Jungle Plant

there's one in every litter

Remember looking at National Geographic magazine's pictures of jungle tribes?  Lying on the living room floor, your head bracing hand falling asleep, the scratchy carpet irritating the skin of your belly where your Hang Ten hand-me-down shirt had lifted up,  turning the slick pages with your functioning hand.  The smooth skinned naked natives with their blackened nub smiles both fascinated and repulsed.  The body manipulations: ritual tattooing, scaring, piercing and stretching of the dark jungle moist skin was so other, alien.  I thought about this as I seated myself at the dinner table on Christmas Eve, forcibly softening my squint of disapproval and holding my tongue in order to enjoy a rare visit from my eldest son.

to find some books on xeriparenting

Modestly pierced ears were pretty much unanimous at the table.  My scientist brother-in-law has tiny hoops in each ear, but my eldest son has surgical steel in various gages looping in and out in three different directions, plus rosewood bottle cap sized plugs in stretched lobes, but most festive is the thick shiny silver bull ring ending in double ball bearings dangling from his upturned nose, jewelry that would be more suited on a 350 pound Samoan, not my delicate featured, freckled, blue eyed Scot-Irish Neo Primitive. Plus I think we can all agree that white boy dreadlocks are unfortunate. Two ambitious rope heads are seated at our dinner table. Brothers, one dark, one red. Seeing them seated next to each other, eating only the quinoa salad, I recall rinsing playground sand and sweat from their toddler scalps as they battled with multiple Batman action figures – and me -  in the tub.  I would pour water from a Toy Story popcorn bucket as they covered their eyes with a washcloth, the stream pulling their ringlets down their backs as the suds were rinsed away. Now those curls are matted and hidden in rough ropes that smell worse than they look and include remnants of camp outs on Mount Tam, beads and feathers.  The elder, the redhead, ‘the Gingerdread Man’, has crafted his signature look into a dread mullet, cutting the front short, growing a pompadour, bleaching it, then shaving it down to a burr cut again, and with the red ropes pulled back, he passes as employable. 

The Gingerdread Man, as he sits here before me, is six months into what we are collectively agreeing to agree is a gap year. He left college after his freshman year and he is the only person at the table who is happy about this. His freshman year of college was a busy one.  While he did well academically, he also hopped freight trains, took up with a nefarious crew in Portland, can use the term ‘squat house’ with confidence, has earned an arrest record and he has three four DIY tattoos. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say he hasn’t been wearing his retainer.

I’m enjoying Christmas Eve dinner with my family and baffled by my poseur Hobo. When he left school he and his tribe went on food stamps because they didn’t want to be tied down to summer jobs. He wanted to roam and since we, the evil fun oppressors wouldn’t be sponsoring his plan, well he showed us. He and I had a chat about integrity and I might have used the words ‘lacking a moral compass’ when I forgot to use my inside voice.

Willing to sleep in a squat house in Oakland or the joint custody tribal van rather than his bed in our home.  Opportunities rejected, intentionally festooned to appear unemployable, throwing himself headlong with gusto into risk laden situations, all the while knowing he has options.  His reality is his choice.

HoboCam Pic

My choice is to detach, and enjoy my dinner, sip my wine and breathe. I look at my kids and realize it was never my intention to raise house plants, children who fear the world and I cannot control his 20 year old choices. I am fascinated and repulsed. I say nothing. 

Mary Allison Tierney's essay The Gingerdreadman is included in the anthology Mamas Write, available at Amazon, or your local independent bookshop.

Tweet

Q is for Quest

The prize table was laden with huge colorful water bazookas, the only thing that mattered. That damned race.  On vacation at a resort in Oregon, a kid’s triathalon!  So fun! 

boys

As soon as the kids started the swimming leg, it was immediately obvious who wasn’t a swim team kid. I wanted to pull him out of the pool and wrap him in his towel, but my son pushed me away roughly as he hurried to put on his shoes, one of the last out of the pool, and he began to run.  He ran and rode his bike and crossed that finish line well in the middle but never quitting.  But I wanted to die for him as he struggled with the swimming and saw how far back he was. I wanted to pull him into a hug and sneak off into the pine trees. He would have none of it.  We walked past the prize table featuring the huge cartoon water gun after the race, not really looking this time.

I admired his perseverance and dealt with my own maternal guilt

by putting both my boys into swim team as soon as we returned.  Not to win races, but I felt I had overlooked some fundamental basic childhood necessity. They had swim lessons, I felt confident they could swim, but lanes and strokes and laps were not in their playbook, and it seemed every other kid but mine was on a swimteam.  I felt like I’d accidentally forgotten to teach them how to use a fork.  Actually that might still be some peoples opinion. 

Powered by Linky Tools

Click here to enter your link and view this Linky Tools list...

Tweet

O is for Options

I want him to look down and ask himself ‘What’s on my plate?’  How do I create a future? Lay the stepping stones to a goal?  So far its still Chutes and Ladders for him.  Every day a new adventure. He has walked his plate to the dog bowl, scraped it clean of opportunities and wondered off the trail. I’ve heard from some (men) that this is admirable, formative.  They’re envious of his freedom. 

Why must his lessons be hand forged artisanally crafted, locally sourced, micro brewed in bad behavior? So Portlandia! His parentally woven safety nets of financial planning and collegiate expectations have been shrugged off, while suspended above his head a sharp blade dangles, twisting in the breeze of his creation with his tsunami of questionable choices. Only visible to maternal eyes, apparently. He senses it but it doesn’t factor into his decision making. 

Powered by Linky Tools
Click here to enter your link and view this Linky Tools list...

Tweet

H is for Houdini

This was the first piece of writing I had published. (Marin Independent Journal)  Motherhood is a minefield. Motherhood is a goldmine. Oh yeah. 

Houdini at 8

Houdini Toddler


There’s a cold dark place you go when you can’t find your child. I went there once. This isn’t the run of the mill can’t pick out your kid’s head bobbing in the pool, can’t sift through all the hooded toddlers at the park, just focused on a sale rack for a second and now you’re on your hands and knees at Nordstrom.

This is an all hands on deck, EVERYBODY is looking and minutes are ticking by and your toddler is GONE. This is when someone gently leads you to a room so you can scream while they hold you.

I stepped into the Toddler Room to pick up my two year old son and in the scramble for lunch boxes and hanging up of jackets I couldn’t see where he might be. The afternoon kids were settling in for lunch and the hip-height chaos was all around me. A few seconds passed before I could move into the room and peek around the corner to the area where I usually found him painting. Not there. His teacher saw my questioning look and helped me look. She opened the door to the outside play area, asking several parents and teachers if they had seen him.

In seconds the entire school was in lock down mode with all able bodies calling his name and looking in the garden, upper school, kitchen, parking lot, office. This is when it became cold and dark, and I was led by the elbow into an office. I remember screaming for someone to call 911.



Parents and teachers had begun looking in the creek that runs behind the school and were fanning out into the neighborhood, when a local resident came out of her house and asked if we were looking for the little boy she had in her arms. He had slipped out the gate in the back of the school and disappeared up a flight of stairs leading to the Homestead Valley Community Center. Like Popeye’s Sweetpea, skirting disaster at every turn, he had gone past the pool, through a parking lot with a blind driveway, along Montford, a typical Mill Valley neighborhood street with no sidewalk or shoulder, across Montford and up this neighbor’s steep driveway.

The fact that he wasn’t run down by an SUV was a miracle in itself. Ten years have passed since that day, and the two preschool teachers have since retired and moved away. I send them both a Christmas card each year and get one in return. I know they went to their own cold dark place that day.   2007

He's 18 now.  Still pulling Houdini's.  Off to college in the fall. 

Powered by Linky Tools
Click here to enter your link and view this Linky Tools list...

Tweet

E is for Expectations

drummer girl

Following the rules

The rules are set for a reason.  Mom expects you to be respectful, in word and deed, of yourself and others.  Mom expects you to be safe, and everyone around you has the right to feel safe. Mom expects you to be responsible, for yourself, your things and your actions.

Own it.

Vuotan @ DNA Lounge

Bending the rules

Rules are meant to be broken.  Well, sometimes.  Mom expects you to take risks.  Mom expects you to challenge yourself. Mom expects you to blaze a new trail, to dare to be different, not to follow the crowd.  Mom expects you to create your own rhythm.

I’m not raising house plants.

photo: his brother

Making considered choices

Notice the sunrise, the full moon, new leaves, the fog. Mom expects you to be in awe of your world.  Mom expects you to contribute in a meaningful way. Mom expects you to persevere.

Clean up after yourself. Leave No Trace applies to the kitchen as well as the tundra. 

Powered by Linky Tools

Click here to enter your link and view this Linky Tools list...

Tweet

D is for Direction

seventeen NOLS Alaska

My son was an early walker, and would lunge like a two foot tall Frankenstein's monster at any dog, arms outstretched bellowing 'Daw! Daw!'. Leaning forward, the weight of his giant ginger baby head nearly toppling him, gaining speed, he lurched forward until he was face to face with the Daw. 

 Dogs loved this. He was clearly their new chew toy. He also had an uncanny talent for impaling his forehead on all coffee table corners. In hindsight, nicknaming him Danger Boy was a bad omen.

A logical adult knows it takes at least couple months before any real respect for your parents grips the conscious mind of a child. Screeching 'No!' as my lumbering infant went on Daw patrol was not effective. I had read in one of my useless baby behavior books, that I needed to redirect his impulses, so that 'No!' would not become another meaningless mom noise, like 'Wear a Helmet!' This was months before he gave up on crawling and started running with the dogs.

ten

I nursed him in the beautiful oak rocker I'd bought long before I was pregnant, so beautiful it needed several cushions and a blanket to be comfortable. It was because of his teensy crab claw infant fingernails that I first wanted to yell at my gorgeous sweet baby. They grew as he slept, Nosferatu style, and as he nursed into a milk orgy he would take a miniscule bit of tortured breast and pinch the bejesus out of me. I would take his fat dough baby hand and nibble off the nails with tears of pain in my eyes and he would pass out like a drunk frat boy, milk running down his chin.

Throughout his school years it was much the same. He lurched forward towards the most exciting thing, skirting disaster, right on the razor's edge. Direction Danger, full steam ahead. My attempts at redirection have been mostly about health and safety, and largely ignored. From sunscreen, helmets, drugs, condoms, hitchhiking to the latest tattoo, I say my piece and hope for the best. Sometimes I tell him to call his aunt or Gramma, and miraculously he does.

This morning I texted him for the forth day in a row, Check in please, with no response. Because we're on the same phone plan I can see that he read the message. So I know he's alive. I have sketchy second hand knowledge that he's headed to New Orleans via Mexico, hitchhiking with two other young men. I am doing my Lamaze Breathing and hoping the universe has a plan for Danger Boy.

nineteen    photo by one of his tribe

He called while I was writing this. I had turned my phone off and he left a voice message. 'I'm in Reno. I'm fine. Well Reno isn't, this place is bad. My phone got wet but it's working now. We're hitchhiking to Salt Lake City today. Bye.' His Direction, for today, is East. That's all I've got, but for today it's enough.


Powered by Linky Tools
Click here to enter your link and view this Linky Tools list...

Tweet

A to Z challenge begins tomorrow

Tomorrow begins the Blogging from A to Z challenge, which I am trying to do individually AND as a contributer to my Write On, Mamas! group challenge. With the opening of baseball season (Go Giants!) Spring is in the air and a huge distraction, so wish us all well.

The good news: Only one more middle school dance on the calendar and it coincides with the opening of the new Star Trek movie, Into Darkness, and is on my DD's 13th birthday, so obviously she's NOT going to the dance.

More good news: DS applied to one college and by some miracle was accepted and by the second miracle agreed to go. So, despite the discovery of our first born's newest tattoo, a turkey vulture, whose wingspan covers his entire chest, things are looking up considerably.  As my friend DJ commented, 'not as emo as a crow'.  Yes, thank god my boys aren't emo. That would be unbearable.

Play Ball!

Powered by Linky Tools

Click here to enter your link and view this Linky Tools list...

Tweet