The sugar-free icing on the cake is that Craig the dental nerd makes our kids brush and floss twice a day, so they always get perfect dental reports. And since I’m the one who takes them to their appointments, the dentist thinks I’m the responsible dental parent and always congratulates me. Hah!
I once took the kids to a hotel without Craig, and at bedtime I had to tell the three of them that I forgot all of their toothbrushes. They turned WHITE (to be clear, my kids are half Asian, so they’re usually brown). These children were horrified. When I went into the bathroom to wash up, Tish found my cell phone, hid in the corner, and CALLED CRAIG TO RAT ME OUT. I heard her whispering furtively, “Daddy—Mommy said to go to bed without brushing our TEETH. What should we do, Daddy?” I ran out of the bathroom and yelled, “TISH! OH MY GOD,” and Tish whispered back into the phone, “I have to go, Daddy, ’cause now Mommy’s screaming bad words at me.”
The next day when we got home, Craig started to say, “What the . . .” but I said DON’T EVEN. And he didn’t even.
The point is, I’m bad at teeth cleaning, but I do use tooth whitener religiously. So when I get the kids’ glowing teeth reports, I flash the hygienists my glowing smile and nobody’s the wiser. In short, I get to be somebody else for a while—a dental nerd in a cardigan with perfectly groomed children—and I really enjoy playing that role for an hour or two. On dental mornings I become my own character foil.
One morning the kids had appointments scheduled, so I pulled on my cardigan, and we piled into the van. Unfortunately, I realized a few seconds later that I had forgotten to feed them breakfast. Usually I keep a dozen energy bars in the car for moments such as these, but on this day, I looked into the glove compartment and realized there was only one bar left. And I was starving. So obviously I told the kids there were no bars left and Amma was MAD, but what else is new? At the light, I turned up the music so they couldn’t hear the wrapper, and I scarfed down that bad boy.
We arrived at dental Disneyland, and I sat in my comfy seat, reading my People magazine in my cardigan while the kids played air hockey. I tried to sit up very straight because I feel like responsible dental-cardigany people should have good posture. But I couldn’t relax because Amma was being really loud. Too loud. So I called her over and whispered to her sweet little face, “You.must.lower.your.voice.”
She pulled away dramatically and glared at me. Her face looked shocked. She pointed her chubby little finger right in my face and YELLED, “MOMMY! YOU SMELL LIKE A BAR! YOU SMELL LIKE A BAR, MOMMY!!! WHAT DID YOU DO, MOMMY?” Then she lay down on the floor and cried. She cried like—I don’t know—like a child who’d been betrayed. Like a child who maybe just learned that her mama fell off the wagon. Like a child from that intervention show. Exactly like that.
Okay. So the waiting room was very crowded, and all of sudden the noise just stopped. All the other cardigany moms looked up from their parenting magazines and right at me. They couldn’t look away, although I’m sure they really wish they could have.
That was when I remembered that I had a 1 billion ounce transparent water bottle with me, filled to the rim with BEET JUICE. This is the sort of thing one recovering from Lyme disease has to drink in the morning. But unfortunately, all I could consider was how incredibly much it looked like a forty-ounce bloody mary.
Briefly, I thought about standing up and making an announcement:
AHEM! Listen, you guys. This is just a misunderstanding. This is actually really funny. Funnier than you can even imagine! Ironic, even. Because, you see, I’m NOT drunk this morning, but I actually WAS, for like twenty years! But now I drink BEET JUICE. This is BEET JUICE. And this crying, kicking one—she’s talking about ENERGY BARS. I smell like ENERGY bars. Isn’t that hilarious? I’m not drunk. Swearsies.
No. One can’t make an announcement like this. I decided that pretty quickly. It hit me that that the best thing I could do was just ACT SOBER.
Now the single best way to appear wasted when you are not wasted is to TRY HARD NOT TO ACT WASTED. Go ahead: try to act sober when you really ARE sober but also paranoid that people think you’re drunk. It’s impossible. You end up trying so hard to walk straight that you teeter. You try so hard to enunciate clearly that you sound like a robotic idiot. In short, the harder you try to look sober, the more you forget what sober looks like or even feels like, and the drunker you appear to be. THAT is what happened to me. I dropped my magazine. I tripped. I spilled my beet juice on my one and only cardigan. Cardigan! HA! Clearly a sham. Might as well have worn my Mötley Crüe shirt with yoga pants and called it a day.
We made it through the appointments. I stared in my rearview mirror the whole ride home CERTAIN that the dental office had called a police escort. I didn’t see any, but still, I demanded the kids stay silent the whole way home so I could CONCENTRATE ON DRIVING SOBER.
I swerved. I failed to obey the minimum speed and then the maximum. I forgot to use my blinker. We finally made it home, exhausted and frenzied. I immediately went to find the candy stash.
Officer Superhero
It’s December 23 and I’m at Target with Tish and Amma. We’ve made it through the shopping part and we’re in the checkout line. I can see the Promised Land, which is: We’re Done Shopping, Let’s Go Back Home.
I watch Amma notice a pack of Gummi Worms. Her eyes widen. I brace for chaos. She grabs the worms, shows them to me with tears in her eyes, and says, “I need dese worms!” I say, “Yep. That’s the magic Target spell. It makes me think I need all this junk, too. The Target spell is why you’re not going to college, baby. No Gummi Worms. Put them down.”
There is no way to convey the drama that was unleashed on poor unsuspecting Target immediately following the word down.
Amma threw herself onto the filthy floor and screamed like a person who maybe just found out that her entire family died. Amma’s particular tantrum style is that she chooses one phrase to repeat 7 million times at 7 million decibels until everyone around her seriously considers homicide or suicide. On this day, she chose, “I SO HUNGWY ! I SO FIRSTY !” (SKULL-SPLITTING SCREAM.) “I SO HUNGWY ! I SO FIRSTY !” (SKULL-SPLITTING SCREAM.)
This was a long, crowded line. And every time the line scootched up, I had to grab Amma’s hood and drag her forward a few feet while she kicked and screamed, like I do with my luggage in the security lines at the airport. And then Tish started crying because it was all so ridiculous. So I gritted my teeth and made my scariest face at Tish and growled STOP at her like some kind of movie monster, but this sort of thing does not tend to calm down a child. So she cried harder. People started moving away from us, and shoppers were actually stopping by our aisle to stare. I was sweating like I was in a sauna, and wishing the “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” song that was on repeat would just end. With the kids jinglebelling and everyone telling you, be of good cheer! Right. My experience exactly.
Up until this point, I had kept my head down, but it seemed time to offer my best beleaguered, apologetic, what are you gonna do? looks to the other shoppers, in hopes of receiving some sympathetic looks in return.
But when I finally looked up, I realized with mounting discomfort that there weren’t going to be any sympathetic looks. Everyone was staring at me. Every. One. One elderly couple looked so disturbed that the grandmother had her hand over her mouth and was holding tight to her husband’s arm. At first it appeared to be an effort to shield herself from my rabid animals. I thought, I hear ya lady, they scare me too. But then I realized that she wasn’t looking disapprovingly at them; she was looking disapprovingly at me. I locked eyes with her, and without subtlety, she looked down at my clothes, then to my cart, and then away.
So I did the same thing. Down at myself, then to the cart. Oooooooohhhh, I thought. Shoot.
My Lyme was back, and I’d been sick for a little while. The day before had been a bad Lymie day, and so was the day before that, so I may have forgotten to shower or brush my hair. For forty-eight hours. And also, when I l
ooked down I noticed that I still had on my pajama top. Which apparently I had tucked in to my ripped jeans. Like seventh grade. I looked bad. Not a little bad—offensively, aggressively bad. Also, here is what was in my cart: six large bottles of wine and curtain rods. It looked like I planned to create a wine bong. Which wouldn’t have been so bad if my smallest child would have stopped screaming: “I SO HUNGWY, I SO FIRSTY!”
And since I was so tired and in such a state of self-pity, I couldn’t even bring myself to feign sympathy toward my starving, parched child on the floor. Because I wasn’t sympathetic, not even a little bit. I definitely remembered feeding her the previous day. Faker.
I resigned myself to suffer through. I stopped trying to help the girls at all. Just left Amma there on the floor screaming and Tish beside her crying and prayed the line would move faster. I am certain that even the atheists in that line were praying it would move faster.
All of a sudden, a uniformed police officer started walking toward us. At first I was alarmed and defensive. But as he stopped in front of me, he smiled warmly and winked.
He looked down at the girls and said, “May I ?”
I was not sure what he was asking exactly, but I allowed myself to hope that he would arrest them and take them away. So I nodded.
The police officer patted Amma on the head gently. She looked up at him and stopped mid-scream. She stood up. Tish fell silent and grabbed Amma’s hand. All of a sudden they became a pair of grubby little soldiers. At attention, eyes shining, terrified.
The officer said, “Hello, girls. Have you two ever heard of ‘disturbing the peace’?”
They shook their little heads no.
He smiled and continued, “Well, that means that your mama and all of these people are trying to shop in peace, and you are disturbing them, and you’re not allowed to. Can you try to be more peaceful?”
They nodded their little heads yes.
The officer stood back up and smiled at me. I tried really hard to show my gratitude by smiling back.
I noticed that the girls grabbed each other in a bear hug and held on for dear life. They had lived to die another day.
He said, “Being a parent. It’s a tough gig sometimes.”
For some reason, I was suddenly desperate to be perceived by him as something other than a struggling mom, so I blurted out, “I’m also a writer.”
He looked genuinely interested and said, “Really? What do you write?”
“Lots of things. Mostly a blog.”
“What’s it about?”
“Parenting, I guess.”
His eyes twinkled, and he grinned and said teasingly, “Oh. Does anybody read it?”
And I said, “A few. Mostly for laughs, though. Not for, well, advice. Obviously.”
I miraculously found the energy and ability and space and breath to giggle.
And my officer smiled and said the following:
“You know, my wife and I raised six kids, and I think that’s actually the only parenting advice worth a damn. Just try to keep laughing. Try to keep laughing. It’s good advice. You’re doing good, Mom.”
Then he tipped his hat to me and my girls, and walked away.
In the end, only kindness matters. Thank you, Officer Superhero. Merry Christmas.
The girls were silent until halfway home from Target when Tish announced loudly, “I can’t believe we almost went to jail. We better not tell Daddy.”
And I said, “No way. We have to tell him. What if we don’t and then he sees the report on the news tonight?”
Big eyes. More silence.
Joy to the World.
On Gifts and Talents
I’ve been thinking about my parent friends for whom the start of the school year is a difficult time, because the classroom has proven to be a tough place for their child to display his particular brand of genius.
For these precious mamas, starting school means revisiting old worries and facing new ones. It means tears and tense phone calls and scary conferences and comparisons and lots of fear and anger and suspicion and Oh My God, Is He All Rights? And What Are We Doing Wrongs?
I’d like to talk to you about your brilliant children.
Listen.
Every child is gifted and talented. Every single one. I know this to be true. Every single child is gifted and talented in a particular area. Every single one also has particular challenges. For some kids, the classroom setting is the place where their genius is hardest to see and their challenges are easiest to see. And since they spend so much time in the classroom, that’s a tough break for these little guys. But if we are patient and calm and we wear our perspectacles and we keep believing, we will eventually see the specific magic of each child.
Like my student who was severely dyslexic and also could’ve won a comedy contest at age seven. One time he was waiting at the water fountain and said, “Lord, Miss Doyle. I been waitin’ in this line since I was six.” The boy was a genius.
Like my precious one who couldn’t walk or speak because of his severe cerebral palsy, but whose smile while completing his grueling physical therapy inspired the rest of my class to call him the “bravest.” Genius, that kid.
Like my little man with autism, who couldn’t have hurt another living being if somebody paid him to. He was the most gentle soul I’ve ever known. And he loved animals like they were a gift made just for him by God. Which, of course, they were. But nobody in our class knew that except him. Undeniable Genius.
Like my third grader who read like a kindergartner and couldn’t add yet. But one day I stood behind her at recess, where she played all alone, and heard her singing to herself. That was the day I discovered her gift. It was also the day that she discovered her gift, because I freaked out. And I marched her over to the rest of the teachers and made her sing for them. And when we came in from recess, I announced to my class that we had a rock star in our midst. And she quietly beamed. And she sang all the time after that. All the time. Actually, it was a little much. But we let it slide because you don’t mess with artistic genius.
Or the little man in one of Chase’s classes who was always getting in trouble. Every day, getting in trouble. And Chase came home one day and said, “I think he’s not listening because he’s always making pictures in his head. He’s the best drawer I’ve ever seen. He’s going to be famous, I bet.” Chase was right. I’ve seen this kid’s work. Genius.
Or my little one who was gifted in the classroom-learning way and was miles ahead of the other kids in every single subject. But she had challenges being kind and humble about her particular strengths, so she had trouble making friends. Sometimes it’s tough to be a genius.
Every single child is gifted. And every child has challenges. It’s just that in the educational system, some gifts and challenges are harder to see. And teachers are working on this problem. Lots of schools are trying to find ways to make all children’s gifts visible and celebrated. And as parents, we can help. We can help our kids who struggle in school believe that they’re okay. It’s just that there’s only one way to help them. And it’s hard.
We have to actually believe that our kids are okay.
I know. Tough. But it can be done. We can start believing by erasing the idea that education is a race. It’s not. Education is like Christmas. We’re all just opening our gifts, one at a time. And it is a fact that each and every child has a bright shiny present with her name on it, waiting there underneath the tree. God wrapped it up, and he’ll let us know when it’s time to unwrap it. In the meantime, we must believe that our children are okay. Every last one of them. The straight-A ones and the ones with autism and the naughty ones and the chunky ones and the shy ones and the loud ones and the so-far-behind ones.
Because here’s what I believe: a child can survive a teacher or other children accidentally suggesting that he’s not okay, as long as when he comes home, he looks at his mama and knows by her face that he really is okay. Because that’s all they’re asking, isn’t it?
Mama, am I okay?
In the end, a child will call the rest of the world liars and believe his mama.
So when he asks us with his eyes and heart if he’s okay, let’s tell him:
Yes, baby. You are okay. You are more than okay. You are my dream come true. You are everything I’ve ever wanted, and I wouldn’t trade one you for a million anybody elses. This part of life, this school part, might be hard for you. But that’s okay, because it’s just one part of life. And because we can do hard things, together. We are a team. And I am so grateful to be on your team.
And then, before we dive into “helping,” let’s just eat some cookies together and talk about other things. There are so many other things to talk about, really.
Let’s be Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. Atticus’s children, Scout and Jem, carefully watch their father’s behavior as the house next door to theirs burns to the ground. As the fire creeps closer and closer to the Finches’ home, Atticus appears so calm that Scout and Jem finally decide that “it ain’t time to worry yet.”
We need to be Atticus. Hands in our pockets. Calm. Believing. So that our children will look at us and even with a fire raging in front of them, they’ll say, “Huh. Guess it’s not time to worry yet.”
Then we’ll watch carefully. We’ll just watch and wait and believe until God nods and says, “It’s time. Tear open that gift, Mama.”
And we’ll get to say our Mama FAVE. Told you so. Told you so, World.
Mommy Do-Little
Carry On, Warrior: Thoughts on Life Unarmed Page 12