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.

Prepared

Feeling anxious lately - in a general way. It happens sometimes - these stretches where sleep is elusive and I get lost in self-navigating: do this, then do that, then do that. Mental checklists for even the simplest things.

It's nice when it's all more automatic. When the days flow, and nothing is a surprise. When there is order and predictability, a clean kitchen, no clutter, and a properly annotated calendar looked at days ahead of events, hours ahead of meetings. When plenty of sleep was had the night before, and the day started with fruit, and maybe egg whites.

It's fictional, mostly. Days like that. I have heard of them, and their Type A bearers. I crave them, even. I imagine them to be easier - a kind of mental blue sky bliss where there are clear routines, and some outcomes, at least, are predictable.

Wednesday, last week, I laid out Annabeth's Thursday clothes. That much, I do. It is me striving for order (and me harkening to a childhood full of paper dolls - and never knowing quite what you were supposed to do with Barbie after she had tried on every clothing combination in her mini wardrobe).

It happened that Daisies were on Thursday, so with her clothes I also laid out the mini IHOP apron with the unfinished flower ironed on in the middle. The flower center she got when her troop memorized the abridged version of the Girl Scout Promise. Nothing in there about being prepared - but it is implicit. Daisies are an add-on, an introductory troop. Pre-brownies, they are bright blue and optimistic. They earn their badges - flower petals - as a group.

The apron tunic thingy was rumpled because she had only just taken it out of her bookbag from the week before. This made me angry. I scolded her. Harshly. Responsibility and keeping things nice and a uniform and putting things away and blah and blah and she looked wounded.

"A lot of girls don't wear theirs. So I took it off."

"No. Not an option for you. It is a Uniform. You wear yours. I don't want to hear anything else about it."

The next morning, she put it on. Pressed. Over a pressed light blue shirt. Khaki bermuda shorts. Plaid tennies.

In the afternoon, I picked her up. At her request, I had let her go to after care after Daisies. She ran up to me. Apron-less.

"Annabeth...?" With a raised eyebrow.

"Mom, Daisies weren't today. Or last week either. Can't I just not wear it on Thursdays when there is no Daisies? No one else has to."

Uhmmm...

oooops.

Two weeks in a row, I sent her to school in her irrelevant Daisy uniform. Twice, she had to save face alone. Feeling, no doubt, a little silly.

Like I felt, hearing it.

Daisies, I then learned (and no doubt had been explicitly told before - in person, via email, and on some printed something or another by the far more organized Daisy moms) are on the FIRST THURSDAY of every month.

And next Thursday? I will Be Prepared.

On my honor, I will try...

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.

Sunshine

(This Post Created for Dear Kid Saturday, a lovely idea.)

Dear Bethy,

You are my sunshine.

When you were born, daddy handed a slippery you to me and said "you got your girl!"  I had always imagined a house of boys - and I felt like I had won something miraculous.

As a smaller child than now, you were all sunshine and gentle happiness.  You would toddle through my adult at home day, shadowing me, asking questions.  Speaking in outrageously articulate sentences at a very early age.

We would walk to the coffee shop, where we would visit, and drink coffee, you and I.  Yours a drop of coffee in a tiny espresso cup filled to the brim with milk and sugar.

At two, at three, both of your brothers had tempers in need of taming.  The older with a frigtening intensity, an instinct to talk back seemingly from birth (no, really, he talked back preverbally - crawling away when told "no," and looking back over his shoulder to say "uunh!" - a baby obscenity if ever there was one.)  Your younger brother's temper flashes quick and loud, sometimes leaving things broken in its wake.

But you?  You would put yourself in time out if you thought you might be out of line. And, as crazy as it sounds... you almost never were.  You always seemed to be measuring, weighing, doing what you thought I needed you to do.  Being who I needed you to be at the time.

This year, though, your moods are out front.  You get angry, you pout, you've even had some temper tantrums.  You're sometimes even difficult - which means, really, that you are fine and finding your way.

The school you go to, Daddy's school, is a little intense. Your brother thrives in that environment, he needs the challenges and high expectations (otherwise, I fear he would embrace the lowest common denominator) but for you - it seemed too much.  

You are bright, you were always precocious and socially advanced.  But reading was SO frustrating for you, initially, in "pre-first" (a moniker so precious it makes me uncomfortable.) So you repeated the grade.  I questioned everything last year when that came up.

One thing they do there  "Love your body week" - seemed especially forced to me.  Something else a little too... precious.  Mirrors are covered with craft paper, speakers address different topics by age level, a yoga instructor visited, you hear about food choices and exercise choices. I wondered if it was too contrived to work.

You never let me say the slightest bad thing about myself.  You tell me, every day, that I am beautiful.  On the rare occasions I wear makeup, you chide me a little.  Apparently, my beauty is masked by all those paints and powders...

Then, last week?  When I heard you describing "Hairspray" to your brother?  And you talked through the whole plot without mentioning race or weight??  I was blown away.  Absolutely blown away.

At six (almost 7!), you are full of wisdom and emotion.  You are sensitive to those around you - the first to comfort pPod when he is in trouble (even if its for attacks on you...not uncommon.)

You are artistic and deliberate and aware. You are curious.  You are often more controlled than me, taking over as grown up when I need to be brought back to reality.  You balance the house, and with you in it, I still feel like I am getting away with something.

I thank God every day for you - but you are bigger now.  You have a hand in this, too - so thank YOU for you.  

Love,

Momma