And look! The first post ever I wrote for the FE site. T. was four, and L.--how could it be? L. was only seven years old. Monday will be my last day here, so it seems fitting to put up my first post ever for my second-to-last-post.

Happy weekend!

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If you are a parent, or soon-to-be one, or will be one in the future, this has happened, or will happen to you one day:

You are standing in line at your local food store, as I was last week. Your just-turned four year-old is twisting and turning on her heels in the checkout line, singing in her sweet, slightly off-key voice and stopping every now and then to give your legs a squeeze and to pipe up, in her little voice, Mama I love you! The people around you smile to themselves as they listen to you, any anxieties they might have about the speed of the checkout clerk shelved temporarily as they enjoy the sweetness that follows your daughter everywhere she goes. An older woman in front of you—maybe in her upper 60s, or lower 70s, looks down fondly on the two of you and then reaches out to pat you gently on your arm.

Treasure her now while you can, she says, perhaps looking at you wistfully and knowingly over her bifocals. They grow up so fast!

I always smile right back when I hear this and I tell them I know, oh I certainly do know all about this, even though my daughter is four and my son--my first baby, the one who made me a mother--is now a contrary seven-year old, all loose teeth and arms and legs at right angles.

This one was always a favorite of mine, even if I'd forgotten I'd written it, actually, until just the other day!

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A blogger friend of mine wrote the other day about a recent study out there claiming that parenthood does not, in fact, bring joy and fulfillment,  that children are a source of misery and stress, and that raising them is a "lifelong challenge to your mental health." Where the data for this study came from is anyone's guess, actually, but I thought a lot about it yesterday--and about my blogger friend's counterpost as I sat during morning remarks at the faculty "development" workshops I attended. (I developed many thoughts during these workshops, so it was all good--mission accomplished.) I tend to think about my kids a lot when I'm at these workshops, because they're held three times/year in the same room in the same building. The first one I ever attended was when T. was a small baby, and every two hours I excused myself to go into the over-air-conditioned restroom to pump milk. I'd sit on the toilet seat with the pump attached to me and listen thoughtfully to the whirr-whirr and wonder what on earth I was doing there, perched on a toilet lid, pumping milk in a cramped stall.

Each Monday I take both kids to T.’s gymnastics class. We get there about 25 minutes early and T. uses the time before her class to work on her homework. L. spends most of his time on his beloved iPod, despite my best efforts. There is no WiFi at gymnastics (why?), but we can usually poach off free WiFi from a nearby business. Usually. This Monday, though, for reasons we couldn't understand, L.’s iPod would not pick up the WiFi, while mine did.

This was what Scott and I call a setback. We started using that term years ago, mainly to lighten the mood whenever L. encountered one of them. Setbacks have never been good, and L. depends on things going just the way he expects them to go. When all is well in his world, and he’s well-fed, content, and well-rested, he has learned to move through setbacks much better than in the old days, when one could derail him for hours. But things have been rocky lately and he is even more dependent on things being just so.

And they weren’t just so on Monday. I told L. I would let him have my iPod when I was done helping T. with her math, but this wasn’t enough. He was extremely frustrated with the situation; what was supposed to be working wasn’t. He went around and around about it while I tried to deflect him with calm, patient words.

Then I noticed a mom across from us making a raised eyebrow face in our direction. Here it comes, I thought.

“There isn’t actually any WiFi here,” she said.

I gave her a thin smile. “We can usually get it,” I told her. “But it’s not working right today.”

The lady fixed a look on L., who was still venting about the lack of WiFi. “There isn’t actually any WiFi here,” she said again. “So there’s no use getting mad.”

I don't often rant about a book I don't like because, as a writer, a part of me is always sensitive to the feelings of the person who wrote the book, even if I will never meet them, and they will never read my rant.  But I've been bothered by a book I finished this past weekend and sometimes when things bother me, they stay with me longer then they should--writing about them is often the only way to send them packing.

A few weeks ago a friend asked me whether I'd read this book by Jodi Picoult. I hadn't read any book by Picoult, actually, so I told her no. The particular book my friend asked about is about a young man with Asperger's, who ends up charged with a murder. I just wondered what you'd think about it, my friend said casually, in a way that implied that there would be something to think about.

So last week I stopped by the library and checked out the book. I read it in only a few sittings, but I found my desire to keep reading it waning each time I opened the book. 

Saturday was a rocky sort of day, in ways we hadn't seen in awhile, and so had been lulled into complacency. It started out rocky for different reasons, but peaked when later that afternoon, for a frightening twenty minutes I couldn't find L. in our Target store--not because he had absent-mindedly wandered away but--and this is the terrifying part--he walked away from me in a fit of anger while I was checking out, and disappeared into the yawning behemoth that is any Target store. One minute he was in line behing me kicking me in the shins, and the next he was gone. It is one thing, I quickly realized, to lose your child for a few minutes by accident (been there--no fun), and quite another to have them lose you--on purpose. Because you can't just pick up your 11-year old and carry him out of the store, the way you could when he was three, or even six. Because the older they get, the angrier you get when they pull a stunt like that, and the anger is scary, too. Because I know that one day, when L. is old enough, he could just walk away, and there's nothing we could do about it.

But we're not there yet; he's not allowed to just walk away and disappear.

And he's not allowed to imagine I wouldn't miss him, or not care.

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L. got a cool NASA calendar for Christmas. But, when it came time for me to sit down and update our family calendar, I realized that we didn't have a new 2012 one. We keep our family calendar hanging in the kitchen, where we can all see it, and add/amend it as needed. I went on a search for a new 2012 calendar, and found L.'s NASA one buried under some books on top of his dresser.

"Hey L.," I said. "Would it be okay if we used your NASA calendar as our family calendar?

"Sure!" L. said generously.

Before hanging it up, I flipped through the pages to see the photos. I thought about the blank expanse of months; the square, white blocks of space that would, increasingly, be filled up with events, appointments, reminders, teacher workdays, in the days, weeks, and months to come.

When I got to December I stopped.

Someone--L.--had already written something in the block for the 21st. My heart did a flip-flop when I saw it.

The End of the World.

I don't know how to convince L. that it won't happen; that the world won't come grinding (or exploding) to an end on that day, at some particular hour.  For every fact I offer, L. has a counter-fact; for every science-based website I send his way, he finds another discrediting it. The world won't end in 2012, I tell him, over and over again. At least, I hope it won't. But if it does, just look at that great expanse of time we have: months and months of neat, square blocks to fill.

Carpe diem.

I've shifted the time I swim laps at the pool from lunchtime (around noon) to 8:00 am. While others might shudder at the thought of jumping into a lukewarm pool at 7:45 or 8:00 on these wintry dark mornings, I like it. I hate feeling groggy, and a brisk swim workout first thing certainly gets my blood flowing. When I used to swim at noon, I found myself the youngest at the pool, surrounded in the locker room by elderly, white-haired ladies, all congregating there for a water aerobics class. Now that I go in the mornings, I find myself the oldest woman in the locker room, surrounded by girls from the local high school swim team.  The locker room always smells like Suave shampoo and hairspray. They must get to the pool by 7:00, because they leave shortly after 7:30 to make it into school by 8:00. They are wide awake and chatty, and they stand in front of the big mirrors blow drying their hair, applying makeup, discussing skin problems and hair lengths, and talking about their parents.

"My dad said my jeans were too tight," one girl said to her friend yesterday morning. "He said they were either too tight, or I'd gained weight."

I snuck a look out of the corner of my eyes while pulling my towel and swim goggles from my bag. The girl was pretty and dark-haired, with curvy hips that she was still growing into. 

"Do you think my jeans are make-you-fat tight, or looking-good tight?" the girl asked hesitantly and her friend set down her round brush and swiveled around to take a look, sizing her up.

"They are definitely looking-good tight," she said. 

That's what probably worried her dad, I thought. Those looking-good jeans might have looked too good for his taste.

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In my continued efforts to cheer up T. (she stayed home from school on Monday) I came home from work and we made these cupcakes, and T. licked the bowl clean. By 5:15 the kitchen smelled heavenly. At 5:30 a friend came by to check up on us. She sniffed the air. "Your house smells divine," she said. Then,

"How's T.?"

"How's Scott?"

"How's Willa?"

"How are you?"

We're all in recovery mode around here. My bronchitis is almost all cleared up, Willa got her stitches out yesterday, and T. soldiers on, waiting for the hives to dissapear. Scott tells me Willa was very brave at the vet. She has to wear her snazzy special collar for another week, just to make sure she leaves the incision site alone. But she is so much happier now that she's pain-free and on the way to becoming fully mobile again. We didn't have any doubts about whether she needed the surgery, but if we'd had even just one tiny niggling one, it would have vanished now that we see what a difference it has made. 

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On Thursday the kids and I pulled up in the driveway and found a young squirrel dragging its hind feet. I had seen him earlier in the day, but when I went to track down a box to put him in, he had disappeared. When we came home there he was, unnaturally still despite our presence, bright-eyed, but because of fear and pain.

Scott left town on Tuesday to fly to Texas for his grandmother's funeral, leaving me to solo parent for a few days. After a few days alone with the kids, I am ready to kneel down and worship single parents everywhere--I mean those truly single parents, who take care of their kids 24/7 365 days/year. I've been sick with bronchitis all week, trying to grade final exams, put together end-of-semester reports, tend to our still-invalid dog and the rest of our menagerie, AND recover/learn enough algebra skills to help L. with his homework, and have felt, mostly, barely human.

But I'm not here to whine and complain. It's Friday, after all.

My husband's grandmother passed away this weekend. It's not my story to tell, so I won't tell it here, but we walked around sad and heavy-feeling all weekend and everything around us felt very fragile and impermanent, the way it does when a death touches you so closely.

Yet life itself is fragile and impermanent--there's no getting around it. We learn this early on, and bury this knoweldge deep inside, where we don't have to look at it everyday. A loss reminds us of this fact, even when we're feeling our most confident, and healthy, and powerful.

I'm reposting a piece I wrote last December, after Scott's Nana visited us for a family holiday gathering.

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This past weekend we hosted the annual family Christmas gathering for Scott's side of the family, and we were lucky enough to have Scott's grandmother come from Texas to share in the festivities. She and Scott's mom arrived late on Friday night, long after the kids had gone to bed. The next morning, I was in the kitchen brewing coffee and chatting with Scott's Nana when L. came downstairs, still in his pajamas, excited to see her. He went straight to where she was seated at the kitchen table and gave her the sweetest, most sincere hug in the world--a body melting hug, not the usual stiff, face-turned-away hug he customarily responds with when asked for one.

In fact, I may be biased, but I don't think, that whole weekend long, anyone gave her a more sincere, sweeter, warmer hug than he had given her that morning. And I was so grateful I'd been there to witness it., even if no one else had.