Siren

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“I just don’t like it when one of you is gone,” says my soon-to-be eight-year-old son.

He is sprawled on our bed, watching me fold laundry, while the ceiling fan spins above us.  Spring has come suddenly to our little town, the birds joyous and loud in their songs, proud and showing off for their future mates, trilling louder than I think I’ve heard them in the six years we’ve been here.  A lawnmower purrs outside, a sound I always associate with comfort and summer.

My husband is away for a few days on a hiking trip with his father, and my son is not happy to have one parent is not at home.   It just feels wrong, he tells me, to not have both of us here.

“What are you worried about, exactly?” I say, as I fold a stack of pink and purple leggings, and roll endless small socks into pairs.

My son starts to talk about various scenarios–what if I got hurt and couldn’t talk or move, what if Daddy and Grampa did not come home, what if a tornado came–and I see him growing more tense with each possibility.

I start to tell him that these things won’t happen, to smooth them over, then stop myself.

We talk about all the adults he could ask for help, just nearby–several families he knows well, and how he could call 911, and how even if he doesn’t remember the address for his grandparents, he knows how to show someone how to get there, or he and his sister could even walk there if necessary.

Strangely, as we talk about these possible disasters, I sense we are both calmer at just the practicing of the steps to react to the imaginary scenarios.  He begins to relax more into the bed, and flips through an “I Spy” book.

I stack the piles of folded clothes into the laundry basket.  I think about the burden of worry, of responsibility too early.  Sometimes the eldest in the family ends up bearing this the most.   “It’s not your job to be responsible if something like that goes wrong,” I say.  “That’s my job and Daddy’s job, and other grown-ups too sometimes.  We are here keep you safe, so your job is to be a kid and learn and try things and have fun.”  He seems satisfied, and wanders out of the room to find his sister.

Even in advanced age of 44 and my role of parent for seven-plus years, I do not admit to my son that I am not sure 1) I actually qualify as a grown-up yet or 2) if disaster struck, whether I really and truly am able to keep he and his sister completely safe from harm.

As I start to put the laundry away, I hear he and his sister giggling over a made-up game.  He has forgotten his worries for now.

Maybe, I think, if I act the part–brave, confident, capable, unmoored by potential disaster–I will become that person.

++

After the kids go to bed, I keep refreshing the weather radar on the iPad.  The angry jagged red line mixes with the sickly yellow blot of severe thunderstorms and is edging closer to our town.  Five different weather alerts warn of possible tornadoes, 60-70 mph winds, and hail.  The sky, a perfect turquoise blue just two hours ago, quickly turns gunmetal gray laced with black.  Hot, sour gusts of wind sneak through the crack of the window I am keeping open.

Our town has a siren that sounds off in severe weather, and I admit as I sit in my bed, wondering about the storm, that I like the simplicity of the signal.  If the siren blows, we go downstairs.  As a parent, there are so many choices and directions, that sometimes I feel overwhelmed about making the wrong one.  When the siren calls, there is no debate, no wondering if I am being excessively cautious, no gazing at the sky to deduce the safest course of action.  As the resident grown-up in charge right now, I like this certainty.

After the kids fall asleep, I head down to our finished basement, and amid the scattered Lego bricks, board games, and dress-up clothes, I arrange our sleeping bags, pads, and pillows–me in the middle, the kids flanking me on either side.  It is our standard configuration when the three of us are together–how we snuggle in the morning, the way we arrange ourselves at our cabin when we sleep over in the summer, and even the way we sit to read books on the sofa.

I return upstairs to watch a movie I’ve seen many times--its gorgeous, well-appointed beach house and gentle wit always cheers me.  The white sand, sunny skies, and willowy, fashionable people take me far away.   Every 10 mins or so, I refresh the radar.  The red line moves closer and the severe thunderstorm gets upgraded to a tornado watch.

I question again, as I do every tornado season, why I willingly chose to live in the Midwest.

Finally, as I am almost fully distracted by a favorite scene, the siren goes off.

I spring into action, scooping up my daughter, and asking my son to get up and come downstairs with us.  He is so deep in sleep that he sits up, opens his eyes, and then lies back down.  I come back in and turn on his bedside light so he partially wakes up.  He holds his beloved baby blanket–a once white, satin-edged, well-worn square he’s had since birth.

(“When will you make me get rid of this?” he asked me about the blanket, a few weeks ago. He knows well how he had to give up his pacifier when he was on the cusp of turning three.

“Never,” I said.  “You can keep that blanket as long as you like, that’s your choice.”)

We head downstairs, and the kids fall asleep in seconds.  I lie awake, willing myself not to keep looking at the radar, while the wind howls its terrible story outside.  I think about what we would do if it gets worse, deciding that we could pile the sofa pillows and sleeping bags into the small bathroom.

I break down and check the radar after an hour.   The main line of red tornado moves across without much incident in our town, but the watch remains in place until 3 a.m.

The basement is cool and my sleeping bag surprisingly comfortable, and I drift off, also thinking that that the sooner I sleep, the sooner it will be morning.

And in a flash, it is the bright morning.  My daughter curls up close to me, so delighted to find herself down in the basement.  “This is so FUN!  This is so COZY” she squeals.  “I love sleeping down here!”

My son also is dazzled by the magic of going to bed in one place and waking up elsewhere.  “Mommy, how did you do that?” he says, in awe.

I laugh, realizing that he has no memory of his sleepy walk down two flights of stairs, holding his blanket.

The kids play happily among our bedding and toys while I fix breakfast upstairs.  While I wait for my first golden cup of coffee to brew, I push up the sashes of the windows, grateful for the sun and the smell of lilacs drifting in.

This afternoon I told him kids that the storms may come again.  “No big deal,” says my son, crunching through his bowl of cereal, his clear eyes showing no trace of any sleep loss.  “We’ll just sleep down there again.”

No concern, no fear.

If the siren blows, we do it what it tells us.

Ratchet

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We mark our days with the satisfying click of a metal prong into the strange device that rests against the roof of my son’s mouth, held there with a bit of blue cement.  “Does that mean the cement will keep it there forever?” my son asks, with alarm.    It looks like a silver butterfly with tiny handcuffs that loop over his molars to correct his bite.  One ratchet down twice a day.   I breathe out in relief each morning and night when I do it correctly.

It has become a routine and will be so for at least the next 12 days, possibly longer.   My son hates the way food feels against the device, so his diet has devolved into an unbalanced buffet of soft, colorless foods — Greek yogurt, pudding, banana smoothies (I am tempted to add a raw egg when he is not looking), Spaghetti-Os (courtesy of his grandmother’s well-stocked pantry), applesauce, chicken noodle soup (hold the chicken, noodles, and carrots), frozen yogurt, and milk.

“He’ll look like David Letterman for a while,” warns his orthodontist, a gentle man with deep brown eyes.   I think about how many years have passed since I could keep my eyes open to watch late night television, and how many years have passed since I even had television service.

“The gap in his front teeth will get huge, and then suddenly snap back again.”  The orthodontist shows the widening and contracting with his hands, as if illustrating the size of a prized trout.

He loves his job, I can tell.   And as I watch him work with my son, I think about how few people I know who are able to have careers that meet that sweet spot between their interests and skills.

How satisfying to be able to right what looks so terribly wrong (like my son’s underbite, the enormous molars, and two front teeth coming in at a diagonal).   The orthdontist alone is an expert, and can  harness the genius of these devices.  He calms this nervous child—prone before him, head tilted slightly down, vulnerable, trusting–and his even more nervous mother.  I clutch my son’s nylon raincoat as I sit in the chair nearby, sweat pooling in my palms.   The orthdontist explains to my son everything he’s doing before he does it, and presents him with the plaster mold of his upper jaw as a prize to take home.

At home, we find that the twice-daily “activation” is not easy or simple as it was at the office under the perfectly aligned lights.   I spend a lot of time readjusting my son’s reading light over his mouth, while he squints in mock pain.  I struggle to orient the little tool, this plastic hook, that seems so flimsy for its important job.  The prong is supposed to jut out at an 135 degree angle.  My less-than-stellar career in high school geometry looms before me—my final grade, granted out of pure pity, was a D-.

The orthodontist has told me the hardest part is getting the hook into the tiny hole in the butterfly.  I poke and poke to no avail.  There is no satisfying click.  My son grows tired of holding his jaws open wide.

I say several swear words in my head and try again.  Finally, the tiny hook fits where it is supposed to, and I make the small dragging motion to pull it down towards my son’s tonsils.

I remove the tool.  As I am about to put it away, a jolt of icy panic runs through me.

The little silver prong attached to the plastic wand is gone.

I stare at it in horror, and peer frantically down into my son’s throat.  I ask him to cough, to see if there is anything there.

My ever-patient son, who each day gathers more evidence to give his future therapist so much to discuss about his childhood, coughs for me.

No hook.

I imagine already the prong’s spiraling descent down into the depths of his stomach, about to poke precious organs.  Could they even see that small hook on an X-ray?

I stop and breathe.

My fingers trembling, I look at the hook again, and see that the prong had slid all the way around the hook, and rests flush against it.

It is still attached, just out of sight.

I nearly cry in relief at my own stupidity and falsely-won panic.

“All done,” I say cheerfully to my son.  “We’ll do it faster next time.”

As he scoots off the bed, I slide the hook back into its plastic envelope.   I flash back to the early days of his life, where I checked his breathing every 10 minutes, terrified of the tremendous responsibility to keep him alive.  The waves of panic when he slept a little too long, the worries before a doctor’s appointment, wondering if he was growing properly.

While the pure, animal fear for his survival, and the fresh, cool relief at each daybreak when my husband and I joyfullly realized he was still alive has lessened since those first scary days, I see that my deeply buried worry—will I lose him?–never ends.

A phrase of an old sentimental ditty floats into my head.   Once you have found him, never let him go.

Downstairs my son tucks into a bowl of vanilla yogurt, while his sister pouts across the table from him, jealous of the attention.   “You don’th wanth one of dese in yourth mouth, believe me,” my son says, his slight lisp made worse for the metal contraption.

I check my email and learn the sad news of a former colleague’s unexpected death, at the tender age of 40.  He was the father of a three-year old child.  Like my son’s orthodontist, this colleague pursued his work with a deep passion.  His intense drive sometimes drew him into conflict with others, but he always produced stellar results.    My eyes mist, and I hear my daughter fussing in the background, her voice tight with the injustice of it all.  “Why does HE get frozen yogurt and I don’t?  And can’t I have pudding for my dinner too?”

Each morning and night, we move the silver spoke down once more.  We are grateful, now, that we get to do it again.

The Second Dimension

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1-late august - early sept 2011 094At the dinner table, my seven-year-old son bites off the florets of his broccoli (leaving the poor headless stalks in a neglected pile on his plate) and asks, “What is a second dimension?”

My husband begins to explain the concept, this idea of a parallel universe, about another boy like him, yet not like him, living another life, based on some different action that took place.  We talk about all the choices, big and small, that make our life one way and not another, and how some people believe there are multiple time dimensions.  “There could be another boy,” my husband explains, “somewhere else, even with your same name, with different parents.”

Between the two of us, we flounder through a kind of explanation–such a tricky thing to explain, this idea of all these slivers of time, stretching off from each other in bright shoots, a diagram of scattered points instead of the neat blocks of a calendar.  He listens, fascinated with this idea.   I notice that he doesn’t immediately resist these notions, but accepts the concept without any skepticism.

I think about the millions of tiny choices that bring me to this Friday night, 6:38 p.m., washing dishes in a white sink in a gray house with black trim on this quiet street in a small Midwestern town.   I think about the other versions of me that could have been — the one who traveled to Australia for work and then never came home, the one who became a veterinarian, the one who edited books in New York and wrote novels on the side, the one who moved to a small farmhouse in Vermont with horses, dogs and an apple orchard and dabbled in community theater.

The doldrums of the long winter, the monotony of the household routines prompts me to look for lots of forms of escape–a restless finger swipe against the iPad to read stories about someone else’s life while I wait for pasta water to boil, the impatient flick through options in Netflix after the kids go to bed, the scanning of the spines in the new book section of the library so I can get lost in this one,  the paging through the months in the wall calendar to see how many days are left until we go here again.

After the dishes are done I sit in the den, reading this library book, which makes me want to be a better person in several dimensions. and think about this favorite movie about a kind of parallel universe.   In the living room, my son is reading aloud a book about monsters.  I can hear a whistling lisp as his tongue hits the gap between his front teeth.   My husband gently corrects a few words as he reads.  My daughter is at the kitchen table, sketching yet another drawing of a horse, this one with a foal nursing its mother, lime-colored grass in thick scrawls all around them.

And it somehow seems so fitting, that the next bit of wisdom comes not from a fantastic spiritual guru or a thoughtful conversation with a friend about gratitude, but instead a fragment from this pop song that floats into my head:

“It’s not having what you want / It’s wanting what you’ve got.”

My son finishes his book and comes into the den and sits on the sofa next to me, pressing his gangly limbs against mine.  “Did you hear me?  I read that WHOLE book to Daddy.”

I pull him close to me, and rub his head.  His hair smells of pencil shavings, ripe pears and sweat.

The Roots of Inspiration

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1-late jan 2013 019

If you were driving to work Monday morning in our little town, at say, 7:32 a.m.,  you might have passed a mother and her child walking to school.  You might have thought you knew the mother, but it was probably hard to tell, as it appeared the person was swaddled in some outer garment that closely resembled a black down comforter.  She was further accessorized with red gloves, a green puffy hat, light blue running shoes, and an overstuffed child’s backpack in a lavender leopard-print.

You might have put on your sunglasses at the stoplight to avoid damaging your retinas from the harsh glare of such a color combination.

You might have seen the child proudly holding her new stuffed Pomeranian, Buttercup, a gift from her grandmother over the weekend.   You may have seen the child wave at her grandpa, who tooted his horn at the two of them on his way to the office.  You could see the mother and child chatting, though you couldn’t hear the mother singing a little ditty her own father had made up about a Pomeranian they had once owned, “She chews up tissues and she snitches shoes / But she’s the kind of an-i-mal we choose.”

Sipping your coffee from the comfort of your car, you might have thought it was a sweet scene, the two of them eschewing fossil fuels in exchange for a leisurely walk on a mostly ice-free sidewalk.   When you stopped at the stoplight, you might have seen them pause at the bridge to watch the Canada geese venture out from the bank into the river.  You could not exactly see the child get excited about watching the birds dip their elegant necks in and out of the gray-green water to catch their breakfast, but you could probably sense it.

“That looked like a nice walk for the two of you,” you might have said to the mother, when she dropped the daughter off at the school gate.   “It was,” the mother would have agreed, with a small, embarrassed gleam in her eye.   And if you had time to chat, she might have admitted that the inspiration for the walk came not from the softness in the air that almost feels like spring, or from a desire to break the fever,  but from her steadfast avoidance (ah, forget the pretense–FEAR!) of driving a certain cheerily named large vehicle, based on an unfortunate incident several winters ago involving four-wheel-drive, a major road, and tears.

The mother might have told you that she and the truck have concluded their relationship is one to be pursued only in the fairest of weather.

You might have raised an eyebrow at the mother’s reference to “relationship” in talking about a vehicle.  To be honest, you did not require such an elaborate explanation for her walk to school with her daughter.

But if you thought it was strange, you didn’t let on.

That’s just the kind of considerate friend you are.

Breaking the Fever

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In our family, the word routine is usually a good thing–it gives us a predictable rhythm to our days–the same daily schedule, repetition of certain meals on certain days, consistent daily chores, and reading chapter books before bed.  We know what’s coming next, and that gives us a security and ease to keep the four of us in sync.

But deep in the slushy, unrelenting ickiness of February, we find ourselves more grumbly with the grey sameness of everything.  We crave different experiences.  My husband and I read the Sunday Travel section and wish we were somewhere–anywhere–else.   We are sick of the same meals that used to be comforting bookends to the week (quesidillas on Thursday, pizza on Friday).   A few nights ago, my daughter asked what peach cobbler was–something she’d heard about in a book–and begged me to make it.  “I just want to taste something different,” she said, in such a tiny and sad voice that I wanted to rush to the kitchen and make it for her immediately.

We want something new–but there’s no time or money for a vacation and the idea of a “staycation” also makes us feel slightly ill.  What’s fun about staying inside our own four walls?

Some ideas that we’ve tried (and many more I hope to!) to help when cabin fever hits hard:

  • Start a new household project.  This is an area of expertise for my husband–who is diligently redoing our half-bath.  Knowing that he can make progress on this project every weekend gives him a satisfying (and challenging) point of focus, and the children enjoy helping him with small tasks (“Please hand me that chisel”) and learning about the process.
  • Finish a tiny pleasurable project you can complete.  Repeat as necessary.   As a knitter with both very basic skills and the attention span of a gnat, I have been enjoying making lots of these easy headbands that are actually designed for children to make.
  • Try a new route to work or school or even to do your errands (walking, driving, biking etc.).  My daughter loves walking rather than driving to school, and there’s no reason that we can’t plan ahead some weeks and do this.
  • Shop for new paint colors.  For some reason, the inspiration of color always lifts my spirits, and choosing a few free swatches to bring home and admire leads to fun dreaming about new wall colors and decor, even without the pressure to buy paint right away.
  • Try an “opposite” day.  My daughter (often the lone voice of spontaneity in our family) wants us to try this–where we eat dinner for breakfast, and breakfast for dinner, wear pajamas all day, sit in different spots at our family table and more details we haven’t quite figured out yet.
  • Rearrange furniture.  It’s amazing how your outlook can shift when you sit in your same chair but have a different view of your surroundings.
  • Get outside.  With the right clothes, there are few places we can’t go comfortably in the winter.  This article has a great list for those of us in cold and snowy climates.  My husband has a perfect radar for knowing when our children need this time, getting them out for sledding, snowman building, fort-building, or just sliding around on the ice.  The promise of hot chocolate sometimes helps to sweeten the deal if our children are initially reluctant to play outside.   A little more planning means we can visit some geocache sites and check for fairy wings as well.
  • Change a tiny part of your routine.  A good friend of mine shared with me a discovery she made–like many couples, she and her husband have their own designated sides to the bed.  Recently, they switched to the other person’s side, and found it to be very refreshing.  Last weekend, my children asked if I could read part of the chapter book we’re reading now before lunch instead of in the evening.   Instead of curling up in our big bed upstairs, we read on the couch in the living room, snuggled in blankets, and read two chapters instead of one.
  • Stimulate your palate.   Tropical fruits are in season right now.  I think swapping out our beloved yet boring apples and oranges for papaya, mango or kiwi might brighten our meals.
  • Listen to something new.    We tend to get especially squirrely and snippy with each other in the late afternoons on weekends–it’s not time for dinner yet, we’ve played all the board games we want to, and we need a restful soothing activity.   We return again and again to these audio stories.  We can also listen to audio books through our library account.  I also sometimes find that a little music in the morning (especially if my kids get to choose) can help all of us feel less grumpy about our outlook.  Pandora has some great preset stations with new music ideas for all kinds of moods.
  • Be a “guest” in your own home.   I’d like to try this one–sleeping in our guest room, and then preparing a special meal off our own (rarely used) china and silver.
  • Freshen your home in little, inexpensive ways.  A good friend of mine culls through her dishtowels and discards the most worn-out or stained ones, and treats herself to a few new colorful ones.  I love the idea of seeing a new, bright color whenever I come into the kitchen.
  • Try some indoor physical games.  Our children still love this game, and also simple charade games  (“What animal am I?”) still delight them.  I also love the idea of indoor hopscotch or other homemade games using materials you already have at home.  (Just try to avoid using the masking tape as a mechanism for silencing grumpy participants!).  Or what about some yoga?
  • Switch chore responsibilities.  Each day our children have a chore they are to complete (e.g, emptying wastebaskets, dusting).  While I know my children would prefer we release them of ALL chores, perhaps we could rotate who does what to change things up a bit.
  • Go deep into learning more about something new.  Our local library is thankfully open every day in the winter, so on the weekends we sometimes schedule a trip to browse and check out new books.   My son is particularly interested in bats and geology lately, so this gives us a chance to let delve deeper into this area, and also the chance to practice looking up key words on the library catalog, and using the call number to find interesting books.   During our last visit we also found some great children’s books on origami, cooking, knitting, and chemistry.

What do you do to break up your weekly routine and stave off cabin fever?