Listening to Scooby

I’ve spent some time recently thinking about my daughter. As in, lying in bed, staring into the dark, really pondering who she is. She is my child, so she is half “me,” genetically. But she is six years old, so her character, the person who she will eventually metamorphose into (okay, yeah, I did it; I resorted to the butterfly analogy in the very first paragraph, how lame) is a long way off.

We call her “Scooby,” or “Scooby-Doo,” which is a play on her informal name, Libby, and its baby-talk offshoot, “Libby-Dibby-Doo.” She is smart – both intelligent and savvy – but she already does that “girl” thing where she won’t reveal quite how far ahead of you she is, keeping just a little bit in reserve. Years from now, this tendency will help her win ninety-nine percent of all arguments she engages in. She’s not a deep thinker, like my oldest son. By that I mean that just about every thought that goes through her head detours out of her mouth. She combines random ideas as if they actually go together and make sense, and then drops them into conversations. And perhaps they do make sense in her world, a universe in which there are no periods, only semi-colons.

Two weeks ago, I was teaching a Sunday School class. I have the lower elementary grades (kindergarten through second grade), and Scooby is one of my students. We were talking about the Ten Commandments, and I had struggled mightily during the previous week to find some innocuous way to explain “Thou shalt not commit adultery” to a bunch of first and second graders. After much prayer, I came up with: Keep your marriage promises. I explained that being married is like being on a team, and you want your team to do well. What if you decided that you liked another team better, so you stopped trying your hardest for your teammates and helped the other team instead? You’d be breaking your promise to your team, right? Heads nodded; they got that.

Phew. We moved on to the last Commandment, “Thou shalt not covet,” or as we paraphrased it, Don’t want something that belongs to someone else.

And here’s where Scooby’s synapses randomly fired. She raised her hand and said, “If you want something that belongs to someone else, like a wife, then you’ll break your marriage promises.”

Did I mention that she’s six?

Now, this isn’t an Oh, my kid is a genius! essay, although I wouldn’t rule that out completely. Only time will tell. No, it’s a reminder to me how much is inside that kid’s head already, and how little I listen when it comes out. Because I’ll admit that in the seconds between her hand shooting up into the air and my calling on her, I was thinking about how much more of the lesson we had to get through before we ran out of time, and were we going to be able to do the craft I’d prepared, and I hoped these kids didn’t feel like I was always calling on her to answer because she’s my daughter, and . . . . Everything except, Hey, maybe she has an insight of her own regarding these important tenets I’m supposed to be teaching.

I’ve been thinking about this off and on for two weeks. How often do we silence our kids, not because we’re not interested in what they have to say, but because we think don’t have the time to sift through what they’re actually saying? I’ll admit it; I do it a lot. (I have three kids, two ears, and one overwhelmed brain trying to process it all. Oh, and a husband who talks sometimes, too.) My heart sinks whenever I hear the phrase, “Oh, Mom, guess what . . . ?” because I know that I am in for a lengthy verbal treatise that will take more concentration to follow than I possess. Sometimes, not always, I’ll let her meander to the point, but, shamefully, more often, I interrupt in an attempt to get her to the finish line more quickly. I have my gentle ways of doing this (I’m not a monster): I suggest that she eat her food before it gets cold; I point out that I need to concentrate on my driving; or if I’m desperate, I tell her she’s “talking just to hear herself talk.”

I need to stop that.

Sometimes, as I commute in to work on the train or bus, I watch toddlers. There they sit, strapped into their strollers, gazing around at the different objects and faces. Pre-verbal, they have no names for what they’re seeing. How in the world do they process any of it? It’s not like they’re thinking, Oh, that lady is reading a book and sipping a cup of coffee. They have no vocabulary for any of that stuff. Without language, what goes through their minds?

The theory that I came up with when my kids were babies is that children come into the world just knowing everything. They are close to the angels, and when their eyes track across the room and they burst into laughter for no reason (what we called body joy), it’s because they are conversing with heavenly bodies. They’re in on the universal joke. As they grow older and rely more and more on language, they lose that connection, until they are completely verbal and as clueless as the rest of us. Babies hold the cure for cancer, the physics of traveling faster than the speed of light, and the solution to the crisis in the middle east – they just can’t tell us. And by the time they can explain stuff, they’ve lost the plot.

Anyway. From time to time, our kids tap into that instinctive insight and, while it may take them a while to get there, they just say stuff that makes you pull up short.

On Friday, I took the younger two to a Disney on Ice™ event. We poured out of the stadium along with a crowd of thousands when it was over, heading to the subway. It was pouring rain, and the wind made it almost impossible to hold the door to the station open. It was after nine o’clock, and I pushed the kids inside, hurrying them along toward the escalator. Scooby stopped abruptly, much to my dismay, and held out her hand. In her palm were some coins, two dimes and a quarter, I think, which she had found in her coat pocket.

“I want to give them to the man,” she said. I impatiently asked her what she was talking about, and she pointed to the homeless guy with a cup, standing just inside the double doors. “Fine,” I snapped, and stepped out of the stream of people, convinced were were about to miss our train. Under my eye, she made her way to the man and dropped her coins into his empty paper cup. He said something to her, and she gave him a brilliant smile. I took her hand as we rejoined the crowd, and probably walked a little bit faster than her legs could comfortably go.

As we stood on the platform, waiting for the train, she turned to me and said, “The man was really happy that I gave him money.” She paused and added, “I’m glad I didn’t spend it on a toy.” The tired part of my mind almost pointed out that her forty-five cents wouldn’t have been enough to buy anything anyway, but then I heard what she was saying. I looked around at the stupid crap people had been induced to buy: plastic mouse ears, light-up toys, mini-replicas of the characters of the show. Stuff that was destined to end up under the bed or in the trash in a few days’ time. How depressing it must be to someone who has nothing – no home, no bed, no food, and no warm place to be in the middle of a February rainstorm except a public train station – to be worth less to the hundreds of people walking by than a dumb toy. To Scooby, those two disparate ideas, the licensed Disney products and the homeless man, were connected by a semi-colon, not separated by a period.

Scooby is six. She’s still closer to the secrets of the universe than she is to clueless adulthood. Sometimes I think she still hears angels’ voices and from time to time, she lets me in on the conversation. I just need to listen.

Write It All Down

The other day, I was going through a long-ignored box in my office, when I discovered two old journals, those cloth-covered blank books that were all the rage a couple decades ago. From time to time, over the years, I’ve tried to capture my day-to-day life, much like in this blog, to get the thoughts out of my head in some kind of order, a way to move on mentally. During my most intense journaling periods, I found time in every day to record the good and the bad, to narrate my life so that the stresses and ambitions and problems would stop rolling around my head like little ball bearings.

One journal was dated 1989, my first year of law school. I think I had forgotten – or maybe suppressed – how much that first year sucked. I lived at home with my parents to save money, and worked as a waitress in a cheesy steak (not “cheese steak”) restaurant on weekends. My commute was miserable; I was completely intimidated by my classmates; and life was just so hard. I was twenty-two – what did I know of hardship? I had not yet struggled with infertility, buried any children, or received a cancer diagnosis.

That was the year I met Rev. Yes, when I met him, he was an intense and driven third year law student with his sights on corporate litigation. (Now he is a minister of the Gospel, with his roots firmly in the nonprofit world. Classic bait and switch, I know.) We began dating not long after he graduated, and we’ve been together ever since. How could I have known then, as I wrote about study groups and exams, difficult professors and opaque cases, that I was discussing these ultimately unimportant issues with the love of my life?

Then I read the second journal, from 1993 and 1994. We were engaged then, and those entries were all about finding just the right wedding gown and trying stay inside our tiny budget for the reception. I can look back and honestly say that I wasn’t a Bridezilla, exactly, but I had my moments. I guess I expected, in the abstract, that we would be married forever; at the same time, it astonishes and humbles me to know that he has been mine, and I have been his, for seventeen years. And he still sends me roses every Valentine’s Day and every anniversary, without fail, even though I am completely allergic to them, and even though that money could be more sensibly spent elsewhere. He sends them, extravagance though they may be, because, even though I can’t keep them in my office, he knows that deep down those deliveries make me happy; and I let him order them because I know it makes him happy.

Later journals would cover our adoption journey, and the total game changing event of actually coming home with our first child. Reading those entries, I was transported back to the days of wonder, exhaustion, frustration, and exhilaration that our oldest son brought. He was endlessly fascinating, and I spilled all my observations and hopes for him onto the lined pages.

From time to time, as I deal with him now, as a surly, obstinate, occasionally sweet teenager, I resolve to go back and re-read those pages.

I wrote about our struggles to have a biological child, about the hormonal adventures and outpatient procedures, the disappointments and thousand humilations of a modern medical culture that is convinced it can actually create life.

And that’s where the journals end. With the advent of the Internet, I took my daily thoughts to various discussion forums, telling my story in whatever context seemed appropriate and seeking answers there. I described the brief lives of our two baby daughters and grieved with warm, faceless women online. Protected by anonymity, I poured out my doubts about myself as a parent, as a wife, as a person. Even now, countless women I don’t know and will never meet walk beside me as I navigate this post-diagnosis road.

How could I have known, way back in those terrible law school days, that this lonely, intimidated young woman would find herself completed by a brilliant, committed, fiercely loyal man? That my love for the law would grow, yes, but would also be utterly eclipsed by my devotion to my family? That we would get the gift of children, not because of the brilliance of doctors, but because of God’s grace? How could I have known what “in sickness and health, til death do us part” really meant? Or, for that matter, how much capacity one person could have “to love and to cherish” another person? How in the world could I ever have known that?

It would be awesome to get another twenty years, to stumble across this blog someday and relive the feelings and impressions of the forty-three year old me, the me who struggles even to remember from day to day the events that make up my life now.

I don’t know if I’ll get those twenty years, but I have today, and I have this blog, and I can write it all down.

Waiting For Shoes

So . . . as I said, I am, at the moment, in remission from cancer, and every four months, I go for a blood test and exam, which are supposed to tell me whether the cancer is back. The whole cancer diagnosis was a big surprise (Nobody ever expects the Spanish Inquisition!), but there’s a special creeping feeling of dread that comes with the every-few-months cancer follow up schedule. I guess the other shoe is still hovering.

After a four-month wait, my second follow up with the gynecological oncologist (gyn-onc) is uneventful. The hospital itself is like a huge labyrinth; you have to remember names (I guess of BIG donors) to figure out which wing you’re going to. Whatever happened to the good old days of following the red/blue/green line painted on the wall until you ended up in the right waiting room?

In this part of the “Gyn Specialties” department, there are always a ton of empty chairs. Go down the hall a few steps, past the blood lab, and you’ll find the OB-GYN waiting room filled to capacity with uncomfortable looking women in varying sizes, all looking impatiently at the wall clock. But the waiting room where I sit is quiet, calm. As I work my way through a People magazine – which, by the way, is filled with stories about celebrities whom I don’t recognize and can’t fathom why they are famous (clearly, I need to watch more television) – I wonder if they keep the pre-and-post menopause patients separated on purpose.

The receptionist comes over to hand me a clipboard with two sheets of paper on it. The first is a list of any medications I’m taking. I leave it blank. I have no prescriptions, no meds at all, and I don’t think they much care about my calcium and iron supplements. The second is a short questionnaire about health issues that may have cropped up since my last visit. I leave those blank, too; in the space for “Colonoscopy?” I barely restrain myself from writing in, “No, thank you.” Any complaints? I think for a second. There’s that slight achy pressure I get after eating – when I eat, which, okay, I don’t really have much of an appetite. Maybe a bit of low back pain; could be our crappy old mattress or the kitchen sink I keep in my shoulder bag. Might be stress.

None, I write in the space. If he finds something, I’ll ‘fess up, but I’m not about to borrow trouble.

This time, the gyn-onc is a little more personable. Our first meeting, in October, was brief and awkward, each of us sizing the other up. I wonder what his initial impression of me was, considering I (1) immediately hit him with a question he couldn’t answer, and (2) took his Well, this is a crap shoot, I’m not going to bull***t you response in stride. What did I think of him? OMG, he’s young! And, Thank heaven he’s not going to bull***t me, ‘cuz, really, this whole thing is a crap shoot.

This time, he wants to make conversation. I don’t. How were your holidays? “Fine,” I mutter, lying back on the table. What do you think of all this snow? “I’m over it” – said as I scootch into The Position. Now, I’m praying that he’ll just focus, because I cannot converse with someone from between my own knees. Not going to do it. He cruises through the potty questions (no problems there), and then warns me that he’s going to do the exam next.

He eases in, like a normal doctor, thumping my back, examining my scar, pressing around on my abdomen. I’m not fooled. Soon enough, he’s murmuring that he’s going to do an internal, and I escape to my happy place until I hear the gloves snap off and it’s over.

Back in our neutral corners, the doctor asks me some follow-up questions (including, “Colonoscopy?” but I’m off the hook for that for another two years). He directs me to go to the lab for my tumor marker blood draw and advises me to call for the results in a week.

All of the questions are on the tip of my tongue. How long after the marker starts to rise would I have before you’d do something about a recurrence? What kinds of symptoms should I, theoretically, be on the lookout for? And the biggie: exactly how does one die of this type of cancer?

But, I don’t know this guy yet, and he doesn’t know how to read me. I don’t want him to label me a complainer, or, worse, a flake. I don’t want the patronizing pat on the head, the simplistic, “Don’t worry about that, many women live long lives with this kind of . . . blah, blah, blah.” Two meetings aren’t enough for me to enlist his aid in building that wall against the possibilities of this cancer. Yes, it may never come back, but if it does, I don’t want it to catch me napping. I have kind of a siege mentality, and right now, I want to know how high the battlements need to be. And I don’t want him to backtrack from his initial assessment: This kind of cancer does come back, usually in the belly; could be a couple months, could be a couple years. That, I suspect, was a moment of total honesty, and anything less than that would mean that this relationship isn’t going to work.

So, I keep quiet, and he reiterates the schedule we’d agreed on last time. He shakes my hand and leaves the exam room. I put my clothes back on.

As I head out of the Gyn Specialties suite, a new band-aid over the puncture in my arm and no closer to any conclusions, I glance down the short hall to the obstetrics side. They’re waiting for shoes, too, I guess. Are their babies healthy? Should the nursery be painted blue or pink? Next time I come, in June, many of them will have their answers. Me, I’ll probably still be waiting for that other shoe to drop.

Bad Mom Snow Day

Another week, another snow day.  Honestly, I think these kids are going to be making up school days until July this year.  They certainly have used up all their freebies.  And there's nothing like a snow day to drive home to you just how bad a parent you are. 

I mean, think about it.  There is nothing to do.  So, in spite of every good intention, the television goes on at the crack of dawn (since a nine-year-old and a six-year-old are incapable of "sleeping in") and stays on all day.  ALL DAY.  And insisting that they "read a book" (my usual go-to alternative to sitting in front of the idiot box) rings hollow because sitting and reading for hours on end isn't really all that much better.  So they fight over the remote, flipping between old, stupid cartoons and new, even stupider cartoons -- that is, until the fourteen-year-old surfaces from beneath the mound of blankets and comforters (around 11:30 or so), and wants to watch High School Musical 2, again.

I can send them outside in the freezing rain for some good fresh air and exercise.  No, really, kids, put on two pairs of socks and three pairs of dollar-rack knit gloves, Vaseline up your face against the chill, shove on those boots, and go play in the mountain of ice covered snow that now makes up our front yard.  Don't worry that you sink shoulder-deep with each step, it's winter FUN!  That bruise from getting hit in the forehead with a big ice-ball will go away in a few minutes.  Just rub it. 

Then as they slide into the house, soaked to the skin, I'll try to convince them that this was the funnest five minutes they've had all week. 

I stuff them with snacks (animal crackers and hot chocolate) every two hours because they're bored, I'm bored, and that's the perfect excuse to eat. 

I seethe resentfully as I dig out the cars from the solid barrier of petrified slush left by the snow plows, irritated that each shovelful weighs more than either of the two younger kids.  I mutter an ungracious thanks to the teenager because his idea of "clearing the sidewalk" and mine are not entirely compatible.  I exhaust all of the online message boards and Internet articles I typically cycle through in a day, disgusted that nobody has anything interesting or lengthy enough to say to keep my attention. 

After the fifty-seventh "Mom, guess what?" I resolve to change my name.  I hide behind my closed bedroom door, emerging only to stir the curry in the big pot on the stove. 

It's dark now, and I realize all of the cool things I could have done today.  I could have played in the snow with the kids, rather than watching them through the window.  I could have taken them for a walk (slippery, yes) around the block to take a gander at the alien white landscape.  I could have hauled out the board games: Sorry, Monopoly, even chess -- and stood a good chance of winning at two of them. 

Snow days mean inconvenience all around, an abrupt shuffling of the plans for the week, an ultimately wasted day.   But they also mean opportunities to connect with children who, too soon, are going to have other options besides being trapped in the house on a day off from school.  It's a cosmic finger on the pause button, the breathing minute we long for during the rush of the normal work week.

It's a lesson learned too late for this snow day.  It's time for dinner, and, after that, bed.  It is, after all, a school night.   But this bad mother resolves to do better next time -- and there will be a next time:  it's only the beginning of February in New England.  Regardless of whether Paxatawney Phil saw his shadow this morning, there's still another three and a half months of winter to go.  We haven't seen the last snow day for the year, not by a long shot. 

Next time, I'll be ready with my hat, gloves, and a better attitude.