tested

Twenty years ago (and more), I had abysmal study habits. It followed that when I took tests, my palms would sweat. I would break out in hives and squirm in my seat. I can remember all-too-clearly when the answers would swirl just on the other side of water-filled eyes and I would will myself not to cry. I can remember watching the time tick past, and seeing the answers all start to look alike, breaking pencil lead out of frustration, or tearing through the paper with erasures or scrawled-too-hard calculations.

You would think it would have gotten me studying. Somehow, it didn't.

I studied. I put in evenings and weekends, hours and hours of the driest material I've ever read, and worked out every sample calculation, checked every answer. I admit I skimmed the last chapters (Accounting for Equity Compensation. Securities Law Treatment of Equity Compensation. Section 16 and Disclosure Rules. How could I resist them?) But the first 9 (just imagine the gems those must contain! The fascinating nuggets!) - I highlighted, took notes, wrote in margins, re-read.

Some of the studying was while Littles bumped around, asking questions and interrupting the flow. Lots of it was done while Agatha or Gavin gave me large stretches of time alone. Once I read about restricted shares while a lovely woman painted my toes.

I took it. The on-line test was the longest single-subject test I have ever taken. Interesting, in that it was so different from test given to me prior, on subject matter I couldn't have dreamed I would be anywhere near.

Much of it was calculations - and they don't come easily to me. Even when I know the rule-sets, I have to plot every point. I do so slowly, cross referencing with at least two sets of study notes, attempting to ensure I am doing the right calculation for the right question. I still miss them - capturing a hiring date wrong, or incorrectly calculating for "disqualified" when it should be qualifying.

Today's answer sets are that kind of tricky. Each is designed to know what you might answer if you look at the question intelligently, with concentrated wrongnesss. Three of the choices from A to D ferret out all the versions of Wrong, and present them to you - in black and white, where they reassure by looking Absolutely Correct.

The non-calculations were no better. So convincing was every option, that I was compelled to look up every single answer - to double-check. After hour three, desperate to pee or to pace or to let the cat in, but terrified to use even one second anywhere else, I started moving faster. And, in haste, the questions got harder. Every choice looked right, or, alternatively, equally implausible .

Four hours looking at one computer screen. With a couple of hundred pages worth of notes. "Open book," in these circumstances, feels a bit like a cruel joke. Not one question of the (100? I didn't notice. I was looking at the backward-ticking time) lot of them was automatic to me. Knowing the material, having studied, having taken the practice tests - it helped. But only just.

Somehow, though - since everything was solidly familiar (if foggy) and since I could say with no more certainty that any specific answer was fully wrong, It seemed plausible that I would pass. Not likely, perhaps, but plausible.

*********

Having spent my day thusly, I felt more sympathetic toward my daughter, stumbling in the front door with a rain-soaked sour whine about her loaded backpack- she who takes three times as long as her peers to do a handwriting assignment, who panics at timed math tests and transposes numbers, who has make up work on top of homework. I feel slightly more sympathetic to my son, who keened for ten minutes about all the things he Doesn't Want to Do. On a hidden, more patient level than my response belied, I so wanted to make the extra time requirements go away for my daughter, replace my son's day with one full of only things he cares about, goals he wants.

My sympathy, however veiled, didn't make the evening smoother. Annabeth's homework didn't dissolve into misty done-ness, Sebastian didn't bounce up to bed with a renewed sense of optimism. In fact, nothing went all that well in the rainy evening after my grueling four-hour graded attempt to prove Something. But I did feel I "got it."

I didn't pass the exam. And I am proudest of the fact that I didn't get all that anxious. I used every second, but I never panicked. I got it done, and I guess I know more about how its structured than I did. I have ten extra points' worth of tax law to parse, calculations to re-do, clear margins to fill.

The test today was, in failure, affirming. In a way I couldn't have guessed. I'd rather not do it again, but I will. Next week, in fact. And I will be better. And it won't be the Worst Thing Ever. Which seems like progress, and a little like maturity.

Tested

I dressed Patrick yesterday morning in his red rugby-striped shirt.

Generally, he adheres to his public-school open-to-interpretation uniform that it is only loosely followed by the pre-K set. Probably a dozen times, I have let him wear something other than the white (now white-ish) polo topper that fits requirements. On those occasions, he always picks the red-and-white. His favorite.

I dropped him and went on to other things - a breakfast meeting, then proctoring an AP test at the other school. I marveled at the relative calm of the adolescents taking that test. It was the final move of their high school careers - once that last bubble was filled in, stray marks erased, cell phone collected from me - they were gone. Off to the Rest of their Lives. And yet none seemed panicked, or even particularly plussed.

Post-testing, I collected my daughter so we could go run a quick fun errand. We lollygagged, loading our cart with sugar cookie supplies. Then we left to retrieve Patrick, who I felt had lingered too long at after-care.

We got to his school and Annabeth asked if she could go in barefoot. She had stripped off her confining running shoes. I said, well sure. Just into the cafeteria. Just picking up a brother.

I walked in a few beats behind her.

Swarms of adults. A buffet. Little boys in top hats, pastel shirts, black pants, sparkling blue bow ties. Little girls in perfect spring church dresses, floral prints.

I was confused for a flash of a second, two, three. Annabeth, beside me in her bare feet, said, "wow. What's this?"

It had been the show. The Show. The end-of-the year celebration to move them all to kindergarten. Proceeding arm-in-arm. Singing, dancing, acting. Patrick had been, apparently, the Big Bad Wolf.

And I. Had Not. Been. There. Girls in dresses. Boys in ties. Gussied parents taking pictures. Siblings in finery eating from the parent-provided potluck buffet. Patrick in his day-stained red and white rugby, dirty shorts. Running shoes. Annabeth in bare feet. Bare. Feet.

I had received notice of this event. An email. Another. Maybe even another. Each time they would come over my phone I would glance at them, intending to parse later. I thought - since one called it a graduation celebration - it was on the last day of school. Next week. I never slowed down, read. Planned. Scheduled.

Recognizing what had happened, I wandered the small crowd wide-eyed and slack-jawed. Stunned. I snapped at someone, a friend. I blathered, in shock. People intercepted and said things like "he was wonderful!" and "I think I got a picture of him" and "It's OK, someone videoed it."

I left briefly, to cry in my car. I sobbed. Pulled myself together. Returned.

To be absolutely fair to myself, Patrick didn't show any concern. Genuinely. He was bopping around with a blue balloon. He said, "It's OK, mama!" Though he expressed disappointment that he didn't get to wear the sparkly tie.

We numbly ate chicken fingers. People said "let it go." And I felt so --- inadequate.

Things have been lost lately - falling off my radar, or under it. I have been going through the motions, sometimes frantic, always preoccupied. School is out soon - and the month has been a mess of pieces and parts.

I don't do this well. I have committed to things next year - big things. I will learn again, this summer, how to use a calendar (I can't figure out when I stopped, or why the very idea of a calendar intimidates me now.)

I blew up later, at night. For imagined infractions of everyone else. But, of course, it was all about that Show. My error. My disconnect. My absent calendar. My crushing love for my youngest. Missing his last baby moment.

We are right here. At the end of the school year - a year rife with last-minute saves: permission slips, lacrosse games, trumpets, leotards. Dirvishes that whirled. Mornings that were late - and often a surprise (as in, SURPRISE! It's morning!) Right here, I am feeling ill-suited for all of it. Overwhelmed, with holes in my thoughts and holes in my day that allow for neither accomplishing nor resolving.

And before venturing to do this again, I would like, just-for-me, a test. An end of the year AP- equivalent that lets me know that I am suited well enough. That I am as good as the next guy and getting better. I would like to darken my bubbles, erase my stray marks, blow off the dust of the mistakes removed, turn in the test and move on. Matriculate. And find out mid-July if, in fact, I have received the desired four and will, after all of it, get credit for this cobbbled-together year.

And if not, I would like to take the year off. Re-group. Maybe study abroad. Come back when I am feeling more mature, and Ready.

Grow

It is spring. My favorite time of the year. Last posts were spring, too - but on the cusp of newness. Now we are in it. In Atlanta, spring is an explosion of color. Everything is in bloom at once,

and you can see pollen dancing in the sunbeam that warms the cat.

I plant things, and wonder how to do it more effectively. It is all mysterious to me - even from long lines of gardeners and farmers on both sides of my family. I like that things grow. I want to help them along... but I get distracted.

I wander the yard in no real pattern. Probably in dress clothes from a rare outing outside the house. I pull things up and then remember I own gloves and I should wear them. I yank at other things and remember I have a tool for that. I go to get the tool and see that the garage is a mess. I tackle the clutter, put the tools down on the cedar chest I really must move out of the garage and go inside to change. Whereupon I see laundry. And fold it.

Patrick commented yesterday on the grass. "It's so pretty, Momma! I love it! We have the only grass with little tiny flowers!" Today we mowed, in response.

I tried to explain to him how we distinguish weeds from desirable plants and it made no sense to him. The deeper I dove into the topic, the more it felt fascist - pulling up dandelions and clover and pretty little white flowering things with no known name. I couldn't explain myself.

When we walk to school this time of year, my favorite yards are the yards at the edges of our neighborhood. They have thousands of matured, multiplying daffodils - but also the plants of my youth. Memories emerge of lazy spring days making "salad" of dandelion leaves, violets, sour clovers, and chives. I don't recall if we ever ate the salads, but my older sister spent one spring obsessively making violet jelly from Yule Gibbons' book. She was 11 or 12 and already achieving things that never occurred to the rest of us.

Most of the yard owners manicure all that away. They trim out the magic, leave the expected - tidy and trim. Colors in controlled bursts. Flowers you are most certainly not meant to eat.

The children burst out of the house with this weather - God's weather. The sun is bright, but the air is never oppressive. People emerge to drink on their porches in the evenings, to walk the neighborhood - to generously imagine everyone is a friend.

Annabeth turns 8 next month. Something close to 1/6th my age - though it feels, in some ways, that I have known her forever. I have known her for her forever - a world where she imagines she can remember when she was "little." Spring is the right time for her, sunshine and optimism on her better days.

She received an award this week. Arts Laureate, representing the first grade in the arts assembly. She was so proud to wear the dress her grandmother made, so proud to receive an award for what is certainly the Most Important Thing. She sees patterns everywhere, comments on the color of weathered buildings. We see the artist's temperament at times, but we saw something so proud, so grown-up when she strode across the stage wearing her medal - the tallest child until the fifth grader at the end.

I turn 42 tomorrow. A weird number. It sounds sensible, established. Far more of either of those things than I am - with my charmingly weedy yard and children flung across the neighborhood. But twice 21, and certainly twice as smart as I was at that number. Which is something. And... it is spring. This will be a good year.

Losing

Last night, Annabeth lost two teeth. (Five minutes after this photo was taken, she pulled the second one.)

To say she 'lost' them is to put a rosy and passive blush onto what was surely an active (and, to judge from the blood loss, somewhat violent) extraction. They were very loose. And she wanted them out. She is almost 8 - and it is a rite of passage she was starting to fear was passing her by entirely. We assisted, at her request, in helping her narrowly dodge that fate.

Her tiny teeth were collected by a fairy. Prior to that offering, I held them up to my teeth. They were a quarter the size. I cannot imagine the her that will emerge with her new giant teeth. How it will change her face. Her between-grins-grin will smile gummily from First Communion photos next month, and from atop her sparkly leotard in her annual gymnastics recital. There is a sweetness in the toothlessness, the loss of baby that exits with the milk teeth.

I remember lost teeth. A palpable loss. You can stick your tongue where there had been a tooth and the raw, yielding gums around space are at once fascinating and somewhat horrifying. You admire your freakish toothless appearance - and, if you are me (which I know for certain you are not. But hear me out...) you are plagued with a lifetime's supply of nightmares and anxiety dreams that perfectly replicate that tongue-to-gap differentness.

Other losses tend to be less tangible. Something was here, now it's gone - and maybe something will replace it. I missed, oddly, babies in my belly for the first weeks after each was born. They seemed safer there. I miss places I've moved from, people that used to be in my life. The memories are foggy, though. There is no muscle memory that can replicate my grandfather's giant hand - with leathery back, crooked strong fingers, and calloused palms; the smell of the ocean after hours at the end of a hot day; the first voices of each of my children.

I lost my job. I can't even grasp that one yet. And I really, truly care so much less than I am supposed to. I know I should look. But at the moment, I am so grateful for the spaces in which I can organize other spaces. I like this in-between place, with no clear sense of what is next. Oddly, I am afraid I like it a bit much.

Yesterday, I had jury duty - which I approach with the heavy sense of responsibility - a Pollyanna-ish belief that this is my Duty. That this is Democracy. Jobless, it was no hardship. I thought of Denise, who is a judge. Robin and Agatha who work for judges. I served, though I was never called. Six hours later, I got up from my seat and left Gavin's Kindle behind. A new toy I was just getting used to, a novel I had 18% completed (per the measure below and to the left of the text.) Gone.

On the way home, Gav called me. Oblivious, as yet, to the missing Kindle, he was warning me about the drive - which route to take. Atlanta traffic, the hassle of here-to-there - the plotting of alternatives. And then? I never saw my phone again. It's here. Though I have torn apart the car, the couch, the garage, bookshelves. I have offered cash prizes to household members. And I can't believe I am being kept from several active Scrabble games.

The organized, fantasy me would have one spot for all those baby teeth. They would be labled with dates. They would be in tiny pill bottles, specific to each child. That me would never leave a Kindle behind, would know where my phone is, would have current calendars up and would have begun the real spring cleaning I vaguely imagine. That me would have a fat savings account from years of careful attention. That me would be called on that phone by friends who would say "wow! I don't know how you stay so organized! So disciplined! You make it look so easy!"

This me needs to look for the phone, get the job, replace the Kindle, do the laundry, make the new calendars and get started with dinner. And every bit of it is much easier than I will manage to make it look. (Well, except for the job bit. But I can blame the economy for that one.)

So. Annabeth lost teeth. I lost, a few weeks back, a consistent paycheck. Yesterday I lost a Kindle. And an iPhone.

Tomorrow, I think I will work on gaining.

Aughts

We were three of us at the start. We rang in the New Year with home-made hats. A brand new tiny baby boy (who was not, actually, all that small.) My sister had just adopted two daughters - six and eight, from Khazakstan. We were in a loft with painted harlequin concrete floors, giant drafty windows, and a cat that wouldn't come down from the overhead pipes.

We left the nineties, the loft, the extended family. We moved to New York. We added a nanny and new jobs. Graduate school. Towers fell. Another baby came. Taxis were hailed, umbrellas were spun inside-out in lower Manhattan wind-tunnels. I counted rats and listened to impossibly clear music with the stunning acoustics of subway stations. I learned something of bonuses, and something of crawling on my hands and knees for one more quarter for laundry loads.

We moved to Florida. We had another, decidedly final, baby. We were sand and salt and sparkly things. The Baby Bjorn, jog stroller, crib, and Avent bottles were dusted off and then retired. Hurricanes came. We lived out our thirties and returned to Georgia to each turn, implausibly and prematurely, forty.

This decade, we added cable and iPods and laptops and cell phones. We started carless and rode cabs, subways, trains, planes, buses, boats. We visited islands at either end of the decade - in the Caribbean at the start, British isles toward the end. We lived in three states, four moves. We went from the potential of family to a Family. With suppertime and homework and school dress codes and "go team" and "go outside!" and "go to your room."

Babies spit up sat up and stood up and learned to walk and then ran and talked learned to read and told jokes and did multiplication tables and wrote reports and begged for more time on their DS games. They cry less, they shout more. They laugh and they love and they try to believe in Elves and Santa and tooth faeries.

I attended three funerals and two births. I gave many, many baby gifts - and know dozens and dozens of fully-formed humans that didn't exist in 1999.

We watched the young senator on TV. I said "that is the next president." He said, with the authority and certainty that I know and love, "no way. Too green. Too black. We aren't ready. He isn't ready." And four years later - he was, he is. And we don't yet know what the reach of that is - but I am heartened by the fact that my children find it not a bit strange.

We are still fighting the same war. We've noticed the change in the weather, and we are talking about organic and local and reducing carbon footprints. We are paying down credit cards and know no one still getting real-estate rich.

We are defined by what we lost - in resources, in finances, in faith, in lives - and by what we have gained - in politicians, and expanded worldviews and tolerance and lives. We are prepared, really, for nothing. And we pray, futilely, that those unpredictable events and impacts will be soft and swift and enjoyable. That we will be spared tragedies, personal and global. That we will be kind, and generous, and peace-loving and patient and considerate.

For us, this last decade was about moving and changing and adapting and defining.

When this decade ends, Sebastian will no longer be a teenager. Patrick will be learning to drive. Annabeth will be in the middle of the college application process. We will be in our fifties.

A decade is a really long time. And, as observed by everyone who has lived through more than three of them, they pass at an unfathomably fast clip.

From here, we have no idea what that will look like. But we know - the two of us, the five of us - more than any other decade before - who we are doing it all for. We know that much.

Borders

I wonder, at 2 a.m. on a Sunday morning, where this post will land.

I am awake, again and still. No real reason why. My brain hasn't fixed on one thing, the thing that has me awake and troubled - rather it flits through things. Page after page of small anxiety: there is a perpetual laundry basket on my unfurnished bedroom's floor, my office has some papers that have been on the desk a year, our garage is a bit too full of unfiltered clutter, and Annabeth didn't read enough this summer.

A couple of undisciplined hours of non-musing of that sort, and I found myself here. I went through phone pictures and came upon this one, from the summer. Mid-summer, with family, on the Bay, that I wrote about in July. I like it.

It looks like change, this picture. The green of grass, the brown of cut wheat. It looks like human imprint on nature, of protected agricultural space in an area near water - always in danger of being over-developed. It looks, to me, like quiet and someone else's property line (which I know it to be), and it looks like 8:30 in a morning with no real agenda and a desire to push through to the end of a run (also, which I know it to be.)

As of Wednesday of this week, the rest of us will all have Somewhere to be. The older two start school - with backpacks too loaded for their size and homework assignments. Expectations - theirs for a new year, and those thrust upon them by the rest of us. First and fourth grades. Lofty stuff.

Gavin will minister guidance and reassurances to the older set at the same school- those anxious to leave, and the parents that watch them go. I will marvel at that process and wonder about when our kids are that age - if knowing the college process, if being on the periphery of so many teenagers (between football and college counseling... around 100/year... for 20 years - give or take - thousands of kids...) will make it any easier for us when ours matriculate.

Of course, it won't. Not really.

For my littles, it is the special new that is the beginning of a school year. The new that is specific to elementary school: sharpened pencils and book bags with zippers that still stick a little. Scuffless shoes, and sharp haircuts. Skin still warm from extra sun. Brains that fell so easily into not-so-much, now creakily trying to grab hold of words from new teachers' mouths. School lunches on little green trays at weird hours of the morning. Friends not seen in months to whisper to from desks still perfectly ordered.

They all just live here. And for those parents of now teens, their kids live there for even shorter. The littles - more and more as they grow - believe themselves to be wholly separate from us. We know different.. but for this to work, we have to pretend we agree with their version of things.

We are all of us always on the edge of something. For me now, the edge of sleep. The edge of another day. The edge of a new week, and the edge of a new year. The periphery of other lives led, influencer and influenced. I will shuffle them off to school at 7:30 each day. And for a few days - the silence will alternately welcome and confuse me.

Onward.

Monday

He did it, he started! His fourth place to be all day, every day - his first true 'school,' with bigger kids. I teared up, he was unfazed.

pPod starts school Monday.

Public school. The first to do that, oddly enough. Pre-K. Sweet, young, scrubbed, happy, demanding 4-year-olds. 20 of them.

We will walk there. Half a mile. Every morning, through three seasons. Just two of us. We will have stuff to talk about. Every afternoon, we will walk home. We will have Things to Do.

He of white-blond hair and constant chatter. Recent discoverer of computer games. Drawer of pictures, observer of details through his little bifocal lenses.

I like this part - standing here, knowing that in a year this will be the past. I like that we are here Before, and most everything else is after.

I don't like this other part, where soon all this will be gone. Where that little bit of baby, as I say to him, still remaining behind his left ear, might disappear without my realizing it. That I will barely remember this in two years. In four, he will be 8, with all his 8-year-old demands. I will struggle to remember him at 4, the way I do now the two-year-old him.

4, to me, sounds like the end of Little.

He had his hair cut today. When will it be his last little-boy mushroom cut?

I call him over to me, and he instinctively gives me a kiss. He sometimes asks, "am I in trouble?" Disbelieving. His temper can spark and flare. He can scream. I can, too - and I am embarrassed when he sees it. It flames out, and he often returns with his eyes down, a ready apology.

He is optimistic. He is mostly unfazed. He observes and he tracks and he saves it for later. He quotes advertisements like he thought of them, and he shares thoughts of his own that sound written. At the tail end, he is ever in danger of being left out, or over-ruled. He thrives on attention, for moments of being considered equal to anyone, to anything. He holds forth.

He is right there on the edge of the rest of his life. And on Monday, I will walk him a few more steps closer.