Honey

He showed it to me while I was on the phone. Opened his hand, and there it was.

"I caught her."

He's almost 10. "She" was a bumblebee.

I thought to wonder why a bee, why his hand. Why holding, and how. But I was on the phone. We are nature people in this house, to the degree that our lifestyles afford it. We like creatures. It was pretty. I figured it was some species he had read about, that he identified as safe.

Later, I called him in from outside. He was sitting by the mailbox. On the ground. Dumbfounded "she stung me! She'll die. It hurts. It itches, too."

I said something like, "what did you think it would do?"

Later, I ribbed him further. Gave him a little grief about the bee, carrying it around like that. That just 'cuz it's furry doesn't make it a pet.

He said, "I found her on some plants at school. I carried her home on my shirt. I thought she was sick. She just stayed there. I talked to her. I told her I was going to make her better, but then she stung me. Now she will die. I killed her."

It was a leap of reasoning, a stumble of guilt.

"I thought, if she was sick, that maybe I couldn't make her better. That maybe she would have to be put out of her misery. And then? It looks like I killed her anyway. They can't live after they lose their stingers. I put her on a rose bush to die."

He sobbed. He lay his head on my lap and sobbed. That big, too-smart, eye-rolling, foot-stomping, put-upon boy broke down.

"Did she have a name?"

"Honey," his voice broke on the "-ney."

I thought of the old lady and the snake, the turtle and the scorpion. Those stories of the wounded and dangerous, made well, only to act out their nature.

He knew she was a bee when he brought her here.

"Maybe she knew, Bass. Maybe she wanted to thank you and offered her the only strong thing she had - the last bit of her 'voice.' She gave you her strength, so she could give up."

"You think so, Mom?"

Yes.

Game 3

OK - so that other post, that football post...that post was, like, four hours ago.

And the kids came home and I fed them hotdogs and we left and I brought bug spray for the coaches - but I was late, so the cheerleaders got it.

And the sky darkened.

And it started to sprinkle. And the tens of people in the stands (on a night threatening rain, on a Thursday night because of high holy days tomorrow, on waterlogged fields.. many just don't come out) huddled closer and brought out umbrellas.

Except I had none. Because I am That Kind of Mom.

And Annabeth stood with the cheerleaders and cheered. And Sebastian ran around with some kids. And Patrick huddled close and asked loud questions, "can they strangle each other in football? Why is that target on the side? What do they get when they finally hit the target?"

And it rained more.

And it became a soaking rain. So I gave Mike-my-husband's-colleague back his umbrella (Mike was in full foul weather gear. AND had the umbrella.) And I gathered up Patrick. And I gathered up Annabeth. And...

...Sebastian was nowhere.

It was as if, in this small stadium, he had *poof* disappeared.

And I wandered and it rained and it poured and it was buckets of rain from the sky and I was, quite literally, soaked.

My two I had huddled under awnings with Beth and Sarah, also colleagues of my husbands, and I looked.

And my looking got frantic and I got wetter. And the there was nothing left to absorb it, so the water rolled off me in rivulets and rivers. And I yelled a little.

And the headmaster's wife Martha looked. And Mike-the-upper-school-head called out and offered to help, too.

And I got a little frantic.

And two facilities guys offered to help.

And then - he was found.

On the far far edge of the dark parking lot in the pouring rain. After 35 minutes of frantic looking. Where he shouldn't have been, out beyond the lights.

And he was chasing a girl. The blue soaked to black and the hair slicked dark. And he was laughing. With other boys and girls (in appropriate weather gear). Chasing. Tossing a ball. Laughing.

And then, whining.

"Really, Mom? I can't stay? Why can't we stay?"

We are cold. We are wet. We are tired. I yelled. I cried a little bitty bit. Maybe out of frustration. Maybe, for a second, I was actually scared.

We are in hot baths now.

And we are also, clearly, part of some sort of community. And that, is in fact, what it's about.

In two weeks is the next home game. I think I'll try again then to figure out the football part.

Football

As a child , there was no football. I was the third girl, fourth child. Mom was raising us alone and given to espousing about the overemphasis of sport in our culture. I don't recall sports ever being on the TV - unless it was figure skating during the Olympics.

It is possible that I had a passing awareness of football- but it was never on the TV, and no one I knew personally - prior to about age 10 - played it.

At then at ten, I decided to become a cheerleader. It was the key to something, I thought. Belonging, maybe. Popularity, certainly. No question the key to wearing a very fun uniform and dancing around with friends wearing the same.

Mom made the uniform. It was red, lined with white. A vest, a short circle skirt, bloomers. The vest had LIONS ironed down the left side. The bloomers said, "CATHY," all-caps, san-serif, across-the-butt. The socks were white knee socks. The shoes, saddle. The shoepolish, white, in a bottle with sponge on top so you could paint away scuffs and get fussed at for dripping on the carpet.

After a year, Mom urged me to quit. Something about her perception of cheerleaders as tarty, or shallow. And pregnant, which was a weird fear to me at the time. Only years later did I realize how much of her protest was the wincing pain of watching me humiliate myself each week.

As a leader-of-cheers, I was horrible. I couldn't chant and clap and stomp at the same time, or, apparently, at alternating times. And I had no idea what was going on on the field. I would forget to watch the instructor and would continue staring ope-mouthed trying to interpret the actions on the field while everyone else bounced to their feet for the next cheer. I could only do spirit fingers with my right hand.

"We're BIG b-i-g and we're BAD b-a-d and we're BOSS b-o-s-s-b-o-s-s BOSS"

I tangled up the spelling, and my siblings mocked me for it.

I loved the uniform. L-o-v-e-d it. The bloomers, the way the circle twirled, the red. The matching ribbons in my hair. Flipping up my skirt to show my (yes, somewhat tarty) name-festooned bottom. That shoe polish. All of it.

But it was not sustainable. We moved, quit. And even I knew I couldn't try out in Florida, where I was suddenly a middle-schooler, and where, as soon as I said, "oh, I used to cheer in Georgia.." friends made it clear that they thought this might mean I had Experience, and knew what I was doing.

Three years later, I joined band - as much as anything because I wanted to be a part of Friday nights. I wanted a cold stadium seat, a role on the field, noise and lights and people yelling in unison. I wanted the quasi-military uniform. More white shoes, more liquid shoepolish. I wanted the thrill of a win and I wanted a flute, with its complicated keys and its pretty silver shine.

I was terrible at band.

I could get a decent tone out of the instrument, but counting confused me. I memorized nothing, because I had no discipline for practicing. If I had, It wouldn't have mattered, because I never could've played and marched simultaneously. It was enough to get those white shoes up to mid-calf, to get the flute up at a right angle, to turn on the correct count. To, as the rare band officer with no talent, keep my lines straight. Besides, nobody can hear the flutes unless it's Stars and Stripes Forever and no WAY was I learning that.

Senior year, we went to state for football. We lost, but after a 4-hour drive across state, at night, on a packed bus (another perk.) At half-time we played loudly and well.

High school ended.

After the year of junior college, and the year at a women's college, I went to University of Florida. Where I, and everyone else, was at least a little bit all about the football. I had my season tickets, I wore my orange and blue...

I loved day games and the smell of beer and the roar of the crowd and swaying to the very old-fashioned fight song and the crush of orange and blue and the rooting on of a very formidable mascot. But I still had no real idea what was going on. I had a knack for watching the wrong guy, for cheering when everyone else cheered. For talking with TIca, over the roars. For, on one occasion, inadvertently carrying in the bourbon of a charming fraternity boy on some sort of probation.

I slept off games, more than once, beer-soaked and a little sunburned, on Dan's couch. (It's a good friend that lives walking distance from the stadium, and offers his couch. Great friend. He is my daughter's godfather. Football had something to do with that, too.)

Then, flash forward another 8 years, and I met and married a rugby player, a former basketball and football player, a future football coach.

A current coach. A coach, now, and for 8 of the past 12 years (a hiatus only during three years in graduate school in NYC, during which he played / coached rugby - and one year here, when he was full-time adjusting to the new school, and the football program had not been fully unveiled.)

I have been to many football games. Perhaps more than I can count. I have been in the same room while many more have played on TV in the background.

And I still spend much of any given game not knowing what is going on.

I like it. Reluctantly, there are bits of it I love. I still love the lights on Friday nights. Dinner of hot dogs. Kids running loose behind the bleachers. The chants, the cheers, and the way my husband loves reaching other people's kids.

I wince when a player goes down, and I try to learn who to watch. What number goes with which player. Who the football moms are.

My own are big enough, now, that I won't have to struggle to keep them in the bleachers. That I can look away for a minute. That two of them can run off with other kids. This year, finally, I can pay attention with no stroller to watch, no Bjorn to struggle with. And only one set of sticky hands in my face.

My oldest is 9, and doesn't play. He wants to, desperately. And he runs balls out to the field during most games. But Dad feels strongly that bones and skulls need to grow more before high-impact sports are involved. I am relieved, to say the least.

Even with Dad's constraints, Bass'll be old enough sooner than I care to imagine. And his brother - his roaring, impervious-to-pain all-action-all-the-time little brother... is certain to play as well, and also sooner than I might be able to stand. His coordinated, spirited sister may even cheer. It could happen.

Tonight is the first home game of the season. And one of the last few seasons where I get to watch someone else's kids. And this is it. THIS is the year I learn the game. I just know it.

Indoctrination

I have been neglecting the blog, even as I have been thinking about it more and more obsessively.

As much as I have an ongoing narrative in my head, this blog business has me thinking all the time "I could blog this..." or, "should I blog this?" (Never mind that I am enough of a word snob to wince a little at "blog" as a noun, let alone as a verb...)

But blog this is, and blog I do.

So it happens that after an amazing weekend at an amazing wedding (in ridiculous and insufficient summary: kid free, we travelled to Vermont for two men we love who bared their souls for the chance to be together, who bought a perfect house in an idyllic vista in a state that 9 months later enabled them to marry... on a weekend with blue skies and high clouds... covered bridges and food and food and drinks and a woman named Betty with countless gifts, and a man named Jay and a B&B with an abundance of porcelain dogs, and candles lit in little white bags, a hoe-down and a cow cake and live music and hiking and a tram and champagne and bonfires and dad-forged rings and friends old and brand new and every single person generous and joy-filled...) I needed something to blog about. I thought it would be that wedding.

But then all the furor around Obama speaking to elementary school kids came into my sight line. And like so much anti-Obama fury, I needed to know what it was about. I needed to understand it. And I really, honestly, could not figure it out. I read, and I read, and I searched and I read and I was dumbfounded.

Apparently, Obama speaking to children, and public schools broadcasting that speech, was threatening. He would indoctrinate. He wants us communists and socialists and he would start by controlling the minds of the smallest among us.

So, with son home not-so-sick from school (as I was nursing a three-day hangover born of carousing, it appears he was nursing a three-day hangover born of grandparental indulgences. But I digress), we watched it.

He is 9. And to him, every word made sense. Pretty standard American values and honor and all that - bootstraps and effort and the future. Stay in school. Wash your hands.

And at night, that same night, Sebastian (the 9YO son) had a pile of work sent home from school. And he needed to do it. And he complained and he griped and he might've slammed a book shut and got sent to his room. And maybe he had to take dinner in his room because we were STILL a little hung-over and Not Having Any of That.

And later, when he wanted to read himself to sleep, I said, "No. One better. Here. Watch the President's speech again."

And he was... well... (really) excited to "get" to do so.

So I handed him the laptop and he stretched out in his top bunk with the cat. Five minutes later he called "Mom, I am going to pause it and get a pencil and a piece of paper if that's OK."

Really.

And it was (of course it was), and he did.

And he took notes. On his own:

Every single one of you has something that you're good at. Every single one of you has something to offer.

You cannot drop out of school and drop into a good job.

The future of America depends on you.

If you quit on school, you're quitting on yourself. You're quitting on your country.

There is no excuse for not trying.

You make your own future.

And the stuff he wrote down - that stuff - a lot of it was in the NYT coverage of That Same Speech.

I do the indoctrinating in this house.

And thank you, Mr. President, for driving home all of my most important points.

Seabass

Not quite sure what to do when I flounder.

When I feel like, maybe, I have no idea what I am doing.

This was that sort of day - an epic clash with Sebastian, when he was mean to his siblings in succession, then mean to me.  I got mean back.  He got meaner.  And none was resolved by more of the same.

I know I am supposed to be the 'grown up,' but I can't always remember what that looks like in every situation.  I have never been praised for my measured discipline.

I am so grateful to others who do it right, or do it wrong and know it - and talk about it, and blog about it.  I am so grateful to those who step in - to my mother-in-law, who has him tonight for an impromptu sleepover.  My mom, who knows him so well and talks me through my most frustrating parent moments.  To his Aunt Agatha, who loves him unconditionally and gently guides.  To his favorite teachers, who ask, tell, and nourish.  

Never have I met a child who needed those teachers more.  For whom knowledge, and learning, were actual life-sources - like breathing, or water.  

When he was littler, I would say that he was just too big for his britches.  That he was born a 30-year-old lawyer and it would take time for him to grow into the role.  Now, 9 years later - he's been in practice for 9 years.  So, he thinks he is entitled to the partnership, an equal vote. Compensation fitting his elevated role.   

I burst with pride when a teacher has the chance to recognize who he is, stops and gets him still long enough to catch a glimpse of his very old soul.  He had two of him this year, and they saved us all.

There is nothing he won't read.  No question he won't ask.  No science show he won't watch.  No answer he won't attempt to give, himself.  He is smarter than me, and I have always known that. He is smarter than me, and he has always known that - which is tougher.

He is so sensitive, intuitive, and scary smart.  He is so insensitive, volatile, and impulsive.  He rocks my world, daily. All this at 9.  What will be left of me when he is 11, 17, 35?

Oh, sweet Sammy Butterbean.  My original pain-in-the ass.  The one person who always laughs at my jokes, and sings along to the same songs on the radio.  You taught me to be a Mom.  And I am still learning.