I don’t think I mentioned that last week’s critique ended with my teacher suggesting I pitch it to our home-town paper.  She’s worked there for years and says they would publish it, yadayadayada.

I left with a weird feeling in the pit of my stomach, because while I’d love to have it published, the story revolves around our son when he was five.  Now he’s eight, and has a social life.  School, soccer, life on the playground...the kid has a life of his own.  I ran the idea past my husband, who was perplexed that this could be a problem for Matt.  In the end, I decided to ask for Matt’s permission.  This meant, of course, that I had to let him read the story...something I’d hoped to have him read when he was older and had more of an understanding of the meaning behind the story.

He surprised me.  When I mentioned that the story would be about our trip to Stanford Children’s Hospital and about a funny little tradition we had when he was five, he gave an immediate stamp of approval.  “But,” I said, “what if some kid comes into class and tells you, ‘My mom showed me this article and it said blahdittyblahblahblah.’?”

“Then,” he said, “I would tell them that it was an important time in my life and that because I went to Stanford, I am healthy now.  I can play soccer and basketball and everything.”

Whoa.  At his age, I would have been writhing in mortification, “MOOOOM!  You can’t put anything about me in the paper!  I will die.  Die, I tell you.  At least then you’ll have another idea for an article.  ‘HOW I KILLED MY DAUGHTER BY EMBARRASSING HER IN FRONT OF EVERYONE!  IN PRINT!’”

Boys are just different, I think. 

_______

It’s contract offer time again, and I am caught between a rock and a hard place.  Let’s just say that I’m not signing the offer in the next few days.  There’s too much at stake, and I want to have a life next year. 

Had to share a piece for my writing class last night.  I was so nervous I woke up Monday morning, knowing I talked in my sleep to my husband.  I asked him what I said, because all I could remember was me frantically asking him something and him, standing in the doorway, staring at me like I’m a dumbass.

Apparently, I kept asking him, “Are you ready to pitch? Pitch your story?” Which is funny, because I was not pitching a story, but preparing for my first critique session.  My teacher isn’t warm and fuzzy, so I was preparing for my slaughter.  It turned out very nicely, however, although the crazy 9/11 conspiracy theorist guy suggested a few things that further cement my belief that the crazy doesn’t stop with the Twin Towers.

That night, I was still so amped that I couldn’t fall asleep until midnight, and I had chest pains, signs of a mild anxiety attack. 

Makes me think about how hard it is for my students sometimes to give presentations or share work.  Only, I like to think I’m a bit more warm and fuzzy that our teacher, who told us last night we were having a pop quiz because she was mad at us for not taking enough notes last week. 

*******

Fall soccer sign-ups were tonight, and I am not exaggerating when I tell you that there was a line outside the gym doors that extended 300 feet and was about 4-5 people deep.  WTF?  As I started to cross to the building, I saw Matt’s coach.  She said that we could mail in registrations.  THANK YOU, THANK YOU!  However, the woman leaving...the woman who had stood in line for 90 minutes only to learn of the mail-in option, she was NOT HAPPY to have learned about the mail option until she reached the front of the line.  All I want to know is why some parents stayed.  Oh, that’s right.  They probably thought standing in line with a bunch of grown-ups and gossiping was way easier than going home and handling bedtime.  Also, they could score 50 martyr bonus points when they arrived home and said, “Hon, you should have seen those lines!  I stood there for nearly 2 hours!”

While teaching a lesson about different text structure (to build to why poems aren’t written the same as paragraphs, because they’re in the middle of writing poems and have no clue where to move to a new line):

Me:  So an essay or story is written in paragraph format.  Can you think of another type of format we use in writing?
Budding Genius 1: A letter!
Me:  What’s one type of letter we write?
Budding Genius 2:  A friendly letter.
Me:  Good.  Now, there’s another kind of letter.  It’s not a friendly letter, but it’s not UNfriendly either.  Can you think of what it’s called? [Assuming they’ll answer: business letter]
Aspiring Evil Genius: BLACKMAIL!

Spent the weekend in San Francisco with my best friend from college, a woman who is now my sister-in-law. In our previous lives, we were travel buddies, and we occasionally get together for girls’ weekends.  Yesterday and today, it was San Francisco. 

Daphne lives in Southern California, and given that we both have full-time jobs and children, we don’t see each other all that much.  In the past ten years, we’ve come to accept that during the first few hours of us being in the same space, we’ll have intense conversations while sitting side-by-side, not looking at each other, simply because we’re so used to talking on the phone.  We have to warm-up to the knowledge that we CAN make eye contact.

In my head, I can count maybe ten good friends in the area.  Ten people I can be spend time with and have open conversations.  Unfortunately, the friendships still seem a step or two below unconditional.  With Daphne, however, I can be fully Mari.  She has known me for over 15 years, and she only wants the best for me.  Oh, Lord, has she seen me through everything, and despite my laundry list of flaws, she sees me as a woman with limitless possibilities.  On the other hand, she is more than happy to call it like she sees it, and in a very blunt manner.

Our conversations ranged from the incredibly philosophical to the profane and immature.  Usually in the same sentence. The inside jokes for this trip involve phrases like “Lady Nasty” and “Time Travel Burrito”. 

I haven’t felt more myself in months.  Also, I ate a really good petite filet mignon Life is looking up. 

Our class took a field trip to San Francisco today.  There’s an awesome clay animation workshop.  Third and fourth grade went together, which means that on the long bus ride, I had a chance to catch up with parents from last year’s class.  They’re a great group, and the moms are just interesting people...funny and smart. 

In the midst of catching up, somehow my niece entered the discussion...International adoption gets a lot of questions, but this one cracked me up.  It seems her daughter had taken the tale of where my niece was found by the Chinese authorities (on board a train) at a few days old, and changed it to a tale of how my parents, while traveling with me in China during my childhood, found an abandoned baby on a train and took her home.

Of course after about a half hour, I imagine they felt they needed more children.

Started a writing class last night.  In it, a 9/11 conspiracy theorist, a psychiatrist, a legislative analyst, and a woman who doesn’t want to read her writing ideas because she’s afraid we’ll steal her ideas.  There are twelve of us total, and you can describe me as the one who wants to write about domestic issues (i.e., personal topics and casseroles which use cream of mushroom soup ).  I’m certainly not the one who is interested in researching the secret sex lives of Pakistani women, although I’ll gladly read it for book group.

Maddie’s first word to read (that is not the name of a family member or classmate):

“Zoo”

Followed the next day by “Zoom”.  Special thanks to Peggy Rathman’s book, Goodnight, Gorilla, as well as the coloring book with cars and other transportation devices.

She’s been dazzling us with recognizing names for quite some time, but this was the first word she picks out of books.  Watching her figure out that a letter can make a difference with what the word becomes...it’s simply breathtaking to realize the world is going to open up for her in the next few years. 

To be so young, and with so many amazing a-ha moments ahead of you…

Last week, my husband and I prepared our son for the trip to Washington, D.C.  We were going to be 3,000 miles from home, and I was a little worried about the crowds and a new public transportation system that gets busy during certain hours.  Eight is an age that is right between being an independent teenager and a little child, instructed to hold your hand at all times, so I wanted to make sure we prepared him for a safe trip.

Here’s what we did:

1.  We gave him my husband’s cell phone for the week and he had to carry it at all times, along with the $20 my husband gave him.  This was not his spending money; it was emergency money.  On the cell, I programmed several phone numbers, from the hotel to my cell, plus a few others.  I taught him how to use the phone, and he was smitten with the feeling of being so responsible.  Matt kept the cell turned off while we were going about town, but I told him that should we become separated, he should immediately turn it on so I could call him.

2.  I taught him to start at every new location with a meeting spot...the elephant in the Natural History Museum, the moon rock near the Air and Space Museum entrance.  He chose the spot, and was clear about why this was better than wandering around looking for me.

3.  We have taught him, that should we ever get separated, he should yell my name—not “Mommy”—very loudly. 

4.  To step down the thorny path of gender stereotypes, I have a rule about who he should find if he can’t find a person with a staff uniform/nametag or a police officer: Find the mom with kids.  A fellow parent is good at helping out, and women commit less “stranger abductions” than men.  Sorry if that seems biased, but that’s what seems statistically safer.  Also, if the adult has children with her (or him), they are more likely to be a parent and not trolling for potential victims (By the way, I didn’t tell him that...I just left it at “other parents will be more understanding.")

5.  And while it doesn’t have anything to do with getting separated, it has everything to do with keeping safe in a city:  We did a ton of walking, and it took repeated reminders that just because the crosswalk light said he could go, he still had to wait check traffic both ways.  We also stood back far from the corner while waiting.  Sure enough, there were at least four times when people blasted through the crosswalk when it was our turn to go.  This prompted the only nightmare I have had in months, and I think he had some very tangible reminders that pedestrian safety is important. 

I framed this, not as things he needed to worry about, but as things which are just reasonable plans so we can relax and enjoy our trip without worrying about getting separated.  I wasn’t worried about abductions; it was more about separation and getting lost in an unfamiliar area.  Mostly, I wanted to stop visions of him getting off the Metro car and me not getting out the door in time.  It did get a bit sketchy a few times in terms of crowd size, but I must tell you that D.C. felt safe, even at night, in the city center.  I was curious how he would feel around so many people, in a new place.  All this planning helped me relax and enjoy the fact that my son is growing up to be an independent person. 

Ironically, he did very well in D.C., but wandered away from me in Staples this Wednesday.  I decided, cruel woman that I am, that I wouldn’t go hunting for him right away.  I would wait it out a bit and see what he would do.  After two minutes of silence, I decided enough was enough, and started to look for Matt.  Just as I rounded the corner, I heard the P.A. announcement, “Mari Soandso, please come to the front check-out.  Your son is looking for you.” I walked up, and he looked at me with big eyes, just as I was about to chide him for wandering away.  “Did I do the right thing, Mommy?  I stayed by the cart [which I’d left to look for push-pins], and when you didn’t come, I found an employee with a name tag.”

Kind of hard to hold a grudge when he does things like that.

I need to tell you that I am surrounded by the uber-organized, and they are slowly making it seem as if it is somewhat normal.  Maybe it’s Stockholm Syndrome, now that I think of it.  This, my dears, is the tale of what would have happened if Patty Hearst had been kidnapped by suburban moms with too much education.

I’m not sure how it is in other parts of the world, but we have this surreal 2-week period in the spring when all the summer programs catalogs are out and parents try to coordinate their plans.  Our fair city has tremendous day camps, as does the university, a science museum, and other athletic clubs around town.  The city, however, structured some freaky lottery system, and today was the deadline.  They now have a three week black-out period where the staff members settle the lottery and then allow open registration in any vacant spots.  During this period, parents all around town sit with brochures and highlighters, datebook in hand.  If we’re lucky, there’s some refreshing beverage in the other, but some of us have learned the hard way to never schedule things under the influence, even if the influence is too much caffeine.

What I didn’t realize was that, at this age, we would shift into some social jockeying to get our kids with their buddies for part of the summer.  In the past 24 hours, there have been no less than 34 e-mails between the parents of four kids. 

The best moment, and I kid you not, was when one mother brought a spreadsheet (!) by my classroom, 20 minutes before the on-line lottery registration closed.  On it were four boys, and what each parent had selected, with highlighted overlaps and color-code for which camps were half-day and which were full-day.  She’d e-mailed it as an attachment to two other moms.

After I recovered from this impressive trip to suburban overanalysis, I arrived home to see one of the other mom’s response to the updated spreadheet, her new notes in a different font color, so we we have the most recently updated information.  These are all amazing women.  One is a statistician (ahem...spreadsheet) who works from home, another a graphic designer, the last is a computer programmer who works for the university.  We laughed, in the midst of it all, acknowledging our parents never went to such extreme lengths to plan our schedules.  But the spreadsheets was still there, and I marveled at the elegant way in which my life has become about coordinating activities.  At work, my college degree and extra coursework is used tying shoes for Kindergarteners and passing out lunches.  In my personal life, my training is applied in the most bizarre ways.  You know when you asked your Algebra teacher, “When am I ever going to need the quadratic equation in real life?” I’m fairly sure the answer to that question is, “When planning your child’s summer vacation, dear.”

I don’t believe in over-scheduling, and I don’t think I’ve done it this year.  We aren’t overscheduled, as much as we are overplanning.  But summer with a child like Matthew can turn into a video game/television zombie if he does not have adequate social interaction, and right now, Matt is very sports-oriented.  Most of the camps have loads of physical activity, and I think the combination is very healthy for him.  Additionally, I will be taking two classes during the summer, so the half-days work well, with loads of down-time with bursts of action-packed goodness.  Only one of the camps has a semblance of intellectual development, and even that one is about computer-created comics, so it’s not like I’m trying to get him into college with these programs.  It’s not for an “edge”; I have no visions of college football scholarships, either.  It’s simply to ensure he has a great summer with old and new friends. 

So while I know that several people would impale themselves upon a bayonet before ever getting so anal as to break their summer into a spreadsheet format, I will go on the record and say, I’m actually pretty proud of how this worked out.  If only the spreadsheet had figured out how this laundry was going to hang itself up before the babysitter comes tomorrow night. 

This weekend, my husband and I celebrate our tenth anniversary.  As I type this, I think he has collapsed on the sofa, trying to recover from the post-work quest for Matt’s new cleats and shin guards, in addition to making turkey sloppy joes, which seem to possess the ability to turn our pink-clad youngest into Linda Blair, minus the split pea soup.  Her chair, did, however, levitate as she proclaimed she doesn’t LIKE sloppy joes.  She doesn’t!

A decade after our very naive vows, and I can’t think of a better partner.  I know it’s occasionally fun to wink, wink, nudge, nudge each other about how incompetent and immature our husbands are...I mean, who doesn’t love a good viewing of the Man Cold?

But in truth, my husband is a keeper, and it felt downright delicious on Sunday night, after traveling for more than nineteen hours, to hear my husband say, “I couldn’t sleep.  Something was missing.” Acknowledging the romance in the moment, I patted his hair while he buried his face in my neck, and replied, “What, my cold feet and an elbow to the groin?” (Nah, I was equally mushy...)

The year I married Ryan, a friend and I vowed it would be the year we tried all the things which terrified us.  We did a drawing class, and I swear to God, took a class called, “Primitive African Street Dancing.” It has since been renamed to be more PC, but I shall always remember the year we flailed away to live drummers, determined to survive, despite three walls of mirrors reflecting the world’s whitest girl and a Sikh woman.  My friend Sarb swore she looked like a scarecrow, and that the drummers spent their breaks smoking and discussing our awkward attempts to locate the “divine source of our feminine powers” (our instructor’s words for use our pelvis as the center of all our dancing...it was lovely).

The thing about the year of risks was how much I laughed.  After a decade of marriage, it can be easy to drown in the responsibilities of being a grown-up.  We shuttle back and forth between items on the to-do list.  Today, errands.  Tomorrow, soccer practice.  Thursday, report cards.  And so it goes.  Maybe it can be a bit more like that year, however.  One full of possibilities, joy, and the knowledge that it’s okay to look like an ass sometimes. 

On Saturday, we will exchange cards and head to dinner, planning a summer trip for the *real* celebration.  Perhaps, however, the real gift I should give Ryan is a wife who’s willing to dance again.