Come With Me

Talk Feeleez is moving. Not too far, just over here.

I needed a little more room to wiggle around, a few more features I could fiddle around with. Please come over, take a look, and save the address so you can find me again.

I care about you a lot. I have put off this move for a long time so that I didn’t make anyone uncomfortable, didn’t rattle anyone by shaking things up too much. With that in mind I made every effort to make the new home a familiar and comfy place. If somethings feels off just let me know and I will see what I can do.

Love Natalie

Drowning In it

This time I don’t think it’s your run of the mill shedding. I think Henry might be going bald. I think he might be losing his entire outfit. I always complain about dog hair around the house because it is ALWAYS AROUND THE HOUSE. God forbid we have any visitors because they all leave with an additional warmth layer on their behinds. Babies leave with a beard hanging from their drool. No one is allowed to sit down if they are wearing black fleece. And black leggings are right out as well. If this is what you have chosen as attire for the day then just turn around immediately and change your outfit before you join us for even a moment.

I should get to work knitting my family body-suits made from shaggy camel-colored yarn because that’s the only garment we could reasonably pull off these days. What? You see a little yellow dog hair? Oh that’s SUPPOSED to be there. It’s the shaggy yarn you see. Full length Thneeds (don’t tell me you haven’t read The Lorax), our all-purpose, dog hair hiding, uniforms. Absolutely required.

We are at that point.

I don’t remember our boy ever letting go of this much hair, especially right before winter. Images of a plucked-chicken dog in the middle of a snowy field, ball in mouth of course, keep running through my mind. Pocked, nubby, bare skin. Oh dear.

He is so sweet. The girls routinely use his round sleeping form as a landing pad when they launch themselves from the couch. Babies can pull his cheek jowls without a reaction. Ride him if you like, he won’t mind. He is doe-eyed and perfect in so many ways. But good gracious the hair. The dog bed he snoozes in, in between meal times and walks, is as big as a kiddie pool and two days after washing, it is completely lined with two inches of blonde duff. A nest. Big Bird’s nest. You know how sometimes when you walk through the woods you can see the remains of an animal? Bits and pieces, but mostly hair, like the animal itself evaporated leaving a hair silhouette on the ground? Our yard is like that. Several Henry-shaped hairy silhouettes.

I could reach over right now, grab any patch of hair I want and pull it straight out.

And I do. Several times a day, and I think he’s beginning to feel like a project, like an object I keep returning to, a painting I keep reworking until it’s just brown mud. When I do stop he meanders a few feet and then shakes. A mushroom cloud of happy yellow hairs fluff off of him and if he happens to be standing in a shaft of sunlight and you happen to notice the snowstorm of hair, you feel like pouncing on him like a hyena and tackling him to the ground. Only then you’d get more hairy than ever, so you don’t.

Rituals, Candy and Costumes Included

The school Halloween party is today. Blue wig, slinky wedding dress, and sparkly heels are packed up and ready to go for Xi’s rendition of the Corpse Bride (the only costume she could think of that was both pretty and spooky – bless her heart.) Even little Echo is invited to attend the school shindig in her Cookie Monster assemble, so we were up at dark this morning so that her older sister could color in the chocolate chips on the cardboard cookie before she left for class.

As a kid I loved Halloween as it involved two things I love: ritual and candy. The ritual was to host a party at our home. My mom would make a giant batch of soup, clam chowder or chilli, and kids were charged with the task of eating a wedge of sourdough and a bowl of real food before trick-or-treating. From my current motherly vantage point I can see that couldn’t have been an easy task. In fact, even in my foggy child memory I think I can remember haggard parents sailing loaded spoons toward wily mouths to no avail. in the meantime, the rest of us already partially-fed children bounced around with plastic pumpkins in hand and badgered the dads about when we could leave.

It was always the dads’ job to escort us around our little neighborhood street. I liked that part. It was Halloween night after all and  if there were to be any ghouls, goblins, or pushy teenagers around I liked the idea of my strapping father in his white hoodie, curly early-eighties hair and glasses, hanging around. We marched up and down the street in our pack, a full harvest moon usually rising above us. In Santa Cruz it is always HOT on Halloween day, so that you can wear the prettiest, frilliest princess dress in the land if you are so inclined, but come nightfall another layer is usually required. So most of us were costumed from the waist down. A bit of pirate peeking out from a zip-up sweatshirt.

Emily and I, with an artist mom in our arsenal, never went for the run-of-the-mill costumes. No kitty cat for us. No princess. No fairy. We liked costumes with cardboard and paint, objects. A Pacman video game, a Rubik’s Cube, a bag of groceries. We’d wear these in the school Halloween parade, hoping our face-paint wouldn’t melt in the sun, never sitting down so as not to crush our cardboard frames. By the time night fell we’d be ready to wear something else, something less cumbersome, and my memory is filled with images of my sister doing magical prest-o change-os at the last-minute. Zorro! No… Michael Jackson!… No, …spaghetti and meatballs! That last one, wow. I wish I had a picture. She wore a full red outfit, draped a natural-colored hammock over top, and pasted on paper meatballs. I don’t know which costume she actually ended up wearing.

In any case, we’d tromp up and down our street and return with the bounty. We never ate while we walked, there was a rule that a parent must inspect each piece before eating, just in case sweet Mr. Sundemeyer down the way had slipped a razor blade into a Reeces. We’d sit on the oriental carpet, our mound of sugar before us, and wait, not patiently, for our dad to do his scrutinizing. It felt like forever before he arrived and looking back I can see that what was a candy/kid focused night for me was also a party for the grown-ups, and I’m sure my dad had some back-slapping and rabble rousing to do before making his way to my pile.

The rest of those nights is a sugar-tainted blur. I remember the soundtrack from Ghostbusters on the sound system and always my grandfather opening the door to pass out candy. I’d sneak shy peeks from behind his legs and die of embarrassment when as the evening wore on and the doorbell ringers grew older and less costumed, my grandpa would shout: Hey! Aren’t you a little old for this? I think I see facial hair on you there! He always gave them candy anyway but I was appalled.

Now as a grown-up with my own doorbell I wish he was alive and that I had him with me on Halloween night, especially when teenagers arrive, asking in a baritone, for me to give them a treat. I could use his kind frankness. And while I’m at it, while I’m picking my fantasy Halloween line-up, I’d select my mom too. A pot of her soup would be the very best pre-game nourishment. And my sister. She might, at this point, simply work her costume magic on my kids, but you never know, minutes before leaving she could conceivably whip up a doozy for herself. I’d choose my dad too. His hair is no longer curly and around these northern parts he’d need more than a white hoodie, but it sure would be nice to see him guarding our pack, directing them toward only the lighted, friendly porches, and sifting through their loot for booby-trapped sweets.

I’ll be thinking about them all. I will miss them. But I think we’ll do alright. I can make a mean Halloween soup, in fact I think last year I even made orange biscuits for dipping, and Nathan is more than papa enough to fend off unruly teenagers and goblins. We’ll shuffle through fall leaves and develop our own candy management system. We’ll love it and remember it and our kids will too.

New rituals with a bit of the old woven through.

 

Winter, You Lame-Ass Cold Thing

I know it comes every year. I know it’s because the earth tilts away from the sun. I know all of that but it doesn’t mean I have to like it. Yesterday, talking to a friend I said: I still wish for shorter winters, and he said: You’re a bit too far north for that!

Arg. Grimace.

On Saturday I saw a sign at the Farmer’s Market, the last market of the year, that said: ” See you the first weekend in May!” The month of May. That is SEVEN MONTHS away. You know they have a market at the first opportunity so that means the very first possible chance of standing around outdoors for any stretch of time is officially in May. Seven months. Seven f-ing months.

Yesterday as I geared up for a dog walk I reached for my puffy coat, which even through the warmth of summer still hangs on the coat rack because Winter always jumps up out of nowhere without any warning, and I almost cried. Because it meant it is cold and it also means that I will be wearing that same coat from now until eternity. Basically the same outfit for seven months. That is worth crying over.

For the last part of spring, all of summer, and the first part of fall, the entire town has been our playground. Any scrap of grass, any stretch of river. If you loaded up the stroller with enough snacks and water you could conceivably stay out all day, moving from one kid friendly locale to another. But not anymore. Yesterday, heading home from the coffee shop, Echo wanted to stop for a moment and watch the football players grunt out some plays. Ordinarily this would mean a relaxing slump on a grassy knoll, but instead with Winter’s arrival, it meant a miserable crouch behind a ponderosa, a face scrunched, shoulders hunched, test of endurance. And I failed. I finally convinced her to climb back in to her sheepskin and blanket, the cozy den of a stroller, and grimaced our way swiftly back home.

Sigh.

As They Are Now Is The Very Best

When I became pregnant with Echo it was like my world stopped. In my mind I was pregnant, I was going to have a baby, and that’s where the story ended. I knew logically that babies grew into toddlers, then kids, then pre-teens. In fact I had watched both Bella and Xi turn from chubby babes to leggy tykes, but somehow when it was my turn to actually give birth my mental imagery and certainly my planning ended at baby. I figured she would always wear the onesies stacked in my top dresser drawer, she’d always wear the puffy booties, always fit in the crook of my arm.

I knew my belly would out-grow my jeans. I knew I would eventually quit my job. Hiking dogs up snowy mountains with a belly would work for a little while, but those same mountains and drooly dogs with an infant? Probably not. So my vision ended with birth. Part of this limited view is in part due to the very real “pregnancy brain” but also to the fierceness with which I was approaching my role, the steel-like focus. I was doing nothing with more intensity than growing that baby, almost like I had never done a single other thing in my life until that moment. I continued, of course, to wildly love and take care of our older girls. Riding three-year old Xi on the hump of my belly, baking muffins, vacuuming the hairy carpet, reading stories and whipping up batches of play-doh. But all the while I had baby on my brain, and even though the older girls were growing before my eyes I never imagined this baby as anything other than a forever baby.

But she’s not.

Today I am only even allowed to call her “baby” if I remind her it’s just a mushy love name, not an indicator of her actual size. She reminds me every day that she grows during each day, not just on her birthday.

I don’t know if I ever wanted her to stay a baby or if that is just as far as my imagination went, but now when I look at photos of her, even the most full-of-thigh-rolls, eat-her-up-on-the-spot, kind of images I don’t long for that girl. I love this girl, the one next to me in a black turtleneck. The big one with blueberry smears on her chin and a thoughtful look on her face.

I think unless it is a particularly horrible moment, perhaps with kicking and screaming involved, the current version of our children is the best. Who they are today is the very best age, the very best stage.

Sure, as a baby it was cute when Echo found her toes, when she made signs to let us know what she wanted. But today she is discovering the delight of thighs clad in corduroy rubbing together. Today she is looking through a kaleidoscope trying to get one eye to look and the other to close and needing to smash the uncooperative one without simultaneously closing the other. Today she is finding out what happens when you stare at the standing lamp while closing your eyes and rubbing your eyelids, the swirling black, orange, and red shapes that swirl before her like a good acid trip. She is doing three-year old things and they are just as cute as those baby things, but better. Because they are happening now.

And I get to watch and remember, both when I discovered the wicky-wicky sounds of corduroy thighs but also when her sisters did. Those sisters are bigger than ever, their heads reaching my armpits and above, and yet even though I can no longer carry either of them, can no longer see a trace of baby fat, this is the version of them I like best as well. Xi is learning to read and spell and carrying a fairy book around with her everywhere we go and I find it the most endearing thing I have ever seen. Bella is inching her toes into the big-kid world and only yesterday we found ourselves in the underwear section of a department store to try on that particular undergarment, so mundane in the grown-woman world but so blow-your-mind-exciting when it’s your first one.

And this is the stuff worth living for. The photos of yesteryear are not. If I were to talk to my pregnant self I would say: Yes. You will have a baby, and yes, she will be the most important endeavor you have ever begun. But it doesn’t stop there. She will grow and change and not only is that okay, it is delightful and just as things should be. You will not be able to live the baby days over, but you also will not mourn them. You will love your girls more each day and always love the moment before you the very most.

It is a relief actually.

Right Under our Noses

I don’t talk a lot about Feeleez, our line of empathy tools. It’s funny because almost daily I print out labels and Nathan scoots off to shoot Feeleez packages off to excited customers. Kris and I talk business talk at the park while our children shovel sand, and we have big hopes and dreams for this little seed we are watering. In fact this very blog was started as a place to discuss Feeleez news and triumphs, yet I almost never mention them at all. In fact, even though Feeleez forms the fabric of our lives I even forget to use them as tools in my own parenting. Maybe it’s the case of the bookkeeper’s own checkbook remaining unbalanced, the therapists own relationships continuing disastrously, or the housekeepers own house staying perpetually messy, I’m not sure. But in any case I used Feeleez last night for conflict resolution and felt like a doofus for passing our poster by so many times, for not using it for all it’s worth, for not employing it ten thousand times a day.

Nathan is a thespian, so he has been away during the evenings this week rehearsing for The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and I have been holding down the fort. So you can imagine the scene at seven-fifteen last night. Three tired girls, dirty from a day at the corn maze, and frayed at the edges from non-stop sister dynamics. A sink piled high with dishes. A mama working feverishly against the clock so that when things went downhill she could usher them toward tooth-brushing and story reading and later when she emerged from the sleep-filled bedroom she wouldn’t still face that ugly mountain of pots and pans. In other words, the perfect scenario for a scrap and the perfect scenario for Mama to yell and fail miserably at gentle parenting.

And so it went. In their last-ditch efforts to squeeze every last drop of fun from the day Bella and Xi flitted about from one game to the next, finally settling on drawing. But when Xi slid a piece of paper out of the pile she hit Bella in the arm. Bella was pissed, yelled. Xi yelled back, explaining it was an accident. Bella, not believing her, struck back. Xi cried and stomped away. I watched it all go down and continued to wash dishes. Eventually I explained to Bella what I saw, but it was biased and preachy and my speech certainly didn’t inspire her to run to the bedroom and drape empathy over Xi’s shoulders. I washed more dishes. Then I dipped into the dark bedroom and ladled out empathy myself. Xi felt better but she could hear play continuing in the living room. She wanted to join back in, she wanted to have fun but she didn’t want to act as though nothing had happened either. She was trapped.

I stayed on the dark bed with her for a while, reminding myself that mothers don’t have to know what to do. I could simply hold her and sit in the dark, there are no rules that say mom has to make everything better, and in any case I didn’t know how to do that anyway. Finally I thought of the poster. Glory be! Xi was game so I invited Bella to join us there. They stood awkwardly, like newlyweds in a tiff, and I acted as host. Who wants to start? Will you tell us how you felt at the very first hit? And so we went through the progression, not how the fight went down, but how the girls felt at each stage.

Bella: Well when Xi first hit me I felt mad like this:  Then, I also felt like this: . And like I wanted her to hurt too, like get back at her. So I felt like this: ,

and:  . After I hit her, I have to admit I felt a little like “doh!”, like this: . Now I still feel a little like that but also a little like this: .

When I asked her what she would prefer to feel like she said, less of the “doh!/oops” feeling and more of the happy one.

Xi said: When I accidentally hit Bella and she yelled at me I felt like this: 

But I also felt a little like this:  because I wish that I had been more careful getting the paper out.

And then when she hit me I felt sad still and also like this: .

I still feel sad but what I want to feel like is this: .

I stood in the background and said almost nothing, only oh, uh huh, and oh yeah. That’s it.

The girls started out with their bodies turned as much away from each other as they could while still facing the poster. As they pointed and described, the space between them closed. By the end they were nearly belly to belly and grinning, shyly at first and then full throttle. They hadn’t directly exchanged a single word. They hadn’t “worked” anything out, they simply saw what is was like emotionally for one another. And that was it. I eventually said: Are you guys looking for a sense of closure? It looks like you want to hug. And they did, collapsing happily into gigggles and each other.

It’s miraculous. It’s empathy via pointing and it takes very little. As dirty, tired, and crunchy as they were last night I had very little hope that things would turn out. I imagined surreptitious elbow jabbing during tooth-brushing and crying ourselves into bed. I imagined herculean emotional feats on the part of mama, a collapse on the couch in exhaustion kind of evening. Instead we snuggled, all three of us in the big bed, close, warm, and well-loved. They drifted off to sleep with smiles on their faces.

Holy shit.

More.

More.

More.

Fleeting

I took this photo today. I was quick on the draw and I’m glad because by the time I sheathed the camera the image was gone. What you see is the silhouette of the plants on the windowsill, projected onto the wall, as the morning sun comes in the window. And now that I think about it it’s a wonder I captured it at all. The sun would have to be at just the right angle, meaning just the right time of year, just the right time of morn, the trees would have to have just few enough leaves on it, there would have to be just enough clear blue sky to let the sun through, I would have to wake up at just the right time, certainly in time to have the shades open at just the right moment. It was a two-minute long moment. The sun then stretched behind the neighbor’s house and it was over.

I almost missed it.

And of course reflection followed. I’ve already been in the “trippin” frame of mind lately, but this fleeting image sort of sent me whole hog over the edge and into reverie. One time in college my professor assigned us one word and we were to spend the afternoon painting that word. He gave us “reverie”. I was twenty and I didn’t really know what it meant, but I made a guess as to how it felt and painted a woman gazing out a window. Somber hues, soft light. The painting was just okay. I think I probably just didn’t know how to do it, not paint of course, that part came naturally, but to sink into reverie.

Now I barely have the time but I slip easily into that state anyway. I know I’m not old, nevermind that some of the folks I interact with on a regular basis were born in 1990. Cough. Sputter. Choke. I know I am in my youth, that when I look back on photos of myself now, with three children filling the house, I will think how very young I look, how rosy my cheeks are, how long my hair reaches. But that’s just the thing. The me that will look at those photos is a whole universe away, years and years away, and I know I will get there in lightning speed.

It is all so fleeting. All of it.

I mean at one point I was a girl. I lived with my parents. I slept in a white wrought-iron bed. I looked out a window onto sunny California skies. I wore a sweatshirt when it was cold, nothing more. I ate food that my mother cooked. I watched t.v. and talked on a corded phone, a rotary phone. I was that person, that person was me. That person was me? It was a lifetime ago and yet so vivid, so real that this life, this one where I sit at a laptop in Montana is entirely surreal.

I now listen to my child say things like: How ’bout we can be princesses of two lands? I am princess of Hawaii, Princess of Egypt… oh, and Princess of Texas, ‘cuz I’m a cowgirl too. And I don’t think anything of it. I only remember it when I sit down to blog. Phrases like that are commonplace, are so now that it’s almost like they don’t exist. I raise a family here, where there are rivers and grizzly bears, open spaces so open they make you worry or want to cry, and trees that turn yellow. I live here, far from the eyes of that sunny-sky family I have known my whole life and sometimes, perhaps because they aren’t seeing it, it’s as if this life of family raising isn’t happening at all.

But notions like that make me panic. It has to be happening, whether or not they can see it, because I don’t want to miss it.

These girls, these days, this me, will later be cause for nostalgia. Like the silhouette on the wall it is going to fade and disappear altogether. I guess I could click away, storing the images in the hopes of actually seeing them, of not taking them for granted, but I know I won’t. I’m just not like that. Our camera grinds itself open with nails-on-a-chalkboard sounds because too often I have left it swimming in the bottom of my bag with crushed cheddar bunnies. So that won’t work. I’ll have to keep my eyes open on my own. Somehow.

And sometimes I won’t. Already so much is lost, images and dates that can’t be brought fully into focus. But there will be other times, moments when I am brought back to this place, back to noticing, even if all the witnesses aren’t present. Maybe there isn’t anything to be done about this anyway, the gap between noticing and not, the passage of time, the memory of rotary phones and the happening-now of toddler cheeks.

Maybe not. Maybe I’m just feeling it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Secret Stashes

You can’t say our home is neat as a pin, the drifting tides of yellow dog hair put us right out of the running for any descriptions like that, but even if you can’t tell, I do clean. I straighten more than I care to admit. I remain constantly on the lookout for signs of disinterest on the part of the children and then at the first opportunity swoop in undetected to shuffle toys back into their “proper” places. When I was a girl my father did the same thing. He’d make a circuit through the shared living quarters and gather items on the kitchen table that we were then required to return to our rooms at the soonest possible opportunity. I remember groaning: But DAD! I was still using that!, annoyed by his preemptive cleanliness. We’d joke that Dad would clear a mug of tea from the table, still warm, if we left it unguarded, or immediately remove an unfinished craft project if left unattended for a five-second potty break.

But now, looking back? I get it. Not only do I get it, I do the very same thing.

I scuttle about in the background, like a fussy hermit crab, reaching between skinny kid arms to pluck the Littlest Pet Shop figurines from the mountain of mess and seal them into their zip-loc bags. Waiting for  plastic horse paraphernalia to remain idle long enough to justify scooping it all into the tub mentally marked: “plastic horse paraphernalia”.  It’s satisfying to pair like with like. A box with legos mingling with playing cards? Ew. Polly Pockets sharing space with bouncy balls? I don’t think so. So I gather and divide, sort and dissect, all the day long, and it all stays that way for approximately fifteen milliseconds. Until Echo rotates back around and says: Mom. Will you get out the toys I was playing with before? There were one hundred and two pieces.

When I’m not looking is the worst. I make my thrice daily toy parceling rounds to find, not only disarray, but a sense of “order” so foreign to me it feels like intentional disorder, like a code that only young girls in the mountain time-zone of North America could ever crack. They repeatedly dump out tubs and boxes, rid them of their original (rational) content to refill them with something else. No pattern at all as far as I can tell.

Jewelry box of tiny sea shells? Now harboring dried garbanzo beans, a geode, two of mama’s broken fingernails, plastic gems, and a bike reflector.

Polly Pockets’ Personal Zip-loc? Now storing three fuzzy mini-kittens, a plastic toy syringe, a princess playmobile figure, and a rubber band.

Sure, it all makes sense to them. When I ask what in tarnation they’ve done with the bottle cap collection, they say: Oh we dumped it out because that canister is now a prison. Or, what happened to the glass eggs that were in the woven basket? They say: They’re in the pink cowboy hat because this swan is magical and that’s her nest. And there is nothing left for me to do but wait until the swan isn’t magical, and the cowboy hat isn’t a nest, or at least until they aren’t looking, to put it all back in its “rightful” place.

It’s crazy, my part that is, especially since nothing ever stays in its rightful place for very long. But the funny thing is that it doesn’t work to leave things as the girls arrange them either. Their particular flavor of order lasts only as long as that piece of make-believe. When it comes time to find the glass eggs the next day they do not scan their mental card catalog and think: Well… glass eggs belong to the magical swan… and magical swans build nests out of pink cowboy hats… and pink cowboy hats always swing from the kitchen chair… so I know just where to look! Nope. They come to me. And if I haven’t already disassembled their various constructions, already de-stashed their various stashes, I’m screwed.

In some ways, even though I scratch my head at the logic, I like the little stashes. They give me a sense of how each girl thinks (or doesn’t) and what is important to them. Some stashes don’t make any sense, I’m pretty sure the dish with peanuts and earrings is a fluke, a whim from a pretend long ago, but other times the collection is like a snapshot, a glimpse of who these girls are.

If I’m looking for a lost baby doll I have to look through the eyes of a three-year old, a perspective that sees every nook as a cozy bed, every cranny as a little home. Baby dolls will never be found under the bed or lying on the floor, they are perpetually tucked-in, under the stack of towels in the bathroom, under the sled in the garage, within Papa’s moonboot, and if I’m not seeing the world this way I’ll never find them.

If I find my own trimmed finger nails stored with precious gems I am completely grossed out, but I’m also a little honored, a little tickled to see my girl’s love for me tucked away in a little red box.

If I wonder what’s important to Xi I have only to pull the curtain aside and catch a glimpse of her windowsill. Her heart is displayed there in foreign coins, pigeon feathers, silly bands, and movie stubs.

I still dream of school-classroom organization, tidy cubbies, labels, and color coordinated filing systems,  and I’ll probably still wear a groove into the floor with my own toy shuffling madness, but in some ways, at least from this late-night, sentimental moment, I hope I never succeed. Imagine how much I would miss, how many unusual still-life compositions I’d never see, how many clues to our girls’ values I’d never find.

There is still a part of me that would swoon at the sight of red legos sorted into red-lego piles, of  plastic horses arranged by size, of bouncy balls filling a jar and sealed with a bold-print label, but now that I think about it, I’m not sure it’s worth it.

Hear Ye, Hear Ye

I think it’s time for a town meeting.

We’ve been going to the park a lot lately because our neighborhood one has gotten a recent makeover. It wasn’t poplar before, a basic slide, some swings, but now there are things that spin, climbers shaped like animals, a towering spider’s web contraption, and the crowd has grown. At any given hour there are tons of kids, from toddlers to teens, and of course parents.

The people watcher in me loves it. My kids nearly plunge to their death several times a day because my eyes are riveted to the various outfits and social exchanges. My nose loves it too. As the fall sun warms the afternoon the wood chips, four feet deep under our feet, let out a sweet hamstery scent.

But the part I want to talk about is park etiquette and how it results in torture for us all. Yesterday we brought our metal water bottle, and a lunch box. We’ve fashioned a long ribbon to the water bottle to make it over-the-arm slingable and for some reason it’s become the main attraction for the twelve months and under set. They are like crows, drawn to shiny treasure, and they want nothing more than to haul that thing around, like a baby doll or a puppy. But park manners dictate that any time a grubby hand reaches for the water bottle or the also irresistible polka-dot lunch box, a mother follows closely behind to say: Ah, ah, ah. That’s not yours. Put that back.

And the toddler returns, again and again. Moms become frustrated, kids become inconsolable. It is sad.

Twice I went over yesterday to say that it was perfectly fine with us if the water bottle became a play thing and that we would just locate it anew each time we wanted a drink. But the thing is, in that situation, I was the weird one, the one acting out of turn, breaking the rules of park etiquette.

But the rules are ridiculous! I hate them.

Parents spend their entire time at the park saying: Nooo! That’s not yours. That’s hers. Yours is over here. Here’s yours. And the kid spends their entire time at the park being shunted away from their primary interest for no apparently logical reason. And the galling part is that when they do finally clutch the toy or sippy cup that is supposedly theirs, if another child approaches and reaches for that item, parents have the unbelievable nerve to say: Let him have it. You have to share! SHARE.

This kind of thing drives me bonkers.

Are you kidding me? Do we really want to emphasize “yours” and “mine” that strongly? I don’t mean to get too metaphysical or anything , but if you think about it nothing is really “ours”, “yours” or “mine”. We say: my chair, when we happen to sit down for a minute. We say: my parking spot, even though we know very well that it isn’t. We say it all the time when really everything is so transient, so temporary, and so quickly passed on when it isn’t of use anymore. And maybe as adults we can all understand that when we say “mine” we are really indicating that we are using it for the moment, that we don’t really own that parking spot or that chair, but kids are literal. When we tell them something is theirs, they believe us. At least until we yank it away from them and give it to someone else in the name of sharing. Then they just think we are mean, or confusing, or both.

(Later we wonder why our society is so greedy. Why everyone seems to only care about themselves. Why everyone hoards more than they need. Why they eat more than their bodies want. Why the more everyone gets, the more they want, and the less they share.)

So hear ye, hear ye.

My official proposals for the revision of park etiquette are:

1. Let’s switch to a different style of language.

That’s the swing that little girl is using right now, do you want to swing on this one? The snacks we brought are over here, those are the snacks that little boy is eating. No more “yours”, “his”, “not yours” etc.

2. Bring to the park only the objects you are willing to share communally.

Explain to your children that if they bring something, others may want to pick it up, play with it, and everyone has decided that that’s alright.

3. Do not punish your children on behalf of others.

I know this sounds weird but I hate it when a child picks up something that we brought and the mother asks the child to put it back and the child doesn’t and then the mother yanks his arm and makes him put it back and makes him cry and then makes him apologize to me, and the kid looks at me like I did this to him. Let’s first find out if picking up an object is okay with the owner, or not. If not, let’s take our time explaining the situation to our child, perhaps in private, always gently and informatively. And then if we feel an apology is necessary let’s make that apology ourselves.

4. Tell the truth and believe each other.

If I say: It’s fine if your daughter drags the water bottle we brought around the park, believe me. If it isn’t okay with me then the responsibility lies in my hands to say so: Well we keep losing track of those dang bottles and forgetting them so I would really prefer to leave it in the stroller.

5. Let’s stop worrying about politeness.

We all know that we are all good people. We all know that nobody is purposely intending to offend. Let’s just let the kids play, pick stuff up, put it back, smile at each other in a Don’t they always love other kids’ sippy cups more than their own? kind of way, and relax.

Relax.

In any case, I won’t think you are rude, even if your child picks up “my” sweater and leaves it on the slide. But I will think you’re an asshole if you mistreat her for playing with it.

More on “mine“, manners, social awkwardness.

Nathan’s take on sharing, here.

Bonus Round – Hair Part III

Given the past few posts you might think hair is the only thing we think about around here.

And to answer that I’d say:

1. (defensively) Well, yeah, hair is like always around. In the morning its wedged under our backs, pinned in our arm pits. Later it dips into cereal milk, gets gilded by honey, stuck in nose snot. By afternoon its whipped by the wind, causing the tricycle to crash into bike racks. At night it is unleashed from it’s mangled pony tail holder with shrieks of pain and tearing sounds. And. It’s. Always. Tangly.

2. (less defensively) I’m not maintenance-y. It’s true! When I do laundry it is in triumph, like: Dang, I totally did a shit-ton of laundry. Laundry isn’t blended into my lifestyle. I don’t have a regular washing day. In fact even when I wash the dishes at night I am patting myself on the back, like I am giving myself a present (meaning a clean empty sink in the morning). I do not do them as a matter of course, no, each time I am (embarrassingly) proud of myself. When I was little and my mom pointed out some chore I hadn’t yet addressed, like scrubbing the toilet, I was always offended. I’d say: But Mom! I made my bed! And she’d say: Natty, I’m not going to reward you for something you’re SUPPOSED to do ALREADY. That’s how I am with hair maintenance, mine and Echo’s. When I see her heading down the street with Halloween-wig hair, the kind you’d wear if you were pretending to be a member of Poison, I say to myself: But I totally brushed her teeth! And we, like, did a craft project and shit too!

So hair is our struggle. I mean hair is my struggle. Echo is whizzing along in her toddler life without even a glance at her reflection. Maybe I mean hair is what I don’t tend to as often as my girl’s cohesive(adhesive?) locks require and then later feel sociological guilt or defiance about my lack of maintenance. And I also don’t like to force her to do things that she doesn’t like just because I care about strangers’ perceptions of me and my grooming skills and concerns (or lack thereof). Some mother-child duos struggle with sugar. Others parry over adequate clothing for the weather. We have hair.

But I must say the braids worked out. We went at least five days without hair troubles. And then after it had fuzzed into a transparent, blonde, ghostly, afro, I removed them. But lo! Wavy delight!

We rode those waves another three days, well actually we are still riding those waves. They aren’t as darling anymore, more a hung over version, an after-party version of the just-released, pretty as a mermaid stage but they’re still keeping on. I do believe the hair gods are on our side because somehow, inexplicably, the fact that those strands were once in braids makes them less tangly, even as the days go ticking by. I cannot explain it.

Now I just have to formulate a plan, somehow coincide every future hair washing with a visit from our braiding-genius friend, because this mama can’t french braid. Remember that whole maintenance problem? Right. So simply scheduling a braiding session from here until eternity ought to do the trick.