More Angsting about Playdates

Here I am, all easy breezy, having scheduled TWO spring break playdates like it ain’t no thing. When it turns out I am not done stressing about playdates, not even a little bit. Here are some of my specific (and let’s face it, pretty deranged) worries:

Being Too Lax or, Conversely, Too Strict: We have house rules, and I think it’s reasonable that kids who visit our house should abide by those rules, just as I’d expect Carla to abide by the rules of any house she visits. But when people who aren’t my family are in my house, I start to second guess our rules. Is it weirdly fastidious to ask that people take off their shoes? Am I helicoptering if I tell the friend that there’s no dropping things/throwing things/jumping from the balcony? Am I being a psychopathic germaphobe/germaphobic psychopath if I expect kids to wash their hands when they come into the house (which is what every member of my immediate family does upon entering our home, every time)? I don’t want kids playing in my bedroom or my office, I don’t want kids jumping or standing on the furniture, we don’t eat anywhere besides the kitchen. These things feel reasonable in my day-to-day life, but when I collect all these rules into a tidy bunch to present to another person, they feel like A Lot. And how do you convey your expectations? I don’t want to be condescending or overly rigid by announcing a thousand rules up front, but I also don’t want a kid to “break” a rule she doesn’t know and then feel like she’s being scolded for it. And also, what about rules that you feel like you shouldn’t have to say out loud, and also are hard to anticipate because they seem so obvious, like “don’t throw food” or “don’t paint on things using the carpet as a dropcloth”? 

Logistics: We now live out of town, and I realize that it’s not super easy to get here. One recent playdate, we brought the kid home with us from school and then drove her home. Another recent playdate, I picked the kid up from her house, her parent came and got her from mine. I think I have established logistics upfront for one of our two already-scheduled playdates – we are going to be in the area of the kid’s house, so when we arranged the day, I said we would pick her up and suggested that her parent come and get her after the playdate is over. But the other kid lives QUITE far away. We can drop her off, and I already let her parent know that… but we haven’t figured out the details of how the kid is getting to my house… I really don’t want to offer to go get her, because it will be a long drive and we are already going to drop her off. But… is it fair to ask her parents to endure the long drive to bring her here? I could suggest we meet somewhere in the middle, I guess. Is that weird?

Duration: When Carla was little, playdates were pretty typically two or three hours long. These days, they seem to last a bit longer, which is fine… but how long is too long? Are they going to hate each other if they spend more than three hours together? And what about sleepovers, which are necessarily much longer? Carla has had ONE sleepover, and when her mom asked what time she should pick her up, and I suggested eleven the next morning, the mom expressed surprise. “Let me know if I should come earlier,” she said ominously, as though the kids would be at each other’s throats. (Eleven worked out fine, but that feels like beginner’s luck????) At this age, is a meal always involved? For instance, I think our playdates are beginning after lunch… but does that mean I need to prepare dinner? (I am already prepared to prepare dinner, I am just wondering if that’s normal or if I’m overthinking the whole thing.) (Hahahahaha, ME?!?!, overthink anything?!?!?!)

Reciprocity Signals: Carla doesn’t get invited to a whole lot of playdates. I don’t think she’s been to a single one this year. Yet she and her friends seem to PLAN a lot of playdates at school. And everyone we’ve invited for a playdate at our house has said yes. So… is this just a case of the other families are busy and/or hate playdates even more than I do and/or they just haven’t gotten around to it and/or they have multiple children so fitting playdates in and among the thousand extracurricular activities they must be juggling is simply impossible? Or am I missing a subtle signal that Carla is not welcome at their homes or not well liked by other kids or or or?????

My mom reminds me that when I was a kid, NONE OF THIS was an issue. She said the word “playdate” was not even part of our vocabulary. I would just say, “Can So-and-So come over?” and that was that. We’d come over and entertain ourselves. But… how? I am guessing – hoping – some of this stress comes from lack of practice. In any event, the ball is already picking up speed as it bumbles down the hill.

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Five for Friday

It’s Friday and I am posting this on Friday, March 15; you may not see this until June for all Feedly cares, but I don’t think I have any control over that. This is kind of a cranky way to begin a blog post, so, as I say to Carla: Let’s try that again.

It’s Friday! I am coming off a night of broken sleep (child coming in at three, returning to bed around four, husband waking up for the day at five thirty), so let’s have some Friday bullets. 

1. Are you as steeped in the Kate Middleton drama as I am? If you have no idea what I’m talking about, a) bless you and b) here is a really thorough explainer. If you are In It, I highly recommend finding a friend who is similarly obsessed so you can text her memes and links to conspiracy theories at all hours of the day. My personal opinion is that Kate is recovering from surgery, probably doesn’t look or feel her best, and just wants to recover in private until Easter as previously planned and communicated by the Palace. BUT, simmering in that dark gross part of me that enjoys drama, especially when it feels very removed from my own boring non-royal life, I am kind of hoping that someone is pregnant with someone’s love child.

2. What kind of snacks do you keep stocked in your house? I ask because we have become friendly with our new neighbors and they invite us over all the time for all manner of things. While I am a little intimidated by reciprocating with A Real Meal (they are incredible cooks and bakers, and every time we’ve been invited to their house the food has been astonishing in both quantity and quality), I am ostensibly fine with having them over for drinks and snacks. The other day, the kids went sledding and we had them over for impromptu cocoa. Luckily, we had cocoa mix in the pantry, and even more luckily the mix had tiny marshmallows, and even more luckily, we had an unopened bottle of spray whipped cream because one of the neighbor kids informed me that he really likes whipped cream on his cocoa in a tone so grave I understood him to mean that something dire would happen if no whipped cream appeared. But then there are all these kids and their parent in my house and I realized I DON’T HAVE ANY SNACKS. It’s not that I don’t enjoy snacks; it’s that I enjoy them too much. We managed to scrape together some muffins I had in the freezer and some individual bags of chips and veggie straws that we had leftover from some party or other, so no one starved. But it made me feel like I need to have at least some snacks on hand. But what?!? I’m not crazy about having a bunch of cookies around, because they either go uneaten or get devoured in two seconds. If we have chips, I will eat the chips. Cheese and crackers aren’t big among the elementary school set, and it’s not like I can have an emergency brie on hand for last minute guests (or can I?). Fresh fruits and veggies, yes, great, and I try to have those around as much as possible, but we don’t eat enough of them to have a ready supply in the fridge at all times. Occasionally I panic buy a bag of clementines, but at least a third of them inevitably go bad before we can eat them. So: shelf stable snacks that appeal to kids and adults but are not so appealing that my family will eat them before we have guests. Is this a thing? 

3. In vanity news, I have been Influenced to buy several things lately. I really like this very inexpensive multi-use highlighter stick. Of course I cannot find the video that originally persuaded me that this was an essential tool in my (non-existent) makeup game, but I like dabbing it on the inner and outer aspects of my eyes and swiping it below my eyebrows for a little bit of lively glow. Totally worth $2.94. The other thing I’ve already tried enough times to recommend it is this bronzing mousse. The weather is edging ever closer to summer, and I don’t want to scare the new neighbors with my fish-belly legs, so I’ve been practicing in the hope that I can add a little lifelike color to my skin before I appear in public in running shorts. I am always on a quest for the perfect fake tan, and this is the closest I’ve gotten. The things I like best about it are: a) It’s dark when it goes on, so you can SEE where you are applying it, and you can also see if you are introducing streaks to your thighs or stomach before the streaks have become one with your skin. b) While it has a scent, as all tanning products inevitably do, it strikes me as much fainter and less objectionable than any other tanning product I’ve ever used. c) The resulting tan is darker than my normal skin tone, but not so dark that it screams FAKE TAN. (I use this tanning mitt to apply it to my body which works really well and helps prevent streaking.) Once again, I have no idea which account suggested this tanning mousse, but I am a fan.

4. One of my current parenting goals is to provide more opportunities for Carla to spend time with her friends. I think I’ve mentioned before that I hate playdates. They fill me with anxiety, because they are both forced social time – sometimes with parents I don’t know well – and because I have no idea how to deal with more than just my one child. For better or for worse, that’s just how I am, and so we haven’t had a ton of playdates. But now that Carla is older, playdates presumably no longer require that social element AND the kids are old enough that I can give them a lot more independence. I used to agonize over how I was going to entertain two whole children, and so I’d gravitate toward things in my comfort zone, like baking projects or crafts. Unfortunately, those things require a lot of prep and supervision and clean up, so they aren’t relaxing or easy. But now I can pretty much let the kids go off and play together. Sometimes we all take a walk outside, and I’m always happy to take a walk, even if the kids ask me to pretend I’m not with them.

Even though playdates are, in many ways, easier now, I still of course have anxiety about them. I find myself fretting about planning An Activity, just in case. I find myself worrying about what happens if the kids get into a fight or misbehave or want food (it always comes back to snacks!) or want to be on screens the whole time.

This is so silly! When I was a kid, I don’t think my friends and I EVER had An Activity. We just went and played Barbies or roller skated in my basement or played school or ran around outside or played house. I can’t even imagine asking my mom or a friend’s mom for ideas. And snacks were not provided by the parent! We scrounged up our own snacks, and I don’t even remember a parent being present for any snacking. In fact, part of the fun of going to someone’s house was checking out their snacks. (Not as fun: eating any sort of meal at a friend’s house, because they had different foods than I was used to and different rules. THAT filled me with anxiety.) I loved my friend J’s house because they had an entire drawer full of candy, and you could just… eat candy when you wanted to! J, notably, was pretty uninterested in the candy. I loved my friend R’s house because her garage freezer was STOCKED with popsicles. At my house, we always had little bags of chips or Zingers in the pantry and Dilly Bars in the freezer and pickles in the fridge. (R and I used to each eat a pickle when we were at my house.) So I am guessing that kids DON’T CARE either what they do or what they eat at playdates. They will figure it out. And yet. We have two playdates on the schedule in the next few weeks and I am already stressing about it. I am planning to be Mean Mom and put a ban on screens, but beyond that… I don’t know what to do or what not to do. Wow, I wish I could chill out about this. 

5. You know something that always feels like magic to me, even though it’s science? Topology. Various algorithms keep serving me videos of topological experiments – because I keep watching them when they appear in my feed – and my mind cannot grasp the mathematics/physics. My dad taught Carla how to make a mobius strip and even seeing him create it with my own eyes doesn’t help me understand how or why it works. It’s witchcraft.

What are you up to this weekend, internet? And, more importantly, what kind of snacks will you be eating?

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Three Things Thursday

Let’s face it, Three Things Thursday is just Randomosity in a different jacket. 

Tonight is the last night of NaBloPoMo, and I am here not through gumption or grit but through gin. 

1. Kids and Homework: My daughter attends a cushy private school and this is the first year that she has had homework. (I know.) (I was a public school kid; it is very different.) Being a parent while your child works on school projects is its own kind of challenge. You want to be supportive but also encouraging. You want to make sure your kid does their assignments but you want them to have their own autonomy and also you don’t want to exert undue pressure. You want to be available to offer help or support but you don’t want to hover. IT IS VERY CHALLENGING. My husband came to the dinner table tonight and hissed that one of the sentences my daughter wrote didn’t make sense, and he tried to talk it through with her, and she decided to leave it as it was. As a Straight A Student, Ivy League Educated Physician, this is VERY DIFFICULT. But. As his mother kindly pointed out: It is our job as parents to support and encourage. It is the TEACHERS’ job to correct and instruct. 
2. Cooking for Not My Immediate Family: I made salmon and green beans and potatoes. I followed a recipe. Everything was cooked but it was not great. My husband, who is to-a-fault honest about these things, gave a shoulder-shrugging “meh” when I mouthed “how is it?” across the table to him. And, sadly, I agree. I HATE THAT. I want to be The Best Cook. I want my in laws to go home and talk about my cooking. I want them to request my recipes. I want my mother-in-law to brag about how great a cook her daughter-in-law is when she plays majohng. But the truth is, I am a mediocre home cook. My husband and I have a few recipes we jointly love, and the rest are just meh or winging it. And that’s got to be okay, even if it hurts my ego. The other problem I have is in not having ANY CLUE how much food to make for more people than my husband and myself. I think he and I tend to eat pretty giant portions, so maybe that skews things? But I made WAY too much food. Like, we are going to have to eat multiples of this exact same (mediocre) meal before all the leftovers are gone too much food. I have literally no idea how to figure out the right amount of food to cook. Recipes are no help. One person’s six portions is another person’s three.
3. Introverting Hard: Tonight, my husband was falling asleep, my father-in-law was falling asleep, and my mother-in-law was on the phone, so I nudged my husband and told him I was going to bed. Yes, it was 9:10 pm. He narrowed his sleepy eyes at me and said, “But you aren’t really going to bed, are you.” This is after having come into our bedroom last night 45 minutes or so after I’d excused myself to go to bed, and I was sitting in our bedroom typing on the computer. I NEED TIME TO MYSELF, MAN. How does he not know this, after 15 years of marriage and 22 years of being together???? I am worn out! The thing is, I had a FABULOUS day. My in laws were out of the house all day, doing whatever it is they do when they visit. My husband was able to pick up my daughter from school. I had nearly unadulterated alone time from 9:00 to 5:00 and it was BEAUTIFUL. So why, after a mere two hours with my in laws, am I ready to throw in the towel and secrete myself away in my bedroom? Because I am the introvertest of introverts, I guess. 

Well. That’s all I’ve got tonight, Internet. Thanks for sticking with me, these past 30 days of NaBloPoMo. I cannot promise to post tomorrow, but I am sure I will be back soon with inane topics to discuss. In the meantime, I appreciate you for reading. And thank you, so much, to San for leading the charge.

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Ghosts of Christmas Past Except Not About Christmas and Not Involving Ghosts

My brain is doing that periodic thing that it does which is to torment me with things that happened long ago about which I can do nothing. And then dwelling on those things until I cannot think about anything productive. 

HOW do you stop that? I am not even talking about middle-of-the-night perseveration, although that has been happening too. I am talking about straight up driving home from taking Carla to school and then BAM, “Remember when you did this totally awful and stupid thing? No, but do you REALLY remember it? Let’s go through every moment in excruciating detail.”

There WAS a stupid thing I did, last fall, and I’d managed to forget about it. Until my brain slapped me with the memory.

It was one of those horrible errors that is totally preventable and has an actual cost to it. Like forgetting to return a pair of shoes that don’t fit before the 30-day return period ends. Or backing your car into the garage wall. Or leaving your car windows open all night during a rainstorm. Things that could have been prevented had you been slightly less lazy or more proactive. I can feel my face heating up with residual shame. Such a waste! A preventable waste of money! And not a SMALL amount of money, either. We were so fortunate to be able to pay for my mistake, and my husband was extremely kind about it even though he would NEVER IN A MILLION YEARS make that kind of mistake. Why? Why did I let that happen? And why am I thinking about it NOW?

I would say that it’s because I just did another stupid money-wasting thing (My phone has been disconnecting from our wi-fi, and I didn’t notice, and I have just willy nilly been watching Instagram videos and scrolling through apps and downloading – good gourd – a ONE POINT NINE GIGABYTE package of bird sounds from Merlin Bird ID, all while connected to the cellular network. We do not have unlimited data, and in fact only use about 5-6 GB of data per month among the three of us, and I have used NINE GIGABYTES, all by myself, in five days. And we have 25 days left in the month before our data resets. And yet, we can buy more data, a GB at a time, but each GB costs $15 which is not nothing!) but I have been torturing myself with the earlier money-wasting thing for weeks now. So who knows. 

Anyway, it’s good for internal piling on: I am the worst, stupidest person, totally oblivious to important things. I am costing our family money for NO REASON. No one else would make such a dumb mistake! I can see that I’m not connected to wifi just by looking at the top of the phone, and I am on my stupid phone all the damn time! I am a drain on our finances and worthless to boot! 

It’s not even just things I DID, it’s all sorts of things, like how I was going through old yearbooks a few summers ago, and discovered that this boy I’d had a crush on for years had written something filthy in my sixth grade annual. I had no idea what it meant at the time, but I can imagine all the other middle school boys giggling about it. And WHY did he write such a thing? We were friends! I may have had a crush on him, but there was never anything but friendship between us. And I was friends with him for YEARS after he scrawled that crude suggestion in my yearbook. 

Should I throw out my yearbook? Scratch out those awful words with permanent marker? Re-evaluate all my relationships?

Why am I thinking about this? I didn’t even find the yearbook recently; it was AT LEAST two years ago, if not more.

Or the other day, I was out for a lovely walk in the snow and instead of enjoying the feeling of snowflakes kissing my cheeks and the sound of my boots crunching in the snow, I started thinking about another awful boy, this one in high school, who once mentioned he’d seen me outside my music teacher’s house after my lesson, pacing back and forth on the sidewalk, waiting for a parent to pick me up. He told me I looked like a hooker. A HOOKER. We were in high school. Why would his mind go there? And why would he TELL me such a thing? And why am I furious about it NOW, a million years after the fact? 

Why are schoolage boys so awful? Not all of them – not yours, surely. But enough of them to make a difference. Will Carla have to deal with boys like this? Will they write grotesque things in her yearbook? How am I going to protect her heart from being infected by terrible people? I have no idea how to protect her or prepare her. I really have no business being a mother if I can’t help her understand that there are people who are mean and hurtful for no reason… but without crushing her spirit.

And then there are more examples of me being a terrible person and parent. Like how last summer, there was a mortifying incident involving another mom and her kids of the sort that makes me a) wonder how, when a child knows The Rules and has shown that they know them and can follow them, they can occasionally not just forget The Rules but flaunt them? And b) how am I possibly equipped to be a parent if I can’t convey the importance of The Rules and how they are meant to be followed always, not just on a whim? I’ve been going over and over that event (which turned out fine! everyone is fine!) and coming up with The Exact Perfect Thing that I should have said or did at the time, instead of saying and doing what I did say and do, which was nothing is except standing in gape-mouthed mortification and letting the other mother take the disciplinary lead. How is this helping anyone, to go over and over it? 

Oh, lord, and there was that other time? With this same mom? When I saw her kid on the sidewalk, by himself, two blocks from home. I was in my car and stopped and asked him if he was okay and if his mom knew where he was, and he said yes and yes. So we kept driving. I pulled up my phone so I call his mother but before I could do so, we saw her on the sidewalk. She was frantic with worry, because she’d lost him. I was able to tell her where he was, but I keep kicking myself for not STAYING WITH HIM and calling her. I could have just stayed right there in my car! But I didn’t! I kept driving! Why? Why did I do that? It all worked out okay, but WHY DID I DO THAT?

You see? It’s not enough that my brain torment me with one thing. It’s got to get right in there with hit after hit after hit. Why can’t it just leave the past in the past and focus on doing the best job possible NOW?

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Tuesday Randomosity: Sleep Award Edition

I have done it! I have done the thing I always think I should do, and never do, which is to GET UP when I awaken in the middle of the night and do something more useful than lying awake, counting how many hours of sleep I could get if I fell asleep right then.

Lest you think I am no longer susceptible to the patterns of the past: I woke up at 3:00 a.m., almost on the dot, and then lay in bed/read soothing blog posts until 4:00, and then lay in bed in the dark, telling myself I should just GET UP ALREADY and start the day until 4:37. That’s when I finally Did The Thing and put on my glasses and came downstairs. I deserve a Sleep Award. Although, now that I think of it, a Sleep Award seems more appropriate for sleeping restfully through an entire eight-plus hours, so perhaps I’ll have to relinquish my claim.

In lieu of an award, I am drinking tea, as I do when I wake up. My stomach is a little uncomfortable with this idea – it thinks it is Sleeping Time, rather than Accepting Sustenance Time. It is also a little concerned about what time we will want lunch. 

If only the grocery store were open now, and I could get that over with! Oh well. I will blog about random nothings instead! 

• Carla has been having extra trouble getting to sleep lately. Firstly, I feel just terrible that she has apparently inherited my fraught relationship with sleep. She has had trouble falling asleep her entire eight-and-a-half years, and that doesn’t bode well for the remainder of her life, which I hope is very long. At least, I suppose, she seems to be able to maintain sleep once she gets there. While I occasionally have trouble getting to sleep, my main issue is staying asleep.
• Well, I suppose my brain is smoothing over the many, many times that Carla has come into my room at 3:00 or 4:00, or that I have awakened to learn that she had been awake for hours already. BUT, it seems less frequent than her troubles drifting off. The power of posting about something of the internet will immediately ensure that she wakes up at 3:00 every morning for the next month.
• The only thing that comes close to the frustration of not being able to fall asleep is the frustration of one’s CHILD not being able to fall asleep. Last night, my husband and I were watching the first episode of Sex Education and I kept hearing suspicious thumps coming from upstairs. It was quite windy outside, and my husband felt that the thumps might be exterior noises, while I was quite sure they were human. And then we had one of those mildly irritating conversations I imagine happen frequently in any longterm partnership, where he said, “Do you want to go check on her?” and I said “yes,” because I’d HEARD “Do you want ME to go check on her?” And then he had to correct my misperception and I had to glare at him briefly before I went to investigate the source of the thumps. 
• Thump source: Carla. Instead of reading quietly or thinking about sheep or doing deep breathing – all of which we have discussed AT LENGTH in regards to their soporific powers – she felt the best way to induce sleep was to get out of bed and gather some toys and play with them, in the bed. On the bed. Preposition the bed. Exasperation! Incredulity! How did she think this was a good way to get to sleep? And yet she seemed very sincere that she thought it would help. Trying to turn down the scold volume on my lecture, I removed the toys and reminded her of all the other options that we have discussed for helping lull our brains to sleep. Count backwards from 100. Count backwards by 5s from 1000. Imagine yourself, in great detail, walking along the route to somewhere you love. List 50 things you are grateful for. Go through the alphabet and name an animal beginning with each letter. Do some deep breathing. Read a book. Recite a poem over and over in your head. When I went back to check on her about 20 minutes later, she was fast asleep. Sometimes it seems like the BEST way to induce sleep is to scold her about it. Which seems… not right. 
• Carla mentioned to me that she cannot see pictures in her head, so the “walking along the route to somewhere you love” isn’t a viable option for her. I love that she’s so aware of what it’s like inside her head. I don’t see pictures in my head either, but I guess my internal travel writer is so descriptive that I can still make that option work. Or I can drum up a feeling of a place that is almost as vivid as an image. 
• Also, it is unfair of me to expect that she remember these techniques when I am terrible at remembering them myself! Only when I am DESPERATE for sleep do I recall most of these strategies. The one that I use most often – mentally reciting Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” until I fall asleep – sometimes doesn’t even occur to me in the middle of a 3:00 am wakeup. Instead, I turn to my phone, which almost certainly makes it HARDER for me to sleep. 
• There was supposed to be a secondly somewhere up there. I suppose you have forgotten about it as well. But on the off chance you were waiting on tenterhooks – “You did the ‘firstly,’ what’s the ‘secondly’? WHAT’S THE SECONDLY?” – I cannot remember. 
• I have finished my first book of poetry for the year. One of my 2022 aspirations is to read a poem every morning, and I have been keeping up with that so far. However, I may not have chosen the best book to start out the year. I selected a book at random and came up with The Seven Ages by Louise Gluck. She has an umlaut over the u in her surname; I don’t how to do that on my computer. I adore Louise’s poetry. (This makes it sound as though we are on a first-name basis, which we are not. I did meet her once, though. We went out to lunch and she is as fascinating as one hopes a famous poet would be.) But The Seven Ages is all about her contemplating her own death. That’s all fine and good, and it resonates, and I appreciate reading her thoughts from the perspective of being 50ish because I am nearing that age. But it was also a little depressing. Perhaps I will try a Billy Collins book next; I own two of his collections, but I don’t think I’ve ever read the poems; my impression is that they are lighter and sometimes attempt to be humorous.
• One of the Gluck poems has really stuck with me. It’s called “The Sensual World,” which, in my opinion, mis-implies what the poem is about or how to read it. But poems are very personal, so you do you, boo. Anyway, the poem is about how the world will grip you in startling and unpredictable and inescapable ways. There is this moment of exquisite beauty that the narrator recounts, in the kitchen of her grandmother. A tiny moment: a glass of juice; its taste; the way the light refracts through it. But it leads the narrator to offer an urgent warning about the trap that life has set for you: “you will never let go, you will never be satiated. / You will be damaged and scarred, you will continue to hunger. / Your body will age, you will continue to need. / You will want the earth, then more of the earth – / Sublime, indifferent, it is present, it will not respond. / It is encompassing, it will not minister. / Meaning, it will feed you, it will ravish you, / it will not keep you alive.” It makes my heart pound, it resonates so deeply. I am so familiar with those moments – of shocking beauty that flares suddenly out of the mundane, of intense love provoked by the smallest, most inconsequential thing (a kitten at the pet store, butting its head against your hand; a child seeing you in distress and trying to soothe you with the very techniques you use to soothe the child; an unexpected kindness from a stranger; a moment of private humor with a spouse; a child, asleep, with hands folded beneath the chin as though posed). And I know the exact feeling of wanting to clutch those things with both hands even as I know – we all know – they are not ours to keep. It is not our lot to hold them forever, but only for the short time we have on this plane of existence. You will never let go. It will not keep you alive.
• Yesterday, I experienced one of those moments of satisfaction/guilt that seem to be a hallmark of parenting. Carla was really anxious about returning to school (who knows why?!?! Is it the constant barrage of contradictory information, such as “Covid isn’t a big deal since you’re vaccinated; don’t worry too much, it probably won’t affect you too much if you get it” but also “make SURE you wear your mask and don’t breathe on anyone and for Todd’s sake, please don’t let anyone breathe on you!” Is it the fact that she hasn’t been in school for a month? Is it the fact that “school” could mean home/not home at any given time?) so I had to bribe her to even get her out the door yesterday morning. The bribe is not the satisfaction/guilt part, although perhaps it should be; it worked. I bribed her with a chocolate chip cookie for dessert (we are reverting to a “desserts on weekends” kind of schedule) AND with “something fun.” (She claims she never ever gets to do what SHE wants, all she does is go to SCHOOL.) I told her she could pick anything non-screen related, and she picked playing Barbies together. Sigh. I haaaaaaaate pretend play. It is the worst. But I agreed, and after school we played Barbies for 30 minutes exactly. Which is nothing. A tiny amount of my day. Then, when we were doing our bedtime mindfulness routine, and we got to the part about “what were you grateful for today?”, Carla said, “I was grateful that I got to play Barbies with Mommy.” No hesistation. Awwww. What a worthwhile way to spend our time together! But also: guilt, because I HATE playing Barbies. And yet it is such a simple way to make my beloved child so happy! Ugh ugh ugh. Well, I am not promising anything, but I will TRY to do more Barbies with Carla. 
• A thing it turns out I DO enjoy is playing Sleeping Queens. Do you have this game? I ordered it on a “my child is not doing enough math” whim last weekend and it is QUITE fun. There’s a video on the product page that describes how to play; it seems much more complicated than it is. And it’s a much faster-paced game than I anticipated. The basic object is that you want to get as many queens as possible. To get the queens, or to keep your opponent from getting queens, or to prevent your opponent from getting your queens, you need special cards. Your only chance to get the special cards is to discard a card from your hand. And – here’s the math element – you can draw more cards if you have an equation. So if you have cards in the values of 1, 5, and 7, you can only discard one of them and pick up one new card. But if you have 2, 5, and 7, you can make an equation and discard all three; then you can draw three cards. If you have/know a child in the young elementary age group, I highly recommend it. Because the number cards only go up to ten, the math is quite easy for Carla (although there’s no harm in keeping up with basic addition and subtraction), but it would be ideal for someone who is just learning to add/subtract. We also do multiplication, when it’s possible. I really wish there were an expansion pack with higher-value numbers. Anyway, I find it to be a really fun game and we have already played at least a dozen times. BONUS: This is a game that you can easily play with two people, which means that we don’t have to wait for Daddy to be home. 
• I made my first foray into baked oatmeal. I am a little reluctant to post about it, because I didn’t love it. And I WANT to love it. It was both better than I thought it would be and worse than I hoped. But I think I chose the wrong (for me) recipe. It called for coconut oil, which – to me (though not to my husband) – ending up being the predominant flavor. I wanted an APPLE flavor. Also, I don’t think I put in enough nuts. The nuts were my favorite part. I need to do more experimentation before I can make a firm decision about not liking it. I think I will try this recipe next. 
• I had a mildly negative interaction the other day that is still gnawing at me. It’s one of those things where the situation felt very fraught, almost purely because I am overly concerned with what people think of me. And the rest of it was fraught because it involved Covid, and I am caught in a wildly swinging internal pendulum of “you can’t control it and you need to find some way to live with it without forcing your child to be a miserable hermit” and “it is perfectly reasonable to continue to take precautions for the sake of those who aren’t protected/in order to keep Carla in school ” and “if you allow Carla to go to school, then how is this situation different” and “it is okay to have boundaries and limits even if they seem arbitrary; everything seems arbitrary right now” and “you and Carla are both vaccinated, you really can relax a little sheesh” and “arrrrrggghhhhhh.” I fervently wish I were the type of person who a) knows the exact right thing to do in any given situation and b) doesn’t care what other people think of me. I am neither of those people though, I am me. And as much as I try to be breezy, breeziness is not in my nature. And I DO care what people think, and I hate that about myself but I do.
• Totally related to the above point: It is not fair to present a situation in one way, with clear parameters, and then to change the parameters in the moment. It is especially not okay to then pressure people into accepting the new parameters. 
• Gah.
• We have a new addition to our Dinner Plan this week. My husband requested Taco Tuesday. I think you know that I will never turn down a request for tacos. This is the beauty of planning out fewer meals than one intends to eat. You can just slide tacos right into the mix, no biggie. It is especially helps when you haven’t yet made it to the grocery store.
• That reminds me that I have my check-up this morning. It is a totally normal check-up, so it should be fine. But it’s with a new doctor, in a new office, in a new location. So I am a little anxious about all of those things. Will I find the office okay? Will I get there on time? Will I like the doctor? Also, will I meet her for the first time while naked? That’s never fun. And then I have to do it all over again in a couple of weeks, because my PCP is retiring and I had to find a new one. (Hopefully I won’t have to meet her naked, though.)

Well, that’s it. I am already painfully aware that today is going to be a grind to get through; my 3:00 a.m. alertness has eroded into fatigue. But blogging is a much better way to spend the early hours of the morning than tossing and turning next to my blissfully sleeping husband, waiting futilely for sleep to bless me with its presence. 

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Dinners This Week

Welcome to the first week of dinners for the new year. An entire year of meal planning and shopping for those meals and cooking those meals (or not cooking them, in favor of something that sounds better/easier in the moment) and eating those meals and cleaning up those meals stretches before us.

While that doesn’t sound particularly appealing, I am feeling a tiny burst of energy about it all. The transition from indulgent holiday food to lighter, more regular meals feels refreshing. I spent a bunch of time this weekend looking through recipe blogs for new possibilities; it sometimes helps to have something New and Exciting – or at least New – to keep me out of the meal planning doldrums. I am going to lean into it while I can, before the inevitable drudgery of making meals day after day after day until death settles over me like a weighted blanket.

We did not make sticky toffee pudding yesterday, so that is back on the list for this weekend. (We did get food from my favorite Indian restaurant for dinner, and it was especially delicious. I would rather have chicken vindaloo ten times over than sticky toffee pudding, so it was a win for me. Plus, leftovers for lunch!)

This week, with Carla doing remote school (and therefore getting to sleep in a little later each morning), I am going to make an effort to have us all eat together. Normally, Carla eats dinner by herself at about 5:30 or 6:00, and my husband and I eat dinner around 8:00 or 8:30. Yes, I hate it, thanks. In an ideal world, we would eat together more often, giving us more family time together… and also giving us opportunities to model things like table manners and conversational skills and “trying new things” to Carla. I’m hoping my husband will get home early enough (people are canceling appointments right and left, which is Not Great Bob) that we can all eat together. This doesn’t mean I will be able to make one dinner for us all, of course, because I want Carla to actually eat something. But I can at least make similar foods (chicken nuggets or fish sticks when we have a saucy chicken or fish dish; raw versions of the veggies we eat) that I know she will eat, and add small portions of whatever my husband and I are eating to her plate. It is very challenging to have a picky child, especially since I am a picky eater myself, and I know how upsetting it can be to try new things. Plus, I know that deciding what to eat and what to refuse is one of the few things that Carla has autonomy over, and I don’t want to rob her of the ability to say no for so many reasons. But I also want her to eat more things than chicken nuggets and frozen peas and plain white rice, FOR THE LOVE OF COD.

Parenting quandary detour over.

There are only five meals on the plan for this week, to give us some wiggle room for last-minute additions or cravings.

Dinners for the Week of January 3-9

Chicken and Zucchini Stir Fry: You know by now that this is one of my favorite dinners. Plus it has a lot of vegetables, which means it fits in nicely with my “more veg” aspiration. Plus my husband suggested it; whether as a peace offering for not making the sticky toffee pudding or because he genuinely is in the mood, I don’t care because I love it. (My spell checker thinks that “peace” is misspelled in the previous sentence… though not in this one. Why are you messing with me, spell checker? Underlining a word I KNOW how to spell is making me question everything I thought I knew.) (It’s definitely not “piece offering,” right? RIGHT?)

Steak, Pepper, & Sugar Snap Pea Stir Fry: I guess I am in a stir fry mood today? This is a new-to-me recipe and sounds different and yummy and veggie packed. I will probably ignore the steak, but my husband will eat it, and we have a package in the freezer at this very moment. Carla likes steak and (raw) sugar snap peas… I wonder if I can persuade her to eat this? Unlikely but I will try.

Follow Up: I loved this — it was such a nice change from our usual stir fries. My husband said it was too salty, though, and I don’t know how to change that since the sauce contains soy sauce. Carla ate a piece of the steak and a piece of the pepper and voted them too spicy (there is sriracha in the sauce as well), but she tried them! (She also ate a slice of beef tenderloin, a pile of raw sugar snap peas, a few slices of raw red pepper, and a big heap of rice.)

Honey-Garlic Glazed Salmon with Air Fryer Brussels Sprouts: Another aspiration is to get my family to eat more fish. I love fish. Carla used to LOVE salmon. But now she and my husband turn up their noses. Well, perhaps if I slather it in a sweet glaze?

Oven Baked Pork Chops with Steamed Broccoli: We will probably have some couscous alongside this old standby, which, incidentally, is another Husband Suggested^TM Meal.

Baked Tilapia with Coconut Cilantro Sauce with Sautéed Green Beans: Listen, there is NO WAY that Carla will even try this. But it sounds amazing and I think my husband will like it. Especially if I can find cod instead of tilapia.

What are you eating this week?

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Turns Out I’m Not Quite Done Complaining About Call Week

I have made a grave miscalculation and we are somehow out of cheese. I keep looking for it around the house, as though there are places other than the refrigerator in which one could misplace a block of extra sharp cheddar.

Like everything, Call Weeks are harder during a pandemic. In the Before Times, I would try to inject as much fun into Call Weeks as possible: spinning the time alone together as special Girl Time, loosening restrictions on screen time, planning special dinner/lunch dates with Carla, planning special coffee/lunch dates with my friends. But now, NONE of that works.

First of all, Carla and I have NOTHING BUT Girl Time. It is the two of us, all day every day. Girl Time is no longer special. It is The Way Things Are.

Loosening restrictions on screen time. Ha. Ha ha ha ha ha. Screen time restrictions have loosened so much over the past five months that they are almost non-existent. I don’t even pretend anymore. I mean, we have a time limit on Carla’s ipad, but the number of times I add an hour to it each day is… embarrassing. (I keep threatening that we are going back to no screen time during the school week once school starts, but… I cannot imagine what that will look like. As it is, I cannot write an email without seven interruptions.)

We can’t plan special lunch/dinner dates because we are not going to restaurants. I know that many people have resumed this activity, but I am not one of those people. I don’t know when/if I will ever feel comfortable dining inside a restaurant.

I am obviously not planning special coffee or lunch dates with friends. I’m not opposed to going through the Starbucks drive-through, but Carla would be with me. So the specialness of the friend-date would be… reduced.

As it stands, Call Week is going to be just like any other week… except that we will all be cranky and stressed out and Carla and I will be missing her father.

Listen, I know that I could go out of my way to Make Things Special. But please believe me when I say I have exhausted all the specialness in my repertoire. I am CONSTANTLY trying to make things special and fun. Because we are in the middle of a pandemic and there are no camps or parties or trips to visit grandparents or even swimming lessons or soccer practice to occupy us or look forward to.

We have picnics. We have been making an increasing number of playdates (we are up to about one per week, I think, and that is really all my little introvert heart can handle), and in fact we have a bike-riding meetup with friends scheduled for later this week. We eat popcorn and watch movies. We play Barbies. We sing songs. We research states and write reports on them. We build Magnatile condominium complexes for said Barbies. We write stories together, alternating sentences. We play math games. We have dance parties. We create the tallest possible marble tower we can, and then watch all the marbles go through it at once. We play air hockey. We run through the sprinklers. We set up stores and buy things from each other. We have spa days. We bake. We read poetry. We put together all sorts of things from Kiwi crates. We do YouTube exercise videos. We build tents. We go on hikes. When it’s raining, we go on Worm Walks (we have yet to find a single worm on one of these walks, but we keep trying) (a Worm Walk is simply when you put on rain boots and a raincoat and go looking for worms) (you probably understood that from context clues but just in case). We schedule Facetime dates with family and friends. We look for bugs. We play restaurant. We ride bikes. We write poems. We scoot. We play board games. We go on scavenger hunts. We play badminton or catch. We draw. We make chalk obstacle courses on the sidewalk. We play with LEGOs. We research animals and write reports on them. We do everything except read because Carla for some reason thinks reading is an activity reserved only for bedtime.

And even though we do MANY of these things every single week, often MANY of these things in a single DAY, there are still multiple hours of the day where we are each glued to our respective screens. Because there are TOO MANY HOURS IN THE DAY.

What I am saying is, when it comes to making Call Week extra! special! for either of us, I am OUT OF IDEAS.

Well. We haven’t done a spa day in a while. Maybe we’ll try that. And we have two appointments this week. That will liven things up a bit. (Although one is remote, which is just More Of The Same.) Plus the bike-ride playdate.

I also checked out Fry Bread from the library a few weeks ago, with the idea of reading it and then watching some YouTube cooking tutorials by Native Americans and then making our own fry bread at home. (We have not read it yet because of the aforementioned aversion to daytime reading.) Maybe we can finally do that. If the weather is hot and sunny, instead of intermittently thunderstormy as it has been, we will wash my car.

What else can I possibly do, Internet? I am. Tapped. Out. (And very apprehensive about winter, when many of our outdoor activities will be rendered if not impossible then highly undesirable.)

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Bad Day Already

The day is not off to a good start.

Part of it is actual, part of it is mental, part of it is diet-al.

Part the first: I have managed to make my child simultaneously hate school and believe that her teachers are going to be mad at her if she isn’t perfect. We had parent teacher conferences last week, and her teachers mentioned a couple of things Carla needed to work on. And I mentioned those things to her, and we talked about some strategies, and she got really cranky and irritable with me and then we moved on. We had a lovely weekend. This morning, she waltzed into my room in one of her signature amazing ensembles (purple pants, pink shirt, faux leopard fur vest, sparkly headband) in a happy mood and snuggled with me until my alarm went off. I reminded her this morning about what we had discussed, and it was like flipping a switch. All of a sudden she was hot and would I take her temperature. No fever. She was really tired and naptime at school is way too far away so she wants to stay home. She doesn’t want to go to school. She’s NOT going to school. I tried to figure out what the deal was – she LOVES school; over the weekend, we drove past her school and the parking lot was full and she said “No fair! Those kids get to be there on the weekend!” – and eventually got out of her that she thinks she won’t be able to do what we discussed and her teachers will be mad at her. So. No school. She’s done.

Well shit.

I tried everything in my Mommy Toolkit to persuade her: Assurance: We don’t expect you to be perfect, we expect you to try your best. Your teachers love you. Here are all the wonderful things they told me about you at the conference. Here are all the things for which your father and I are so proud of you. Bribery: If you go to school today, you get to do X! I will let you bring your horse in the car on the way to school! If you still feel bad at school, you can go to the nurse and she will call me to come get you! Logic: School is your job, you have to go. If Daddy didn’t want to go to work, what would happen? It’s a law that kids your age have to go to school. Mild threats: If you don’t go, here are all the fun things you will miss. If you stay home, you will be bored; no TV, I have work to do so I can’t play with you. And – bringing out the big guns – I will make you go on ERRANDS with me. She was undeterred.

Finally, after assuring her for the ten thousandth time that neither her teachers nor I would be mad at her, that none of us expects her to be PERFECT, that we just want her to TRY… After singing her the Daniel Tiger song about “your best is the best for you”… After coming up with some specific strategies to try with her teachers… FINALLY, I got her out the door. We were thirty-five minutes late.

And then, when I was telling her teacher about the strategies we had discussed and explaining what had happened, I of course burst into tears. Because nothing makes a Bad Parenting Morning worse than leaking it all over your child’s poor teacher. The only saving grace was that we were so late, there weren’t many other parents lingering in the halls to see me blubbering.

Man, I really screwed things up. And I don’t know exactly HOW, or exactly how to fix it, or how to do it differently. And she still needs to work on the things she needs to work on, although obviously they are not DIRE. (Though I managed to get poor Carla to feel that they ARE dire.) And my heart just feels so RAW for her, because she is working so hard at growing up – so, so hard – and she wants to please us and her teachers so badly, and she is so much more sensitive than sometimes even I realize. And of all people in the world, I should be the one who KNOWS what she needs and understands how to get through to her without screwing her up and I DON’T.

So that’s the actual.

The mental is the crushing certainty that I am the absolute worst choice of person to be a parent. And that nonetheless I have to do it anyway. And at stake are my child’s PERMANENT HAPPINESS AND WELL BEING.

There is also the outward spiraling, wherein I begin to feel that everything else in life is terrible too: our house is falling apart, I can’t keep up with the to-do list, I am failing as a writer. You know. One bit of the scaffolding gets knocked in and the whole structure comes tumbling down.

Then there’s the diet-al, which is stupid and I should just QUIT because it’s making me miserable. I have a constant headache. I feel nauseated and my brain seems to be going at half speed. I am not particularly hungry or missing foods all that much, but I do have a rather abnormally intense fixation on Diet Coke.

You can see how this all adds up to a bad morning so far.

Two things I am using to try to pull myself out of this negativity quicksand:

1. The diet is over as of Thursday morning. I will be celebrating with a big bowl of pasta and a thick slice of cake.
2. I have a pedicure scheduled with a friend for Friday, which should be relaxing and my friend and I will get to chat and catch up.

And between me, my husband, and Carla’s teachers, we should be able to figure out how to redirect her perfectionism… somehow? Right?

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Parenting Moan

Poor Carla is just off  lately. Saturday she ate practically nothing – some bacon and a tomato from her BLT at lunch, a handful of fries; a peanut butter sandwich at our friends’ house that night – and then she ate a great lunch yesterday but literally NOTHING for dinner. Not a single bite. She requested instead to go to bed. But then she woke up at 11:30 and could NOT fall back to sleep. She was up until well past two. Two a.m. in the morning. And if by “she was up” you are assuming that maybe I was sleeping, no. I was reading Harriet the Spy and playing YouTube “spa music” and fetching water and taking her temperature and reading old favorite picture books and giving her Tylenol because her “neck” hurt when she swallowed and making a “nest” in my room beside my bed and lying quietly in the dark and hissing at Carla in my most soothing way to just be STILL and close your EYES.

No surprise that she was dragging this morning. She didn’t eat as much for breakfast as I thought (hoped) she would – most of her smoothie, one French toast stick – and was just kind of slow. Which could be tired slow. Or not-feeling-great slow. Or just plain old Kindergarten Slow. Who knows.

Why is so much of parenting so unknowable? That’s what I’m bemoaning this morning. I mean, I get it. There’s no handbook. No two kids are alike. Yada yada blah. But I have had this particular kid for nearly six whole years so you’d think I’d at least have the hang of dealing with her by now. But you’d have thought incorrectly, I’m sorry to say. (Mainly sorry for me, not so much for you and your misplaced faith in my supposed parenting “ability.”)

There are so many QUESTIONS. And I have answers to SO FEW of them! Sure, some things, like “should she be holding that sharp knife?” and “should I give her a hug?” have simple answers. But so many do NOT.

Some of the questions for which I do not have answers just TODAY:

• Is “not eating dinner” a totally acceptable thing once in a while, or does it indicate something is WRONG?
• Does a repeated claim that a child has a headache indicate an actual headache… or is it a bid for attention… or is it a parroting of my own not-infrequent headaches and therefore a cautionary tale against complaining too much about my own minor aches and pains… or is it a way to divert attention away from the not-eating?
• And if there IS a headache, is it a normal Everyone-Gets-Headaches-Sometimes headache or does it indicate something is WRONG? And how do you know the difference?
• How in the world do I stopper the effervescent frustration of Slow Child Not Moving Quickly Enough When We Need to Get to School on Time FOR THE LOVE before I burst forth with a Mean Mom snarl of PUT YOUR COAT ON OMG?
• If there is no fever, and no REAL reason to keep a child home – especially when everyone seems to think that a snow day or two is imminent this week, based on predicted temperatures – is it really okay to send her to school? Even though this guilty feeling keeps nagging me like a staticky sock stuck to a pant leg?

This is not to mention all of the day-to-day questions I have, including but not limited to:

• How much screen time is REALLY acceptable? And if my kid squeezes it all into the weekends, does that make it better or worse?
• How am I ever going to get her to tie her shoes? I don’t want to buy shoes with laces until she knows how to tie them; cod knows I’m not going to tie them for her. But how is she going to learn until I buy her shoes with laces? DILEMMA.
• Should we be FaceTime-ing with relatives more often?
• Is my kid’s behavior around other adults totally typical of her age, or something I need to be more on top of correcting? (Things like not answering when being spoken to, sticking out her tongue or otherwise being playful, ignoring them totally and wandering off…)
• Am I preparing her well enough for Real Life? While still allowing her to enjoy the freedom and innocence of childhood?
• Is she really going to lose ALL her teeth? And how am I going to handle the horror that is a piece of my child’s bone hanging by a slim bloody tether from her gums MORE TIMES?
• Do I read to her enough?
• Do I play with her enough?
• Does she have enough time to play?
• How many stuffed animals are too many stuffed animals?
• Are my expectations too high? Not high enough?
• Am I giving her enough intellectual stimulation? Social? Physical? Creative?
• Am I teaching her good eating habits?
• Am I a good enough role model?
• Is she getting enough sleep?
• Is she happy?
• How many ways am I failing her?

I don’t know if you are aware, but this parenting thing is EXHAUSTING. It’s like taking a midterm exam every single DAY and knowing that you haven’t studied enough and you are pretty iffy on big chunks of the material. But you don’t get a grade now  – oh no, you have to take 4,560 more exams just between now and when your kid presumably heads off to college. And they’re really important but there’s no way to know if you’re just squeaking by with a C average or totally bombing. That’s the hardest part, right? I could be TOTALLY SCREWING HER UP and I won’t know until she’s an adult.

I am going to go treat this bout of parenting angst with some melted cheese and maybe consider a nap. How’s that for being a role model, hmm?

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Babysitting Anxieties, Then and Now

I had no idea that one of my biggest side hustles as a mom would be trying to find a babysitter. Maybe this isn’t true for everyone – especially if you have nearby relatives who are happy to take a kiddo for a few hours – but man it has been true for me: I spend a ton of energy trying to find and keep babysitters.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to feel comfortable leaving Carla with a sitter AT ALL. Our first regular sitter lived down the street. She’d just graduated college, she had a bunch of siblings and a history of taking care of kids in the neighborhood. Plus, she was a former lifeguard so I knew she was a) CPR certified and b) schooled in handling emergencies.

At one point, she was always busy when I asked her to watch Carla, so I stopped asking. (Who knows – maybe she really wasbusy. But if she was just uneasy telling me she no longer wanted to babysit, I wanted to take the hint.) That was a sad loss.

I tried one of those websites where you can find a sitter… but I have to be honest. I freaked me out. Too many options, and too much potential risk, I guess? I know many people have used those sites with great success. But it’s not my thing.

A neighbor mentioned that her high school son would be interested in sitting for Carla. But… Carla is scared of him for some reason. Maybe not scared, but totally apprehensive at the idea of having him watch her. So that’s off the table. (And, I’m sure, so is asking his older sister; talk about insulting!)

Finally, we found a sitter who worked at Carla’s old daycare. Again, I was delighted! She and Carla knew and liked each other. She’d been vetted by a place whose very business was taking care of kids. Plus, I just liked her. But she moved out of state. Before she left, she recommended one of her former colleagues from the daycare, who was also a great find. But then she had a baby and I never heard from her again.

Just a year ago, I felt flush with an abundance of sitters. Carla’s swim instructor was happy to babysit. And one day when she was unavailable, she recommended a friend who is a speech pathologist and works with high-needs kids. We met her and she was excellent. So that’s TWO sitters to call on if we need it. But they are both really expensive, which is a factor.

So when Carla literally picked up a sitter at camp this summer, I was over the moon. (I showed up in the car line on the last day of camp and Carla dragged this young woman over, and the young woman said, “Hi! Can I give you my number so I can babysit Carla sometimes?” Um. YES.) She was Carla’s swim coach at camp. She was a high school student, so she commands a lower fee than the two adult professionals we’d been using. And she was wonderful. Full of energy and obviously deemed capable of wrangling a bunch of five year olds – in the water, no less – by Carla’s school. We had her over to watch Carla and Carla had a blast and keeps asking when she can come over again.

My husband and I haven’t been on a date in MONTHS, so I am ready for one. And I want to sign up for this Sur la Table class so I can cross it off my to-do list. So I texted the sitter… and she hasn’t responded. I am going to give it until this weekend to follow up (she’s in class during the week, obviously), but I am worried about how best to contact her. I could email her… but do kids these days email? Or I could call her… but do kids these days use the phone? (I doubt it. I don’t use the phone and I’m a billion.) Probably I’ll just text her one more time and then if she doesn’t respond I will begin the grieving process. Because I don’t want to badger her.

Did I ever tell you about the horrible babysitting experience I had in grad school? I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned it here. As with most of my past (a phrase that makes my earlier years sound unnecessarily mysterious; they were not), the incident is kind of fuzzy. I have a truly dreadful memory. But the broad strokes and the pervasive dread have stuck with me.

I had a professor that I loved. He taught a class on my all-time favorite author, and we spent the semester reading books I loved and delving into the author’s craft and I loved every minute of it. Much of the reason I loved it was the professor, too. He was engaging and smart and he seemed to value my contributions – slim though they were; I once got an A- in a class I otherwise excelled at simply because I didn’t speak up enough – and I really liked him.

One day, he asked if I would babysit his two young kids. I can’t remember if he put the request out to the class or if he asked me specifically. But I said yes and gave him my cell number so he could send me details. I sat for the kids one time and it was… rough. I’m not much of a kid person as it is; I don’t really know why I said yes in the first place. I have a very blurry recollection that maybe the professor was in a bind and I said yes reluctantly just to help him out. I’m pretty sure I told him right then that it was a once-in-a-while deal, that he should not count on me as a regular sitter. But maybe that’s one of the tricks your mind plays on you, after the fact, filling in what youshould have done. Maybe I was eager to help out, at the time.

So I sat for the kids and then I was done. Once was enough. Again, I don’t have anything specific to hang that reasoning on. Maybe the kids were unruly or mean or fought a lot or cried a lot. Maybe I felt overwhelmed or realized, yeah, I don’t like kids. Maybe the parents were late coming home or I felt uncomfortable in their house. I have no idea.

But he asked me again and I said no, I couldn’t do it – blaming it on some other commitment, feeling horrible for leaving him in the lurch.

(A little part of me can empathize with him, now that I’m well-versed in trying to find a sitter for my own child. You find someone you like, and you want that person to be Your Person Forever. When you have no other options, you might be a little more willing to be annoying in pursuit of getting what you want.)

And then he called me again, to ask me to babysit. And I declined again. And then he asked me again. Did I go back and sit for the younger kid, one more time? I think maybe I did, but maybe I wanted so badly to say yes and stop the badgering that I invented that memory. In any case, he called again. And again. I stopped answering my phone when he called. I felt guilty about not wanting to help, and uncomfortable about lying about my other commitments, and awkward about having to see him in class.

And then, in class, he started telling us stuff that struck me as really inappropriate. Stuff that maybe you shouldn’t share with your students. But it sounded like he and his family were going through a really rough time – my memories here are more specific, but I don’t want to share the details because a) they aren’t mine and b) if I ammisremembering, that makes sharing them even worse; suffice it to say it was really, really disquieting stuff – and so I can understand that he might have been so consumed by what was going on that he lost his sense of judgment about what he should and shouldn’t share. Or hey, maybe it was perfectly reasonable for him to tell us what he was going through, and my particular high-boundary personality coupled with my strained relationship with him is what made it seem out of line.

He would talk about these things they were going through, and how desperate he and his wife were to figure them out, and how they had all this time they had to spend away from the one kid while they were struggling to help the other kid.

In any event, it made me feel awful. Sad for him and his family. But also like he was guilt tripping me about not babysitting for them. In front of the whole class. He and his wife neededsomeone to help them out. The younger kid neededsomeone to be there for them, while her family’s lives were in a tumult. And I couldn’t even be bothered to babysit???

I realize that a lot of this is my own personal interpretation. And you weren’t there, and you aren’t getting his side of the story. But I hope you believe me when I tell you I felt a tremendous amount of pressure. And I felt I couldn’t do anything about it, either. I couldn’t drop out of the class – it was too far along in the semester by that time. I didn’t feel that couldn’t go to anyone in the department, because it’s such a small department and he had such standing in it that I didn’t think anyone would believe me that it had become a bigger issue than a stupid babysitting request. I didn’t even tell my closest grad school friend about it, because I was afraid she’d say something and I’d get blackballed by the department.

Writing it out even now, it seems ridiculous. How could an entire semester be ruined for me because someone wanted me to babysit his kids and I didn’t want to? And of course, I’ve lost (or blocked) the details so I can’t lay it out for you to fully examine. Instead, you get these shards and fragments. How can I expect you to form a clear enough picture that you understand?

Well. This is all I’ve got.

And it did ruin the semester for me. Worse, I haven’t picked up a book by my once-favorite author since.

Like I said, I do have some empathy for him. Now. After the passage of many years has softened the anxiety and discomfort I felt at the time. And knowing what I do about the singular desperation a parent feels in the face of losing a perfectly good babysitter.

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