An Untidy Life

If writing had been relegated to the edges of my life before my father came to live with us, it has now been pushed over the precipice and plummeted to its death.  Words shattered at the base of the canyon.  Letters splayed everywhere.  Sometimes, I stand at the edge and look over at the wreckage and feel overwhelmed at the prospect of putting it all back together.

I miss it.  The outlet.  The opportunity to make sense of the senseless.  To construct a narrative out of chaos.  Line up the sentences of my life and make them march in order.  That’s really what writers do.  They tidy.  They take the messiness of life and try to make it neat.

Living with my father living with cancer is anything but neat.  Every day I find new corners of impatience within myself.

I look at my sink, that once held the detritus of just two people, and now it’s littered with the remains of three.  Signs of illness gather in the corners of the bathroom, pepper the sink, lie matted in the drain.

I know he tries to clean it up, which I appreciate.  But there’s always more.

Most days, I feel like I am slicing off parts of myself and handing them to others until the end of the day, when there are a only few crumbs left to dab at.  At dinner, my father, anxious to share the day, tells us every detail of every moment.

“I had the most wonderful day,” my father begins, his voice still traceable to the Lower East Side.  “I went to Shop Rite and spent hours picking everything out, reading all the labels.  I brought back the coupon they gave me the last time I bought coffee and they gave me the two dollars, even though I didn’t buy new coffee.  Isn’t that wonderful?”  He regales us with stories about everything he has eaten, every person he has encountered, everything he has read.

Sophie pleads at my elbow to tell me something.  “Dad, could you hold on a sec.  Sophie needs a turn.”

“Do I have to eat this?” Sophie says, prodding her eggplant in peanut sauce.

“Just eat the broccoli.”  I tell her.  “You don’t have to have the eggplant.”

“My stomach hurts.”

“Soph, if you don’t eat, there won’t be any dessert.”

“How much do I have to eat to get dessert?”  I sigh.

“So let me tell you about this band that I heard in the park….” My father starts in again.

“Do I have to have the noodles too?”

“Soph, I’m not cutting deals.  Eat.  If you’re stomach hurts, don’t eat, but you’re not having dessert if it hurts.”

“They were terrific…” my father continues.

I look over at Kevin who is almost finished eating.  I have no idea how his day has gone.  Nor does he know anything about mine.

Underneath the table, my toenails are menacingly long.  Later, in an effort to cover the chips in the polish, I give them a coat of quick-drying red.  As I go to replace the cap, I spill the contents of the bottle all over.  Bright red splashed onto the floor, the cabinets, the off-white towels, and my leg.

I pour nail polish remover on the floor and get most of it up, but it stubbornly clings to the grout and the fibers of my towel,

“Mommy?  What are you doing?”

“I’m trying to clean up nail polish I just spilled all over the place,” I tell Sophie, trying to keep my voice even.

“Can you do my nails when you’re done?”

The hours I never knew were empty are now filled with hospitals and side effects and phone calls.  My relationships with my friends have been relegated to texting and facebook and voice mail.

          Thinking of u always.

          Miss u.  Much love.

My working hours stretch deeper into the night, because it all still needs to get done.

I hate being busy.  I remember when I once wore it as a badge of honor.  How I used to get into these competitive little conversations with my husband about who was busier.  I spent years unwinding that knot, trying to create more spaciousness in my life.  Not that I was wildly successful, but I had been making progress.

That progress has stalled in the middle of an intersection.  Everyone’s honking, and all I want to do is get out of the car.

Charming

Sophie has developed her first friend independent of me—someone who she has chosen and who has chosen her.  Their mutuality is dictated by something other than sheer geography or parental design.   They share the same delicious mixture of creativity, mischievousness, and silliness.  Today, they were playing “spa” in the cracking plastic sandbox in the back yard.   I happened to glance out the kitchen window just in time to see Sophie “washing” Lola’s* hair with sand. 

“No!  Stop!”  I called out waving my hands.  They looked up, surprised.  Disappointed. 

“What?” asked Sophie.  “I was doing her hair.”

“Soph, you could get sand in her eyes.”

“I didn’t.  I’m not gonna.” 

“Famous last words,” I replied.  “Please don’t wash your friend’s hair with sand.  Help her get it out.”  And she did. 

Last week we were at a craft show with my mother.  Such things bored me to tears when I was her age, but Sophie looks at every item—whether it’s adult jewelry or sponges cut into fake cheese for a display—with great enthusiasm.  “Mom!  You’ve got to see this!” She called me over to where she was standing in one booth, “It says Best Friends Forever.” 

“It’s a charm for a bracelet or a necklace,” I told her. 

“Can I get it for Lola?  Please?”  She widened those great gray eyes of her in earnest. 

I have a hard time saying “no” to displays of thoughtfulness and generosity.  I bought two, one for Lola, one for Sophie.  Matching bracelets to seal their friendship beyond the last days of kindergarten.  Next year, they would be attending first grade at different schools across town from each other. 

Sophie happily swung the little Chinese take out box that held the bracelets.  Once we were home I set the bracelets aside, for Sophie to give to Lola after kindergarten was over. 

I didn’t want the two of them flaunting their bracelets in front of the five other girls they were friends with in their class. 

The Monday after our craft fair outing, I picked Sophie up from school and we went food shopping at Wegmans.  She asked to sit in the cart, like she had when she was much younger.  Somehow, she folded her long limbs and forced her legs through the holes in the seat.  I was concerned about how I would get her out without the Jaws of Life. 

“Mom, something happened at school today.”

“What?” I asked, scouring the shelves for Marsala.  They are constantly moving everything around at Wegmans. I’m sure it’s an evil ploy to encourage you to find and purchase products that you wouldn’t ordinarily even think of.  It just makes me hostile. 

“I told Lola about the bracelet.”

“Oh Sophie it was a surprise.  Why did you do that?  What if the other girls overheard you?  You wouldn’t want them to feel bad.”

“Well, they didn’t.  But then Lola told them about it.”  This is exactly what I didn’t want to happen. 

“And?”  She had my full attention now. 

“And Isabella* got really upset.  She was crying.” 

“Well, put yourself in her shoes…”

“But I didn’t do anything wrong!” 

“I know you didn’t mean to do anything wrong.  But imagine this.  What if Isabella had bought Lola a Best Friends Forever bracelet and told Lola to keep it a secret.  But then Lola told you about it.  How would you feel?”

Sophie was quiet.  I waited.  “I’m thinking about it,” she told me.

“I see that.”

“Bad.  Jealous.  Maybe left out.”

“Exactly.”

Sophie looked like she was ready to cry.  “Honey, I don’t mean to make you feel bad.  And it’s okay for you to give a gift to Lola, but you want to do it in a way that’s not going to hurt other people’s feelings.  I was going to have you wait until after school was over to give the bracelet to Lola.”

“You didn’t tell me that!” It’s true.  I hadn’t.  I thought out-of-sight, out-of-mind.  I had underestimated her excitement.  And her ability to be discrete. 

“You’re right. I probably should have.  But you learned something from this, didn’t you.”

“I won’t ever talk about a gift in school again.  Ever.” 

“Well, more like you have to consider how doing something like that might make other people feel.  Don’t worry.  This too will pass.”

I gave her a hug. 

But it didn’t pass for Sophie. 

Saturday morning there was a knock at my door.  Sophie came bounding into my room, throwing a handful of bracelets onto my bed.

I pulled myself into a sitting position and looked at the clock.  7:15.  Sigh.  I had set the clock for 7:45 because we had an End-of-the-Year breakfast for her class to get to.  I could have slept for thirty more minutes. 

“What’s all this?”  I rubbed the blear out of my eyes. 

“I made everyone charm bracelets!”  She had taken six of her very own bracelets, wrote her friends names on little paper tabs she decorated with drawings of flowers and stick-on jewels and stuck the tabs to the bracelets with tape. 

“Now everyone will have one.  No one will be left out.  I want to give them to all the girls at breakfast.”    

She’s becoming more and more of her own person.  Not just developing her own, meaningful relationships, but understanding how to navigate the complex social world, and generating creative, caring solutions to some pretty thorny problems. 

“They’re beautiful,” I told her, smiling, and basking in the warm aura of my charming daughter.   

The Intruder

I haven’t written for awhile, because I’ve been conflicted.  Each time I set pen to paper (or fingers to iMac), I realize that I can’t talk about Life With Sophia without talking about the turn that our life has taken. 

I’ve been waffling, as I always do, about how much to share.  How much of the story I would be telling is my story, and how much of it is someone else’s story.  To what extent do I want to make the private public.  But the effects of not writing about it are inhibitory.  The reticence spreading like the very disease that has entered our lives.  That’s how it is when you make something taboo.  If you don’t talk about something, you find that you have to talk around it, and everything you say feels like a half-truth.   

Part of me hopes that if I do talk about it, I will draw the support to me that I need and, maybe I’ll say something of value along the way that will be helpful to someone else. 

I don’t mean to be so mysterious.  My father has been diagnosed with metastatic throat cancer.  He is coming here to live with us through the duration of his treatment and recovery…whatever that may look like. 

I have fears about what that may look like.  Fears that visit me in the night. 

Last night I had a dream.  I was trying to get Sophia ready to go to school and there was a strange man in my house.  He opened up my freezer and took out a frozen sheet of naan, as if he had every right to do so, leaned against our Formica countertop and chewed it, eyeing me.

“I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” I told the man.  “I’m taking Sophie to school, and I have to lock up the house.”

He ignored me, went on chewing, and said, “Don’t you love Barq’s root beer?” 

“Uh, I do like root beer, but like I said, I really have to get going.  Could you please go?”

“I’m not going anywhere,” the man replied menacingly.  I began to feel anxious—the pressure of needing to get Sophie to school on time, to get to work on time, and not knowing what to do about this uninvited guest. 

“I have to lock the door behind you,” I insisted, standing next to the door, trying to reason with him.  He pressed a code into a pad on the door—something I had not noticed before—and replied, “I’ll lock up behind you.  I know the code. “

“I don’t want to have to call someone,” I threatened vaguely and hoisted my bag higher onto my shoulder. 

He moved in close to me.  I could smell his breath, which was boozy.  He kissed me lightly on the lips, and, still close, whispered, “You’re not going to call anyone.” 

Then I woke up, still frightened.  It had all felt so…intrusive.  I felt helpless.  It wasn’t until I was sharing the dream with Kevin as I prepared breakfast that it occurred to me:  the intruder was Cancer. 

And that’s how it feels.  Insidious.  By the time you discover it in your house, it has already established residency.  Made itself at home.  Spread out.  Taking.  Locking itself in.  Refusing to depart.  Cancer doesn’t care if you have other things to do, places to be.  It demands your attention.

My father’s cancer is incurable.  In a week, they will begin to try to attack it with chemotherapy.  Cisplatin.  A heavy metal and a cellular poison—as deadly to healthy kidney cells as it is to cancerous cells.  But even this “big hammer,” one of the original cancer drugs that still works better than anything else they’ve got for throat cancer, will not eradicate every mutant cell from his body.  It will shrink the tumors, hold them at bay for sometime, minimize symptoms—difficulty swallowing, breathing, speaking—extend his life.  But all it takes is one microscopic cell, dividing over and over again, because that’s what cancer cells are—a mutation of the DNA in a healthy cell that creates the uncontrollable division of cells in the body—to form new tumors. 

I wonder if it feels like a betrayal of his body.  I watch my father struggle to understand what is happening to him—not just the medical realities, but the metaphysical whys. 

It is hard not to look at the hourglass and spend one’s days exclaiming, “My sand is running out!  My sand is running out!”  What a thing to suddenly realize that your life is finite.  My father, who is seventy, had assumed more time.  I had assumed more time.  There always seems to be more time.  So we fritter, and we worry, and we fight. 

I am scared.  I don’t know how to do this.  I don’t know what to tell Sophia as my father grows more deeply ill.  I worry that our attachments will deepen, and then I will lose him. 

A Matter of Time

We are headed home from North Jersey.  I hear on the radio that the Turnpike is a mess.  Having already spent an additional half an hour on the Parkway behind a five-car pileup, it seems like a good idea to take an alternate route.

That, of course, is trafficked too.  Apparently, I’m not the only one with this idea.  We’ve been in the car for two hours already, and will be at least forty minutes late for dinner.  Sophie is being a trouper.  Sick of reading, she’s got her headphones on and is lip syncing to Kidz Bopp.  Every now and then she shouts out, “I love this one!” jarring me out of my own podcast reverie.

Then, all of a sudden, we have an emergency.

“Mom!  I have to go to the bathroom RIGHT NOW.”  How is it that there is never any fair warning?  That she goes from perfectly comfortable to explosive bladder in a split second?  As a teacher, I could hold it for seven hours straight.  I’ve got sphincters of steel.

I was planning to stop off at Whole Foods to pick up a piece of fish on the way home.  Perhaps she could hold it until then.  It’s only about five minutes down the road.

“Can you hold it for just another couple minutes?”

“No!  I can’t!   Mom, could you just pull over?  I can’t wait another second.”  Of course, there’s nowhere to pull over.  We are surrounded by industrial parks and grassy shoulders.  We are not going to make it to Whole Foods.  I’ve got to hope that something comes up soon before she soaks the backseat.

Ruby Tuesdays appears on the horizon.

“Look!  There’s a place!  Go there!”  Alas, another detour.  Such is the life of a parent.  You have to go with the flow.

I pull over.  Here is the true challenge.  Getting her from the car to the stall without incident.  Sophie has a Pavlovian response to bathrooms.  Just seeing the toilet sends her system a message.  I have been the victim of classical conditioning before.  It’s particularly irksome when it happens just before she sits down.

But this is not one of these times.  She whoops triumphantly as I breathe a sigh of relief.  We won’t be slinking out of Ruby Tuesdays, leaving a puddle behind.  This time.

I check my watch.  It’s twenty minutes later than the last time I checked.  We are never getting home.

Sophie pops out of the stall, adjusting her belt.

“Wash your hands, please,” I instruct, drying off my own.  She walks towards the sink, but gets stuck in front the full-length mirror on the wall.  Pop music is being pumped into the bathroom, and Sophie starts to gyrate.

If I weren’t in a rush, it would be cute.  I might even join her.  

“Sophie!  It’s not time for dancing!  Please wash your hands!”

She acts like she hasn’t heard me, giving a couple more revolutions of her hips before I bodily usher her over to the sink.

“Hey!” She says, “You don’t have to push me!”  Uh, yes, I do.

She squirts some soap on her hands and immediately rinses it off.

“Soph, you’ve got to rub your hands together,” I squirt her again, despite the fact that now we’ve been in the bathroom at Ruby Tuesdays for almost ten minutes.  She sings as she washes her hands, saunters over to the paper towel dispenser, and proceeds to meticulously dry off her hands.

I hold open the bathroom door, “Let’s go.”

“Mom?  Why are we rushing?”  It is a good question.  To get home five minutes faster than we would otherwise?  What does it really matter, now?  Why am I stressing myself out more in service at arriving home at an arbitrary time?  Why don’t I just text Kevin and tell him:  I’m going to be late.  Really late.

I do.

“You want to go out for dinner? Meet at Zinburger?”  Kevin texts back.  The thought has not occurred to me.  I have been so consumed with plan A, with getting back On Time to Make Dinner, I never considered that there might be another, more gentle way.

“Yes.  Thank you.  That would be perfect.”  I type.

The sun is setting.  We get back into the car.  The road opens up, I release my grip on the wheel, turn on the radio and together, Sophie and I just enjoy the ride.

Reasons My Daughter is Freaking Out

This post was inspired by the book, Reasons My Kid Is Crying, by Greg Pembroke who captures frustrating yet funny parenting moments through well-captioned photos of unhappy kids. Join From Left to Write on April 15 we discuss Reasons My Kid Is Crying. As a member, I received a copy of the book for review purposes.

Tantrums at six look at lot different than they did at two.  For one, they are far more verbal.  Whereas a toddler will throw herself down on the floor kicking and screaming bloody murder, a six-year-old will engage you in a lawyerly argument about what an awful parent you are, how maligned she is, and how, after she is done haranguing you, she may never speak to you again.

Ever.

At which point it takes everything in your maternal power not to say

In my dreams

But the one thing that remains unchanged is the endearingly irrational reasons she is having a tantrum in the first place.  Here are a few of Sophie’s from the past couple weeks:

• I sang Let It Go wrong and now we have to start all over again.
• I told her it was time to take a shower.
• She wasn’t allowed to have Oreos and Marshmallows for dessert.
• I asked her to do her homework, and handed her the wrong sheet.
• I put broccoli in her eggs.
• I wouldn’t let her wear the same pants three days in a row.
• I asked her to put her jacket on when it was 40 degrees and raining.
• I took her out to lunch and to see a play, but she just wanted to be home with daddy.

If I was to snap a picture of Sophie in one of these low moments, I think she would bum rush me and break my iPhone. I’m not going to try it and find out.   I’m not stupid.  Besides, I wouldn’t want to.  What might have gone unnoticed at two, would be humiliating at six.  The sense that I was mocking her would only thrust her more deeply into her angry and injured position. 

To be fair—if someone did that to me, I’d flip out too.  (Despite what I may think, my reasons for throwing a fit are no more sensible at 43 than they were at 6—we want what we want and sometimes our desires defy all rationality.)

If there is one thing I have learned in four years of meltdowns, it is best to let the storm rage and blow over.  To avoid stoking it with words or attention, making it a bigger deal than it already is.

In these moments, I find it best to take a step back, appreciate the absurdity of the moment and laugh, but silently and to myself. 

Join me.  What’s one of the reasons your little one flipped out recently?

Protecting the Family Jewels

My poor, poor husband.

He never learns.  You would think that pain would be an awesome teacher.  But he seems to have amnesia for suffering.  The way women who have multiple children do.  Night after night he grabs Sophia and tickles her mercilessly and night after night he winds up bent over, his brows screwed up in pain, gasping, “Just give me a second!”

I plan to get him a cup for Christmas.  The man needs protection.

This is how it goes down:

Sophie says something like, “Daddy!  Don’t tickle me!” with a twinkle in her eye and her dimples as deep as two holes going all the way to China.

He says something like, “You mean I shouldn’t do this…” wiggling his fingers menacingly at her.

She then shrieks with delight and begins running in circles around the partition that separates the dining room from the kitchen from the living room—like an excited puppy.  He takes off after her and within two strides is upon her.

The screaming is earsplitting.  I’m usually in the background saying things like,

“Can you guys please take that somewhere else?”
“The shrieking.  I can’t take the shrieking.”
“Kevin, do you remember what happened the last time you did this?”

All to no avail.  Kevin picks her up like a sack of potatoes, throws her onto the bed or the couch, and sets to tickling the daylights out of her.

You have to understand that Kevin has been waiting years for this opportunity.  He used to torment me in this way, back when we were dating.  I hated it.  HATED it.  I view tickling as a form of inhuman torture akin to waterboarding.  In fact, if anyone ever wanted to get information out of me, all they would need to do is wiggle their fingers in my general direction and I would spill my guts.

I’m that much of a wimp.

I used to try to fight back, but Kevin has about 80 pounds on me, so it was often a losing battle.  Finally, we agreed to draw up a Tickle Treaty in 2000.  Fourteen years later, neither of us has broken the treaty, which means that Kevin has been having to do something with his sadistic impulses.

They have been bubbling and brewing and building for those 14 years.  At last, he has met the ying to his tickling yang, because she loves it.

Until she doesn’t.

This is when I call out my final warning, “Somebody’s going to get hurt in a second.”

Sophie laughs and giggles and thrashes, her limbs go flailing and she looks something like the Tasmania Devil from Looney Toons.  It’s all fun and games until, eventually, she starts screaming for him to stop.

This is when he should stop.

Of course, if he does stop, she begs him to start all over again.

But if he doesn’t stop (because he knows this, because she’s still giggling her irresistible giggle) invariably Kevin gets a swift kick to the groin.

I have to bite a hole in my tongue to keep from saying, “Now what did I just say?” in the teacher voice that makes everyone want to punch me in the nose.

Instead, I shake my head and throw up my hands.  As Kevin rolls around in agony, Sophia is already taunting him, “Daddy….you can’t get me….”

And out of nowhere, Kevin gets his second wind and goes for her underarms.

I slip into another room.  It’s better if I don’t watch.

Back-to-School Blues

“My stomach hurts,” Sophie whines, picking at her bowl of oatmeal.  Then, she bends in half, clutching her stomach and starts screaming, “OW! OW!” at the top of her lungs.

One would think her appendix was exploding. 

I stand there, waffling: 

On the one hand, we have just had another long weekend, due to the 900^th snow day this winter.  Both Kevin and I stayed home, each taking a turn playing with Sophie so that the other could work.  We baked cookies.  We played board games.  We snuggled in front of the fire and read books.  Sophie was in heaven. 

On the other hand, Kevin just had a stomach bug a few days ago.  I was sick the week before that.  Sophie doesn’t usually complain of illness.  And she isn’t eating…

Is she sick or is it the back to school blues? 

Kevin walks in, grabbing a banana before heading out the door.  “She’s fine.  Send her to school.”  He says, kissing me on the forehead.  And he’s gone. 

Sophie gives me a pained expression, “Mo-om!  Please can I stay home?”  I have a client scheduled at 9:00.  It’s 8:20 right now.  I have exactly 10 minutes to get her out the door, so that I can drop her off at school and beat my client to the office. 

It’s likely the back to school blues.  But what if it isn’t?  What if she’s really sick and I bring her to school and she starts barfing.  And what is her teacher going to think of me, dumping Sophie off in her classroom, while she’s carrying on like this.  I’ve been a teacher.  I know what they are going to whisper behind my back:

Worst mommy ever. 

It doesn’t help that I’ve got a really messed up relationship to illness.  In the 8^th grade alone I missed a whopping sixty days of school—one third of the school year. (I still have the certificate of commendation that my best friend made for me, congratulating me on this feat.)  Most years, before and after, I was absent from school for weeks at a time.  Bronchitis.  Sinusitis.  Long, lingering, upper respiratory infections that seemed to take on a life of their own.  To this day, I am uncertain whether I was truly sick, a skilled malingerer, or just deeply anxious and depressed. 

I can remember the anxiety that grew with each passing day.  It would start out fairly innocently.  I’d be out for a couple of days, with congestion and a terrible cough.  My mother would take me to the doctor, who’d give me a pill and a written excuse, validating the illness.  My mother would coddle me, making Lipton tea and playing gin rummy with me in the afternoon.  And I wouldn’t get any better.  One week would turn into two, two into three.  Meanwhile, the make-up work would mount—piles of textbooks would sit untouched on my desk.  Due dates would come and go.  Entire units would be reviewed.  Tests would be given.   The longer I stayed away, the more impossible it seemed to return.  Despite my loneliness.  Despite my boredom.  I was never quite sure where the illness ended and my anxiety began. 

My husband, on the other hand, rarely missed a day of school.  He graduated from high school with perfect attendance.  A couple years ago, he actually did go to work with appendicitis.  A colleague made him go to the hospital just before his appendix burst. 

Back in the kitchen, I tell Sophie, “Honey, I’m sorry your stomach hurts.  Maybe you’re just nervous about going back to school.” 

“Mommy, please?  I want to stay home with yooooooouuu.” 

I want to take her seriously, but I don’t want to feed into malingering.  Hoping that Kevin is right, I usher her out the door and into the car.  Once at her school, I share my dilemma with her teacher, who promises to keep me apprised of Sophie’s condition.  She sheds a few real tears as I head for the door. 

Oh, the guilt. 

Later I get a call.  She’s been listless all morning.  Didn’t eat her snack.  Has been asking for me.  I wrap things up and rush over to the school.  When I get there, she’s running around with her friends, smiling. 

“Mom?” she begs, “can’t I stay a little bit longer?”

This post was inspired by the novel The Divorce Papers by Susan Rieger. Young lawyer Sophie unwillingly takes her first divorce case with an entertaining and volatile client in this novel told mostly through letters and legal missives. Join From Left to Write on March 18 we discuss The Divorce Papers. As a member, I received a copy of the book for review purposes.