Mother's Day Peace

Mother’s Day began with a text from my college boy middle child.  He was working the farmers market and wished me a happy mother’s day and said I Love You.  He won. Later that morning my daughter presented me with an orchid, a plate of raspberries and a muffin, and a homemade card with a wonderful note.  Ok, she won. Handmade trumps text. Sorry buddy.  Now nirvana: read the Sunday New York Times in peace.  But, there is no peace in the NYT.

The story of the 200+ abducted Chibok schoolgirls, plucked from their boarding school beds and loaded onto buses by armed Islamist militant terrorists, is a hard one to read.  The group’s name, Boko Haram, translates to ‘Western Education is sin’ and they believe in strict Sharia Law. Their leader, Abubakar Shedau released a video threatening to sell the girls.  He wants to trade them for prisoners.  A CNN interview with one of the girls who escaped is heartbreaking.  She is so traumatized that she will not return to school. 

This is not good Mother's Day reading. Or maybe it’s the exact right kind.  I yell upstairs for my daughter to give me an update on her homework. 

In stark contrast is a moronic article in the Style section about crop tops. An enormous amount of lady sweat and anesthesia is going into feeling confident while sporting a partial shirt.  As a mother of a teenaged daughter, this is not optimal.  Apparently there are women so beholden to Forever 21 fashion standards that they’re scuttling over to their friendly neighborhood cosmetic surgeon, waving red carpet pictures of starving celebrities in crop tops and plunking down 6K for Airsculpt – all for the promise of flashing a smooth tight midriff.

At this point my ‘fix this’ mom brain kicks in.  Navy Seals can airdrop the crop top ladies into Nigeria in exchange for the 200 abducted schoolgirls who value education over Ab Attack class. I think about running this idea by my daughter. I envision the blank stare. I know she will think the Stella McCartney top that the 84 pound Rihanna is rocking is super cute, and that she will be horrified that my idea suggests that I am not taking #bringbackourgirls seriously. 

Good thing it’s Mother’s Day, as my first-born slides in under the wire and calls. He’s in solid third place. It was our first conversation in over a month.  There had been talk just that morning of filing a missing persons report, but luckily it didn’t come to that.  The call was appropriately glitchy – he has no reception on the Oregon farm where he lives and works.  It mirrored our relationship – ‘Huh? What? I can’t understand you. OK, well, thanks for calling, I can’t hear you so I’m hanging up. Call when you have better reception. Love you.'

Peace.

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B is for Baby

Baby baby oh baby. Baby soft. Baby doll. Sweet baby. Such a baby. Don't be a baby.

As a toddler I had a rag doll baby.  I don't remember what her name was and I wouldn't have remembered her at all if it weren't for the picture, which stirred the memory of bathing her in the powder blue toilet. By the looks of the doll in the picture I was up on the latest hairstyles of 1968 and updated her look to a Rosemary's Baby pixie.  The ragdoll is naked because - I vividly remember this - I put her lacy dress on the cat.

I moved on to Barbie soon after and never wanted babies until much later. I turned 30 with a newborn and a two year old. I was surrounded with all things baby, complete with dual carseats in a Volvo. Special catalogues kept coming for all baby related disaster prevention, from impossible to remove outlet covers, latches to prevent pinched fingers or lifting the toilet seat to special stroller coffee holders. I bought a plastic VHS insert to protect the thing from toddler hands or a sandwich, a foam visor to prevent dreaded water from touching their faces while shampooing, plus the giant padded tub surround and a dishwasher caddy to sterilize binkies and sippy cup lids. Insanity.

My third baby didn't take.  I miscarried at fourteen weeks.  My boys knew a baby was on the way and then wasn't. I was in maternity clothes, then I wasn't.  I had emotionally committed to a third, was less sad than determined to try again.  In just less than a year my boys had a sister.  Oh baby.

I was not prepared for the pink.  My world was Thomas the Tank, Batman and Robin, Ninja Turtles and Max Steele.  Everyone I knew was determined to outfit my daughter in satin, floral & ribboned pink.  It was cute at first, but I was blessed, thank you baby Jesus, with a girl who treats Disney princesses like kryptonite. The baby dolls people sent her were put in the closet at her request.  She thought they were creepy. She preferred hand me down beanie babies to baby dolls, and pushed Pooh and Piglet in the doll stroller someone gave her.  Her favorite clothes were her brother's outgrown jeans and a Pokemon shirt.

My sister took over the baby mama role and I got to be an auntie twice.  That's plenty of babies for one family; Gramma has five grandchildren, boys and girls from twenty-one to four. Siblings, cousins, all bases are covered. Thank god for free texting apps.

So now I'm anti baby, as in, 'don't make me a nana'. Not yet. Just give me a good fifteen years please. I put economy sized boxes of condoms in my sons college survival boxes. I suggested Planned Parenthood when a GF became part of our world.  My daughter starts high school in the fall, so the appropriate healthy conversations are on going.  She's been paying attention.  Oh baby.

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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. 

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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. 

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Salish

Two years ago I had the privilege of participating in my nephew’s birth. When I arrived,  I waited behind the curtain until her contraction peaked and then went in to say hello.  

"You’re a liar and I hate you," she said weakly. 

While it was best that she didn’t witness my first two deliveries, watching me sneeze out my third probably wasn’t the best preparation for this day. With my third I wised up and got the epidural.  It was a significantly more graceful process.  I napped.  I read.  I glanced over at the monitor when I felt my e-friggin’-normous stomach tighten.  “Whoo – that was a doozy!” My sister rubbed my feet and fought with my husband for the cozier recliner

I tried to explain the difference but she wasn’t buying it.  I gently suggested that she get the drugs.  You get numb for a filling, right?  There’s no shame in getting relief ; no extra credit for suffering needlessly.  Of course it was useless. In this Seattle birth center, we had a dula, a tai chi master/labyrinth facilitator/impending grandma, two expecting parent biologists, and me; there would be no drugs today.

I’d never been present for the birth of a baby, outside of my own three. I’ve been the big sweaty groaning mess who couldn’t remember how to breathe.  Playing a supporting role was a relief.  Holding her hand, lifting her knee, offering words of support and encouragement came easily.  I knew my brother in law wanted to be down at the business end where I was, to watch his son’s head crown, but my sister had him in a headlock as her contractions heated up. She wasn’t letting me relinquish my post either, with her knee and hand.

When Oliver Salish emerged, after the feeling returned to my hand, his new grandma and I shared the most biologically bizarre sensation. The unmistakable tingle and ache of letdown. We were both very physically and emotionally immersed in this birth, so this must be Nature’s way of making sure the wee one eats.  Nice to know you can be useful.

2007
Mary Allison Tierney's essay The Gingerdreadman is included in the anthology Mamas Write, available at Amazon, or your local independent bookshop.

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