Evolution of Language

On our drive home from daycare each day, Clementine likes to go on a puppy safari, peeking out her window to spot people walking their dogs. “Puppy!” she’ll cry with glee before fixing her eyes on me to demand “More. More puppy,” as if I have the power to make them appear in front of us at will. She is equally excited at spotting a bike (she prefers the Spanish “bici” (bee-cee)), but puppies are really her thing. Lately she’s been eager to figure out how these puppies relate to the people walking them, and putting it in the only terms she has, she’ll now point to the walker and say “Puppy Mama” or “Puppy Dada,” happy to have figured things out.

You see where this is leading, right? Since she will still not refer to herself as anything other than Baby, she now recognizes me as “Baby Mama,” and Nate as “Baby Dada.” Her language has evolved to that of a rapper! While it’s true that she doesn’t use these names exclusively (she is far too eager to use Amanda and Nate now that she has figured out everyone has at least two names they’ll answer to), I love it when we’re in public and she loudly recites our relationships to one another: baby, baby mama, baby dada. I especially love it when she points a finger in some other family’s direction, squints her eyes a little and shouts “Baby Mama! Baby Mama!” That’s just us keepin’ it real.

And we're back

Yea though we have passed through the valley of the shadow of pneumonia, we have somehow survived. C’s drippy cough means she’s up a few times a night, sometimes wired and unable to get back to sleep, so I’ve been enjoying life jammed in her very small bed with her. I tell myself we’ll laugh about at this when she’s 20.

Despite the illness, Nate and I did sneak away for a few rare nights out last week: once to celebrate my birthday and once to enjoy our annual outing with the judge and Julie, who invite us to attend a reading at a local college to which Julie is very connected. This year Marilyn Nelson read, and I was pleased with how enjoyable the reading was (very little of the poetry lilt which always drives me nuts by the third or fourth poem). I left all charged up and ready to face the page—hopefully it will stick. I love going to the event with the judge and Julie because she knows EVERYONE there, Detroit literati to all the big players, and he has the most amazing sense of humor. I spend a lot of the evening wishing he and I could communicate telepathically because I know he has a thousand stories (candid, funny and sometimes surprising stories) about everyone who walks by.

I was only a little familiar with Nelson’s work before the reading, but I had heard she writes poetry for young people as well as adults. “Poetry for young people” has such a pleasing ring to it that I immediately thought I’d be a very literary mama and snag a signed copy for Clementine, who is wearing me out on the heavy rotation books. When I got to the book table, I saw A Wreath for Emmett Till, one of her “young people” books and didn’t end up buying it. Till, you see, is a young boy who was lynched for once whistling at a white woman, and while I am really behind the notion of the book, I just couldn’t see tucking C in with a rhythmic crown of sonnets about lynching, no matter how beautiful or educational, touching or necessary they really are. What can I say? Even I have limits, though I hope I remember to buy it for her when she’s in sixth grade and so embarrassed I’m her mom she can hardly walk straight.

Spring has sprung in our neighborhood, which is always such a relief because we feel so trapped. It’s also horrible because for the first few weeks of the spring our neighborhood turns especially wild. Maybe it’s because NASCAR isn’t racing as much yet, or perhaps there’s nothing for our neighbors to watch on their ridiculous Rent-a-Center GIANT televisions (I can see nostril hairs on the picture from the street, I swear), or maybe even they get a whiff of the outdoor air and get giddy with all the possibilities. Every year Nate and I swear this is the year we’ll give up on the place after nights of drunken carousing around a fire pit on one side of us or hours of six unsupervised sibling screaming on the other side, but we remember that it always dies down eventually. I used to be good at loving this place, this salt-of-the-earth, trying-to-better-itself place, but I struggle. I long for gentrification. I case newly-bought homes for signs of…well…signs that they won’t move a couch on their front lawn or be involved in domestic disputes. I never thought I’d say it, but I miss the people with the wrestling ring in their backyard—now that they’ve moved it’s just trampolines, broken down 4X4s and large, loud, untrained dogs purchased in lieu of security systems.

Better little by little

This picture was taken before the pneumonia, but it captures her pretty well right now. She's not as pathetic as yesterday, barely able to pick her head off my chest, but she's not back to her happy, dancing self either. The coughing is terrible! Since she's napping quite a bit I uploaded lots of Easter pics finally, but they don't seem as mood-specific. Click for more.

Under the weather

Excuse the silence. Clementine has pneumonia. Not unlike when I unknowingly sent her to daycare with a broken arm, this time I sent her to a day of daycare and exposed her to two days of working in the office with me as her condition worsened. I'm not self-flagellating, just realizing that it is possible to feel like you're following good instincts only to have that all shot to hell down the road. When C puked on my on Sunday and Nate decided to skip the concert and stay home I worried that she would end up being fine and we wasted a night out and a sitter on nothing. On the other hand, if we had both gone we would have been wrecks the whole time. It's a gamble either way.

She seemed to be perking up yesterday, but last night was an endless battle again the flames of fever and today sure enough a rattle on the left side. After we got her medicine she slept on top of me (and only on top of me) for four and a half hours. So much for working the rest of the day from home. She is really suffering but still manages to be cute. In her sleep she called mostly for her socks but also sometimes for Yora, Hudsie, Hudsie mama, PeeWee (as in the playhouse) and the socks again. When she woke up from her marathon nap she told me that Floyd the cat was in the bathtub and then laughed her ass off. Fever dreams must be the best.

Fever 103

It's later than I like to stay up these days, but I can't sleep, floating from my bed to the computer or the bookshelf while Clementine sleeps fevered in her bed. I'm remembering symptoms, quelling new worries (was she pointing to her right side when she said "Owie," and does that indicate appendix?) and realizing I can be a little histrionic. I know she just has a fever, but she seems so unlike herself, so uncomfortable, and I feel like I need to be awake, hovering, waiting for her to wake and need me. I want to comfort her, to soothe her.

This trip up is because I can't stop reciting a line from "Fever 103" by Sylvia Plath: "I have been flickering, off, on, off, on." I need to find the rest of the poem to read it, and I'm taking that as a good sign. When we brought Clementine home I kept Plath's Ariel beside the bed and read it constantly with new eyes as I pumped or when I would wake in the middle of the night to rock her back to sleep. I'd like to say I was learning something about poetry or motherhood from the experience, and I suppose I wouldn't be lying if I did. But mostly I was looking to the book to reassure me that motherhood didn't mean the end of my poetry, that I could still write in the face of such a consumption. Perhaps Plath wasn't the best place to look for that, but the blame is all mine: I have written only a few poems since Clementine, and not one is something I'd show anyone. I tell myself it's hard to write from a place of such contentment, but that's as big a lie as any (for if we are going to get into the argument that poetry is inspired by isolation, fear, anger, etc., what better inspiration than motherhood?). I just don't have anything left for the page right now. I hope it will change, that I will change it. I hope needing to read Plath in the middle of the night is a start, but I don't know how one can balance this much: work, parenting, social connections, an artistic life.

I was thinking about this last night at a Lucinda Williams concert that is worth it's own post (along with a post about the talent show the night before held in my working class/redneck town in conjunction with the contemporary arts museum downtown--a whole post I hope I'll make time to write). Lucinda was singing about making a little something to eat; it was a solitary, searching activity in the song and isn't even the refrain, but I felt the world screech to a halt a little while she sang about it. I can't remember a time I put that much thought (and really it was just a few lines of the song) into what to eat myself. I certainly can't remember a time when that deliberation, that act could then be a part of a mood, a feeling I wanted to communicate in a poem. I can't accurately describe what the hell I'm actually thinking about, but as I listened to her I realized I will not be on my own that way again for a long time, if ever. That restlessness, that attention to every whim and mood, that ability to connect small decisions to larger existential struggles is something I don't have time for anymore. What the hell kind of poet am I, I wondered to myself, that I can't make it the center of my world? That's the only way to be successful, right? Marie Howe, Sharon Olds, even my friend Crystal: poetry comes first. Lucinda too.

But then I remembered Clementine, the things that are the center of my world, and I was OK. Better than OK. Sure, Nate would have been with me at the concert had C. not puked her guts out as we were leaving (is that parenting or what?). Sure, I wilt a little when a writer friend of mine gets a prize, publishes another book. I didn't know this would be my path, my happiness. I didn't know I would stray from writing, but I have. I don't know when I'll go back, but the hope is alive. Ultimately this is the life I want, the life I choose every day. Clementine is wheezing in the next room, her hot little body restless and wandering under the covers, and in a few hours she will nestle between me and Nate in bed. But I know she'll be OK. I'm going to read one more poem (which was one I obsessed over when we were first home with her and the one I read at her faux baptism) and then go get ready for her. This is what I want to be doing.

Lurking

Long ago (last year) I blogged just about every day...sometimes more than that. I've fallen off a lot lately, and I'm not exactly sure why. I'm busy, yes, with work and a daughter with whom I want to spend just about every free minute I have. But there might be more to it than that. I'm having a hard time keeping up with my end of the conversation. I may even have forgotten what I'm talking about midstride. This started as a way to record Clementine's life and mine as we struggled to know one another, and it quickly became a way for me to reach a small community of like-minded or curious parents who happened by. I have no aims to be a superblogger like the tiresome parent who once told he was working hard "to build the readership" of his blog, and sometimes I wonder why I keep it up.

Why am I thinking about blogging like this? Nate might say it's my nature to overanalyze, but in fact I have been lurking on a blog kept by a senior at the high school where I work and it consumes a great deal of my attention and energy. Out of context that sounds creepy, but everyone on campus is as obsessed or more than I am, whether she is his English teacher or a student who has never met him. He is dying--and I think at this point that's a fair statement--of an agressive form of pediatric cancer. He and his family started his "Care Page," a blog program for cancer patients, at the beginning of his struggle with cancer as a way of keeping people updated on treatments, outcomes, tests. It has now become a way for the family to keep a public record of the day-to-day life of a cancer patient nearing the end of the battle, but it's so much more. It's a mediatation of life and death; it is the most eloquent account I've read of someone so young looking right into the face of death and having presence of mind enough to talk about it. A lot. To say the things he wants to the world before he goes. And as the bulletin boards on the page grow by the hour with comments from fellow students, teachers, strangers, it also becomes a testament to how a community can care, how it can learn from the people within it. I'm not nearly as eloquent as the 18-year-old in the center of the Care Page when talking about it, and I can hardly even log on these days without dissolving into tears.

And with those cheerful thoughts I leave you. Clementine is just up from her nap and is shaking like a leaf. She has been fevered, freezing and puking in the last 24 hours, and I'm going to go cuddle her and maybe give in to her relentless demands for dancey dancing (see below) and Oz.

Dancey dancing

There is a new obsession at our house, and it has nothing to do with Easter. Two weeks ago I attended a very cool, very laid-back tap dance class downtown with my friend Laura. I’ve long known one of her dreams in life is to tap dance (and she has long known that I’m usually up for anything), so I was happy to accompany her as she took a step closer to realizing her dream of being Shirley Temple or Ginger Rogers or whatever dancer is responsible for her yearning. Following others people’s dreams or desires can be a real treat because they can take you where you didn’t ever think to go: a tap dancing class, a part of the world about which you weren’t ever curious before, through a book or movie that hadn’t interested you. With little invested, you can experience just about anything without the fear of it falling short of expectations or being harder than you imagined. I went to tap class thinking, sure, this could be fun and left pretty darn pleased with myself, ready to sign up for a little while (though not yet ready to take over Laura’s passionate dream).

As it happened, Singin’ in the Rain was on Turner Classic Movies that night, so I recorded it and watched at it between rounds of domesticity after Clementine went to bed. The next day after work/pre-dinner, when Clementine often clamors for some form of TV or movie and we resist because we just aren’t going to raise a TV-starved kid, I thought of putting the movie on and was delighted with how excited she was to watch it. She chanted “Dancey dancing,” or something along those lines as she watched, trying to imitate some of the movements but not wanting to put too much effort into it when watching was taking so much of her energy. When a dance number would die down, she’d ask for more, more, and I’d fast forward to the next one, anxious to hear her proclamation of “Dancey dancing” and to watch her wiggly little hips and crazy arm gestures.

For the last week we’ve been eking dance numbers out of anything we have in the house (Wizard of Oz and exercise tapes so far) and recording anything on TCM that might have even one such number. On Easter, after the bunny, after our weekly brunch at Club Bart, after a few errands, we found ourselves perched on the doorstep of Thomas Video waiting for them to open so we could rent more. The pickings were slim since our VCR is broken, but we made away with Brigadoon, An American in Paris, Take Me Out to the Ballgame and The Busby Berkeley Collection, which is the real gem. Not troubled with the plots of the actual movies themselves, the DVD is just the old black-and-white dance numbers from the 30s, many of which darling C has made nicknames for so we can be sure exactly what she means when she says “Meow dancey.”

For my part, I’m encouraging this, and not just because I have some tap shoes on the way. There are many things I’m passionate about in life (poetry/writing, art and travel to name only a few), and there are many things about which I have been passionate at some time. It’s the latter in which I’m totally willing to indulge Clementine. I have been a beekeeper, a bookmaker, a chef, a welder, a translator, a farmer, a vulcanologist, a jewelry maker, a clothing designer and, now, a tap dancer, among many other things. I haven’t done any of them extremely well or for very long, but I gave each one my interest and my best shot until I felt I learned what I wanted. I wish that for her as well, to look at something—anything—and be interested, to immerse herself in just about anything in order to figure out the depth of her interest/passion. OK, maybe I’m over thinking her current obsession with all things dancing. It could just be that she wants the damn TV on has learned this is how we will allow it. We’ll see. All I know for sure is that dancey dancing sure beats the hell out of Elmo. At least until she demands ballet lessons.

Hoppity hop hop

Last Easter (worth the click if only for the world’s best family portrait) we were at my dad’s in Washington D.C. with my sister and her kids and didn’t have to think about how to celebrate the day. Because my niece was older, we of course did an egg hunt and everyone got baskets with all sorts of goodies. We were along for the ride, so it didn’t matter that my 6-month old baby didn’t understand, didn’t walk and could have cared less about chocolate (and bonus for me: I got to eat all the candy in her basket). I thought I might get away with a low-key (as in, not really celebrating) Easter this year, too, but how wrong I was.

The other day at the store, we passed some simple baskets—no bunnies, no eggs, no grass or decorations. Clementine reached for them and said “Da bunny! Da bunny!”

“The bunny?” I asked.

“Yes, da bunny,” she said, nodding. “Hop, hop, hop. Bye bye.”

This is how lots of our conversation go these days, so while you may be scratching your head in bewilderment, I totally got what was going on. But how did she learn about the Easter Bunny who hop, hop, hops with a basket and then goes away? Of course: day care.

The next day I asked Julie if they had been talking about the Easter Bunny lately, and the whole mess of the kids fell in line as if on cue and started singing parts of “Peter Cottontail,” all in different keys and at different points in the verses. They put their little hands out in front of them, curved over as if in simulation of paws, and began to hop all over the place shouting, then screaming, “Hop! Hop! Hop!” until the song faded away, the hoping became a pogo-like jumping, and the place descended into madness.

Well, hell. I guess we’re celebrating Easter this year.

But here’s the thing: I don’t really remember much about the myth of Easter. Yeah, it involves baskets and dying eggs and plastic eggs and candy and looking for eggs and (in my house) making Easter hats out of Peeps and an upside-down basket, but the actual beginning-to-end story evades me. We dye the eggs in advance, but how does the Easter Bunny find them and why does he hide them? How do the plastic eggs filled with pennies and jelly beans come into play? If the Easter Bunny fills your basket with chocolate and goodies (or, as the Peter Cottontail song would suggest, “Easter joys”), what do you carry around with you to find all the plastic and hard-boiled eggs? And why, oh why, do people make egg salad out of the hard-boiled eggs that are stained with who know what kind of food dye and have been unrefrigerated for who knows how long? I have philosophical questions, too, about what the Easter Bunny brings (do we really need another mysterious character bringing us heaps of gifts?), why he or she wants to do this and how we explain the bunny getting around, picking up baskets, hiding eggs, etc. This is much better fleshed out in the Santa story.

Nevertheless, I’m a sucker for my kid and am happy to jump on the bandwagon of any holiday if I can revamp it just a bit for our purposes. For instance, all the Easter candy is really just for me and Nate. We’ll give her dried fruit and yogurt-covered raisins, right? And books, books will be a big part. And we’ll take a trip to the zoo that day to look at bunnies. See, we have ideas. But there is a basic formula, so in search of the essentials (plastic eggs, day-glo grass) we headed to Target the other day and were totally amazed by the throng of people wandering dazed or angrily through the aisles, stuffing their carts with all kinds of stuff they hadn’t really come in for but felt obligated to supply their children (here I blame the underdeveloped story of the E.B.; parents are shooting in the dark here!). It was amazing. And angry…did I mention how angry everyone was in the face of all that sugar?

We came away with a few things but were pretty disappointed. For one thing, it was impossible to find just plain jelly beans. There were spiced and speckled, LifeSaver, Mike and Ike and all sorts of wack-o kinds, but no just plain jelly beans. And the eggs—there were bugs and dots and pool balls, but we really had to dig around for the just plain crazy colored ones. I guess Target isn’t the place you go when you want to keep in non-commercial, pretty simple, semi-homemade, super kitschy or whatever, but what’s a wanna-be Easter Bunny/ workin’ mama to do on her lunch hour just days before the big event?

So here’s what I wanna know. What are your Easter traditions? Anything you can pass along?

Kissin' Cousins

The whole cousin relationship is an odd one, isn't it? Dependent initially on one's parents' relationships with their siblings, the cousin thing varies from family to family and doesn't mean the same thing to any two people. I have five cousins--two who lived in Alaska while we were growing up and with whom we had pretty much no contact (yet I do remember one at my grandma's funeral who was clearly on acid or some other combo of drugs because he told my little sister that lizards were crawling out from beneath the casket), two who lived nearby and with whom we had sporadic, emotionally-charged contact that changed as my mom and aunt got along or didn't (as adults they're more dysfunctional than most, so I stay away), and one we saw every summer and with whom we were reasonably close for a while; a lot of that has faded away with the passing of my other grandma, though--we hardly hear anything from Pennsylvania these days. In contrast, my college roommate grew up right alongside her cousins and considers them more like siblings than anything else.

My sister and I had a rocky relationship growing up, one which I am still made to feel guilty about from time to time because I wasn't the loving, inclusive big sister that, in retrospect, I wish I had been. As a teenager, I would have predicted that my sis and I would barely speak as adults, that our children would see each other only on major holidays and at funerals. I would have been so very wrong. Happily, my sister and I speak almost daily, and having kids around the same time as one another has meant that we can provide them with a new version of the cousin relationship. Vacationing together was great because the girls played together and entertained themselves, formed little bonds and shared secrets--it was the stuff of childhood, the kind of relationships I wish for them to always have.

The only problem is that Clementine has developed a serious Abby jones, one that can't be easily satisfied now that vacay is over and we're living a five-hour drive away from the beloved object of her obsession. On vacation, each morning darling C would wake up, lift her sleep-heavy head with her crazy, matted bed head, look to the door and say "Abby?" OK, one morning she said "cheese," but the rest of the time it was all Abby. Closer to nap time, this would become more of a whine, "Aaaabyyyy," and often ended with her collapsed in front of the door alternating Abby with "out! out!" I was afraid of what it would be like at home: temper tantrums and fits that couldn't be assuaged with promises of Abby sightings later in the day, meals when C would demand to sit next to an Abby we couldn't produce. But it hasn't been like that. Well, not exactly.

Instead of begging for Abby, Clementine has turned Abby into a word that serves many purposes. Sure, she's still Abby the person we talk to on any phone or phone-like toy or device, we still walk around and identify her in all the pictures (and the younger Nora, which Clementine pronounces "No-la," as well--Nora's not forgotten but is rather a follow-up like "Abby, Abby, Abby, No-la") and conjure her when I ask silly questions like "Do you know who we're going to see today?" But she has also become a strange noun that refers to the things C associates with Abby: the two hand-me-down hoodies from Abby, for example, one of which I found wrapped around C in her sleep last night. When she wants to wear one, she points and says "Abby" so definitively I start to believe that all hoodies should be called Abbies; "Do you want to wear your Abby?" I ask. Clementine has boots that she calls Abby (thank heavens for spring and the retirement of the boots), and she has books and toys that are Abby as well, though I'm not always sure why. She launches into long diatribes full of words that I don't yet understand and peppers her sentences with Abby. Sometimes she'll answer a question like "Do you want pasta or meat for dinner?" with a simple "Abby," nodding her head and sporting a very earnest look. One of her kitchen utensils is sometimes Abby, and I'm just counting the days until we rechristen all the stuffed animals Abby as well. Incidentally, the laptop computer is called No-la mostly because C remembers looking at pictures of Nora on it, and the upstairs computer is "dancey ducky" for the little beat bot I found one day while reading another blog.

Let's be clear that I'm not complaining. I think this Abby obsession is sweet, and I'm trying very hard not to abuse it and make it lose its magic. I'll cop to flexing it once or twice as an "Abby doesn't scream in her bath, so why are you?" or "Do you think Abby would be happy that you aren't going to bed?" But I'm not proud and don't intend to do that again. I love this little cousin relationship and wish someone would invent a super-speed transport between Chicago and Detroit so we didn't feel so damn far away.