I'm watching my children try their hands at it, too. And I'm realizing that the hard part may be just beginning. Getting all seven of them safely through their teens should be quite an adventure.

I hope it doesn't go by too fast.

The Old Yearbook

Since today is Sunday, I decided to post something relatively serious. This is about something that happened to me a few years ago:

It was about the size of a thin book of sheet music, so the book had been placed on the thrift store's music shelf. I was looking through the stack, hoping to find some piano music for my daughter, when the little book caught my eye. I picked it up and saw that it was actually an old high school yearbook. The book was dated 1942 and was from a school in a small town a few miles away. I flipped through it for a moment, then decided I might as well take it home to look at – the price was only fifteen cents.

I enjoyed looking through the old yearbook that day. Things had changed so much since those times. One of the school events mentioned was a special assembly that had been arranged to inform the students about the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The school calendar included two weeks off at harvest time, when many students in the rural town were needed at home. Pictures showed smiling young people in the fashions of the time. I showed the yearbook to my husband and children, then set it aside.

Several weeks later, I was preparing to visit a church in a nearby town where I had lived some years earlier. I had been asked to speak in one of their meetings. For some reason, as I gathered my scriptures and other materials for my talk, I picked up the old yearbook and took it with me. When I got to the church, I started to leave the yearbook in the car, but changed my mind and took it in.

I sat down in the meeting and waited for my turn to speak. A middle-aged woman I knew slightly came in a few minutes late, sat down beside me, and whispered hello. As I sat next to her, the thought came to me that she might want to see the yearbook, so I handed it to her and quietly invited her to look through it. A few minutes later it was time for me to speak, so I went to the front and gave my message.

When I returned to my seat at the end of the meeting, the woman was holding the yearbook and looking emotional. "Can I borrow this?" she asked. "I would like to copy some pictures." She pointed to a picture of a pretty teenage girl and said, with a trembling voice, "That is my mother. I have never seen a picture of her as a youth. We have no pictures of her before her marriage." She showed me other relatives of hers in the yearbook and asked again if she could borrow it.

"You can have it," I told her. "I bought it for you." She looked surprised, and I said, "I didn't know why I bought it at the time, but I just found out. I bought it for you."

The Power of the Dark Side

I inherited three major qualities from my grandmother: 1) the ability to laugh at my mistakes; 2) a passionate love for a great bargain; and 3) prematurely gray hair. All these gifts combined last weekend in a way that made me richly aware of my heritage, and also made me look and feel like a complete idiot.

It all started at the beauty supply store, where I had stopped to pick up some hair color (to cover Grandma's Gift Number 3). I knew just what to get, and I was headed to that section of the store when I was sucked in by what is, for me, one of the most powerful magnetic forces on earth: a clearance table (Grandma's Gift 2). I was interested to find that the table had hair coloring on it, and naturally I was tempted, but I wasn't convinced – this was not my regular brand; in fact, this was a brand I had never heard of, and it was only about a dollar less than my usual stuff. I stood there, with the bottle in my hand, considering, when I saw a sign on the table I had overlooked. It read "All Clearance Items are Buy One Get One Free."

Something deep within my soul quivered with joy. I filled a bag with the cheap stuff and fairly ran to the checkout.

On the way home, I congratulated myself on my brilliant bargain. The hair color had been marked down to $2.99, and each bottle was big enough to color my hair twice. That meant that I had enough hair color to last me over a year, and at a cost of just seventy-five cents an application. In what can best be described as a sick tightwad fantasy, I pictured myself walking down the road, swinging my stunning brown locks, my pockets jingling with all the cash I had saved by making this impressive purchase, spending my windfall savings on some luxury item, like maybe a corn dog or two.

Back at home, product in hand, I was less confident. The instructions for my new hair color seemed to have been written by someone who had limited exposure to the English language. But I've been covering my gray for years, and I was able to come up with a rough translation. Bravely, I plunged in. I mixed up the coloring, spread it on, spent a pleasant and relaxing 45 minutes smelling like embalming fluid, then washed my hair. It was at this point that I discovered that while some of my hair looked about right, large sections of my hair were several shades darker than I was used to. Also, large sections of my forehead were several shades darker than I was used to.

Remember, I am a person who can laugh at my own mistakes (Grandma's Gift Number 1).  Also, as was clearly demonstrated that day, I am a person who has a family who can laugh at my mistakes. When the hilarity eventually subsided (ha ha), I headed back to the store, this time to buy my usual brand of hair color.

Feeling more secure now — after all, I was on familiar territory again — I re-colored my hair.

Now, perhaps you are thinking, "But if her hair was too dark, how could adding more color to it make it lighter? Wouldn't that make the problem even worse?" If you are indeed thinking this, I would like you to ask yourself another question, which is, "Where was I at the time, when I could have brought up this obvious issue to a person in need, a person who clearly had inhaled too many hair color fumes?"

Yes, I stepped out of the shower later that day looking far worse than before. My hair was so dark in some spots that it seemed to be functioning as a black hole in space would, sucking all the light out of every room I entered. There was no more pretending that I wasn't in serious trouble. Even my grandmother (whose usual perky advice would have been something like, "Just put on your prettiest dress and a bright smile and no one will notice anything's wrong!") would have started looking around for a wooden stake to drive into my heart if I got too close.

Keep in mind that at this point, I had already messed up twice in one weekend by believing that I could be my own stylist, and as a result, I looked like I should be filling out an application to compete in an international Elvira look-alike contest. So naturally, I did what any sensible person in my situation would do: I grabbed the nearest pair of scissors and started hacking off large chunks of my hair.

Okay, it's possible that at this point I had lost the capacity to think clearly.

I'll spare you the next part of the story, as it is rather tedious and also involves profanity. But let me say this: Some people may tell you that there is nothing so expensive as a cheap paintbrush. They are wrong. Compared to the financial hazards of purchasing discount hair color, buying a cheap paintbrush is like dropping your gum in the dirt. I spent far more money trying to fix the problem than I had ever hoped to save. Now, my locks are still not stunning brown, and my pockets are certainly not jingling. At this point, when people ask me, "Ooh, what happened to your hair?" I cannot even distract them by offering them a corn dog.

If anyone else out there loves a bargain like I do, I have some extra hair color for sale. Hey, I'll let it go cheap.

Learn As You Go

I don’t know for sure where they got my name. I suspect that they use the birth announcements in local newpapers to gather a list of new mothers. But when the company called me one day, wishing me congratulations on the birth of my new baby, I assumed they were selling something, and I was right.

I’m not very good at getting rid of salespeople, although I never want to buy what they are selling, so as the woman on the line told me about the parenting magazine I could subscribe to, full of helpful tips and information for an amazing price, I tried to think of some plausible and polite excuse I could use. I didn’t come up with anything and it was my turn to speak, so I said the first thing that came to my mind, not knowing where I was going from there.

"This baby that I just had," I began, "this is my seventh child . . ."

"Oh, my goodness!" the telemarketer exclaimed. "Well, thank you very much for your time, and have a nice day."

And that was that.

I hadn’t expected that the revelation of that simple truth would so effectively make her flee, and I wondered why it had. Was is that she figured the mother of seven wouldn’t have any money to buy a magazine? Or that she guessed I wouldn’t ever have time to read it?

The most likely possibility, I finally concluded, was that she assumed that a woman who had already experienced motherhood six times would already know everything there is to know, and therefore find the magazine unnecessary.

While I appreciated her vote of confidence (if that was indeed what it was), I found that I was uncomfortable with it, because, frankly – here comes a confession – I don’t have a clue what I’m doing here. After a period of time in this job that would, in any other field, qualify me as experienced, I still feel most of the time like I’m making it up as I go.

It worried me a bit when I pondered this, because I had assumed when I had my first child that my lack of confidence and competence in parenting were the natural result of inexperience. How should I know? Gosh, it’s not as if I’ve ever done this before!

But now, after a decade and a half in the biz, I thought I ought to have learned a thing or two, and I wasn’t sure I had.

Then one day a friend asked if she could bring a group of 12- and 13-year old girls to my house so they could learn to make bread. Bread making is something I do know how to do, so I gladly went through the steps with them, allowing each girl to try every step of the process as they made their own loaves of bread.

Everyone’s bread was edible, but I noticed that many of the girls’ loaves had a crumbly texture, or were a bit heavy, or looked lopsided. As I looked at their bread, I suddenly felt the kind of nostalgic affection I would feel looking at a Holly Hobbie lunch box: Hey, I remember that!
It had been a long time since my baking efforts had produced that kind of bread, and I had completely forgotten that when I started out, my bread was usually substandard. Improvement had come gradually, through trial and error, and I hadn’t even noticed how good I’d gotten.

So maybe, it occurred to me later that day, I am better at lots of things, including motherhood, and I just haven’t noticed it.

It’s probably an act of mercy that we forget just how helpless and confused we feel in those early days of parenting. Things get harder, in many ways, as your children get older, but you do have a new competence, born of day by day mistakes and occasional successes, that gives you a firmer ground to stand on when everyday crises try to tip you over.

Now I kind of wish I had saved one of my first loaves of bread. It would serve as a reminder of how far I’ve come. Of course, I didn’t keep one. But I did keep my oldest child, and I look at him and realize we did okay.

I hope that the girls were happy with their bread. I hope they ate it and enjoyed it, and I hope they try again. And I hope they can figure out on their own something I wasn’t wise enough to tell them that day – that no one starts out being an expert at anything, whether it’s playing the piano, or kicking a goal, or making bread, or raising children. You keep trying, keep messing up, appreciating the good stuff and learning from the bad, and one day, you realize, you know what you’re doing.

So give me a little more time. I’ll get there.