Artifacts from a young life

A couple of days ago I got Eugenides' newest novel out of the library and I had seven days to read it.  I did it in three.  I have stayed up well beyond a reasonable bedtime every night and am weary now.  It is so hard for me to put down a book even when I know I will suffer for it in the days to come.  If I could figure out how to read for a living, I'd be all right.  After I picked S up from school on Tuesday, we came home, had a snack, checked in, all I wanted to do was pick up the book.  I thought maybe - maybe - if I got her going on her homework followed by an educational video game on my computer, I'd buy myself a half an hour to read and still be with her.  Parallel play.  It worked.  She did her homework, I read, occasionally helping or checking in.  It was paradise.  Then she disappeared into her room.  This is pretty unusual.  S is not one of those only children you hear about who can entertain themselves for hours out of sight of all others.  She tends to want to interact after her homework - take a walk with me, play a board game, help with dinner.  But she was just gone.  I could hear her shuffling around in there, hear drawers opening and closing, the occasional light crash, nothing to worry about.  Once or twice she emerged and grabbed some tape or scissors.  What was she building in there?

I read for a good hour.  I mean a good hour.  God, I love reading.  I glanced up at the clock, I was going to have to start dinner.  Throughout this low-energy bluesy time, I've maintained certain activities.  Non-negotiables.  I get S to school on time every day, well-fed and with a home-made lunch.  I make healthy dinner from scratch.  I keep the house fairly clean.  Still pursuing writing, but with less fervor than it deserves, still trying to figure out how to use my MFT license without diving into another fucked-up public mental health job, still spending too many hours a day researching homes in a small town far away yet to be publicly announced as my husband is still sucking off the television industry teat, I am primarily a glorified housewife/stay-at-home mom.  At least everyone is eating healthy food and the house is in order, even as my brain is a bit wonky.

Finally, S comes out of the bedroom with a reusable shopping bag over one shoulder.
"Can I do my presentation for you?"
I sit up.  I wrench the book away from my body, remind myself it will still be there at bedtime.
"I would love to hear your presentation."
"Pretend you're at table one, ok?"
"Ok."
"So after I show you something, I'll pass it to you, then you pretend to pass it to table two, but you can really just put it down on the side table."
"Got it.  This is your artifact presentation?"
S nods.  Then she stands in the middle of the living room rug and rocks back and forth, smiles like she's trying not to giggle, seems to have a hard time knowing where to rest her eyes.  She has switched into performance mode.
"This is a book called Harold and The Purple Crayon.  It is one of my favorite books because the boy draws everything with his crayon and I've had it for a long time and my mom's friend Adam gave it to me and he moved to New York and I miss him and so it's very special to me."
She hands me the book and slips me a quick smile that says she's excited about what she's put together here.  I try not to get teary.  When I get proud, gushy teary, she always says, "Seriously, mom?"
I place the book on table two.
Next she pulls out her baseball glove, "This is a really good kind that you can't get anymore.  It is a Reggie Jackson glove and my uncle gave it to me.  [How old is it, mom?]"
I think, then whisper so as not to insert myself into her presentation, "Over thirty years old."
She continues, "It's over thirty years old and it's very special to me because as you probably know, I love baseball.  And I'm a lefty."
She hands it over, I consider it and place it on the table.
A super close-up picture of our dog is accompanied the narrative, "he's very lazy because he's had two knee surgeries..." then self-correction, "I mean, he's very lazy and he's had two knee surgeries so he can't walk very much.  But he was lazy anyway."  A giggle, then, "this picture of him lying on the floor is pretty much what he does all the time."
Next, a metal owl bookmark "that Poppi gave me so it's really special.  He likes to give me bookmarks and lets me pick them out.  I also love to read, so..."
Then, a carved stone owl that "Nana got it for me in Budapest because she knows I love owls.  And they carve a lot of things out of stone there."  Not sure how specifically true that is, but sounds good.
I'm most surprised when she pulls out a bracelet I gave her that I think I bought in the East Village on one of my earliest independent outings, just a series of metal squares linked together and a small rock glued on each - lace agate, amethyst.  "This is special because my mom gave it to me and she knows I love rocks.  I have like 400 rocks in my collection from everywhere we go I get rocks."
The presentation slows down as she shows how the clasp works, which requires her to lay the bracelet down on a table and slide the metal hook through a miniscule loop.  I resist helping her, as I won't be there at the actual presentation.  I imagine the kids will try to help her and the teacher will ask them to sit back down.  She'll figure it out.  I am mesmerized by that bracelet - when and where did I get it exactly?  It's got a real pull for me, a strong feeling of mid-teenage hippie days when I was into rocks and crystals.  It's pretty cool.  She's finally got it on.  "It's too big for me but I hang it on my wall as decoration and someday it will fit."
 Her final item is a geode bookend.  "As I already said, I love rocks and this one is big and sparkly.  My dad gave it to me, I don't know where he got it but he knew I would like it.  There's a bigger one, but this is the best one.  I'm going to pass it around, but be careful because it's heavy..."

It's a random sampling and I wonder if she shouldn't have included items that were more specifically historical - the first tooth she lost?  photos of ancestors?  I stop myself immediately.  This is how she defines herself.  Owls and rock collections.  Her lazy dog.  A book that makes her feel happy.  Her baseball glove.  She asks if she can do it again.
"You can do it all night," I say.
"I like doing this!"
As I watch a second time, I realize the sample isn't random at all.  It has a very deep unifying factor.  "Adam gave me this book before he moved to New York.  He's really important to me." 
"This glove was my uncle's." 
"From Poppi," 
"From Nana," 
"My mom's bracelet that she gave to me,"
"a geode from my dad."  

She defines every item with a description of the person who cares enough about her to give her something from their own private collections from youth or buy her something on their travels because they miss her.  My daughter is only seven and she already knows that material things are only valuable in how they represent love.  That the most important artifacts tell the stories of the relationships you build.  That the story of one’s life is the giving and receiving.  The items, no matter how sparkly, are just symbols of the real stuff.

Aggggghhhhh.

I'm reading a novel in which someone slips into deep depression, a real chemical low, can't-get-it-together depression.  I know I do not have that.  I have the blues, the funks, low-energy irritability.  I blame LA.  I know it's not entirely LA's fault.  But LA does have to bear some of the responsibility, with its sprawling spread-out-ness that makes it hard to see the ones you love, to create community, to feel a part of anything.  It's partly your fault, LA.  But not having lived anywhere else for the past 14 - fourteen! - years, it's hard to know what it'd be like elsewhere.  Sometimes I got the blues in New York in my 20s, in Massachusetts in my college years.  I lived in a state of teal and aqua and turquoise in New Jersey, but I was a teenager then.

One of the strange things about watching your child grow is that they start to have moods.  Like, real moods.  Not just those meltdown in the middle of the grocery store because you've taken them on one too many errands and they are hungry and tired and just need to throw themselves on the ground and wail.  I'm good with those.  S still has those types - the big, intense, and quickly over melts.  What I would call the healthy melts.  If you don't try to reign them in, they pass like an intense but brief tropical storm, like the afternoons when I lived in Costa Rica, when between the time you left your host family's house and arrived at the radical political science institute you'd be drenched and the sun would already be shining.  I like those kind of storms.

But now I sometimes see the blues.  Not a lot.  I have a happy kid, an active kid, a kid who brought home a book from the school library on Derek Jeter because "even though he's a Yankee, I really like him," and "he inspires me, mom, because he's like me.  He wanted to be a professional baseball player from the time he was my age!"  S has stopped worrying about the fact that there are no female professional baseball players.  She has over a decade to remedy that.  She starts Fall Ball Little League in two weeks.  Baseball.  In case you meet S, don't offer her "girls' softball" as an alternative.  S thinks softball is bullshit.

Mostly it's a lot of joy and interest and curiosity with flare-ups of frustration or exhaustion, but now and then there are blue days for her too.  And those are hard to weather.  No matter how much I believe in letting people have their feelings, in walking through the tough times, in not suppressing the struggles, damn is it hard to not try to "make" your child happy.  But I don't.  Mostly.  I listen.  I empathize.  I question, act curious, try to go deeper.  Sometimes I just say, "yeah, some days are like that, huh?"  And they pass.  Far more quickly than my blue periods.  I know (post-a-shitload-of-therapy) that part of why my blues hang around, my funks funk me out for longer than necessary, my body ends up achy and my brain fuzzy and my mood apathetic is that I fight them.  Higginses are troopers!  We don't have down times.  We present with a smile and we don't like complainers.  We see depression as weakness and lethargy as pathetic.  (Imagine my learning curve to become a therapist and find empathy for the real struggles of real people).  The Speers-Higgins clans are steeped in deep Puritan blood and the Puritan work ethic not only sees finding joy and fulfillment in your work as besides the point - it actually discards those concepts as devil's work.

And so I do blame LA.  And I blame New England.  For here I am, generations deep in the Plymouth Brethren 'you work because that's what you do' Puritanism, the 'don't expect much from life and you won't be disappointed, in fact occasionally you might be pleasantly surprised' motto of my parents (seriously, my mom just said that to me this weekend and I dry-heaved.  And it's not in a Buddhist way of being in the moment, but in this old pilgrim way of self-sacrifice and discomfort in the idea of pursuing dreams or taking risks.)

And while the old New England stock rattles around deep in my chest cavity, making my heart feel selfish for its desires; my groovy LA therapist tells me to put my hand over that heart, cradle that chest cavity, close my eyes, and ask it (my heart) what it wants.  "Get really quiet and listen for your heart's desire."  Yes!  Yes, my heart's desire.  In that big, white-carpeted, ocean-viewed office in Santa Monica.  Yes!  And then I walk out and call my mom to arrange our child-care schedule for the week and even without telling her about my therapy (because I'm not an idiot) I feel like a giant asshole for not only thinking that I have the right to follow my heart's desire, but even to have a therapist with a big white-carpeted office.  Self-indulgent.  Privileged.  Entitled.  These are very bad words.

Is my desire to return to Massachusetts a primal desire to return to the homeland?  Is it partly driven by a desire to stop living split in two?  Because the groovy-LA-follow-your-bliss-crystal shit doesn't sit right inside me, even as I have acid reflux from the New England Puritan crap.  But my friends who still live in Massachusetts have found a way to reject at least some of that without trying to replace it with an airy cultural philosophy that lacks context.  They are following at least some of their desires - they are musicians with day jobs who gig at night; they dj on weekends and are social workers by day; they gather together frequently without having to sit in hours of traffic on the 405 to see the people they love.

Today I am writing despite the blues.  For that I credit my family.  Higginses do not take to their beds for weeks or even days no matter how deep the shit feels.  I write on, I take a walk, I apply for jobs, I show up to run the workshop at school, train parents in Community Sharing so that the children in our school will learn how to talk about feelings and walk through them.  But I can't help but wonder what it would be like if I'd been allowed to have my meltdowns, go big and hard and furious, storm off to my room saying "life sucks" (without being shamed for it) and then return ten minutes later cleansed and ready to move on.  If I hadn't been made to feel that it was selfish to have a hard time.  I guess we'll see in several decades when S hits mid-life.  For now, I will take a walk.

Just a quickie

Don't want to lose momentum but didn't get a chance to write today.  Just had taco night with S and she spent the whole time telling me all the great things she's doing at school and how she and her old pals are playing tag at recess and she's having such a good time...  She disappeared into her room for the better part of an hour to gather "artifacts" for her share about her life, then asked if she could search the internet for a typing program to practice her typing, after she finished her homework.  Was it just yesterday I was pondering home school? 

Stuck in Lodi

Just started putting on Pandora after one too many frustrating experiences with random play on my IPod - Ramona and Beezus books or Charles Bukowski poems interrupting my Beck groove; Christmas songs sung by country singers sending me into inexplicable sudden panic.  Pandora is fun because you enter an artist that represents the mood you're in and see what the anonymous Pandora people think of you.  This morning I put on the Bruno Mars channel and greatly cheered up a cranky Monday-morning seven year old.  Jon said, "How'd you get the pre-show music list from the Nickelodeon show we're taping?"  It's true - from Bruno Mars to One Direction to Maroon Five - it was all the music the second-fifth grade crowd is rocking.  When I got home from dropping S at school and a quick trip to Trader Joe's, I chose the Jakob Dylan station.  Pandora always starts with a song from the actual artist and basically, I just wanted to hear that scratchy sexy voice.  Oh Jakob Dylan what you do to me.  I got some Ben Harper, okay, some Iron and Wine, getting a little folksy for my mood, and then a cover of Lodi, the 1969 Creedence Clearwater Revival song that I just love.  I didn't really ever listen to the lyrics before - "Oh lord, stuck in Lodi again," and this time it made me do a little research.  It's about Lodi, California, an agricultural town about 70 miles from Fogerty's hometown of Berkeley (or so claims Wikipedia) and the feeling of a broke musician being stuck there.  I remember a Lodi, New Jersey that's pretty arm-pitty too.  I mostly know it as the place with the big DMV near the town where I got my tattoo in the early 90s - Wayne, New Jersey.  Wayne had the big fountain store (right across the street from Schatzi's Tattoos) that was made famous by the band Fountains of Wayne and the scene in the Sopranos in which Tony buys a fountain from the police officer he's had fired.  It's a great disturbing classic scene.

I have to change the channel now.  I have an aversion to Jack Johnson.  I just can't believe it's music for adults.  Switch over to the Dayna Kurtz station and hear my friend.  I'm sure she's not making any money off it.  God she's good.  She's so good.  Buy all her CDs:  www.daynakurtz.com

S didn't want to go to school this morning.  It was a classic rocking weekend with a daddy/daughter fishing trip, baseball, family hanging...I'm hoping this is just a normal Monday morning thing, but I'm having a rising anxiety about her resistance to school.  I'm pondering the concept of homeschooling.  I'm fantasizing that if we were in Western Mass it would all be different.  I'm internalizing her discomfort.  I'm visualizing her slumped shoulders as she walks into the classroom.  What is going on?  When I talk to her about individual subjects - music, math, PE - she says she likes them all.  When I ask about her teacher, she says she loves her.  It seems to be interpersonal, social, something about feeling overwhelmed being with 20 kids every day.  I imagine it's overwhelming.  I've never enjoyed being in a big office and having to deal with a myriad of different personalities.  And at the very least I had a cubicle to retreat into.

I have to turn my focus now to a training I'm doing tonight for parents at S's school to lead class groups, help them build community, learn how to problem solve, grow empathy, all that good stuff.  I led a community circle with last year's third graders and loved watching them begin to open up, listen to each other, solve problems with more respect.  Tonight I'll train a crew so we have one parent per class.  Paring down some of the confusing and overly groovy materials from the program we initially used, making it more user-friendly, developmentally-appropriate, and just plain fun.  We shall see.  I breathe deep, remind myself that it's only week two of third grade and that children struggle with going to school and no one loves it all the time and that's ok.  And that this could just be transition time.  I listen to a little more Wallflowers.  It shoots me back into a time in my early twenties when it wasn't that I was happy, exactly, but I was responsible for no one but myself.  I didn't always do a great job of taking care of me, but the worry about that was different, more existential, less heartbreaking.  Ahhhh..Angel on my Bike.  His voice is a salve to me.  S will find her own salves.  I can help her, but I can't do it for her.  That may be the most excruciating part of parenthood.

Capture the Flag: DAY FOUR

I remember Capture the Flag.  I remember my brother breaking his arm during a big neighborhood game.  Capture the Flag in our day was unruly, unsupervised, snaked through wooded areas (suburban, not real country) behind houses and from yard to fence-free yard.  I realize as S's PE teacher teaches them a (non-flying) version of Quiddich and amps up Capture the Flag to "Super Capture the Flag" ("It's way more awesome," says S), he's following their lead.  He's finding out what the kids think is cool and morphing that into a lesson plan.  Smart.  Funny to be observing so closely the machinations of third grade and realizing the strategy.  Find the in, meet them at their interest, then infiltrate with facts and skills.

It's dreary and muggy in LA, not common weather for us.  I'm in the tiny backhouse sweating.  The chickens are squawking.  Our dog is stinking up the place.  What looked like a potential place to do legitimate therapy when I first fixed it up now looks like a hovel.  The carpet is stained and pieces of leaves are scattered around the floor.  Bedding from our last visitor is piled on the couch, which is covered in hair from his dog.  The yard is littered with chicken poo and feathers, the summer garden neglected, wilting, flies everywhere.  I know it's not as Clampitt bad as I'm making it out to be, though it's not great.  It's mostly that LA looks shitty when it's not sunny.  I noticed that the first summer I was here, 14 - gulp - years ago.  Unlike other places I've lived, LA doesn't look moody and mysterious on overcast days, it just looks depressing.

I have been skewing depressed lately, at least when I'm alone.  It's not full-time depression.  I am not having that much trouble getting out of bed and I don't return there.  I've been cooking good dinners, playing board games with S, showing up to help at the school, organizing events, even having a reasonable amount of sex (with my husband, people).  And it's not like I'm just going through the motions.  I'm actually in joy in the moments when I'm with people I love.  It's just that once they all head off - on the bike to work, into the classroom, off Facebook - I'm by myself.  And I sink rapidly.  I can always pull myself out - I'm a pro at finding the next thing to do, embarking on a project, focusing the energy - but what's astonishing to me is how quickly I sink back in.  How quickly the cobwebs hanging off the windows and the dried chicken poop on the flagstone terrace dunk me down.  How the screech of a power saw nearby just makes everything seem so dreary. 

In third grade news, I asked S to change her pants just as she was walking out the door because she had clearly wiped her eggy hands on them.  She didn't want to.  I didn't care.
"But I don't care that I'm in stained pants."
"But I do."
"But they're my pants."
"Let's not do this.  Just change your pants."
She goes into her room, pissed.  Yells out, "Then can you help me find some other pants that are as comfortable?  Those were the only stretchy leggings."
I'm about to lose it.  I walk in, saying, "You might have thought about how comfortable they were before you used them instead of your napkin."
"But I didn't wipe egg on my pants."
"Then it mysteriously found its way there."
She has terrible table manners - largely our fault, I know - and only now am I confronting some of the hand-eating, the clothes-wiping, the loud burping.  I haven't really cared to be honest, but am starting to feel like I want her to be able to accompany us to more, shall we say formal (read: less-caveman) settings without having to correct her in public.  She is now expected to say "May I be excused?" and to clear her plate.  That part's going well.  The wiping-hands-on-pants, not so strong.  Sadie is standing in her underwear, looking as annoyed as I feel.  I pull out a pair of lovely, clean, dress-code appropriate dark blue comfortable leggings.
"Oh, those," she says.
I walk out of the room because frankly, I'm not in the mood for attitude.  She's still cranking at me on her way to the car.  I tell her to have a great day and I'll see her at pick-up.  I'm done with the interaction.  Jon turns around when they're at the car and runs back over, gives me a kiss.  He knows I hate having to play cop/mama.  He calls after drop off and says that she was fine as soon as they pulled out of the driveway.
"But you sound really upset.  You okay?"
"I'm just blue," I say.  "Just dumb.  The weather, the...I don't know."
"Buy a house in Western Massachusetts," he says.  He knows that's what I fantasize about when LA (or anything that happens to be happening while I happen to be in LA) gets me down.
"I guess I'll go look at some in a few weeks?"
For once, I don't really feel like flying across the country solo, even to look at potential homes for our future.  I feel like he's calling my bluff by agreeing to Western Mass after years of complaining that he could never stand the winters.  Depression comes with a degree of stuck-ness.  I sit here in the stink, the noise, the gray, and wonder if a big, bold move would break me out.  Maybe I should make an offer on a house, start to build our future somewhere else.  But depression is mobile.  3,000 miles isn't far enough to outrun it.  I just need to breathe through it and keep doing the good work.  And enjoy my ragamuffin child.

The Writing Callous: DAY THREE

S keeps getting out of bed: "I can't sleep!"  "I've got too much in my brain!"  and then finally, "Look at this, my finger hurts."  The third time she emerges from her room, it's coming up on 9pm. I'm tired and hot and quickly sliding into "Go to frigging sleep" mode.  I can't imagine how she'd hurt her finger in bed, so I just glance down without giving it much thought.  And there it is.  Wow, I remember that.

S has the early stages of the pencil callous.  She actually has the pencil blister which will evolve into the pencil callous.  Remember the pencil callous?  Erupts when you first start writing more than you've written before and you're gripping that thing real tight and the yellow painted wood rubs on your finger?  I ask because this may not be a common experience.  This may only happen to lefties as we tend to hold our pencils between our ring and middle fingers instead of our middle and pointers.  But I would assume it can also affect the middle.  S has it on the fourth finger of her left hand, exactly where I had it.  I wrote so much in third grade, really discovered my love for it, that my callous grew into a lump.  I used to rub it with my thumb.  It relaxed me.  Between my wrinkly thumb and lumpy ring finger, it was easy for me to remember which side was my left.

S's teacher sent home a short questionnaire for parents to start conversation with our kids (I assume.  I can't imagine she actually wants them back).
The questions include:
What was your third grade teacher's name?  Ms. St. Denis
What do you remember learning in third grade? Cursive writing
What was your favorite subject?  Reading/Writing

S, reading it over as I put a band-aid on the blister, asks, "Writing?  Really?"
"Yes, why?"
"That's like the opposite world answer to me."
"Well, I became a writer so...I guess I like writing."
"Huh,"  she says.  "I guess you must."

In the hour before bedtime she has fluctuated between a giggle fit and a non-sensical meltdown.  Through tears she says that school is too tiring and that she has no friends at recess and that she actually does have friends at recess but she is too good at four square and it's hard being the best at things and everyone wants to hang out with her and she doesn't like having to be with too many kids at once...
I let her go until it winds down.
Then I ask, "So you're upset because you're too good at things and too popular?"
She stares at me for a moment to see if I'm mocking, then bursts back into the giggles.
I tell her that's what we call a "quality problem."  I also say I hear her and I adore her and she'll probably feel better after a good night's sleep.
It's easy to belittle the meltdown of a kid going back to school, but honestly, it's a lot to be with twenty-two kids all day long after a summer of road trips and camping and only having to hang with who she chooses when she feels like it.  I don't like to be mandated to a room with people I haven't chosen for hours on end.  I'd probably meltdown a bit too.  And I sometimes feel overwhelmed when people want to hang out and I'm weird about being good at things.  Though I suck at four square.

All About Me: DAY TWO

We began to grow unsatisfied at our public neighborhood school in LA during S's kindergarten year.  I remember thinking from week one, No show and tell?  That's weird.  I remember seeing samples of student work and thinking - that doesn't sound like my child's voice.  But I was gung-ho about this neighborhood school that so many privileged families deserted.  When the class was discussing the solar system, I asked S if she wanted to bring in the folder of gorgeous glossy photos of each planet that a grown-up friend brought her from a trip to the space museum in Washington DC.  When I picked her up, the photos were in her backpack exactly as they left.
"Didn't you share these with the class?"  I asked.  She'd been so excited, memorized the names, the order, the relational sizes.
"We're not allowed to do things like that," she said.
Oh the beginning of the blood boil.  A burst of fury followed by deep breathing and an appropriate parental response.  "Probably Ms R just didn't have time today, so why don't you bring those back?
"I'm not allowed to bring them back."
Not allowed?  Not allowed?  Not encouraged to share personal experience with the subject at hand?  Fans of curiosity not flamed but instantly squelched in the name of more time for practicing the standardized tests?  Breathe, breathe.

After a series of events like this, I met with the teacher, brought in some articles about "constructivism" (hands-on learning, eliciting knowledge from the learner and building on their interests...).  That was not taken well.  In a fit of frustration and bad judgment, I went to see the awful (since-fired) principal who Jon used to say looked like a drunk trombone player, who was biding his time til full-benefitted retirement.  He told me he'd handle it.  He handled it by calling a meeting of the kinder teachers and parents and fanning the flames of discontent, made it seem like we were "getting them" in trouble.  Oh it was ugly.

I think if there was one incident that symbolizes the end of our relationship with the neighborhood school (where to the very end I was writing grants for gardens, bringing in comedy improv assemblies, and volunteering for the fundraising Luau, trying to resuscitate creativity), it was the incident with the dog in the morning.  After Spring Break - we're talking at least seven months into the school year - we adopted a puppy.  When S came out of school, I asked if she'd told Ms R about it.
"Oh we don't get to tell her things," she said.
By March, I no longer took that as childlike hyperbole.  She was serious.
"Did you tell your friends?" I asked.
"We don't really have time when we can share like that."
"How about lunch?"
"We're supposed to whisper at lunch so it's hard to tell a story."
"Oh." (oh shit.) "Does anyone else in your class have a dog?"
"I don't know.  We don't talk about things like that."
Okay, that's it.  You're in kindergarten and you don't talk about whether you have dogs?  You are told to whisper at the lunch tables?  You feel uncomfortable sharing personal information with your teacher?  And right there was the pinnacle of the "fuck this" that had been building.  I called Jon from my office downtown where I was holed up, secretly researching charter schools instead of finishing my client reports.
"You on board with a radical move?"
He was, though he said he'd miss the drunk trombone player.
We found a brand new charter school based on principles of student voice and constructivism (which hadn't even opened its doors yet), we entered a lottery and lucked out.  We knew it would change our lives.  We didn't know how much.

Yesterday S brought home two pieces of homework from her first day of third grade.  One was a big poster that she was to fill out with information about herself - her favorite books, pictures of her family, and of course, how many pets she has.  Because her teacher cares about who she is.  And she is allowed to talk about her dog.  The other piece was an even more detailed survey - What are your hobbies? Who is your favorite singer? What do you do on weekends?  S did it independently while I chopped up tons of veggies for taco night.  My only input was to challenge the places she put question marks or "I don't know."  "Give it a shot," I'd advise, and when she said, "there's too many to fit," I'd suggest, "choose one or two."  And she did.  Bruno Mars.  A Kelly Clarkson song.  Boogie Boarding.  She's a real third grader.

S said that part of the first day was given over to a show and tell in which the teacher and her co-teacher (special education teacher splits time co-teaching in all the rooms - don't get me started on the wonders of this charter school) showed special objects that let the kids know more about who they are.  It's opposite world.  See and be seen.  Personalize.  Open.  Share.  This is how we learn.  We know this.  This may not be how we get the highest test scores on bullshit tests.  But this is how we embrace school.  S woke early yesterday and today, put on her boyish dress code clothes, smiled her toothless smile, and headed happily to school.  There are many days when, as a barely freelance writer, an underemployed therapist, a glorified housewife, I feel like I've done nothing right.  But the moment I look at my daughter in her red, blue and tan school clothes telling me about how her teacher felt nervous getting back to school and there are things she does to help her get ready and feel less scared, when my daughter leans over her poster so carefully writing why she loves baseball, when she assumes that people will be interested in what she has to say, in those moments I know I've done one thing terribly right.

And so it begins: DAY ONE

This morning at 8:10am we arrive at S's school.  I get a lot of hugs.  I give a lot of hugs.  I sell tickets to a parents' night out fundraiser while comforting kindergarten parents who are trying not to cry.  I stop in the office and catch up with the administration.  I hand the principal a bag of cheddar goldfish I meant to give S's teacher to give to kids who don't have snacks.  I try to peek into the third grade window but the room has frosted glass.  Crafty.  I hear a new mom in the office confused about the dress code and I am able to offload a giant bag of clothes that S has outgrown.  Phew.  A new mom gets me a cup of coffee while I am flitting around meeting new parents and selling tickets.  I warn her she just made a huge mistake showing such initiative and attention to detail (in this case the detail that I need coffee), then giving me her name.  That's how you end up getting roped into leadership, I tell her.  Another dad mentions that he's a designer and I march him over to the head of the yearbook committee.  They never learn, these parents.

This is all to say, I'm still involved at the school beyond what makes any sense to me.  I love it so much and it makes me crazy.  I struggle with the feeling that I'm "supposed" to be making money, that I'm "supposed" to be putting my masters' degree to better use, that I shoulda coulda woulda.  But we are not starving, in fact we are finally reasonably financially stable, and I have energy and passion for this school.  So here I am again, building community, sharing information, connecting the newbies.  The only way I could stop is if I didn't even show up.  And with internet access, probably even that wouldn't work.

S and her friends pick each other up as they greet each other.  I watch her from afar when she reunites with her best boy buddy, who now has teeth where he used to have a big gap.  She finally has the gap.  They are cracking each other up and I remember that so viscerally, that early feeling of finding your friend so funny it doubled you over, that realization that other kids can crack you up more than adults.  And that you can be funny too.  I see her say something, wait, then register pleasure at his giggles.  I stand with his mom and we smile at their smiles, we like each other's kids.  We are happy that they are happy together.

On the drive to school, S says she is nervous and excited - "good and bad nervous," "excited nervous and scared nervous," and also "so tired."  She doesn't seem tired.  She doesn't even seem that nervous.  It feels a little like she's saying what she thinks she's supposed to say.  She says that "everyone says third grade is the biggest grade and it's a really big deal."  I don't say, "yeah, I'm writing a blog about that."  I am tired.  I am not particularly nervous.  Watching her get into line and immediately help the new girl standing behind her, watching her giggle with her buddy, even seeing her once when she heads to the bathroom and I'm still standing in the hallway outside the auditorium with a stack of money from ticket sales, she is just fine.  More than fine.  She is glowing.  She is wearing all blue today (dress code is very flex) - a sky blue shirt and turquoise shorts, navy socks, rainbow sneakers.  She is glowing.  And I am fine.

Last night before bed, she tried to play up the scared thing, but she was asleep before nine.  No one who is really nervous falls asleep before nine.  She ate a good breakfast.  She chose Earth Wind and Fire and Katy Perry for family dance after tooth and hair brushing.  It's 11:47 and I can't wait for 3:00.  I feel lame at how much I can't wait to hear about every part of her day.  I'll take her for ice cream on Abbot Kinney after school and we'll walk and talk.  I'll hear about what third grade is like now.  I'll choose salted caramel.  I'll remember how lucky I am.

Kissing

My first kiss was not consensual.  That's one thing I realized from starting this blog.  As detailed in the first post, I was chased under a table and kissed, repeatedly, then pushed down on a friend's couch and kissed.  It was not violent.  I'm not going into some traumatic flashback about the whole thing.  I'm fine.  I like kissing now.  Have even found it at times in my life to be like a mind-altering drug.  But for years, kissing seemed like something boys "did to" girls and girls fought against.

Kids in third grade talk about kisses - with hope, with disgust.  Friends share with me that third grade is when they had their first kiss.  We played truth or dare in those tires, but I somehow avoided the kissing dares.  Maybe I only ever took truth?

I didn't kiss a boy until seventh grade when my friend's birthday activities suddenly morphed into "spin the bottle" and "seven minutes in heaven" (go in the closet with a boy and...what? ).  I can still see the "Rock the Casbah" video playing, smell the musty basement.  As we tentatively approached kissing games, we were always prepared to break into "pass the balloon" or "freeze dance" at the sound of parents' footsteps on stairs.  I was intrigued by boys but still freaked out by kissing.  At that point it was more about insecurity: I was pretty sure I'd do it wrong and people would giggle about me when I wasn't around.  I felt that way about most things by 7th grade.  It didn't help that we all had braces that clinked together and I was susceptible to cold sores that were forever erupting across my top lip, rendering me the leper at a kissing game.  At the time I didn't realize that pressure was one of the triggers for cold sores and I played the french horn (cold metal mouthpiece pushing into mouth with braces cutting from the inside).  Even the pressure of awkward teenage kisses probably triggered further eruptions.  I was cold-sore free when I was told to go in the closet with Jeff V, a sweet boy who towered above me.  It was my first french kiss and it wasn't delicious, it wasn't terrible.  He smelled like Polo cologne.  I cricked my neck.

My first positive memory of kissing doesn't come until the summer after 8th grade when Dave Mack invited me to spend a weekend at his family's beach house on Long Beach Island.  They were exotic, the Mack family - rich like I'd never experienced, sophisticated, snobby.  They had a chef and a housekeeper.  They had two houses and still vacationed in Europe.  They took me to a French restaurant and a Broadway show.  The boys did real drugs and drove a convertible Cabriolet.  They lived on a lake.

Dave was 17.  I was 14.  While his older brothers and their super-chic girlfriends did drugs around a campfire on the beach, I walked away across the dark sand, scared of pot, embarrassed at my prudishness.  Dave followed.  We ended up under a deserted house on stilts, me crying that I felt left out, he telling me he'd rather be with me than smoke weed, rather be with me than anything.  He kissed me and it was a new kind of kiss.  Gentle, confident: he had kissed before.  We lay back in the cool sand for hours just kissing, light touching, my whole body coming alive.  Later that night, back at the beach house, there was a light tap on the door of the room I shared with his brother's girlfriend and as if prearranged, Dave was suddenly in my room and Beth was off to Eric's room.  The dreamy kissing continued, some more touching, still sweet, innocent, but escalating.  I was short of breath.  I didn't know where it was going, how I would stop it.

Boom.  His German military father threw open the door and barked (in German) for the boys to get back to bed.  I was humiliated.  I pulled down my pajama shirt.  The next morning, scary German father roused Dave at 5am and screamed at him, forced him to run up and down the beach until he threw up in the sand.  That relationship was done by the end of summer, but not before I'd given in and started smoking pot with them and even watched them do cocaine.  Disoriented from the marijuana, desperate to fit in, the sexual exploration was pushed further than I wanted.  But I got out intact.  I scared me off drugs for years.

I haven't talked to my daughter about kissing.  I'm not opposed to it, but I tend to let her take the lead and on this subject, she is not leading.  We don't talk about boyfriends or girlfriends except in the context of adults we know - ie, "that's your uncle's girlfriend" or "those two were girlfriends but now they're going to be each other's wives."  She knows the basics of procreation, including some modern concepts since our gay friends have a sperm donor and she had a lot of questions about the technical aspect of that.  Her closing line after I explained a sperm bank was: "A cup of sperm...that's a weird present!"  Sure is, my dear, unless you've ordered it.  And if anyone ever gives you one, call the police.

I actually have issues with parents who like to use adolescent terminology with little kids.  It's rampant, parents asking first graders, "Is he your boyfriend?" and putting together little montages of cute little boys and girls handing each other roses to romantic pop songs.  The Nickelodeon shows with their strange adultification of young kids, the eight-year-old boy character saying "she's hot" about a grown woman.  I think it's the heteronormative stuff that bums me out so much.  How rare it still is for someone to say, "Do you have a boyfriend or a girlfriend?"  But even beyond that, let them be.  They don't need to know about all this stuff yet.  They're kids.  That said, S loves Katy Perry and half her songs are about blackouts and menage-a-trois, so... 

One thing I notice being so involved in S's school is that children develop at different paces in every arena.  Academically, socially, physically and certainly in terms of awareness of romance, attraction, even sex.  By third grade, I knew where Jason Zappa was at every moment of every day.  I cared more about whether he was laughing at a joke I made than anyone else in the room.  I made him cards with penguins on them because I heard he liked penguins.  I didn't want to kiss him but I did want to be the most important person to him.  I wanted him to love me.  I loved him.  S seems not to have any of that yet.  With girls or boys.  She cares for her friends, but no one seems to rise above, no one seems to torture her, she doesn't look for approval from anyone or talk about them disproportionately just to hear the sound of their name.  Yet.

In the car the other day, a friend's five-year-old son was telling us about how he had another life before this one and he was married and had kids and lived in New York City and his parents were called Fred and Martha.  This kid is fascinating, takes fantasy to a level I've never experienced, speaks with such authority I find myself wondering if past lives are maybe a real thing.

"So when you married Lucille, did you guys have to kiss?" his mom asks.
"Yep," he says.
"Was it ok or kind of gross?"
"It was ok.  Because we had to kiss to be married."
"Oh."

His mom and I exchange rear view mirror glances - this is awesome.  Then it occurs to me, this is an opportunity.

"What do you think about that, S?" I ask.
"I don't know," she answers.
"Do you think about kissing sometimes?" Ugh, that was clunky.
"I don't care," she says, not answering the question.
"But, um, do kids talk about kissing in your class?"
"I don't know," she is shut down. "I don't care."
After a silence, she changes the subject to the upcoming seafood fest and whether she can have lobster, oysters, and calimari.  She feels romantic love for seafood.

Later, I say to my friend over a glass of wine, "She's really not interested at all.  And at that age I was definitely thinking about boys.  What do you think it means?"
"I think she doth protest too much," my friend says.  "What I heard was that she didn't want to talk about it with you.  I think those conversations are going on out of your hearing."
I want to protest too much.  I realize I don't want that to be true.  I want her to tell me about her longings, confusing feelings, desires, dreams.  And she does, with some.  But I didn't tell my mom when I started having those kind of feelings, that's for sure.  And though I am close to my one daughter in a unique and heart-wrenching way, she is not supposed to want to talk to me about everything.  She is supposed to hold some things for herself.

I compile a list of phone numbers and email addresses of the adults in our lives that she adores - there are many - and decide that one of these days, I'll hand it to her and say, offhandedly, "These are all people you can call if you ever need to talk about something and I'm not who you want to talk to."  I just want to make sure she can talk to someone trustworthy.  It doesn't have to be me.  I want her to talk to someone older, someone with perspective not so she won't kiss or love or explore, but so that she will know what consensual is and what it isn't.  So she will open herself only as much as she wants to at each moment.  And kissing will be a portal to pleasure whenever her lips first touch those of someone she loves. 

Older Friends

S and I are at the farmers' market with a friend and her two kids - a three-year-old daughter and a five-year-old son.  "Little kids."  S is great with little kids.  My mommy friend and I plop down on a patch of grass, break into the strawberries, and watch them crawl around in circles, growling, pouncing.

"We're jaguars!" the five year old calls out.

"We have to pass jaguar tests to prove we know how to hunt!" yells S, fully engrossed in the fantasy play she often eschews these days for baseball, board games, boogie boarding.  (The three "b"s).  S is usually holding a glove or other sports equipment these days; she's obsessed with baseball.  Baseball renders her serious.  She can tell you Mike Trout's stats and explain why you shouldn't bunt with two strikes.  There's something sweet and nostalgic about seeing her crawling around with younger kids, hearing her giggle as she pounces.  She's still part little kid, even as she surprises me with her insight and intellect, her growing interests and dismissal of "little kid things."

We had set up near the skate park on purpose, thinking the five year old boy would enjoy watching the "big kids" do their tricks.  For a while our kids are too involved in the jaguar training to even notice the growing skateboard crew, but when I look up from the strawberries, I notice S staring over.  I follow her look.

"Hey isn't that...?"
S nods.  "It's N."
"Wow.  He looks giant," I say.  I can't help it.  In his black skinny jeans and oversized t-shirt, his hat on backwards (no helmet, dammit), this is a big kid.  How can this be my baby's buddy?  How can this be another third grader?  I glance over at Sadie.  She is a big kid too.  N, at the top of the ramp, sees us.  S waves, a cool wave, one of those "what's up" half-waves.  An teenage wave.  N throws the same gesture back, with a "hey." They are cool.

I am not cool.  I yell out, "Hi N!  We haven't seen you in so long!  How's your summer?"
He gives me a slight nod, even cooler than the wave, and then flies down a ramp and up the other side.  I realize I have embarrassed him.  An old lady too happy to see him.  A liability.  I look around for his mother, his grandmother, anyone I recognize.  I realize he's there with a pack of teenage boys from his neighborhood.  I always walked to the park untethered the summer before third grade, but that was suburban New Jersey in the 70s.  This is LA in 2012.  I am so not ready for this.

N falls as he does a trick (how I wish I had the authority to make him put on a helmet) and immediately looks over at S to see if she's noticed.  She is as cool as he is.  How do they already know how to do this?  The five-year-old boy and his three-year-old sister have both stopped with the jaguar and are staring in wonder at N.
The five year old asks, "You know him?"
S says, "Yeah.  He's in my class at school."
My mom friend turns to me, "He's in her class?"
I nod and say quietly, "Scary, right?"
My quietly is never quiet enough.  S turns, "Why'd you say it's scary?"
"Oh, sorry.  I just mean it's a little funny as a mom to see you all growing up so fast."  I leaned down to nuzzle her cropped hair.  "And he should be wearing a helmet."
"Mom."  I note that she looks back toward the skate park to see if that was noticed.
We pack up and head out.  N half-watches to see if S is watching.  The little ones stare at him in wonder, while S walks ahead, not looking back.  Is she aware she's being eyed?  Is she ignoring on purpose?  Am I prepared for this new phase of coolness at all?

Later that day we hang with another girl from her class and while they practice diving, I tell her mother about the experience (making sure they're far enough away, underwater even), "I mean, here's an eight year old boy hanging out unsupervised with teenage boys, in a skate park.  There is no way that he isn't hearing certain things, and if I were him, I'd be psyched to be the one to pass them on to our wide-eyed little ones."  She cringes, I cringe.  We know it's coming.  "I just want to make sure that the first time they hear about...you know...blow jobs, they run the information by us."

I'm pretty sure I ruined her day.  But I remember third grade.  I remember truth or dare games deep in the cloister of the tire playground.  I remember taking my cute ceramic puppy and sitting it on top of Jason Zappa's model of the empire state building and when the building point went into the hole on the bottom of the puppy, a group of boys cracking up and implying...I didn't get it.  What did they mean I wanted Jason to put it inside me?  Put what and what?  Except I kind of got it.  And I was humiliated.  I still get hot in the cheeks when I remember that moment.

I am not a prude and I know this is all natural development.  I also know that LA in 2012 isn't New Jersey in the 70s.  These are really good kids.  And all this is coming.

Counting down...

I never read the book Whatever I need to know I learned in Kindergarten or whatever the heck it's called.  I think I've pretty much gotten the gist from the name alone, never mind that period when it first came out and co-workers at temp jobs would quote it incessantly - "share your crayons, play fair, eat a good snack" - cute, very cute.  I remember isolated events from kindergarten.  They mostly involve my earliest nemesis, Eddie Deeb.  I remember Eddie chasing me under a table and kissing me, then pinning me down on a couch at a friend's birthday party as soon as the dad left the room.  He was creepy and aggressive with the early energy of a frat boy with bad boundaries.  I admit to being thrilled when someone posted pictures from our 20th high school reunion and his cute kid chunky had turned to flab and he had a strange baldness pattern I'd never seen before.  Karma.

I occasionally catch a whiff in a stranger's perfume of my first grade teacher, Mrs. Hudson, who was tall and black and always had on a great 70s matching outfit and I am transported back.  First grade feels like fantasy camp.  I have a strong memory of making a paper-mache koala bear for a project on Australia and randomly studying Lapland in second grade.

But third grade?  I remember third grade.  I remember the cliques, the social pressures, the crushes, the humiliations.  I remember realizing in third grade that school mattered and that these were people I was potentially going to have to deal with for a long time.  I remember learning cursive and feeling the sides of my brain click together.  I remember thinking the cool jocks, Amy Loder and Patricia Frazier, were laughing when I couldn't climb the rope to the ceiling of the multi-purpose room.  Third grade is when people were in or out, when alliances shifted, when I began to feel sadness, lonely, left out.  Third grade is when our parents would drop us off somewhere for a little while, then pick us up.  When we began to touch our toes into an independence that was delicious and scary and non-refundable.

In five days my daughter begins third grade.  She is only doesn't turn eight until the end of October and in this era of ubiquitous red-shirting, is younger than most of her classmates.  She just lost her first few teeth this summer and while at the top of her class academically, she is developmentally young.  I don't think she's had a real crush yet.  When the cool boy who skateboarded and raced BMX bikes and was over a year older than her moved in and started gifting her barrettes and stuff animals, I waited to feel her early crush energy.  Didn't feel it.  Might she be hiding it from mom?  Possible.  But some kids just don't feel it so early.  I was eying Jason Zappa across the room long before third grade.  My husband doesn't remember registering girls til middle school.  This is one of those areas where I long for my daughter to take after him.

I watched the third graders last year, even led a community circle group to help them build a strong team and learn to listen to each other and solve conflicts.  It was not easy.  Each child was a massive bird's nest of feelings and longings and confusing growth spurts and yes, hormones.  Some of the girls wore their hair long and let it fall in their faces as they read sophisticated novels and snorted at the antics of boy trying to annoy/attract them.  The developmental age range was stunning.  The glimpses of impending adolescents popped out in attitudes and insecurities.  This was no sweet little second grade.

Lying in bed last night, I asked S how she felt about starting third grade (and surreptitiously recorded it on my phone):
- I'm nervous.   Something terrible could happen.  I mean, I don't think anything terrible will, but it could.
- What could happen that is terrible?
- Just like, you don't know what could happen.  I mean, anything could happen.  Well, maybe not anything...maybe I'm taking that I little too far.
(I laugh, she continues)
- But still, a lot of things could happen.
- Like what?
- I don't know (silly tremble in her voice)
- Okay.
- Like, um, I don't know.
- It's exciting though too, huh?
- I know it is.
- You're going to learn how to write in cursive.
- I'm excited about that.
- And there's a whole wall in the classroom for your math.  And you'll probably do a lot of science.
- I love science.

We grow quiet after that, perhaps thinking about how we both find science captivating, though while the fact that there is so much still unknown seems to make her feel powerful, it leaves me a little befuddled.  Perhaps it's harder at 41 than at 7 to accept how little you actually know.  It feels like I should have a few more answers by now.

This blog will chronicle the third grade year of a girl on the west side of Los Angeles, growing up with a tv writer dad, a blogging therapist school activist of a mother, and a cultural landscape vastly different from the one I knew.  Juxtaposing it with my own third grade year, perhaps we'll learn something about 1979 vs 2012, about growing up on the east coast vs the west, about how technology affects the year about which teachers universally say, "oh that's the big one."  Everyone seems to agree that third grade is the major year when social rules change, academics leap forward, the achievement gap almost instantly widens, and cute little second graders begin to show deeper signs of the people they will be in the world.  I remember terrible things happening (that in retrospect weren't so terrible) and I watch my sweet little daughter falling asleep with thumb in mouth and lamby in hand and breathe through the worry.  She is ready for third grade.  I am ready for third grade.  Or are we?  Either way, here we go.