momtrolfreak

Preschool is for Lovaaaaahs

PHOTO: enormous pizza-box valentine Frog made for one of his girlfriends

Oh Lordy.

My son, he is in Love. Capital-L-O-V-E love. He's been completely infatuated with this particular classmate--we'll call her Tinkerbell--for a few months now. She's an older woman (five and a half!!), a full head taller than he, and very mature (I mean, you know, she can write).

My first inkling was when we were repainting his bedroom recently (see: OCD) and I asked him what color he wanted to paint his bedroom, giving him some swatches to choose from that ranged from ecru to taupe to desert sand, with one green thrown in there for giggles. He handed the chips back to me and announced, "I want to paint my bedroom pink." Now, I have always said, and I still believe, that my son can grow up to be a cross-dressing garbage man if he wants, I really don;t care as long as he's happy, but he has never shown any interest up til now in anything remotely girly, so I was a bit surprised.

"Pink?" I asked, trying to figure out how to talk him out of it because seriously, there would be some major clashing with his bedding. I have my limits. "Really? Why?" 

"Because Tinkerbell likes the color pink, Mommy, and when she comes over for a playdate [this has never happened] I want her to like being in my room."

Okay: awwwwww! I was proud that my little 3-year-old (by definition, three year olds are all narcisists) would actually take the time to think about what someone ELSE would like when choosing a color for his room. Still, we put our foot down. No pink.

Then the plot thickened.

At pickup one day in late January, there was a note in his cubby: "Please speak with Frog. He is in LOVE with Tinkerbell and ishaving a hard time understanding gentle touch. He is squeezing her hand too hard and jumping on her back when she sits on the rug at circle time. The things love makes you do! Thank! :-)"

LOVE was actually underlined five times. This was serious. So we talked about gentle touch, and how girls like to play, and how even Mommy doesn't like to be jumped on, and the whole time I was thinking, OH MY GOD am I already having the "no means no" talk here? What is going ON???

And then I found it: it was mutual.

Tinkerbell's mom called me to ask if we wanted to go out to dinner at pick-up one day the next week, because Tinkerbelll MADE her ask me. Ah-ha, so it seems we have a cougar on our hands, I think. (just kidding. I don't think 5 and 1/2 counts for cougar status, no matter how young your boy toy is.)

So we go out to dinner at the local noodle place, and the kids are so excited to be hanging out that they literally cannot sit still. Tinkerbell, by the way, presented Frog at dinner with a beautiful hand-drawn and lettered red piece of construction paper that said "TINKERBELLL FROG AND DOLLY." Dolly is her favorite baby doll, from whom she is inseparable. So, um, she's already married him, in her mind, right? This is their little family. She has appointed him her Baby Daddy.

If one of them is picked up before the other, the early-picked-up kid finagles his/her parent to let him/her play on the playground until, lo and behold, the other parent shows up and theyoung lovers end up playing together. As if they have not spent enough time together at full day preschool. Somehow Tinkerbell's mom and I have not figured out that we, too, need to wear snowpants and hats and gloves. Our kids are happily rolling around in the snow while we stand, teeth chattering, lips turning blue. Last night when we got in the car I realized I literally had no feeling in my ears. This is how Nanook of the North's mom must have felt.

The bright side is, I really like Tinkerbell's mom. So hanging out with her is a bonus, a nice little reward for all the chaperoning.

Except then we got in trouble with the teacher.

Frog ratted me out: he told his teacher, "We're going out to dinner with Tinkerbell tonight!!' as I was helping him get on his coat. She looked at me in shock. "Wait," she said, and pointed her finger at me. "You'rrrre ENCOURRRAGINNNNNGGGG THISSS!!!"  She was only half joking.

But really I don't see the harm, as long as he's not disruptive during class.

Which I guess he is.

But now there's a new wrinkle. Apparently his Capital L-O-V-E love has morphed into, well, Big Love.

As in, the multiple wives kind.

We went to see Disney on Ice with Penny and her daughter, previously called MiniPenny here but really, she's not really a carbon copy of her mom so that makes no sense, so, she shall henceforth be known here as Cinderella (her favorite princess in the Disney pantheon). Now, Frog and Cinderella are two weeks apart in age and have known each other--and had semi-regular playdates on weekends--since they were, oh, a couple of weeks old. So, they are quite comfy with each other. But it's never been romantic. Until now. (Does this sound like the pitch for My Best Friend's Wedding?)

So they sit next to each other for all of Disney on Ice (during which Penny and I kept looking over the tops of their heads, mouthing to each other, WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON? Seriously, whoever "wrote" and I use the term loosely Disney on Ice is doing some awesome psychotropic meds. There was only the barest hint of a plot, coupled with lots of cleavage (Jasmine is STACKED and has clearly been doing the 30 Day Shred), lots of talk of romance and How Do You Know If He Really Loves You (gag), and, um, fire juggling? Not to mention that I nearly had a seizure from all the sparkly spinny things they sold every kid in the audience for $20 or something right BEFORE the show, so that you had to look across the top of a sea of Seizure Spinners to see the ice. The kids were transfixed. Didn't move. And we didn't buy them anything either, because miraculously they didn't ask for anything, except for popcorn and a bottle of water. (I love our kids). ANYWAY, Cinderella was dressed as, shocker, Cinderella to see the show, and Frog was quite smitten, for the first time. He's always called her "my best friend" but this time he called her "my girlfriend" in the car on the way home.

He was talking to me about how the funnest part of the show was playing with pebbles in the parking lot planter outside after the show, because he and Cinderella were giggling and, well, kind of flirting. 

Frog: MOMMY, I can tell you are not listening to me because your eyes are not pointing in the mirror where my eyes are pointing.

Me: Okay honey, hold on, I'm just trying to get on the highway, just a second.

Frog: (pause) Okay Mommy, what was your favorite part of the show? (I love it when he interviews me like this. He's a contemplative kid, not a yap yap yapper, so whenver he's in the mood to really converse, I do cartwheels in my head)

Me: Hmmm...I think it was the Jack Skellington part because I like Halloween and they had spider webs and tombstones and ghosts and stuff and it was scary. What was YOUR favorite part of the show?

Frog: I liked the princesses. Because....mommy? I. LIKE. GIRLS.

Me: (stifling laughter) You Do, huh?

Frog: Yes. And Mommy? Tinkerbell and Cinderella are both my girlfriends.

Me: Well, honey, I'm not sure you can have two girlfriends at the same time.

Frog: Wull, MOMMMEEEE, yes I can because I love them both.

Me: (fully aware that we need not get this deep into relationship talk, that it is in fact harmless for him to like two girls at once, as he is thuh-ree, but enjoying the conversation) Yeah, but, one of them might get jealous. How would YOU like it if Tinkerbell had another boyfriend? How would you feel if she held ANOTHER boy's hand at circle time?

Frog: (lightheartedly) That would be okay....(reconsiders, looking out the window at the night sky, his childhood flashing before his eyes) WAIT. No.... I would be MAD, if another boy held MY Tinkerbell's hand I would be mad and I would...I would talk MEAN WORDS at him. (dear God, anything but that. That's a felony in some states)

Me: Well, so, maybe it's more fun to not have any girlfriends, right now, and they can both just be good friends...?

Frog: That's a good idea Mommy.

That only lasted about ten minutes, though, as the calendar quickly hurtled towards--as luck would have it--EFFING VALENTINE'S DAY. He carefully picked out valentines for both Tinkerbell and Cinderella, INSISTED on buying a $15 doll for Tinkerbell as a "Special Valentine," (don't worry, he got Cinderella a Cinderella snowglobe at DisneyWorld, it's all good), and blushed every time I mentioned either of their names. He also insisted that for valentine's day for school, when we were shopping for boxed cards for his class, that we not get JUST the dinosaur cards that he wanted, but that those were JUST for the BOYS, and he made me buy (oh, come on, it's $2 a box, big deal) another box of valentines that were PRINCESSES, "because Tinkerbell and Cinderella don't like dinosaurs, THEY will like Princess cards."

At least he's thinking of what his significant other wants, instead of what HE wants, which is more than I can say for many men (skanky lingerie as a gift for HER? really?).

So, good job, little man.

If he stops playing Putumayo Kids and I hear Barry White playing in his room, though, I'm cracking down.

I have to say though, both Cinderella and Tinkerbell are CATCHES. Tinkerbell has MANY admirers in the class, I know that. Cinderella goes to a different school but I think she's had a couple of Gentleman Callers as well. But my little guy's won their hearts.

He's only three, and it's already come to this.

I am so screwed.

On Going Missing

A woman I was once close to, with whom I traveled to the Dominican Republic and to Malawi (in southern Africa), who probably saved my life on two occasions and was with me for what some might argue was a near-death experience on another, has gone missing in Haiti.

I'm not asking you to do anything about it. I just have to process it. And your mission, should you choose to accept it, is, I suppose, to come along for the ride.

As a matter of fact, she might be fine by now and I just haven't heard the news yet. I hope that's true.  

As part of my current job, I used to run a philanthropic organization that, without getting too specific, organized trips to do free surgeries for children in areas of need. We went a couple of times to the Dominican Republic and several times to Malawi, the dubious claim to fame of which is that it is "one of the world's least developed countries."

The first time Keri saved my life we were sitting in our sad little hotel room, eating a long awaited meal after having arrived only hours before. After two and a half days of travel to get there, a harrowing final flight in which we lost pressure in midair and had to turn back around and land in Johannesburg and then get back in that same (unmarked, plain white) airplane the next day, after arriving and having all our luggage dumped on the tarmac for us to pick through, after checking in and finding a dead spider under my pillow, we were jet lagged and dehydrated and giddy and while eating mediocre food that at that point tasted like manna from heaven I got to laughing so hard that I actually inhaled a bite of food, and THUNK! it stopped my windpipe right up, as clearly as if I'd corked a bottle of wine. I went white. I made no noise. I tried to cough to expel it, but nothing happened. I still had tears in my eyes from laughing so hard in my punch-drunk state, that at first Keri must have thought I was just laughing so hard no sound was coming out. Then I felt myself making the "international symbol for choking" (hands to throat--I remember thinking at the time, oh my God I'm going to die immitating Chris Farley), and Keri was on me like white on rice, quickly did the Heimlich--or something, she stood me up from the edge of the bed where I was sitting and she did something, I'm not sure what, actually--and the food was out. I coughed my head off. Tears were running down my face. I had a sore throat and almost no voice for the next three days. In Malawi, there is no calling 911. If she had not been in my room, I probably would have died. I was very, very lucky that I was traveling with her, and that she was in my room, and even luckier that she was a nurse.

The second time Keri saved my life  was not quite as dramatic. We were traveling home from that same trip, and I had, on the last day, after 10 days in the O.R. in Malawi, and getting run-down, and working 14 hour days, and being really careful about water and such, at some point I must have let my guard down, and I contracted some sort of food- or water-borne illness. I have never been so sick in my life. I'll spare you the details, but just imagine the worst stomach flu or food poisoning you have ever had and multiply it by, oh, a guhjillion. Keri got me on antibiotics right away; she just carried all these meds on her, all the time. Thank God. They didn't kick in right away (and I had trouble keeping them down long enough to work, because I couldn't keep anything down), but who knows how bad off I would have been otherwise. She got me on the plane from Malawi to Johannesburg, then Joburg to Heathrow. I kept it together for most of the flight to London, until they walked through the cabin with the pesticide canisters (when you leave Africa, they--it's hard to believe this is true, in the 21st century--they actually DELOUSE you. The flight attendants stand at the front of the plane with what looks like a sterno canister in their hands, they reach up and pop the top off of it like it's a grenade, and then they hold it above their heads and slowly walk toward the back of the plane while a fine white mist fills the air. They don't even make an announcement about it sometimes, so the first time it happened I nearly lost my shit). This time, I had been hurling for days but was doing ok on this particular flight as long as I remained really still and breathed through my moise and there was no turbulence, but the smell from the canister put me over the edge, and I hightailed it for the bathroom again. I was so sick I couldn't even come back out. They actually landed the plane in London with me bracing myself, on my knees, in the bathroom at the back of the airplane, with a flight attendant yelling at me from his seat across the aisle. In Heathrow I sat, crying and leaning over a trashcan, in the main terminal, while Keri procured an assortment of crackers (would it fucking kill the British to sell saltines just this once? I thought) and some sort of juice. I literally could not stand, I was that sick. I laid with my head in Keri's lap and slept during our three hour layover. Keri is Canadian so we were to part ways at Heathrow. She took the chance of missing her flight so that she could walk me to mine. She talked to the gate agents about my condition, showed her credentials, and somehow got me on an earlier flight, with three seats together in a row so I could lay down flat and sleep. She gave me an eye mask and told the flight atendants not to bother me. I slept for 8 hours straight and somehow made my way off the plane when we landed. I almost kissed the ground, I was so happy to be home. When I went to the doctor the next day in Chicago, he said that the antibiotics had 'saved' me. He gave me a shot of something else, for good measure. Three days later was the only thanksgiving I've ever had where I ate nothing. It took me three weeks to feel somewhat normal.

A place like Malawi is no place to be having brushes with death. You have no idea how much you rely, in the so-called "first world," on things like streetlights and the ability to call 911, until you have a car accident without those things.

I was riding in the middle of the cab of a beat-up pickup truck. It was midnight, and the sky was black as pitch, the kind of black you can only get when there are no lights nearby, where you can look in front of you and not even see your hand, where your eyes seem to try to reach out of your body, straining to identify something, but if you look up you can see layer upon layer of fields of stars, as if you're wearing 3-D glasses. THe kind of dark, I'm convinced, you can only experience in Africa. 

Our host (the head surgeon at the tiny, one-story hospital) had had us to dinner at his house and, though he was a bit tipsy, was driving us back to our hotel. Cabs were not an option: you could sometimes get a gypsy cab outside a hotel, but there were no cab companies to call for a pick-up. We pulled out of his gravel driveway, and one of his hired household help closed the tall iron gate behind us (it was not a "nice" house--you simply have to have a gate to protect your home). I had no seatbelt, but at least I wasn't sitting with the men who were simply crouching in the back of the pickup bed in back. We were driving down a totally unlit street when our right side mirror suddenly shattered and little pebbles of safety glass showered those of us in the cab. We all screamed at once, before we even knew what had happened. We had been sideswiped by an oncoming jeep. It hadn't had its headlights on so we only saw it a second or two before it hit us, not long enough to have time to swerve. Our host didn't stop the car.

"You don't stop on the road at night here," he explained in his clipped British accent. "They might have done it on purpose to get us to stop."

"To do what?" I asked.

"Rob us, of course," he said. "Maybe worse." He kept driving.

If it had been a head-on collision, he explained later, we would have been dead for sure. No one else would have traveled down that road until daylight. We would have bled to death from our injuries in the middle of the street. Wild dogs were around (and the news had recently told of children being mauled--or disappearing--in nearby villages because of attacks from either a wild dog or a hyena or something). We had no cell phones.

"And of course even if we somehow were discovered and taken to hospital," he expained with a chuckle, "half the surgeons in the country are in this lorry!" Ha, ha.

Ha.

Keri and I had a stiff drink back at the hotel, though we had to be up at 5am the next morning for prayers at the hospital (it was run by a Christian organization) and then scrubbing and prep. We talked about our plans for kids (neither of us had them, then), our desire to adopt, our marriages (she was newly hitched), other travels, the cases for the next day. She was considering moving stateside but didn't want to miss out on the maternity leave in Canada.

Keri is an amazing woman: capable, strong, hilarious, great under pressure. She put me in my place in the O.R. (and outside of it) more than once, and there are not many people who can do that. When the funding was cancelled for the philanthropy, we fell out of touch, I think because she had hard feelings that I had somehow wanted to get rid of the project (not true, but I suppose I didn't fight as hard as I could have for it, either. The writing was on the wall, I knew the Board wasn't going to keep it because they had to cut funding somewhere, and to keep arguing after months of preliminary lobbying on my part would have been an exercise in futility). I haven't spoken to her in years, but I just heard from a colleague that she was in Haiti at the time of the earthquake and no one has heard from her since.

I hope that wherever she is, if she's in need, that there is someone with her that is as capable as she has always been, someone that can look after her the way she looked after me. I have no way of helping her, from here. I've given my money to the Red Cross and a few other small organizationson the ground in Port Au Prince, I've watched the news to try to spot her (silly, but...she's got long blond hair, she'd kind of stand out). She might be fine and I just haven't heard. If she's fine, she's working to help people 24/7, I am sure. It's who she is. Her need isn't any greater than anyone else's, there. There are so many tragedies. But I hope she's fine.

I hope she's fine.

And You May Ask Yourself, Well: How Did I Get Here

I'm at the computer, my husband is working late, my preschooler is in his room building block castles while listening to Santana, and marriages are crashing down all around us. Of our closest friends, three of the couples that five years ago I would have said were among the most stable, the most loving, the most perfect matches, have ended. It’s hard to know where to go, what to say, who you’re allowed to talk to, what your role is. If you have a role at all.  

Divorce necessarily is about self-preservation and, if there are children, about keeping those children happy and sane and loved, so I’m not looking for sympathy here as the friend of someone getting divorced. My role is tiny-to-nonexistent. No one cares—no one should care—about the effect someone’s divorce might have on that person’s adult friends. But I can’t help feeling shell-shocked because...these relationships? These were Things I Knew For Sure. 

One couple we actually lived with for several months when we had sold our house and our new condo ended up being behind schedule. These people took us into their home, OFFERED out of the blue that we should move in with them, into their tiny three bedroom bungalow with two kids and one bathroom. We were living there when she found out she was pregnant with their third child, and I was one of the first to know. It was their family life, their children, their parenting that made us rethink our childless existence, that made us decide at 32 that maybe we did want children after all.

One couple we considered as legal guardians for our own child and only decided against asking them because we worried it would be too much of a burden, financial and otherwise. I remember watching them say goodbye with affection once as he was headed just to the grocery store and I thought, wow, we don’t kiss each other goodbye. What’s our deal?

I remember one wedding like it was yesterday: an intimate celebration on a set that my husband designed that actually rotated on a turntable. This little cottage turned in circles before us, surrounding the two lovers with twinkling fiberoptic “stars” and as much love as one could cram into a church basement-turned-theatre. Almost everyone there was an actor—including the officiant—and when a cell phone rang during the ceremony the officiant quipped, “If that’s God or my agent, tell him I’ll call him back.” They were the coolest kids in town, with the coolest apartment in an old warehouse building, where you had to wind your way, Escher-like, through a maze of stairways and hallways, past dozens of Not The Right Doors until you finally arrived at The Right Door, only recognizable as such because of the heap of parkas and boots piled outside and the laughter coming from within.  They held Flirting Parties and parties where men ended up dressing in old period costume pieces from the show that had just closed and making fun of their partners who had worn the clothing onstage.  Their parties were more like “happenings” in the sixties. You couldn’t risk missing one. He took my belly photos when I was pregnant with Frog and framed several 8x10's as a shower gift. I still have a black and white photo they gave me of the first time I met their daughter: my foot next to her tiny infant foot, a photo on which the new mom had written, “Big foot, Little Foot, foot foot foot.”  The infant girl is, what, ten now? Eleven maybe. Maybe only nine, but she looks older. Gorgeous like her mother, who directed us in our first show in Chicago, in tiny bit parts in a very cool theatrical experience that really MEANT something…because everything these two did, it meant something.

This sounds like a eulogy, and in a way it is. I am mourning the loss of this great marriage, of their life together and what it meant to those who came into contact with them. They meant so much to us. They still will.

Amazing what we can’t see coming.Would it change anything if we could?

I wonder if we would brace ourselves for impact.

To some extent, our current lives and our ideas of what the future holds are based on these marriages. Each time one dissolves, we grab hands, take a deep breath and duck under the wave, let it wash over us. We feel the pull of the current washing everything out from under us and out to sea.  We dig our feet into the sand until our toes cramp.

These are people I respect and love, all of them.  It physically pains me to see them hurting. My husband and I are having late-night talks these days where we intone meaningless, trite phrases like we never saw it coming and of all people and then intertwine fingers and murmur to each other, We are so lucky.  

This is our mantra now: We are so blessed. Not that we didn’t realize it before. Not that we haven’t been through our share of trauma and hard times and really hard times and hurt feelings. We have. And I don’t know why those times, for us, led to resolution and a strengthened relationship rather than to divorce.

I am under no delusions that it could not just as easily have gone the other way.

I know no secrets to a happy marriage. I cannot throw stones. I am not more committed, more forgiving, more understanding, more patient than other people. I tend to hold a grudge. I know what it is to feel as if I could never forgive, and I know what it is to finally feel the release of forgiveness come upon me unexpectedly.  What I don’t know is how to get from the former to the latter.

In the end, I don’t really know anything. So I leave off writing and I go to my son’s room, grab his little blanket from the bed as bait and lure him to me. He resists—he is, after all, building a castle, important work—but the blanket's inevitable pull draws him to flop, finally, into my lap and release into me, to suck his thumb (this last remnant of his babyhood), to let me cradle him like I did when he was a baby and I was even less certain than I am now of what the future would hold. I curl around him and we listen to 'Black Magic Woman':

Don't turn your back on me, baby....

I bury my face in his tousled hair and breathe in the familiar scent of my magical, perfect three-year-old boy: campfire and Nilla wafers.

“I love you Mommy,” he mumbles around the sides of his thumb.

“I love you too, Boo-Ba.” I squeeze him a bit tighter.

“And I love Daddy a lot.”

“Me too,” I whisper, laying my cheek on top of his Nilla-campfire head.

Me too.

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