Why my son isn't special, and yours isn't either

Someone sent me a link to the (no longer airing) television show Psychic Kids the other day.

My son, the person contends, might be like these kids. Not socially maladjusted, probably, and not with these abilities, but he's got a special something. He's not like most kids. Check this show out.

I'd never watched it. I had a feeling it would just rile me up, and I was right. I felt dirty watching it. It really seems to border on child abuse. These smart, sensitive, fascinating kids were getting all the wrong messages; their parents were getting all the wrong messages; and no one was being helped. The kids want validation, guidance, understanding; and they can't get it except through exploitation and fakery.

But here's the thing: I kind of, sort of, understand where the parents are coming from.

No, not like that. I'm still me, after all. Rational, skeptical, wholly anti-woo. What I understand is the parents' urge to have their kids be special. Unique. Like really, really unique. Their talents are different from everyone else's talents, so of course their problems are different from everyone else's problems.

And they're right. The kids' talents and problems are unique, and difficult, and nuanced. Just like everyone's problems. Their kids are hard to reach, and their problems are hard to address. Just like all kids.

I see it in Arizona all the time, these two extremes. At one end, you have the hard, grizzled "I ain't buyin' this 'Everyone's a special snowflake' bullshit; now pull yourself up by your bootstraps!" guys. Think ranchers, cowboys, farmers. Everything is black and white. Every problem is easily addressed, and there's one -- and usually only one -- common-sense solution. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a namby-pamby idiot. At the other end, you have the froofy, kooky "We're just the universe getting to mystically know itself" crowd. Think UFOlogists, Sedona vortex seekers, and the folks who love to talk about the Phoenix Lights while showing you their crystal collection. (I actually had someone do this.) Now I truly love the grizzled Arizona frontiersman, and I love me some dreamy Sedona artists, but this is silly. Truth and validation are not magical, but neither are they simple. It's not always either "Here's your problem. I fixed it!" or "There is no answer on this physical realm." That's what I'm talking about with Psychic Kids.

It's entirely possible that these kids have more -- maybe much more -- talent and difficulty in some areas. The kids have mental issues and aptitudes that their peers won't understand. It's necessary to grant them this validation. However, it's just as likely, and just as necessary to express to the kids, that other children have issues and aptitudes that they don't have and won't understand. You don't get to be the star of the world. You don't even get to be the star of your own world. You're a spectator and participant, and it's infinitely better and more interesting that way.

Maybe these kids' talents and problems lie along more difficult-to-discern, difficult-to-deal-with lines. Maybe the parents decided they don't understand what their kids are going through -- which is fine; but then decided that it must be incomprehensible to anyone, paranormal -- which is not fine. You don't need to resort to magic for your kid to be special. Magic isn't real. Your kid's specialness is. Your kids problems are.

Am I one of those hippie parents who thinks everyone's a winner? Yeah. I guess I am.

But here's the difference: I'm not saying your (or your kid's) special beauty lies in some unable-to-be-grasped magical aura. I'm specifically saying it does not. It's real. You might not be able to grasp it, but it's graspable. It's concrete. You're special, and there are ways to find out how. You have problems, and there are ways to pin them down and address them. Same for your kid. Everyone is special. Everyone's a winner. This doesn't diminish the words "special" and "winner," because we all win at different categories. And we all suck royal donkey balls at several categories as well. Same for your kid.

Apparently (according to the original link sender), this makes me a closed-minded wet blanket. I don't see why. The choices aren't "My kid has black and white talents and foibles that I can readily describe" or "My kid is a magical starchild." Do you really think every kid but a select few is less complex, less nuanced, less worthy of wonder and consideration; than psychic kids, savants, "Indigo" children, "Crystal" children, kids with an affinity for animals, or whatever specialty your kid has? How is that better than "My football player can kick your honor student's ass?"

Of course I think my kid is the most special kid in the world. And it doesn't feel like an opinion. But it is an opinion, and none less valid for being one. He's the most special because of his unmatched (in my limited experience) imagination and way with animals, because of his intelligence and insight, because of his kindness, and yes, because of his flaws. (His ability to focus, for example, is so miniscule that while we were ice skating the other day he stopped, simply because he forgot to keep moving his legs. I'm relieved that breathing is involuntary.) His specialness is born from his specific set of characteristics as well as those of everyone he encounters. His shared experiences and private thoughts write a specific story that's his, and to a much lesser extent, mine and my husband's. His story is staggeringly beautiful. It is mind-searingly tiresome. It is heart-breakingly, uniquely painful. It is heart-meltingly amazing. I'm proud, touched, annoyed, exasperated, and amazed every moment that I'm with him. I try, from time to time, to share some of that with you. But here's the thing -- I share the qualities of it. I share the universal -- or near universal -- parts, including the universal happiness we all feel from witnessing someone's distinct footprint on the world. I share the details to show the beauty. I don't expect the details themselves to impress anyone, because I know they're not objectively special, at least not in the sense that they're unique to us. And they don't need to be. The whole package is special. Isn't that enough?

Which brings me back to what I suspect some of the Psychic Kids parents are doing. Their kids have talents, sensitivities, and problems that happen to be hard to put a finger on. Fine. So spend time with your kids. Validate them, even if your answer is "I believe you, but I don't know what is happening. There is a real answer out there. Let's find it together." Even if it takes a lifetime to find, even if you never find the answer. Because you'll make your own answer along the way, and it will be built of a million real things. Early morning cuddling and dinnertime fights. Walks through meadows in the golden hour and homework nagging. Sleepovers and playground fights. Snapshots by road signs and sinks full of dishes. Board games and cats and dogs and backyards and cookies and toys and baseball games and school dances and a million other things that won't be special to anyone on the planet but you and your kid. And that's fine. Think of the world you'll discover together. Think of the people he'll meet, who'll get to know him in return. He will grow up with volumes of special experiences. What's more, the understanding that it's the big picture that makes who we are, that no one's concerned about his mundane trivialities -- but only because each one of them is carrying a whole universe of their own, waiting to be explored -- I think he'll be infinitely better for it than if you told him he has magical powers and sent him to a spooky house with some wacko.

Interfaith conversation on the playground

Written yesterday; held off until I got my son's permission.

We had a loss in the family this week. My son found out just before going to school, and found himself explaining why he was crying at school. A brief conversation ensued. (Names changed, except for my son, David.)

He told me about it after school. It was a normal conversation to him. Everyone's conversations should go like this.


David: "I told Cody and Brandon about what happened."

Me: "And what did they say?"

David: "Cody said he was sorry for my loss, and that [insert religious belief here]."

Now, we talk about these things all the time, especially the last few days. David is enormously curious, compassionate, and opened-minded; which I think is a fantastic combination. He's changed his mind a million times on the Big Questions, which I also think is fantastic. I knew he did not believe this particular religious claim, at least today. He happens to think it's kind of silly. The Oh-no-what-did-you-say alarms started to go off in my head.

Me (in a deliberate, level voice): "Hmm. That's interesting."

David: "It is interesting! I think it's really interesting. But it's not true. At least, I'm pretty sure it's not true. I don't even know if I want it to be true, but it really doesn't make any sense to me. That's what I told Cody."

Me: "Oh? What exactly did you say to him?"

David: "Well, I just said 'Thank you. That is comforting. I don't really believe [religious belief] is true, but I think it's a nice story. Thanks for being so nice to me.'"

Me: "And what did he say to that?"

David: "He asked me why I thought that. I told him, and then I asked him if he was someone who thought anyone who has different opinions goes to Hell. He said, 'No; that's stupid. Everyone can have their own opinions.'"

Me: "I am really, really proud of both you and Cody. What happened next?"

David (shrugging): "Brandon told me a story about his dog dying. I think he was trying to be sympathetic, so I told him thank you. Then we all played kickball. Only WE use special rules..."

[Fifteen-minute soliloquy on special kickball rules omitted for brevity.]

Kids. They are freaking awesome.

Hitting: Always wrong

A downer post today. Head to yesterday’s post for pretty nature pictures. I’m doing a post every day this month, so I’ll probably be back to my regular nonsense and/or pretty pictures tomorrow.

I had a post half-written (OK, half written in my head, anyway), but this distracted me, and then made me watch in disgust, and then sickened and saddened me until there wasn’t room for anything else.

It’s a “father” -- a judge, no less -- hitting his 16-year-old repeatedly with a belt. Go watch it if you want to see it for yourself. I’m not posting the video here. The upshot: seven years ago, a child downloaded some stuff onto the family computer. Her father decided this was a good reason to beat the crap out of her, humiliate her, and demean her. Apparently, he’s continued the harassment, and/or she’s in the process of dealing or needed some leverage against him, so she just now shared it.

It’s sick. He’s sick.

And you know what? It’s sick when anyone hits a kid. For any reason.

At all.

I know this is over the top, even for people who endorse corporal punishment. I know some people have “planned spankings” and go to great pains to never do it out of anger. I know we’ve done it that way for ages. Heck, I was spanked for lying. I turned out OK. Most parents, spanking parents included, mean well.

To which I say, so the hell what? Matters of degrees don’t make “only a little assault” or “a small burglary” OK. We’ve been doing all kinds of things for ages that we eventually come to realize are bad, and we often muster up the integrity to stop doing those things. And as for the parents who mean well -- every medical study, every psychological study, every kind of study or observation done by anyone who’s not a psychopath; has concluded that spanking never solves the problem (even disobedience), and often makes things worse. And hitting to any large degree at all is abuse.

The judge wasn’t disciplining his daughter; he was beating up a kid. Congratulations, asshole.

Hitting other adults isn’t OK. Hitting children in schools isn’t OK. Children hitting other children isn’t OK. We need to stop hitting our own kids. It’s reprehensible. This guy is way more reprehensible, sure, but it’s sickening any time it happens.

Today, my son frustrated me. He refused to listen. When he did listen, he did the exact opposite of what I requested. He downloaded forbidden games onto my work computer, right after I stood in front of him and told him not to, for one. And the brattiness continued. Throughout the evening, he ignored me, moped when I tried to make him happy, and generally acted like a punk.

I wasn’t angry.

I was frustrated, sure. I probably didn’t handle it as well as I could have. And OK, maybe I was a little angry, if you want to call it that. But if anger is lashing out -- even wanting to lash out -- then no. If anger is using your displeasure to bludgeon the other person, literally or figuratively, then no. Never.

I want to make him obey sometimes, sure, but mostly I want to make him happy. I want to make him learn, and make him see things, and make him happy, and make him a responsible, compassionate, smart, ambitious man. (If you follow 99 percent of what I write about him, you'll see that this is usually the direction he chooses.) But you know what? I can’t make him any of these things. I can guide him. I can love him. I can’t force him. And I’ll never try.

If you ever feel anger toward a child -- real anger -- then, well, I would feel sorry for you, if I wasn’t busy feeling sad as hell for the kid. If you actually hit your child, my would-be sympathy goes out the window. Let’s all quit it. It’s wrong.

Monday goodies: My kid, animal listener

Horse whisperer. Dog whisperer. Fill-in-the-blank whisperer. You hear it about people who have an affinity for a certain animal. I've even used it on my son before: lizard whisperer, bug whisperer. But really, the fundamental assumption seems to be that you can sort of tame the animal, at least for that instant -- that you fundamentally understand what's going on, from its point of view.

My son's not that kind of animal whisperer. For one, it's nearly all animals. For another thing, he doesn't tame them. He doesn't want to. "Whisperer" seems to imply that he's the one doing the talking, and he doesn't care about what he has to say with animals. He doesn't whisper. He listens. He seems to understand their otherness. If he truly bonds with an animal at all, it's in the sense that he knows they, he and the animal, are separate beings, that this is an Other -- and he loves that. He revels in it.

He doesn't pose with animals, except for once in a while when I ask him to. Usually I just catch him at it. He doesn't seem to understand that this is a special or uncommon gift.

No fear

Someone told me again today. I should teach my son to fear. Revere? I asked. Respect? No, they said. Fear. A little fear is healthy.

The context doesn't matter. I've heard it many times. Fear strangers. Fear injury. Fear failure. Fear the other.

Fear God. Fear authority.

Fear me. His father.

Sometimes people actually say "fear" -- I am shocked, every time -- but sometimes, they only imply it. Better to fear injury than to be injured. Fearing parents means you obey them. Fearing the stove keeps you from being burned. Fearing gods saves your soul. You have to teach him to be afraid of something, don't you? You're not going to just teach him to go up to the whole world and ask it what's up, now, are you? What if THINGS HAPPEN?

Really, I can think of no more soul-crushing experience than fear. So yes; that's exactly what I'm doing. He'll know fear in his life, and I'm sad just knowing that. It's a natural, visceral reaction to evil or tragedy, I think, and it's understandable. But it should never be a strategy. It should never be a decision. I will never teach him to fear. For as long as possible, I'm going to keep him from really knowing fear. If I screw up everything else; I'm really, really proud of doing this one thing. It's not about being brave. It's about being alive.

Go on; change my mind. I'm completely serious. Tell me one single instance in which fear -- not caution, not prudence, not revulsion, but fear -- is the way to go. I'll make an exception.


You can't, can you?

What's up, world?

Summertime and the living is easy (snapshots)

School's in -- around here, we start early, and his school starts earlier than most -- and I was afraid we'd squandered our vacation time. It flew by, and now it's back to work. Back to reality. Now we'll have even less time together. I was sad.

I was stupid. He thrives in school, as always. I'm almost eking out a routine that will actually produce some stuff. I'm getting stuff done around the house, and when I pick him up, we make sure to treasure our hours together. We're all getting into a routine, and it's far from drudgery. It's comforting.

Continuing another routine (hey, three times is good for me), here are the snapshots. His pictures, my words.

**He set up a notepad on the shelf of our backyard grill and took notes on everything: me ("Mom seems to enjoy taking pictures of the storm"), my husband ("Seems to have trouble telling boys from girls") (not what it sounds like), the cat ("Likes to smoosh his paw against the window and purr"), the birds ("Like to fly crazy in the clouds").**

**He wrote other stuff, but he said the rest is secret. He hunched over the tiny blue notepad, pencil scratching. The sun sank, casting bright platinum and gold strings, tracing his chin and upper lip, each fine hair along his arm, and the pencil in a glowing ribbon.**

**As I tried (in vain) to get work done in the afternoon, I heard "Hey. Hey! What's that spilling all over the coffee table?!" followed by the sound of pounding feet, frantic towel-fetching, and "Sorry! I'll get the carpet too. Sorry!" I drowned it out with the sound of fingers on keyboard.**

**A black cloud of some bird or other (we said doves, but they were so wild, so primal), now rippling along its ranks and now morphing and globbing like a giant amoeba, slowly made its erratic progress across a heavy slate gray sky. The three of us stood watching from our driveway as a fierce wind hurled dust and leaves into our eyes.**

**I dropped him off at school this morning, and instead of lining up he dawdled in a patch of tall grass. "I don't know what he's doing," I said, half-irritably, to no one in particular. "They're looking at spiderwebs in the grass," a neighboring mom told me. "Oh!" I replied. "Well that's fine then!" She looked at me as if I had said it was fine for them to poop in the hallways. My son glanced over, smiled, waved, and raced to line up.**

**After the spill in the living room, I continued to tune out my family as I heard the commencement of a raucous game of living room ball (the object of which appears to be to kick a ball about the living room until the cat is traumatized or something gets broken). My husband kicked the ball, which bounced off my son. "You hit me in the ASS!" he said. "Your what?" "My ass!" He replied, pointing, my husband later told me, to the front of himself. Discussion ensued. Some minutes later: "David! No one has one giant booby!" I snickered, gave it up and joined them.**

**I came in from working in the yard for an hour, dizzy and radiating heat. He ran to hug me. "You smell like the sun," he told me. "Thanks a lot," I said. Are you saying I smell sweaty?" He shook his head. "Nope. Just like the sun. It's beautiful."**

**He whined, groused, and dug in his heels about homework. Even counting to three in a threatening tone didn't work. "Fine," I said. "You can be grouchy alone."**

**Pink sunrise light streamed through his bedroom window. We moved getting-up time back ten minutes, and played with action figures on his bed.**

**Fifteen minutes after the homework confrontation, he crept into the office, walked silently up to me and kissed my cheek. "I'm sorry I was a grouch," he said. All his homework was done.**

**He brought me a curled brown leaf, probably left over from months ago and dislodged during yard clearing. It was wholly unremarkable. "Here," he said. "This one is special." I took it. I still have it.**

Oh, Snap.

In college, like all students, I procrastinated like hell. So the hours directly preceding my advanced writing courses usually found me stuffing an entire muffin down my gullet while I raced to the computer lab, hoping one of the dinosaurs that still accepted my floppy disc was open so I could glance over my woefully inadequate notes and pump out some writing that at least appeared to be advanced.

One such day, I was accosted down the sidewalk from the computer lab by a screeching nerve bundle of a man who wore a sandwich board proclaiming all the groups he thought were on their way to hell ("pencil-necked men" was my favorite, but "rebellious women" got bigger play). Like all right-thinking human beings, I was compelled to spend the next twenty minutes trying to disabuse him of his psychotic assholery mistaken ideas, all the while resisting the urge to employ his sandwich board and a whistle he repeatedly blew in some decidedly more creative manners.

That, most definitely, is a story for another time. But the upshot that day was that once I arrived at the computer lab, I had ten minutes to crank out a masterpiece, and the line for PCs wrapped around to the drinking fountain that always smelled like ass. So I hightailed it to the front of the Mac line, which was always a couple of students long, plunked down, typed from the top of my head, and printed it off. I called it "Snapshots of My Family," and chronicled moments of my family from the last ten years. That essay got the best grade of the semester.

The moral here is definitely not to blow off writing. I have learned my lesson the hard way about that, as has, I suspect, anyone who has ever put pen to paper or finger to keyboard (or put off doing so to put mouth to beer bottle or ... well, never mind). The moral that I should have immediately gleaned from this is to get the hell over myself and just write. I plan, and plan, and plan. And think about writing. And plan some more.

As before, my son shows me how it's done. He just does.

It always goes the same. I'm neck-deep in some Important Stuff drudgery.

"Mom, come on! The clouds are glowing!"

"I'm coming!" I lie.

"Just come on."

And I do.

Here, then, starting with that awesome cloud shot, are some of his snapshots. And in words, some of mine. I think maybe I'll do this once a week. You know, just because.

**He sat down in the office chair, still in his pajamas, and wanted to know about the big bang and human evolution. I told him. He understood.**

**He ran in and needed his camera right now to capture the sunset. He was right. It was almost neon, it was so bright.**

**He held back tears as we searched the house for the stupid cat, who had been missing for hours. The cat eventually wandered down the stairs nonchalantly, whereupon he was ambushed by a strangle hug and a teary seven-year-old who wanted nothing more than to bury his face in cat fur. The cat actually seemed to like it.**

**My husband found a huge toad in our driveway after the recent rain, and we all sneaked outside to watch it eat crickets. The cat darted outside. We collected him, deposited him in the house, and went back outside to stalk the toad with a flashlight. My son's still talking about how its fat legs trailed behind it when it hopped.**

**He took my side, but managed not to be a know-it-all, as my husband claimed that the Harry Potter actors pronounce Voldemort "Vahldemart."**

**He hung a notebook-paper sign -- "Seacrit Headquarters" -- on the unusued spare bathroom upstairs. The inside is plastered with more paper: "artwork painting" drawings of us, control panel buttons, a menu, and a drawing of every pet he's ever loved, living and deceased.**

**He riffed off some background music in a cartoon last night, and made a song and beat that was totally unique, but had real cadence and rhythm.**

**My husband and I stalked a dragonfly together the other day, hiding from our son because, technically, I had my feet a couple of inches in the water when I wasn't supposed to. Minnows nibbled my heels.**

Don't go making waterfalls

In case you've contacted me today and are wondering why I'm taking even longer than usual to reply, let me provide you with an illustration, drawn by my son this morning:


That's him and me. He's got the frown and the cascade emanating from his mouth; I, the smile (because I'm "nice," he says; which makes sense because I'm certainly not happy -- I take about as much delight in this situation as I would in being audited by the IRS while the IRS is being represented by my least favorite teacher from seventh grade, who resembles a shorter, fatter Mommie-Dearest Dunaway on a particularly bad day -- while we're both on our periods). I also have a branched wrist, apparently, so I can both hold his germ-infested paw and offer a continually re-chilled washcloth. The alien at our feet is our cat, who sat by David's side all night and morning and alerted us like some kind of feline Lassie every time he stirred. Which is cute, except when he's just stirring and I want to be sleeping.

So that's what I've been up to today. He started the fun last night by producing a very believable recreation of Niagara Falls (only tinged cherry-Pop-Tart pink) in the bathroom and then holding a repeat performance, and another, and another. He finally retired, and we were only treated to one Linda Blair-esque episode, so that's something.

I was going to post another question post, and probably will later. For now, you can have my questions du jour to tide you over.

• How does a thimble's worth of liquid turn into seventeen gallons in the stomach of a seven-year-old boy?
• Is there a way to suspend a person in a mid-air forcefield while he sleeps so you don't have to, say, get up at 3 in the morning to groggily lug a wad of puked-on bedding downstairs; and so that you don't feel something seeping up your arm toward you elbow and this time you actually hope it's pee? I mean, just for example.
• Anyone know of a way to force a grown man to do his share of pukey kid duty? Or how to find him, for that matter?
• Can you safely spray Lysol on a cat?

What I did over spring break

What did you do for spring break?

It's a question I heard asked a few dozen times this week, and not by my son's teacher for an assignment (though my son recently brought home a creature he drew, with phalluses for nearly every body part, which leads me to wonder what assignment prompts they do have).

The moms ask each other.

We moms drop off our progeny and then line up side-by-side at the playground fence, watching, waving dutifully and conversing in varying states of wakefulness. It's like King of the Hill or South Park where they all line up and talk, only the topics are less interesting ("Really? Sale on American AND cheddar at Fry's?"), and I'm sometimes even less eloquent than Boomhauer, depending on whether the migraine fairy has visited that night/morning.


I'm already at a disadvantage here. I parked next to a fellow-mother-acquaintance-friend this morning. She opened the sliding door on her spotless, scratchless, rustless, cat-piss-on-the-tires-less, brand new van and ... wait, no. She didn't open the door; it opened its-frickin-self, like some kind of Star Trek door. Anyway, I got out, helped my son out, and walked around to reattach the passenger-side mirror, which falls off about once a trip and thereafter hangs by its cords like some kind of sad, redneck ornament. We walked our kids in and I was happy to notice that her son and mine were similarly well-groomed, though I'd be willing to bet hers hadn't weaseled out of a bath last night and wasn't secretly wearing two different socks that only matched above the sneakers.

As our kids sprinted off, she smoothed her mint-green cardigan over a pearlescent blouse, and sort of fluffed it out over her Capri pants. I ... well, I don't own a cardigan or anything that could be rightly termed a blouse, and my calves' disobliging habit of not tapering at all pretty much rules out Capris. But I wore that ASU T-shirt and jean shorts. Her hair did this thing that looked sort of like an elaborate frosting swirl and sort of like an ornate piece of jewelry, but still left it looking shiny. Mine was in the ol' standby ponytail. Her feet were perfectly pedicured, slender little French tips to the last toe. Mine ... let's just say I don't have a desire to draw attention to my feet.

And it's not for an office; she goes back home just like me. So already I'm feeling less-than-successful in the effort-making department and wifeyness/momminess in general.

And then the bragathon starts. And let me tell you, guys don't hold a candle to our pissing contests.

"So, what did you do over Spring Break?" Perfect Mom asked.

"Well, we taught our martial arts class most of last week, but we made time to go to the Hilton in Sedona, after a ton of walking and shopping. They have flat-screen televisions there now," said Sporty Mom, who doesn't dress as impeccably as Perfect Mom but looks like what would happen if Angelina Jolie and Jessica Biel had a baby.

"We went camping. And hunting! It was great. Our youngest took his first big animal," said Renaissance Mom, who near as I can tell has done every activity in existence with her three kids. I was at the other end of our row, which was good because I was too tired to keep the distaste from my face when she described searching for a photo devoid enough of gore so her little one could show off his kill. I am an avid non-fan of recreational hunting, and tried to remain politely impassive as the other mothers voiced admiration. I passed the time entertaining thoughts of a Celebrity Death Match-style throw down between Renaissance Mom and PETA Mom, a mother from David's old school; and also by silently thanking the registration gods that my animal-activist son was in another class and wouldn't be scarred for life by today's show and tell.

The pissing contest continued. Disneyland (whoosssssh), Six Flags (pissss), England (foreign piss!), thirteen-kid sleepovers (actual piss! Beat that!), Tiki parties, day camps.

"So what did you do?" Perfect Mom finally asked me.

"Eh, we just stayed around the house mostly," I demurred. "Harry Potter marathon. Playing in the backyard. We went to the Riparian Preserve a few times, did some hiking."

"Oh, that's ... nice," one of them said. "Must be nice to just step back and stay at home for a change. Oh, did I tell you about the fusion food at that rooftop cantina?"

But it's not for a change, I wanted to say. That's how we have fun. Pretty much always.

Sure, about once a year we do the big-V Vacation thing. Sea World, the beach (which is way exotic for Arizonans), ocean kayaking (which couldn't be described as a vacation experience so much as an ordeal, at least the way we did it), that whole bit. We're looking at maybe going to Hawaii some time.

But most of the time our time off is, well, off. Relaxing. It made me think: Am I being too slack? Sure, overscheduling sucks, but aren't you supposed to want to cram as much into your time with your kids as possible?

That's the thing, though. I feel like we do that. We didn't really do much over spring break. We stayed at the house. Read a bunch of books. Watched a bunch of movies (or the same few, a bunch of times over). Went to the park, went on some walks, played in the back yard.

Or maybe I don't realize how much we did. I'm taken in by the argument that proximity-to-house equals loser-vacation.

We saw the sun set every single day. We found ladybugs and they crawled on our faces. We discovered a tree where the cormorants at the preserve like to roost, and we stood there as the sun set and painted the sky orange and pink, watching and listening to them squabble over perches and burp at each other. (Ever heard a cormorant? They don't chirp; they burp. Grab yourself a seven-year-old and find a cormorant. It's good for an hour of laughter, at least.)

We listened to the Canada geese honk as they flew in formation in the evening. We watched egrets; their white primary feathers forming aprons around their forms and glowing almost a painful white as the sun lit them; skim the water as they pulled back to land, necks folding and unfolding in graceful curves. We watched the light play through the trees and the impressionist flowers and grasses, and saw it hit on the glaring red flashes of blackbird shoulders as they called for mates. We feed the geese and ducks.

We saw Saturn through the local observatory telescope, looking as it won't for another fourteen years. The planet's rings are wide but thin, so as the earth passes through Saturn's equatorial plane you can see just a faint line as you get an edge-on view of the rings, and their diminished glow allows Saturn's moons to show more vividly. David didn't want to stop looking. He still hasn't stopped talking about it.

We pulled weeds, and pulled weeds, and pulled weeds. Which doesn't seem like a particularly great spring break activity, but if you happen to be a bug lover, and if your mom's lack of diligence in the yard has turned it into a conglomeration of every arthropod native to Arizona, it's great fun. We found orb spiders, aphids (which explains the ladybugs), rainbow-colored beetles, and grasshoppers in every color imaginable. We'd never seen yellow grasshoppers. We're watching a resident spider as she grows and molts and snacks on crane flies.

We had kicked off spring break with a party for my son's birthday, which was only attended by a few kids (the rest were undoubtedly busy getting passports or firearms), but was full of much sweaty play and cake and Transformers paraphernalia. A few days before, at his request, I had taken him to Chuck E. Cheese, where we spent 30 bucks to win a 25-cent toy and left smelling like feet and pizza, and he had a blast (despite the place housing his one phobia: Chuck E. himself, who, blessedly, never shows up).

We ate cheese sandwiches every day, always on fresh bread with cheddar, Swiss, AND American, the good kind, which was in fact on sale at Fry's. We drank the fancy juice that comes in boxes. We stayed up late every night. We looked at flies' wings and cat hair and leaf cells through the microscope and we played light sabers.

"Mom?" he asked the night of our last day off.

"Hmm?"

"Whenever I'm sad I try to think of you, like what we did today and yesterday. Sometimes when I'm happy too. Sometimes I think of other things instead, but then it always makes me think of you anyway. I like that."

We did nothing for spring break.

And everything.

Looking back

Since I've started blogging at least semi-regularly, I've begun to get requests. I'm one of only a few bloggers among my offline acquaintances, and so it was kind of slow going at first. Blogging. Um, sure. But in the months I've been active, blogging's picked up in popularity among even the uninitiated, and I like to think I've also hit a stride of sorts. So it's my thing now, and I get requests. They take three forms, with some overlap -- the topical ("You have to write on such-and-such issue!"); the experiential ("Come on! When are you gonna write about when you: forgot your pants/hiked the Grand Canyon/got mugged for your trash?"); or the writerly ("I loved reading your essay. You should so post it!").

I find the last one particularly flattering, being a writer and all. But I always feel kind of like it's, I don't know, cheating. I'm supposed to write new stuff, right?

I'm cheating today anyway. But this one's different.

David's seventh birthday is tomorrow. I can't freaking believe it. Seven. And between the preparations for his birthday and assorted drama in my own life, I haven't written much about it yet. I will. But I'm feeling too darn nostalgic right now. So here, a repeat for some of you and with less polish than I'd like but pretty much the way I wrote it years ago, is his birth.

*************

It didn’t occur to me until I saw the blood.
This is not how motherhood is supposed to begin.

Blood soaked the sheets, forming a pool, the slick surface undulating. Mine. It never happened like this in the movies. It happened in those “emergency childbirth” shows - blurry, strobe flashes and a melodramatic drumbeat, the narrator grave.

My most coherent thought was that the shows underplayed the drama.

It had begun routinely. The doctors asked the requisite questions and calculated the number of humiliating positions I could assume. After posing me on hands and folded legs, like a terrified jackrabbit, the anesthesiologist prepared the epidural and reassured me. I produced a crackly squeak, which I hoped he would interpret as a polite laugh.

As I steeled myself for the jab, the electronic beeps monitoring my son’s - David’s - heart rate slowed conspicuously, like a neglected wind-up toy. The doctors’ eyes narrowed.

I was flipped on my right side. “…definitely a placenta abruptia.”

On my back. “…gonna need a C-section.”

On my left side. “… don’t want her to bleed out.”

As I wondered if they would employ a mother-to-be rotisserie, the bone-white sheet turned reddish-black.

“Whoa, that’s too much blood. We gotta deliver now.”

I signed to have the operation. I would have signed for a C-section, lobotomy or castration. My hands shook. My arms, legs, torso followed, as if a maniacal puppeteer were throwing a tantrum with my limbs. And why was it so cold?

My sister stood aside as my mom frantically tugged on one-size-sort-of-fits-all sky-blue scrubs.

“She’s in shock, isn’t she?” she hissed to my mom in a stage whisper. She fingered circlets of hair, pulled the sleeves of her sweatshirt up and down - she would not be in the operating room. And there was no father. Only my mom came with me.

Fluorescent lights raced overhead as I sped feet-first down the hall. I gazed at the floor. The beige and taupe tiles became tracer bullets in my path. My limbs crashed against the cot, with a thump-clang-rattle-thump as they hit sheets, frame, sheets again.

It’s all wrong. I’m not ready. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be.

A Caesarean section, I’m told, takes about forty-five minutes. Mine took nine. I managed to turn my head and watch David’s birth. He was blue. Not bluish. Blueberry Popsicle blue. Ice blue. I held my breath with him. The doctors - there were a dozen now - rubbed him, rolled him, and fed him air. Finally: a small, uncertain, “Wah.” His cyanotic tint faded into a coralline red-pink.

Six years later, I’m still not ready. But you’ll know who I am.

A plastic tarantula, empty juice pouches and the books Slinky, Scaly Snakes and Bugs, Bugs, Bugs! litter my car. A Vivaldi CD I played impulsively on the way to the lake one evening has remained in the player for three months, by decree of my son. The only acceptable replacement, I’ve been told, might be the Shrek soundtrack.

My philosophy discussions, once rooted in Kierkegaard and Hume, now begin with “If it’s time to make baby birds, why do the girl birds run away from the boy ones?”

My bedroom-playroom-home office is a hodgepodge of academia and an advertisement for Toys “R” Us. A plastic Superman bust looks over cosmology texts. A scientific paper titled “Candidates of red shift 5.5-7 galaxies” bookmarks Diego Saves the Whale.

I spend days playing, reading, running, teaching, kissing and making it better. I spend nights, and a few afternoons, working. I seldom sleep. I smell like chicken sticks, bubble mix and Play-Doh.

My prayers have turned from generic petitions to the weirdly specific: “God, please let my son pee in the toilet this time. I’m out of dry underwear and paper towels.” Or, “God, please let me say the right thing when the dog dies. I can’t stand to break his heart.”

Every issue is weighty - eating (you can’t have Pop Tarts nine times a day), religion (sure, God might sing “Happy Birthday” to Jesus on Christmas), animal care (cats and dogs cannot “play robots”). He wants to be an animal rescuer, and volunteer at the zoo. It’s an hour’s drive. I can’t wait to take him.

Asked to name my favorite actor, I couldn’t decide between Squidward Tentacles and Scooby-Doo. My physics and calculus are rusty, but I can recite every Dr. Seuss book and know how many times SpongeBob has taken his driving test (thirty-nine).

David’s wide, tooth-packed smile is an explosion that takes over his face. His laugh trickles like the lyrical, playful flow of a mountain stream. To feel his rose-petal lips on my cheek, or his silky, gold-brown hair in my fingers, is to experience love.

It came to me, at the arboretum, as it often does: just watching him. He danced and swirled near a bush, disturbing a flurry of black and iridescent-blue butterflies, which spun briefly about him before alighting elsewhere. This is exactly how motherhood is supposed to be.

For many a young to middle-aged woman, a pivotal moment of anxious resignation is when she finds herself filing coupons alphabetically, scolding drink-from-the-carton culprits or uttering the phrase “You’ll poke your eye out,” and realizes she has become her mother.

Not me. I have become my son.

I giggled the other day when the cashier farted while ringing up our purchase. I have developed an unusually high affinity for Pop Tarts and string cheese. I was always horrible at delivering punch lines, but I don’t even know the jokes anymore. My son’s favorite joke goes:

“Knock knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Me! Ah ha ha! Knock knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Me!”

(Repeat for ten minutes.)

Other than that, I don’t really know any jokes. But my days are still filled with humor. I do know, for example, that the nature-show narrative “The boobies come in great numbers, as far as the eye can see,” is good for an afternoon of laughter. I know the simple joy that comes from pulling up to the stop sign beside the neighborhood horse stables at the exact moment two mares engage in synchronized defecation, or the snickers borne from lifting one snail from the dirt only to discover a second one attached to it, the hermaphroditic parts “lined up.” I’ve relearned the joke that “your epidermis is showing.” I know that spelling out the word “up” on the talking computer at the science center makes it say “You pee.” I know that I don’t get invited to any parties. I choose to believe everyone in attendance wishes to avoid being overshadowed by my newly acquired comedic repertoire.

I was warned motherhood would mow me down like a trimmer over wild, unruly grass. Make me into a tame, monotonous turf. Get ready for boredom, I was warned. Be prepared for repetition.

Instead, we have tended the wild weeds in each other. There is repetition, sure, and I don’t think I’ll ever quite understand how the same cartoon episode remains enthralling upon viewing forty five times. But rarely is there monotony. We seem to have an unspoken pact, a refusal to abandon wonder. If this is an anomaly of nature, either his as a child or mine in my simple-minded refusal to be bored, I welcome it.

*************

And lastly, if you're wondering where he got the baby-jowls, I give you me, circa 1980:

So beautiful it hurts

The evening before, it was homework that stole our sunset.

He'd promised to do his homework in exchange for an evening stroll. I happily agreed. We needed a walk. He then proceeded to stall doing his homework, to whine about his homework, to get generally snotty about his homework. The sunset outside was amazing. It went from gentle melons and pinks, while he SWORE I was making it up when I gently corrected his spelling; to richer oranges and reds as I received the death glare for reminding him there was a back side to the worksheet; to blues and finally totally dark as he staged a small protest when I tried to point out his name looked like "Pavid" when he was petulantly, deliberately lazy with his handwriting. His homework got done, but we missed our walk, our moment.

And this evening, it was the boogers that did it.

I'd worked hard on my own stuff. I'd tried to catch up in both my personal and professional dealings. I'd taken a break to pick up my son from school, played a board game with him, served a snack, nagged him to do his homework, answered about ten million MomcanIhaves, MomcanIdos and MomMomMomlookitMomlookitMoms, and then rushed back again to the phone and computer. He'd call me back to the living room about every thirty seconds -- if he'd just give me ten freaking consecutive minutes, I'd grumble to myself -- but I was managing, slowly, to hack away at the day's tasks.

He called me out, a-freakin'-GAIN, and proceeded to ignore me once I got to the room. He was watching a commercial wherein the announcer apparently aimed to drill the product name into kids' -- and by extension parents' -- heads through sheer obnoxiousness: "So get ZEROGRAVITYMICRO!!!! Only ZEROGRAVITYMICRO can zoom on the floor, walls, or upside-down! It may even be able to violate the time space continuum! Really! So ask your parents for ZEROGRAVITYMICRO! Again, that's ZEROGRAVITYMICRO! Right now, ask for ZEROGRAVITYMICRO! Seriously, go ask! Now! ZEROGRAVITYMICRO!! Go ask your parents! ZEROGRAVITYMICRO! That's ZEROGRAVITYMICRO!!"

Finally, I asked what was up.

"I just wanted you in the room."

"Five minutes, David. Just five. Please."

Five seconds later, he called me back in. He said his hands felt funny and presented gunked-up fingernails. And even though I had about ten minutes to finish what I had been trying to do before various deadlines whooshed by, and even though cleaning my son's nails is about as easy as bathing a cat, I tried to clean out what seemed to be glue. To accommodate his nails-being-touched phobia, I was trapping one hand at a time and facing away from him, using my body to block his view as I scraped the glue out. About a minute in, however, with the glue now all over my fingers, he stopped me.

"Mom? I think my nose is bleeding."

I looked up. He'd quietly used his free hand to try to wipe it -- resulting in a sort of bloody handlebar mustache look. "What happened?"

"Well, before when I was scratching my nose ... I think I scratched too hard."

Realization struck. "David, what's under your nails?"

"Probably nose stuff."

"David! You weren't SCRATCHING your nose. You were PICKING your nose!"

"Nuh-uh!"

"Yes huh! Did you put your fingernails into your nose? Did you dig?"

"But I wasn't!" (He was really whining now.) "I was scratching itches on the inside!"

"YOU. WERE. PICKING!"

"Waaaahaaaaa! I'm sorry, Mom!" His feet pounded the hallway to the bathroom. Slam. Muffled sniffling.

Ten minutes later he emerged from the bathroom, sans blood mustache and fingernail boogers. He asked if we had time to go out somewhere. I told him I wasn't sure; the day was almost over now. The sun was just about down.

"But I was waiting for you all day! I would have used a tissue if you were out here! And you said we could go out!"

He was laying it on a bit thick, but he was right. And really, what did I have to show for the day? What had I done? I'd e-mailed and written and blogged and Flickred. I'd worked a bunch and rested just a few minutes. I'd packed and called and cleaned and fixed. I'd even made a start in the Christmas lists. (Actually, one list: "1: Art kit; 2: Butterfly raising kit; 3: Transformers action figures; 4: EyeClops Bionic Eye; 5: NO Zero Gravity Micro...") I'd nagged.


And now I'd made my kid cry.

I really could have been out there.

Seen one way, parenting will always leave you guilt-ridden. No matter how much you play, take care, clean up after, tolerate, sing, laugh, sympathize, admonish, teach or help there's always something you're not doing. There's always something you're leaving out. There's always something you're missing. If you really, truly love your child, then every minute missed (especially if it's because of you) feels like a sin. Like sunsets. In a state with 360 clear days a year and spectacular sunsets nearly as often, if you truly love the planet, how can capturing only a few dozen sunsets -- either in photos or through sheer experience -- be anything but a sin? In either case, it seems the moments consciously treasured will forever be dwarfed by the moments missed.

But we decided to try to go out anyway. We yanked on our shoes (playground sand still rattling in his), grabbed a water bottle each, swiped some dry cat food (to feed the geese and ducks) and dashed out the door. I caught every green light on the way there. The sky was burning orange and yellow. Things were looking up. Still, I didn't figure we'd make it. And sure enough, we pulled up as the sun was dipping completely below the scrub and trees that lined our view over the east end of the water. The sky had turned a dull, darkish shade of faded violet. Crap.

Again, we'd missed our moment.

But he smiled. He dug his hands in the cat food and flung it into the pond. A couple dozen ducks and geese hastened over, casting Vs in their wakes in the darkening water. The geese honked and barked. The ducks chattered. A squadron of egrets flew overhead, impossibly long legs trailing behind them. One duck had taken to flying up as David threw the food, snapping and missing each time. He cracked up.

And we had our moment.

Some moments of parenthood are like blazing sunsets, vivid and Hallmarky and just oozing with overt awesomeness. But others are less noticeable -- and go totally unnoticed, if you're not careful. Sometimes the moments just creep up on you. He'll befriend a friendless girl at school, and you'll just about explode seeing him walk her out one afternoon. Or you'll catch his smile refracted dozens of times through raindrops on a window. Or he's sitting in a cardboard box that he's christened "David's club," and you're the only one allowed to join, and the passwords are "I love David," "We love playing" and "Magic Tree House." Or you'll watch as he coaxes a cat out of hiding or gently holds an insect. Sometimes, he's not even doing anything: just standing, in a baggy shirt, grasping his teddy bear and watching the last rays of light hit the parking lot pavement. And you'll think: Damn. This is My Kid.

And sometimes, mundane moments blossom into vivid Moment moments. He'll be pawing through your books, say, and he starts to sound out the lines in a book of poetry. You abruptly notice the way he holds the hand of an elderly person he's only just met, his fragile fingers resting over the delicate blue branches of the man's veins. You'll be rushing like mad to clean up for dinner and he presents you with a fistful of slightly stuck-together Christmas M&Ms, plopping the mass into your hand and withdrawing his own hand, covered in green and red polka-dots, and declaring that "You deserved a treat." Or you'll be packing, full of worry and preoccupation, and he'll push play on the CD player and dance with you to "Thunder Road," jumping and spinning and grinning just for you at "Roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair." And you wonder how does he do that, how does he know, how can he bowl me over so completely? How is life so damn beautiful it hurts, and I only just now noticed?

The sunset unexpectedly turned into a Sunset sunset that night. It put on a second act of sorts, and the rest of the day -- the bills and the deadlines and the forms to sign and folks who won't call me back, the e-mail and mail mail and articles, the boxes packed and not yet packed, the stuff not yet fixed or cleaned or even considered, the homework and boogers -- just ... well, didn't melt away, really. This is reality, after all. But for a moment, they were hidden behind a curtain of deep blue and vivid pink, of bold streaks of orange and yellow, and of the silhouette of my son, his Casper-the-Ghost head and rounded cheek backlit by the surprise encore.

We sat and rode the evening into night. Carpe noctem, apparently. Seize the night.

The next day, we drew each other pictures about it. Carpe parvulus, maybe. Carpe occasus. Seize the child. Seize the sunset. Because the horrible truth is you'll miss out on so many moments. But the cool thing is, for a while, you get a perpetual fresh start, another chance every day.

Also, boogers are harder and less fun to clean out from under nails than caked-in cat food dust, but not as bad as poop or dried blood. Just in case you were wondering.