“Christmas Lullaby,” by Jason Robert Brown, eavesdropped after dinner early December last year. [Ed note: Once you start the video, double-clicking the image expands it to full screen, a decidedly mixed blessing since then you get more jostled by my improv'ed lo-tech iPhone cinematography.]
I couldn’t help but re-run this sweet gem which I first posted a year ago. Still sweet, still–with the exception of the diapers on the boy–true. Love to all who reads and listens here.
We were moving from books ‘n milk to the brushing of the teeth, stations two and three of a five-station, post-dinner nightly journey that ends with lullabies in bed and, for the elder and more insomniac of the pair, rambling conversations about the larger questions of life.
All this rhythm and ritual has been road-tested by years of parenting and a statistically significant number of controlled experiments (no ritual? bedlam!). It’s no simple matter, to ease their young bodies and minds from the hurly-burly of the day into the waiting arms of Morpheus. Before, I would never have put such stock in this kind of stuff–in fact, I would have considered it far more “routine” than “ritual,” and derided it. No longer. I’ve learned.
I had just finished reading Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen to the boychild whilst the girlchild bore a hole in page after page of her latest American Girl historical yarn. We were gathering our things, and the boychild was already heading into the bathroom on Mama’s back. I had been thinking something as I was reading Night Kitchen. I’m not sure what led me to it, but I made the judgement call that his older sister was old enough to hear a little something about the slings and arrows that fly around the books they read.
Above, what I ate for dinner, oh, a number of weeks back. A favorite meal. Stir-fried tofu, sauteed purple onions, roasted pine nuts, stir fried kale. Probably olive oil, some Spike and other seasonings, probably a dash of sesame oil, a squirt of Bragg’s Liquid Amino Acids, and a shake of toasted sesame seeds. Dinner of tree-hugging vegetarians.
It’s in a kid’s bowl, because for reasons even I can’t explain, I still hold out hope that they’ll be enticed. There are a gazillion ways parents successfully lure their kids into healthy eating habits, and most of those are assayed by people with more patience and tenacity than my beloved and I, more willing to stay up late and read nifty books and blogs about how to induce your kid into healthy eating habits (there are scads of ‘em). I did listen to Laurie David (environmental champion, producer of the huge documentary An Inconvenient Truth, and advocate for green and mindful eatery) break it down simply, thus: she decides what to bring to the table, her kids decide how much they’ll eat. That was when her daughters were younger and in the inducement age. Now that they’re teenagers, they’re more vegan and locavore than their mom. Hope springs eternal.
I figure we might get there. But in the never-ending parental steeple chase, you can get up over only so many hurdles, and after everything else (cleaning up after themselves! making creative stuff in some hands-on activity instead of staring at a screen of some sort! engaging in sincere conflict resolution after the inevitable fights do happen!) the tired ol’ mares among us will just have to rear up and trot around that last, one hurdle too many. Working some kind of miracle mojo and conjuring fantabulously non-picky, adventuresome eaters (particularly when a sucrose product bribe is just plain off the table, literally and figuratively) is smply one of those parental hurdles we just gave up on clearing. At least thus far. We’re only seven years into this gig, any thing could happen.
Halloween: not just for kids. As any student of Bakhtin or Butler will tell you, grown-ups get a lot out of dressing up, too. For many years, since the kiddles became of trick-or-treating age, I’ve dressed up as a Fred MacMurrayesque dad. Moustache, tie, plastic pipe, sweater, newspaper under my arm, slippers. (Fred would have been cleanshaven, but I couldn’t very well walk around simply looking like a mannish lesbian, could I? I mean, where’s the theatricality in that?)
Not realizing the careful periodization in the 1950s, a straight woman friend, mom of one of my daughter’s chums, thought maybe my dad outfit might be improved by rigging up a TV with a sports game on it somehow extended in front of me, maybe with a bowl of chips affixed to one wrist and a beer to the other. At the time we were talking, her husband was off at a day-long 49er’s game (if you factor in the generous tailgating time built in pre-game) while she was saddled with both kids: who’s to blame her for veering toward the Archie Bunkeresque?
A rolling Barcalounger would have really been the only proper way to execute this concept, but then how would I be motivated to get up and reposition it from house to house? The kids are too little yet to be able to push me in a wheeled Barcalounger. You can see the challenge.
One sad year I was a walking ballot, with the exact language of Proposition 8 written out on one side, and the line-up of presidential choices on the other. Suggested votes “X’ed” in, natch. (In the fog of the intervening years, the kids now have it that I was one of the sycophantic playing cards in service to the Queen of Hearts in Alice’s Wonderland. All in all, I felt just about as effectual.)
Window watcher, Berkeley, CA.
The window he’s looking out is the back door, not the front. We live in Berkeley, CA (better known, perhaps, as “Berzerkeley” or “The People’s Republic of Berkeley”) and we’ve seen stilt walkers, solitary harmonica players, muttering grocery cart pushers, cell phone-clutching subway-bound commuters, skateboard riders, and a three-legged neighbor dog stroll, roll, hustle, and lope east and west in front of our house. Still, all the real action takes place out the back window.
Out back is where the shared yard is, through which his cousins daily pass en route to their home at the north of the lot; out back is where his kind, endlessly fascinating neighbor friend (my own friend, of over 20 years) lives in the building to the east; out back is where most of his and his sister’s adventures unfold: on the grass, under the bushes, on the trampoline (and under it), in the hammock, around the veggie bed, and on the chalk drawing-bedecked concrete between two of the houses.
Lake Merritt Boat House, Oakland, CA
Here’s something to listen to as you read. (One day I’ll figure how to embed. I really will. For now, open in a new window & come back, eh? DianeCu has inspired me how to go ahead slice the YouTube page to the operable part of the music player, sans big visual. Here I was waiting to figure out how to do my own pretty media bar thingy. Cheers, Mother of Invention! And somebody tell me if I just ran afoul of YouTube’s link policy so I don’t bite the hand that’s feeding me the music! Which is a song of the same title as this post, from The Story‘s 1993 The Angel in the House.)
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The author (far left), pleased as punch to be posing with (l-r) KALW San Francisco City Visions producer Lisa Denenmark, NCLR Executive Director Kate Kendell, City Visions host Joseph Pace, and Equality California Marriage Equality & Coalition Strategies Director Andrea Shorter, following the July 11, 2011 show “What’s Next for the Marriage Equality Movement in CA?” (Photo credit: Keiko Lane)
Radio
The photo above is visual punctuation on a really nifty event: I had the amazing opportunity a week ago to talk with KALW’s City Visions host Joseph Pace about the marriage equality movement in California alongside two of the smartest, most consequential women you’re going to find on the issue: NCLR’s Kate Kendell and EQCA’s Andrea Shorter. (I know, right? Pinch me! Wait! Don’t do that: it would just hurt.)
Producer Lisa Denenmark wanted me to speak to the big picture cultural matters that the issue brings up, and provide a first person and parental viewpoint to flesh out the top-notch legal and tactical vantage points provided by Kate Kendell and Andrea Shorter. So lord love me I did.
Voting open 'til Feb 19, 2012.
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Intrepid campers, Olema, CA.
We took a camping trip a few weekends back. A micro-trip: one overnight, left town Saturday afternoon after work, came back Sunday night. Camped out in the brother-in-law’s camper van. Stayed in one of those commercial RV park dealies, because of course the whole thing was spur-of-the moment and nothing at a state campground was free. At least in our state. But lord love us we went.
The beloved and I were both in foul states of mind, en route. Stressed, sad. Neither of us has made appreciable headway in our respective work/life arm wrestling matches. Balance, we each feel confident, is on the horizon. But at the moment the horizon line remains tipped.
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