Planting Dandelions (22 page)

But even he understands there are natural boundaries, proverbial spaces in our togetherness.

“Close your eyes,” he has recently taken to ordering me when he's changing underwear. “I don't want you to see my wee-ness.”

At five going on six, his wee-ness is under autonomous rule, no longer part of his mother's domain. And all the rest of him is lined up behind it, on the road to independence, or to another kind of allegiance.

Suppose the girl is great. Suppose we all love her, take her in as one of our own. Then suppose she breaks our hearts, or he breaks hers, what then?

My own parents suffered with me when my heart was broken, and suffered because of me, when I broke the heart of someone they'd come to love and regard as a member of the family. Once, after a fight with my boyfriend had ended badly, my misery so distressed my father that he personally intervened and negotiated a reconciliation on my behalf, without my knowledge. I never knew exactly how he brought it about, but my boyfriend came back early the next morning with a changed heart. The incredible part is, Daddy didn't even like that boyfriend much. But he could not stand to see his daughter in that particular kind of pain.

My mother and my first husband were close during the short time he and I were together, and when I confessed through tears that I had fallen in love with someone else, she hugged me hard, told me she loved me no matter what, and made it clear that her sympathy was with my home-wrecked husband. She knew that their relationship would atrophy on its own after a while, but she wasn't about to pull the plug before the love stopped flowing. It wasn't just about him and me, which is something I didn't appreciate until I had children of my own. Ever since they've been able to smile and make friends, I love whom they love. Even if I don't necessarily like them, or have anything in common with their mothers. The soccer field and playground make unlikely allies of us all. The mom of one of the kids' preschool friends once heard me mention something about going to church, and for two years, I let her go on thinking that I was a good fundamentalist Christian like she was, and not, as Patrick fondly describes us Episcopalians, a member of the church of freaks and queers. I was willing to let her believe I was saved as long as our sons were buddies. I would probably try to win back a girlfriend for him, too, even if
she
were a fundamentalist Christian. I'm invested in their relationships. And it's not that easy to withdraw the investment just because the principal players have moved on.

It's unrealistic to hope that my children won't ever get divorced, given the statistics, and their own parents' history, but I hope it anyway. It's easy to get a divorce, but it's hard to get unmarried, even when the cut is clean and bloodless, like mine was. Our legal and financial ties were easily dissolved, and there were no children to keep us connected to each other. I moved away, and apart from a split-second, chance sighting across a parking lot during a summer vacation over ten years ago, we never saw each other again. Even so, the severed life is a phantom limb that sometimes twitches and aches for no apparent cause. It's been nearly fifteen years since I kissed that husband good-bye—three times as many years apart as we were a couple—but sometimes I still dream about him; that we are together in the home we once shared, and that it's this life that's been the dream all along.

Most of the time, my memory of him is distant and unfocused, a face in the background. But then something will bring it into sudden focus. Once it was a silver locket, tarnished and forgotten at the bottom of my jewelry box. Inside, our two portraits were still hinged together, each of them so small it was like spying through the wrong end of a telescope. A stolen backward glance. Sometimes it's my oldest son who reminds me of him, lean and tall, with his sandy brown hair and blue eyes, his innate esprit de corps and love of order. It's ironic to glimpse traces of the life I left behind in the life I ran toward, and it could be pure projection, yet it moves me when I see the similarities. Nothing is ever really lost.

There's no reason for those memories and dreams to occasionally haunt me. As far as I'm aware, I have no unfinished business with that long-ago part of my history. Except that I think, on some level, maybe there is no divorce. Maybe if you make those vows, you don't get your whole deposit back. Parts of your souls stay tangled up together, for better or for worse. I mean to tell my boys that, too, before I blink and they're men already, picking out rings, making promises that are impossible to keep and hard to take back. But the metaphysics of love will have to wait until I've covered the mechanics. You know, the basic facts. Like where eggs come from when both chickens are left-handed.

W
henever career counselors try to parlay child-rearing experience into marketable job skills, what they typically come up with are administrative functions, like appointment making and record keeping. As if you'd want to do those things for anyone to whom you weren't legally or morally bound. They completely overlook the far more specialized skill set moms acquire over the course of those years, which easily qualifies many of us for top creative positions at Disney World, or in Broadway musical theater. By the time our kids head off to college, we are show business veterans, having produced, directed, and starred in such classics as “Christmas,” “Halloween,” “Birthday Party” and other holiday extravaganzas for eighteen consecutive years, at breathless tempo. Motherhood isn't a desk job. It's vaudeville.

Let's take a run through the standard repertoire. Practically speaking, the first major production of the year is Valentine's Day. Chronologically, it should be New Year's, but that's an adult-oriented occasion, which properly belongs to the childfree, since they can sleep in the next morning. They're welcome to it. The rest of us can't stay awake till midnight anymore, anyway.

Valentine's Day used to involve champagne and debauchery, too, but classroom party preparations leave a mother too exhausted for romance. V-Day is the biggest classroom party of the school year, and conscription into its service is impossible to avoid. I have three elementary school kids who have up to thirty classmates each. That's a lot of love to deliver. I'm usually up late the night before, hot-gluing foil-wrapped chocolate hearts to cards, signing X's and O's, cutting sandwiches into heart shapes, and hating everyone. I think mothers wearing a school visitor name tag on February 14 should be treated like military veterans, with drinks on the house and complimentary manicures wherever we go.

When I was a kid, about a thousand years ago, Valentine's Day was all about the valentines, which were painstakingly handcut from a book that contained not one licensed, trademarked character. You chose the plainest, slightly backhanded ones for the kids you didn't like, and the most ornate, gushing ones for the kids you did, and we gave it to each other straight up, without the orgiastic euphoria of corn syrup solids to cloud things. For party refreshments, we had our own tender, young hearts to eat out. I don't know when that changed, or whether it's an American thing, but every valentine my kids give and receive comes attached to at least one piece of candy. As if that didn't add up to enough insulin resistance, the room moms mix up a vat of sugar and red food dye and pour it in a feed trough. Or they might as well, considering what is actually served. If you've seen video montages of psychedelic “happenings” in the sixties, you've seen something like a modern Valentine's Day classroom party. On the glycemic disaster index, Valentine's is second only to Halloween.

I try to limit my on-site presence to dropping a snack off at the door and running, but this year I thought I'd linger and check in on my third-grader's class. The party couldn't have been going more than twenty minutes, but the floor and desktops were already littered with red and pink cellophane wrappers. My child was slumped backward in his seat in what appeared to be a diabetic coma. Several empty Pixy Stix tubes lay scattered in front of him. His lips twitched slightly when I spoke his name. About half his classmates were also catatonic at their desks. The other half were doing gymnastics across the room. Their drug dealers, the room moms, stood paralyzed against the wall, as if watching a fire they had accidentally started.

“Here,” I said to my son, picking up a bottle of spring water from a treat bag and silently blessing whichever mother had thoughtfully included it in the loot. “I think you should drink some of this.”

He rallied enough to unscrew the bottle top and pour in a packet of red drink mix that had come with it. Of course. I eased out the door, hoping he would hit his bottom and find a recovery program before the bell rang.

Sugar is to children's parties as cocaine is to the entertainment industry. If your kid is part of the scene, you have to accept that they're going to come into contact with it. You hope for the best, and brace for the worst. For a very short while, I thought I could keep my babies' pancreases pristine. I kept them away from refined carbohydrates. I limited fruit juice. I made them barley-sweetened whole grain teething biscuits that even the dog wouldn't eat. But I couldn't keep it up. The slope of my nutritive backslide can be plotted by each of my kid's first birthday cakes. When the oldest turned one, I made him a whole wheat carrot cake with pineapple-sweetened cream cheese on top. Two years later, it was a homemade chocolate layer cake, frosted with buttercream, for my middle child. Three years after that, I ran by the warehouse club and picked up a slab of corn syrup and hydrogenated vegetable oil, spray-painted blue, for the baby.

It was an increasingly futile effort anyway, since we don't live in a bubble. Even the bank tellers at the drive-up window are pushing candy. School is just a high-fructose corn syrup distribution hub. I've had to shift from a preventative focus to damage control. I can't keep my kids from getting their hands on a can of soda when they leave our house, but I can at least make sure they've had something nutritious before they get out the door. I figure it's better to shoot for moderation anyway. I grew up under a very strict anti-junk-food regime, and wiped out all seventeen years of it in one semester of college. My husband, on the other hand, grew up with no dietary rules or restrictions, and never developed an internal regulator to suggest that there should ever be any. Outside of the suppers I cook, he eats like a twelve-year-old with no mother. So I've relaxed my standards in hopes of finding the middle way.

Besides, what's childhood without an occasional sugar buzz? At least once in your life, I figure, you've got to eat a chocolate bunny the size of your head, and you might as well do it when you can most efficiently metabolize it. I must have a little bit of the pusher in me. I loved watching each of my kids realize for the first time what's inside a plastic Easter egg, what comes after they say “trick or treat.”

“HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME,” my youngest bellowed joyfully up and down the street, the first year he could trick-or-treat on his own two feet and hold his loot bag by himself.

Where creative output is concerned, Halloween is an even bigger production than Valentine's Day. It's also more competitive. Everyone's in it to win for best costume design and best front porch special effects. To add to the intensity, there's almost always a conflict between directors and actors as to whose artistic vision should get prime consideration. The actors in our house always win. My cute and original costume suggestions are consistently rejected in favor of the trademarked and cliché.

“Ninjas, again?” I ask, when presented with their demands. “That's
so
2005. What about the headless man I showed you?”

“It's weird.”

“It's
avant-garde
.”

Actors.

Halloween is just as much, or more, work for me, as any of the other major kids' holidays, but I get to share in the fun to a greater extent than at Valentine's Day or Easter. For starters, there is the kickback from the treat bags. I prefer to take my cut in chocolate, but will also accept candy corn and caramels. And then there are the grown-up parties, with the excuse to dress up, something I love to do. My husband loves it considerably less. In fact, no two words strung together will strike dread into his heart, and joy into mine, like “theme” and “party.” The last time I persuaded him to put a costume on, we were going to an allages gathering, and I came across a cheeky, last-minute concept he agreed was too apt to resist. I folded and pinned a tablecloth around him like a giant diaper and dropped a couple of onions down the back so it would sag appropriately. When we arrived at the party, the adults immediately caught on that he was a—wait for it—party pooper. We were basking in the glow of a well-delivered punch line, when someone's little boy wandered into the room, carrying a plate of cookies.