village

We had, for 19+days this summer, two or fewer children. With each child-shuffle, the balance tips. Things are different. Sometimes quieter, smoother - other times... just quieter. Almost universally easier, from a logistics-standpoint.

It is a luxury to have these stores of fabulous adults that want to liberate us from our children - godmothers and godfathers, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. I can write this now, in fact, because local support (Agatha!) has us with none, on a Sunday afternoon. Preparing for my new reality as a full-time-working mom...blogging, cleaning, organizing.

In my family, as kids, we would go to the Farm every summer. We were a little foreign in Connecticut, where others noted our southern dialects and expressions. Where we winced, a little, at cousins' nasally tones of "Antie Baabrah." We were comfortable there. We moved quite a few times, and it was the place where nothing changed: the lush giant garden, the rows and rows of blueberry bushes - the peaches, strawberries, raspberries, apples, rhubarb - each seeming to magically appear for us, in succession. Grandma would bake and can and prepare - a kitchen chemist of few words, warm sweet smells, and generous yield.

We would arrive late. Very late. Off the interstate, we would press our faces to the glass looking for the trolley museum, the sign we were close. We would pass Uncle Ansel's farm on the left, turn right onto Scantic Road... and then, when we turned the one curve half a mile or so before Grandma and Grampa's, the tall white house with the lights on assured me we were seconds away.

When we got there, we would announce ourselves as we crunched forward on the smooth pebbles of the circular drive, breaking up chamomile with each wheel rotation. Grandma and Grandpa would appear on the front porch. We would unfold and tumble forward. I would run to Grandpa's strong arms and be lifted up, twirled around. He wore work pants in a dark green or navy, a button-front workshirt, light blue - sleeves rolled up. The waist of his pants would sag between belt loops, held up by a belt fashioned from saddle-leather and notched to the farthest point - a raw-edged hole punched through with an awl.

Grandma would laugh her rare laugh, clasp her hands together and look truly delighted, embracing us each with powerful hugs. She would be wearing bits and parts - giant, baggy, leftovers from teenage cousins. Clothes designed only to cover. She might have a bandana over her hair - long, silver hair she would brush out at night, and braid into coils, pinned into place on the back of her head, the same exact way every day.

Our grandparents toiled. At all times. They got up before us, and went to bed after us. They were constant, with ropey forearms and Things to Do. We would slather on citronella oil from little brown apothecary bottles and try to outwit mosquitos, sometimes 'keeping up' with farm chores, other times avoiding them by staying gone and staying busy. We'd hike down to the pond, avoiding thorny bits, whacking at tall grasses with bigger sticks. I would ride on my grandfather's lap and steer the 40-year-old John Deere. We would make bricks out of natural clay on the banks of the Scantic River, a tributary of the Connecticut River down the road. We would pick blueberries and "smoke" unlit reeds stuffed with ground up mint leaves.

Mom would drive home a few days after we arrived, and pick us up weeks later as summer closed.

We grew each summer. We worked, we played - we explored boredom (but didn't speak of it.) We felt hot dirt under our feet and invented games. I followed my grandfather through gardens with a salt shaker in my pocket. I slept with my mom's old stuffed animals, and pored over evidence of her youth in the attic, trying to know more. I twirled in her college gowns and attempted to make paper dolls as she once had (hers, pages and pages of elegant creations made while near or in high school - fashion designs with painstaking details. Mine made around age 8, wobbly and crookedly cut - hashed out, over-embellished, and abandoned.) Our socks grew dingy from farm use, and came off the line crunchy and hot.

People have asked how I can leave my chidren - Annabeth for 12 days with her godmother in California, Sebastian for 10 with his grandparents' after we'd left. I can do it, partly, because I did it. Every summer. There is peace in separateness, a break from family members, a chance to re-invent yourself, to explore versions of yourself those closest to you are blinded to. To get away from the gnawing of siblings, the nagging of parents. There is growth in learning that other adults do things differently, that you don't have to buy Mom's crazy, or Dad's. It is good, halfway into a summer crammed with the togetherness of road trips and Things to Do to experience missing the same people that drive you nuts.

There is peace, too, in two-verses-three. Giving and receiving additional attention when one is out of the mix. Quibbling less, competing less, and exploring gentler spaces.

Tomorrow we collect Sebastian from the airport. He will walk tall and proud, wearing the pin that identifies him as an Unaccompanied Minor. In two weeks school will start, and I will start a job, and there will be no more room for breaks from routine.

Our children are each made better by their time away, living and exploring inside someone else's rules and routines. They learn from other people, people whose ideas sometimes differ from ours - or don't differ at all, but are easier to receive and more palatable from someone else - someone more interesting, new again each visit, and wise.

contributing

I like this jangly-nerve-endings, ready-to-work, time to Do Something feeling that has me in constant productive motion.

I am writing now, daily. It is a combination of paid work, grass-roots work, and unpaid release. It feels good, in every case, to get things out of my head and onto a screen. It feels great to produce, or to contribute something.

My sister always says the world is full of consumers and producers, and a life well-lived is a productive one. My grandmother, a woman of far fewer words and far less education, believed the same - though was too busy to comment on it.

I want to harness some of this energy for the mundane: clean the house, pack, tie up ends that have been loose for so long I have grown used to them in this state. Of course, that will only happen when there is no more avoiding it. We will have to leave for the trip, but precedent would suggest we will do so later than we want, with the house messier than I intended.

Between, among, and around summertime adventures and chores for the littles, I am job-hunting. To that end, I am actively networking for the first time ever - taking advantage of the interwoven threads of people I know and have known. I am savoring the intersections, loving the connections.

Looking for a job is forcing me to look back, to examine and evaluate 20 years in the workforce. (Go ahead. Gasp. I do.) I have to talk about it, think about it, offer it up as evidence. Doing so has me feeling, many days, surprisingly competent and reassured.

There is optimism to this thing I am doing now. There is a forward-looking sense that it will all be fine, and a retrospection I am capturing while in the middle of it: the threshold is all promise and possibility, and a thing worth savoring.

mid summer

It's been pretty slow here.

We're into the thick of summer, and the busiest days have had maybe a couple of two-hour blocks of Somewhere to Be.

I won't lie... there has been talk of 'boredom,' and moments when I questioned the sanity of this much time with this particular crowd of littles - bumping into each other, shooting invisible weapons, jumping onto furniture, flopping onto the floor begging for Something to Do.

In retrospect, though, I will remember the thrill of the lull, bucking trends by doing little that is planned. They will paint it a shiny shade of memory it and tell their own children, "when I was Your Age, we entertained Ourselves and were Grateful!"

Pools have been good, and still exciting. We have been to five or six of them, relying heavily on invites from others. Next year, (she says each year) must have a membership. Summertime, with water, is magic and happy, with exhausted children tumbling into bed. Without water, there is a lot of general oppression, broken up with trips to the library.

We've done that, too: library visits. The third week of break, (I think. I have lost count, and calendars elude me in the summertime.) Sebastian learned bridge at a library-provided week-long (free! two hours a day!) workshop. On the last day, we forgot him - each adult certain the other was picking him up. Two hours later, we figured out we were both wrong.

The Summer My Parents Left Me at Bridge Camp might be a sad future college essay, or at least fodder for comedic self-deprecation, if he we weren't so completely unfazed. I guess he has come to expect such from us. His combined affection for books and the absence of siblings helps. Still. There is something especially pitiful and nerdy-kid perfect about being abandoned at library bridge camp.

There was a lemonade stand. Home-made from the juice of twenty lemons, sold with oatmeal butterscotch cookies. It was sticky, and hot, and we made a tidy profit, in spite of the failed yard sale that provided the backdrop and excuse.

There was a living room fort so inviting that Annabeth slept there. Once with a friend, once for a nap, and a night alone. A coffee table, blanket tenting, a few pillows. It seemed hot to me, claustrophobic, and hard. She loved it. I fought reason and order and left it there. For days.

There was a sketchy drive-in theater, with lawn chairs and popcorn, car speakers turned up loud, a surprising breeze, glimpses of truly inappropriate movies on other screens, and a bed time perilously close to midnight.

For them, there have been sleep-overs. Grandmother, neighbor, godmother. Mini-vacations from the rest-of-us, mini-glimpses of freedom and someone else's pancakes.

For me, there have been job interviews - not yet fruitful, but competent other mom, hair done in the middle of the day provides some novelty. (Never mind my running out of gas on the way to my networking interview. I was rescued: sweaty, beheeled, standing in the middle of the uneven parking lot of the mini-mart that I had thought had gas, but didn't. It did have bars on the windows and a dumpster out back where terrible things happened a month or so ago. It was not a place to be in poplin, pearls, and patent leather. My rescuer was perfect - and assuaged and delivered me.)

Next weekend there will be a long drive, and we will move this show to Maryland and Connecticut - where we are sure to do more of the same, plus extended family, cornfields, some boats, a zip line, nightly cocktails, goats, and maybe even a tent in the yard.

It is summertime. And it is good.

pPod

We walked to school for the last time on Tuesday. I didn't realize until probably Friday that this day was coming. Intellectually, I guess, I knew it - but I didn't KNOW it until I was doing it.

We had homemade cookies in hand, hydrangeas picked in the morning from our enthusiastic bushes. We played as we walked to school. There are always imaginings. He has been a super-hero, a friendly bear hunter. He has been looking for his dragon, or trying to outsmart a tiger (our brown striped companion, Chessie, who follows us for most of our walk.)

That morning he said, clutching the flowers, "today we are climbing Snow Mountain to go visit the Queens, with gifts." Queen Jones and Queen Woodard, teachers of pre-K. I told him, yes, gifts: flowers for Beauty and cookies for Sustenance. He repeated this to the teachers when we arrived. I couldn't have been prouder.

What I will miss, I realize now, even more than the walks, is the time that is Ours. The spaces that fill with not-so-much. When we do things - just him and me - or we don't. He helps with laundry, he pushes the vacuum... or he plays alone, talking to his toys: Playmobil pirates, Legos, odds and ends collected from siblings or McDonald's.

Today is Our last day. We'll finish Monsters - vs - Aliens and go for a walk. We'll head to the neighboring neighborhood, where they have the pond he liked to visit when he was two. We'll have a picnic. We'll talk about stuff.

He is five. He is gentle and rambunctious, busy and thoughtful. When he colors, he uses every color on every page. Puppies have purple ears and green noses and yellow tongues. Transforming robots are stripped of their menace in his hands: orange chestplates, giant pink feet.

I'll miss his conversations with Baby Patrick (they are waning, though he still holds a special place.) Eventually, he won't ask me to sing to him at night: made-up words to Brahm's Lullaby, "I'm Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover" and all three verses of Rainbow Connection. He'll stop accessorizing, putting on a cape in the middle of the day for no reason. Or sunglasses, a cowboy hat, beads strung sideways across his chest.

Since infancy, he has made people laugh. They say, "I would love to be inside HIS head!"

And I have had the pleasure now, for five years, of being granted more time with him - alone - than either of the other two. I was more distracted, often working, this time. But he's been right there, happy to self-entertain and pleased to bring me in when I was available.

Through it, I have had many opportunities to glimpse inside that head. And it's nice in there. It's bright, it's colorful, and most definitely - good things are coming.

Tomorrow the other two are home, as well. We will all tumble into summer and in August, all three will head off to the same school. It will be easier having them all in one place, and it will be inspiring to watch how much he grows.

But I will miss the place where flowers and cookies seemed like all we needed.

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.

Home. Work.

This is where I work:  at the kitchen table, partially cleared.  On my bed, not yet made.  On the couch, recently re-slip covered (and still not replaced).  In my office, piles pushed aside.  In the TV room, late.

Work spills into work spills into life and all the edges get blurred.  I have been known to shout at children, "I just need ten minutes if you give me quiet!  Hours if you don't!"  And I bill that way. Conscientiously tracking my time, remembering when I mentally or physically checked out and subtracting those hours from my day, making them up at night, or the next day (the "off" day.)

In four years contracting for the same desperate multi-national, I have watched people more competent, more necessary, more confident, more reliable... get laid off.  Get end dates, or not. Get escorted out, or told when it will end.  It is frightening to be this dependent upon something so clearly so shaky.  And it is this, my low-commitment, flexible, no-benefits, frenetic lifestyle that saves me.

Deadlines loom, and stuff on stuff on other bits of stuff is due - or should be done.  And some of it is not particularly trackable or traceable - some of it is mine and only mine within this company that spans countries, this job that spans departments.  Working with clumsy web content tools and internal clients spread across aforementioned lands and duties.  Working some, too, with words - amorphous and gooey and always positive.

So the home work breeds homework. The 'to do' list that only sometimes gets items ticked off.

Mostly not.  And I have survivor's guilt, and 3 AM panic.  And hours that spill over my allotted 24/week, and other hours that I know I shouldn't add on, and do - to my day, but not to my time sheet.  

And in the spaces in-between, in the summertime, pools are visited, and bathing suits eventually put away.  Groceries are purchased, and children are eventually fed , dirt is tracked (good outdoors brought in)  and the floor is eventually vacuumed. On camp days, bags are packed. Walks are sometimes (but not enough) taken and some evenings, we go to the park.  We eat out a few times too many.

And school will start, and their homework will begin again.  And mine that comes from theirs- papers to be signed and registrations to be completed and checks to be written and field trips to man.  And I will miss some of it - not show up, forget to send the check, not sign the slip.  And I will feel myself slipping.  And I will question my own competency.  

But in This job, I cannot get fired.  My littles, at least, won't let me go - and when they do, I will still show up for work. Trying to win them back, wanting to be needed.

Us

I said once here, and oft in 'real life' that I love raising my children with a somewhat elastic notion of family.

Part of that is choice, and part is necessity.

In our family, there is one grandparent on one side, and four on the other.  There are two fully biological aunts and two such uncles.  There is the uncle that is the half-brother, and the uncle that is a step, the aunt that is a step - and all the spouses.  Four godparents are not biologically related. 

There are 12 cousins.  Two are mixed race. Two speak English as their second language.  One has no siblings and a lot of sports. Nine have only one sister.  Two have just one brother. Two have two brothers.  One is an actor. Two are adopted. Two are teenagers.  One attends boarding school. Four are five and younger.  Two are in middle school. Six live in-state.

Add 'em up and it's a lot more than 12.  Nobody can be just one thing.   And we have two sets of friends the children call "cousins"and we don't necessarily correct.  

  

An aunt, an uncle, a grandmother, and two godmothers have no children of their own- so ours get to be a novelty.  

We have one GED, so far. And we have some crazy number of advanced degrees, including three PhD's.   We go to different churches, those of us who go, and we live in different regions of the U.S.  For stretches of time, at least two relatives are in different countries altogether.  One is half Icelandic. We are many different shades of human.

We are a big, bizarre jumble - and our kids are truly excited when distant relatives emerge, and plans expand.  Fascinatingly, the question "how exactly are we related?" has really never come up.  Not even with Bass, who is 9, and questions everything.

Two degrees of separation- from us to others- bring together wholly implausible combinations of people.  

We are bi-coastal, bipartisan, biracial.  Biologically connected, and not.

A family should stretch.  It should embrace.  Children should be around adults from different places who do things differently than their parents.  They should know there are Special people, people for whom they should be willing to do anything.  The bonds to those people formed before many were even born.  

I love that we can look around our extended family and, making no excuses, see true and loving organic diversity.  I love the differentness and celebrating the sameness - common histories and common nows.  I love that people call, and drop in - and stay awhile.  

We are, even those among us who don't know what they believe about such things, truly blessed.  All of us.  

Here

Not enough can be said about old friends. Connecting with people, people with whom you have connected before or still - both versions providing a panacea from all the newness that is sometimes life - life in the David Byrne "this is not my beautiful house" way that being a grown up is all about.

A weekend of friends - various friends from various times - all from impossibly long ago (since, when I paused to realize I have known the newest friend of either group... for ten years..) came after a smidge of social panic, a year of avoiding hosting anything....

The weekend served to 'get my head right.' I feel alive and grown up and grateful and relieved to be the person I am with the experiences I have had in the place where I am right now - with a rich melange of friends. Fun, funny, interesting, compassionate, good people who didn't care that the cobwebs were still on the porch.

(I noticed them at Saturday's cook out. Then noticed them again at Sunday's. It's Monday night. Along with the folding chairs thrown out to seat folks on the cooler side of the house... they are there still.)

I like my littles to see us with other bigs, and I like to see them scrambling with other kids, both known and not - their own age and not, in and out of the house, toys strewn and loud noises up and down the street. I like nerf gun battles and scooter races, sidewalk chalk and competitive kick-the-can.

I like to imagine, when they see us laughing aloud with people they don't really know, that they are baffled a little by the 'real' us, by the normalcy we must've projected once - before we yelled and maintained and instructed (and, sometimes, ignored). Before we were -gasp - Parents.

After the weekend of magical guests, I got up my littles all went to day camp to give me two weeks of working peace. That seemed a small miracle in itself. A quiet house, and a to do list that got... done.

The house is clean again, and I am starting my own scramble, some - to put the rest of the summer into place, and to figure out how to get more adults in my world. So I can remember who I am - which seems to leave a whole lot more of me for my Littles.

Aglow

We went to a party tonight.

A lawn thing, in the neighboring neighborhood.  A band in a gazebo.  Picnics.

In that neighborhood, everyone is younger.  A little flossier.  The oldest kids are three, four.  

This is a territorial place, and I fancy myself an ambassador of sorts. Out to represent our very near neck of the woods. 

I smiled, chatted, tried to fit in.  Spoke to one or two people I didn't know.  Admitted, proudly, to our address half mile down the road. Shooed our children away from the cornhole game.

It got dark, we gave our kids glowsticks.

A dog that pPod, age 4, was playing with, bit his glowstick.

It  sprung a leak.  The dog, apparently unharmed, persuaded us to take advantage.  So, naturally, we  covered both sons in glowing leopard spots.

The younger adults in the crowd - barely past rave age - joined in.  Soon, several people were messily glowing and dancing to the rocking 70s cover band.  

This was good.  We felt a part of things.  

Until...

...we heard, sharply, "well, honey, that's Their prerogative.  WE don't DO that," as a mom tensely pulled her own glowstick-clutching daughter away from us, as she begged her mom to 'open' hers.

And  we realized that on the edges of our luminescent revelry,  all the parents of small children still in attendance were visibly quite offended - shielding their children and herding them away.

Our work here was done.  We gathered our things and went home.  

(We might have giggled a little.  Maybe.  Rebels.)

Summer

'READY OR NOT, HERE WE COME!'  

The big kids played something called Purple Martins and Mosquitos, and I was awful at it.  

The call was made by one of the finders.  The game required that one person hide, and everyone else look for them.  When each person finds the one in hiding, they hide too.  It was played in the dark, when real mosquitoes were out.  And I was, in my memory, the last one - every time I was allowed to play.

Today, that call is coming from Summer.  I can hear it as sure as if it (and my children 3) were actually yelling the actual words.  

We are decidedly Not.  Ready, that is.  In a house where every micro-event is another surprise (SURPRISE! Time to get up!  SURPRISE!  Dinner time!  SURPRISE!  Everybody needs to brush their teeth! SURPRISE!  There's a soccer game!) summer is a tough one to wrap your brain around.

It comes on so fast and furious.  And there is so much of it.  Those first day camp discussions, in March - they're too early for me.  I'm not capable.  In March, I can barely believe spring is here - not over and done with and on to summer.  Not yet.  And that continues through April.  And now, somehow, it's May.  Which still sounds like spring to me.

By my daughter's birthday, which happens this week, the camp registrations are in full swing or closed out.  They confuse me still, even now when they are suddenly very relevant.

When the end of summer hit last year, after so much of it had been so unstructured, there was some desperation to every self-entertained one of them - a deep-seated desire to hang with someone other than me, other than each other.

The Big One and I swore we would never have that unscheduled a summer again.

But that conversation was... ten months ago.

Thrilled at the prospect of public school for my youngest, I eagerly allowed for his summer to start when theirs does.  Which means his school ends... when theirs does.  He is four.  He is, decidedly, a liability... more labrador puppy than boy. He has Things to Do, and is not often kept up with by older siblings treasuring their limited ability to escape.

They have, I think, two weeks each of day camp.  And we all have a three-week roadtrip to Maryland - the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay, for cookouts aplenty, vaguely tipsy parents, younger cousins, sparklers, a zip line, deer sightings, and boat trips - (though the dates are not quite set.)  

For the rest of it, I am working from home - and the kids are...?  Playing in the sprinklers?  Riding scooters?  Having water fights?  Camping out in the basement? Going on picnics with mom on the 2 days/week she doesn't work?  Hanging out in a friend's treehouse?  Not watching pPod?

Wait.  That doesn't sound so bad.

From this vantage point... now, with the house almost quiet and a lawnmower buzzing in the background... as the air gets a little heavier and the hydrangeas think about bursting into bloom... right now, this minute... that summer sounds quite good.  

If only we could ALL recharge, with little expected of us, for weeks at a time.  WIth nothing more pressing in front of us than the application of sunscreen and bug spray.

This is how we had summer.  And if I allow myself to remember completely correctly... the days were sometimes crushingly boring. But only if I let myself recall that.  What my front brain recalls is the sheer imagined bliss of it.  

I think we all need empty spaces in our days.  Time and room to explore.  Growing outside of our cages.  I think dirt is good, and children living in a neighborhood where they are safe to roam and return home to a whistle.  I think electronic stuff should be shut off, and art supplies should be within reach.  

I think there is charm in having the best thing you can imagine be a swim in a friend's pool and an ice cream from the ice cream truck.  I think you should have to come up with new games for kick balls - and that all the games should have deadly titles.  (Slaughterball.  Smear the you-know-what-i'm-talking-about.  Death by Ball.  That sort of thing.)

I believe, when you are seven, your biggest goal of the summer might as well be riding down the biggest hill of your street with no hands.  When you are nine, you should get to ride to a friend's house on your bike.  Alone.  And when you are four?  You should sometimes tag along, and sometimes get to play with friends all your own.  That live on your street.  And like super hero capes.  

Besides, that frustration that comes at the end of the summer?  Smells like a great recipe to cook up a little enthusiasm for 4th, 1st and pre-K.

And that settles that.  

This week, Annabeth turns seven.  I'll close my computer of all the summer camp options still available, and instead make plans for Annabeth's new bike. And possibly a kickball. After all, it'll be cheaper than day camp, a lot more memorable, and far more useful in the long run.  

Summer's calling.  We're ready enough.

Champion

We went to the dentist last week.

"We" means 2/3 of my children.  The night before, the Big One saw the dental appointment and asked 'why now?', meaning - why now, when we are cutting back expenses, have a pile of bills, and have started the hell of paying off this year's taxes.

The short answer is that 'next month' never seems to come - that is, we can put it off, but to what end?

Later, a few things occurred to me - that is, that dental visits are simply what you do.  And that as a child, we never missed our annual dentist appointment.  And that whatever the cause, we all had perfect teeth and giant smiles.  Teeth, and our family smiles, were a source of misplaced pride (since luck, genetics, and fluoridated water each played a larger part in our big, straight, cavity-free teeth than did the daily brushing, or occasional swipe-throughs with floss.)  

My mother raised us alone, with no financial or emotional assistance from my father, who abandoned her and his four children when I was 18 months old.  She struggled as a counselor, and then a teacher, to make all ends line up - and to give us the extras so we wouldn't notice.  

Visits to the dentist happened in the summer, when we would stay with my grandparents on their farm in a small town in rural Connecticut ("farm" is a retired tobacco farm, and "Connecticut" is rural riverbank broadleaf tobacco territory.  Lest you be confused and immediately associate "Connecticut farm" with Martha Stewart's plush Westport horse ranch...This was decidedly Not That.)

On the farm, I got to be queen.  My naturally bossy tendencies were given full reign, as my grandfather imagined poor, fatherless Cathy the victim of every nefarious plot.  I followed him with a matching salt shaker in my pocket so we could eat hot tomatoes off the vine.  I talked non-stop, and he listened - mostly silent.  We picked blueberries for my grandmother's flourishing summer blueberry business, and he would come to my defense when I got in trouble for handing over a bucket of mostly red berries, speckled with hard little green stems, and rubbed almost translucent from over-handling.

Famously, my siblings (4, 6, and 7 years older) would be admonished if I tripped.  If I cried when left out of games with even older cousins.  Or, when younger, wet my pants.  

Grampa was my champion.  I could do no wrong.

I have no idea if the trips to the dentist were paid for by my grandfather or my mother - but it doesn't matter.  They would have happened either way, because my mother firmly believed in good teeth and in doing what you Should, and because my mother was a notorious refuser-of-aid (even if had come in the form of dental visits, provided for by her father.)

I wasn't really thinking of all of this.  Not yet.

I visited my son - proud and four - in the chair.  He had a mouth full of flouride treatment, and I involuntarily shuddered.  I took a picture.  I said to the hygienist, "I remember those, back before they had those little suction straws.  They were awful.  You weren't allowed to swallow and it was so hard not to."

Annabeth wanted details.  So I told her.  "When I was little?  You had that awful stuff and no sucky straw, but you couldn't swallow - you had to keep spitting in a little bowl.  But once, I did swallow. And when I got back to my grandparent's house, I threw up in the bushes."

"Really?  Did you go to the hospital?"

"No,no.  Nothing like that.  But  I can remember my grandfather yelling about 'that goddamned dentist had no idea what the hell he was doing!' and my grandmother yelling back that we were told not to swallow, that she heard the dentist say it..."  

"Was the dentist wrong?"

"No, hon.  He wasn't.  But my grandfather was always quick to stand up for me.  He imagined everyone was doing wrong around me, and that I was never at fault."

"Wow.  Was that nice?"

Conspiratorily, I answered, "It was fantastic."

And it was.  I think my grandfather honestly believed it was his duty to single-handedly make up for the fact that my father was an unmitigated ass.  That he had abandoned all of us, and never looked back, was something so far out of my grandfather's loyal and hardworking imagination that he was compelled to make up for it.  It was an abomination, and needed to be revealed as such - and not imagined to be any sort of norm.

My grandfather was my knight.  There to prove to me that men were not, inherently, bad.  That hard work and loyalty should always prevail. That I was wonderful just being.

It was folly to think he could do all that.  On his own.  In just eight weeks a summer.

But he did.  

And I would have had no reason to think of him last week.  No reason to talk about him to my kids, no reason to remember what it was like to have a champion, to be spoiled in grand and real ways.  What it was like to be beautiful and Right and smart.  To be listened to, by an adult, as a child. To feel hot dirt between your toes, and to eat hot tomatoes out of a field.  To pull a salt shaker out of your pocket.  

Had it not been for an ill-timed trip to the dentist?  I might not have had any reason at all to think of Grampa.  

And that's a pretty good job for a dentist.