Laughing At The Dark

It’s almost here!

Laughing At The Dark: A Memoir of Motherhood And Mayhem will launch on April 15, and I can not wait for you to read it.

So many times over the course of this long and awful year, I didn’t think this book would ever see the light of day, but every time I thought about deep-sixing the whole thing, someone would remind me of why I wrote it in the first place. I wrote it because we all need reminders. We need someone to tell us that we aren’t alone. We need someone to tell us that shit happens but shit isn’t all there is. We need someone to tell us that failure happens but failure is only one part of the story. We need someone to tell us that beauty happens and that it matters even though we can’t hang onto it forever. We need someone to tell us we don’t have to take ourselves so seriously. We need someone to make us laugh, even when laughing isn’t exactly appropriate.

I’ve had those voices in my life this year, and I wouldn’t have made it without them. I hope Laughing at the Dark can be one of those voices for you.

You can pre-order the e-book now! Or if, like me, you prefer to hold out for a paperback you can hold in your hands, mark your calendar for April 15!

There’s a Murder Cat Out There

It’s spring. The trees are budding. Little flowers are poking up from the earth. In the morning you can hear birds singing as geese fly overhead, returning home from their southern winter. Being outside and soaking up nature feels like the best the world has to offer right now. But before we all go full Tennyson and idealize nature as the ultimate good, can we get one thing out there?

Nature is terrifying.

I’m not just talking about mosquitos and floods and lions eating baby gazelle and, you know, viruses. (Though really.) I’m referring to even the ordinary, everyday reality of nature.

Did you know that sometimes when dogs are mating they can get…stuck? I know this horrifying fact. I know it because more than once I witnessed it happening with the street dogs in my old neighborhood. It involves a lot of loud screamy yapping, and it is very hard to keep your preschooler from noticing and asking questions. Thanks for that, nature.

Did you know that sometimes roosters crow when it’s not actually dawn? I found that out one night when Nate and I stayed with a family in rural Argentina. The setting was idyllic. Quiet, lovely open air, stars lighting up the sky. The rooster crowed at least once an hour all night long. Why? I don’t know. I’m no rooster expert. In fact, after a night that was basically just a handful of half-hour naps, I couldn’t even remember the word rooster.

In spite of these realities, though, we persist in inviting nature into our lives up close and personal. Nate and I have had several pets over the years (including two right now) and we often marvel at our own decision-making skills. We have invited animals to live inside our house with us. We love them. But objectively speaking that was a very…interesting…choice.

When I was pregnant with Scott and Ellie was not even two, we adopted a kitten. Well, the kitten adopted us. I mean that literally. One day I was sitting in the living room of my second floor apartment, talking to our intern, and a tiny orange kitten came walking up the stairs and right into our house. I have no idea how she got inside from the street, but there she was. Ellie was delighted, immediately named her Gigi, and insisted we give her milk, which the kitten drank like the starving animal she was. Obviously, we had to keep her.

Up to that point I had only had male cats, so I took the kitten in early to the vet and asked about having her fixed. He said it couldn’t be done until she was 7-9 months old. I mentally marked the date on my calendar and took my new little Gigi home. She was only six months old when she got pregnant. Street cats, people. We noticed the weird shape way too late, took her in, and sure enough, we were expecting more kittens. Any day now, the vet said. Neat.

Only two months away from my own due date, I made a nest of blankets in one corner of the family room and prayed Gigi would pick that spot to deliver her babies. Luckily she did because the mess, oh my word, the mess. I’d like to think we washed those blankets, but there’s a decent chance we threw them away. I honestly don’t remember. I do remember that Gigi the teenage mother looked emaciated after giving birth, that we had four tiny newborn kittens which were sweet and mewly, and that I had to spend the next several weeks trying to keep Ellie from killing them with her intense love. She picked them up. She carried them around, squeezing their tiny necks. She set them on high shelves and then walked away leaving them there crying and unable to get down. Somehow, they all survived, and somehow I was able to give them all away to new homes before our own baby came. But you’d better believe that Gigi had a surgery after that, and from then on, I was back to only male pets.

When we moved away from there, we left our cats with friends, and we have been a strictly dog family since then. Until a couple of years ago when I let my girls talk me into adopting a cat again. His name is Ollie. He is the rescued offspring of a feral cat who made a nest in one of my in-laws trucks. He purrs more than any cat I have ever owned and he looks adorable curled up on my window seat. We love him.

He is also a ferocious hunter who would make his feral mother proud.

I never meant to let him go outside, but he was determined. He wanted out with a fierce passion, darting at the door every time it opened, so that eventually, with so many people (and a dog) coming and going here, I gave up and allowed him to come and go also. I really didn’t think through the consequences of that decision. I figured he would be safe enough here and didn’t know to ask what he would do out there. I never had a cat while living in a place with woods and no street dogs.

He likes to bring me his hunting trophies, you guys. Mice. Birds. Mostly dead. But yeah, one of the birds was still alive. At first. If you’ve never seen a predator toy with and then kill its prey in your living room, you are a very intelligent person who has made better choices than I. It takes a long time to clean up that many feathers.

And then, a few nights ago, exhausted from the stress of quarantine and bad news and working from home, we were startled awake at 11:30 pm by the sound of a small repetitive scream: eeeee-eeeeee-eeeee-eeeee. Nate’s half-asleep brain pictured Lucy loudly playing a kazoo in the hallway. I thought an injured bird had landed on our window sill.

Lucy opened her bedroom door just a split second before I did. She screamed and slammed it shut again. Eyes adjusting to the dark, I saw what she had seen. Ollie, standing in the hall with something live hanging from his mouth. I slammed my door, too, minus the screaming. Nate took it from there. Through the door, he reported to me that we had something new: a bunny.

We got very lucky, and Ollie took his prey to the bathroom where it darted behind the shower curtain and hunkered down, going silent to avoid detection. Nate was able to grab a plastic bag and carry it outside and set it free, still alive. Ollie prowled around sniffing for his prize. We closed every door and window and left him to his disappointment. We did not immediately return to sleep.

Who can sleep with a murder cat outside their door?

And there it is: this year’s tagline. Because really, is there any other way to sleep? If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that even while we live in oblivious denial, nature is out there, in all its terrible glory, and we’re inextricably involved in the whole hot mess.

So we make creative use of plastic bags and invent songs about murder cats so that we can laugh until we eventually find a way to sleep, and then we get up the next day and go outside and look at the flowers and think about beauty and how it’s all mixed up with terror. And maybe we go ahead and write a Tennyson-like poem.

Or maybe we just laugh and get back to work.

Not Consumed

One of the first lessons I learned about living in South America was that holidays would be hard. Everything about life in another country involves having your routines and rhythms disrupted. Every day brings the low-grade stress of having to consciously do the things you would normally do unconsciously. Eventually, you adjust to this stress, and much-more-long-term eventually you even begin to find the new rhythms normal and unconscious again. But whenever a day with particular emotional significance comes along, you can count on it taking a toll.

First, you are far away from most of your family and friends, who made those days special before. Second, the traditional activities and schedules are all different, so you have to adapt to new ones. Third, more elusive and yet in the end even more impactful, all the environmental cues are wrong. Stores don’t play the songs you subconsciously expect. Your neighbors don’t speak, act, or decorate their houses in the way you never even realized you enjoyed. You don’t have access to the same tastes and the same smells, and smell suddenly seems vital to the experience. And in the southern hemisphere, even the weather is all wrong, hot when it should be cold, fall when it should be spring. Even if you love summer, blazing heat on Christmas day just feels…wrong.

I could tell a dozen stories of the ways I tried to adapt to new normals, tried to buck the system and make my own in-between homemade holidays from scratch, or tried desperately to create an illusion of the old normal. In the nine years we lived in Argentina, I tried it all the ways. Even in retrospect, I couldn’t tell you which was the best. I think it was mostly just a matter of what we needed emotionally and what was possible physically on each given day. Like so many things, there aren’t really rules. You take it as it comes and you do the best you can.

This week I’ve been thinking about one particular holiday, though: Thanksgiving, the last one we spent in Argentina, which would make it November of 2010. Thanksgiving the year before had been a massive disaster, a story I’ll maybe recount some other day when I have more emotional fortitude than today. We lived and worked in the city of La Plata with two other families, both dear friend as well as co-workers. One of the families was gone that holiday season, back in the US visiting supporters and preparing for another three-year term. Knowing it would just be our two young families, trying to make the best of a holiday that was important to us but didn’t exist where we lived, trying to celebrate with traditions designed for late fall though it would be 90 degrees in our un-air-conditioned houses, my friend and I plotted to put together a festive plan.

We would cook the turkey at my house, we decided, where the oven could overheat everything, but while it was cooking, my family would go to her house. We’d use some of our carefully hoarded supplies to make refreshing cranberry cocktails and we’d cook all the sides together while the children played. When it was time for turkey, I’d go back and get it while she set up a long, pretty table outside on the patio. We’d all gather around the same table in the shade and eat our traditional foods and play some music, and it would feel like Thanksgiving, like home, like it was supposed to feel, just for a little bit.

In the days leading up to Thanksgiving, we prepared decorations and hunted up elusive ingredients for the full holiday spread. They day before, I let the kids help me make pie, rolling out the crusts in a mess of flour and cinnamon. Then, early Thanksgiving morning, I woke up to Nate tossing and turning. He was warm, on the verge of fever and feeling terrrible. Knowing how important this day was to me, he told me he’d be fine. A few hours later, up now with the girls, I went in to where Scott was still sleeping, only to find his cheeks red, his head hot to the touch. Clearly, they both had a virus.

I called my friend, both of us on the edge of tears as we discussed what to do. I could tell that she didn’t want to cancel Thanksgiving together but she also didn’t want to invite sickness into her own family. I didn’t blame her a bit. In the end, we decided to skip all the hours of prepping together and just cook in our separate houses and convene for a meal outside, keeping Scott away from her girls as much as possible.

I can’t really remember the meal from that day, though I’m sure the food was good. I remember that Ellie was disappointed that we wouldn’t be going to their house until dinner time. I remember that Scott slept on the couch while the rest of us ate. I remember that as soon as we’d cleaned up the dishes, we had to take him home again. I remember that it did not feel like Thanksgiving, did not feel like home, did not feel like it was supposed to feel, even a little bit.

It was a small thing, really. A minor loss. Especially compared to all the suffering and loss the world holds. But some days, small losses loom large.

As an adult, you live knowing that you won’t always get to have things they way you want them. You make the best of hard situations when you have to. And then, sometimes even your options for making the best of a hard situation get taken away from you. Sometimes you lose your coping mechanisms, and it’s the most confusing loss of all. Sometimes there’s just no path toward things feeling the way you want them to feel.

That Thanksgiving, I had to face that loss and deal with it. I have had to face it many times. Today, I am finding myself facing it again, and I don’t know that it’s much easier for having faced it before.

But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.

Lamentations 3:21-23

This is what I know, and this is what I consciously bring to mind over and over again: every hard thing I have ever lived through, I lived through. Whenever I thought something would destroy me, I was not destroyed. Each time I dreaded facing another day, I faced it. His mercy has been new every morning of my life.

Hard as I try, not every day is a day I can laugh. Some days, the hours I’m facing are too hard, the race I have to run is too long, the portion I’ve inherited is not fair. So those days, I don’t laugh. Those days, I wait.

I wait for my real inheritance. (It’s not a fortress or a job or even an identity. It’s a person.)

He always comes when I need him.

The Lord is my portion. I will wait for him.

Lamentations 3: 24

Lord, you alone are my portion and my cup; you make my lot secure. The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; surely I have a delightful inheritance.

Psalm 16:5-6

At the Party

She wanted to play with Barbies. Having loved my own Barbies as a little girl and eagerly hoarded tiny glittery shoes and traded away stuffed animals for miniature ball gowns, I understood the appeal. Sure, I had some feminist qualms. I’ve lived long enough to be concerned about real issues like body image and female stereotypes. But she was two and liked shiny things and make believe. I liked making her happy.

And she was my third child, so let’s face it, I had learned to pick my battles.

We sat on the floor with the pile of dolls and clothing. Lucy meticulously chose each outfit, rejecting my advice and opinions. When they were deemed sufficiently fabulous, I asked where they were going.

“To a party,” she said, the “duh” unspoken but still very clear.

I tried not to read anything into the overly stereotyped way she had them fuss with their hair one last time before heading out on the town. I mean yes, pink was her favorite color, and yes she couldn’t think of anything more important for her dolls to do than dance around in sequined dresses, but that probably didn’t mean anything, right?

Or did it? Had she so thoroughly absorbed cultural standards that she conformed to them without even knowing why? Had I already failed at protecting my daughter from the world’s bizarre expectations of women?

The dolls were just finishing a very bouncy dance when Lucy sat up and began to direct my movements.

“Now make them dance, Mommy, but watch out. Now monsters are attacking them! Kick the monsters! Fight them! Here! I have the dog!”

She produced Barbie’s floofy pink poodle.

“Now the puppy is fighting the monsters! We’re all fighting them! And here comes their dad!”

Ken appears, dressed business casual.

“Now he’s fighting the monsters, too! But it’s too late! They’ve already killed all the monsters!”

Pile of Barbies do a victory dance, along with their dog and their dad. it was nothing compared to the victory dance inside my head.

The adventure having ended, she asked if she could watch some Sesame Street.

Sure, baby. And for the record, we can play Barbies anytime you want.

I Dealt with All the Other Messes, Now Where Do I Find the Bleach for My Brain?

For the last eight months, I’ve been working on a book called Laughing at the Dark. It’s a memoir of sorts, stories from my life and some thoughts that go with them. It’s not ready for publication yet (hopefully you’ll see it sometime next fall) but this chapter that I wrote months before a pandemic confined us all to our homes just keeps sticking in my head. Some of us may still feel physically safe, for others our fears are for parents or for compromised family members or for ourselves, for still others our anxieties center around the emotional and the economic impacts as we face real consequences. But never in my lifetime has it been so obvious that we are all ultimately vulnerable and not nearly as powerful as we’d like to think. So hopefully this little excerpt can be a small moment of laughter and a reminder that you aren’t alone. Here’s to accepting together whatever comes and to doing the next thing and then the next.

When you are blessed to have a contented baby who also happens to be your third child, the little darling will spend a lot of time on the floor. (At least, I like to assume I’m not the only one.)

Lucy was born right at the beginning of the current baby-wearing trend, and since we lived in another country and were at least ten years behind all trends, I didn’t have any nifty slings or wraps. I had one very uncomfortable “baby backpack” that contrasted starkly with the many cute baby blankets that could be tossed on the floor for Lucy to roll around on.

And she was just so happy to lay there and look at the world go by.

There were always things to watch. A whirlwind of a big sister. A snugly big brother. A puppy exactly six months older than she was and very interested in dashing about licking things. Guests in and out. Noise and action in the neighborhood. More than enough stimulation for one introverted baby.

When Lucy learned to crawl, she was right there on the floor to have all the room she needed to do so. She explored our tiny house right next to the pup, slowly going after the things she had formerly just observed. She wasn’t particularly adventurous, but at home where she was familiar with everything in sight, she owned her world.

Which is how she began the habit of sticking her fingers in every crack and crevice to see what was hidden there. The door frames and window wells. The space under the couch. Behind the TV.

I think that last one is where she found the dead cockroach.

But then, does it matter where she found it? What matters is that I walked into the room to see my sweet little baby girl on the verge of putting a dead roach into her sweet little baby mouth.

I have never moved so fast in my life. I have never touched a roach so willingly, either. But I’m proud to say that I stopped her just in time.

Then I washed her hands and my hands and swept under and behind every piece of furniture in the house. I only wished there was some way to wash the memory from my brain.

If you’ve ever worried about the germs your child is exposed to or felt guilty about not keeping your house as clean as you should, congratulations. You now know that you are not doing as badly as you could be.

In all seriousness, though, while I still cringe when I think about that day, it’s only a drop in the bucket of dirt and germs that my kids encountered daily. During their early years, we lived in neighborhoods on the edges of those temporary shanty-towns you see on the news. Ellie wore the sweet little dresses her grandparents bought her to play on the cement floors and packed dirt yards of her neighborhood friends. We took walks next to the open drainage ditches that lined our streets, and when the rain made drainage back up into our house, the water smelled of sewage. Sometimes we’d be without water for hours or even days at a time, which meant no bathing or, you know, flushing toilets. Yes, that is as bad as it sounds.

I don’t say any of that to evoke pity or scorn or admiration or any particular response. It was just a fact of life where we lived, as it is for millions of people around the world. We did what everyone does: the best we could. I tried to keep my kids away from the open sewers and mostly succeeded. If I failed, I gave them a bath. I bathed them regularly, even though it was usually in a Rubbermaid tub. I made them eat their vegetables and drink their milk, and when we got food poisoning from the choripan we bought on the side of the road, we drank a lot of Gatorade and got through it.

Once, our teammates rescued a tiny kitten from a nearby field. Our kids all loved that cat. They played with it. They snuggled it. We didn’t discover that it had ringworm until all three families on our team were infected. I spent the weeks before Lucy was born spreading cream over everyone in an attempt to get the red splotches totally healed before we had an infant in the house. It almost worked. The tiny spot on my right arm didn’t disappear quite enough, and while nursing Lucy, I transferred the fungus to her sweet newborn head. I know, right? But in the end, we went back to the pharmacy, got more cream, and a few weeks later, she was healed.

Every time something like that happened, I felt all the sickening feelings of disgust and shame that you might imagine. I don’t think anyone is so laid-back that they get to escape the disgust and shame. But whatever we might feel, we parents are the ones in charge of dealing with the mess. So we do the next thing. And then the next. And then the next.

As far as I can tell, that’s really all there is to adulting. It’s not knowing what you’re doing. It’s not being prepared or having a plan. It’s figuring out the next step and then doing it, even when you feel like crawling into a hole and giving up.

For what it’s worth, these days my kids are all healthy.

I could try to take credit for that. I could say that it was because I exposed them to so many germs that they have strong immune systems. Or that it was because I brought them home to a cleaner environment partway through their lives that we avoided the worst dangers. But I don’t think either thing is true.

I know kids who lived in those slums who had asthma from the pollution and chronic health issues from malnutrition. I also know kids in the same exact households who licked ashes off of rusty nails when their parents weren’t looking and grew up as strong and healthy as the proverbial horses. I know kids in middle-class America who have life-threatening allergies and others who have almost died from complications of the flu. I also know some who can run three miles without breaking a sweat and scarcely ever have so much as a cold.

It turns out that the human body, like everything else in life, is incredibly complex. Its health is affected by such an intricate mix of genetics and environment and random chance that we would be arrogant to take too much credit when it goes well and foolish to take too much blame when it doesn’t.

I’m not saying I don’t need to make healthy choices when I can or that it makes no difference what I do. Some parts of our life and health do lie within our control, and I certainly want to tip the odds in my favor if I can. I’m just suggesting that so much of my kids’ well-being is not up to me. Some things I can’t change and some things I can’t predict, and when I start to believe I can, I’m setting myself up for serious anxiety. I’m also setting myself up to judge others in the most unproductive way.

It doesn’t sound particularly high-minded, but in a fractured world, our physical vulnerability is one of the few things that we all truly have in common. However different our values, our customs, and our beliefs about the world, we all live in fragile bodies and navigate a world over which we don’t have nearly as much control as we’d like.

You and I and the moms in rural Ghana and the moms in the slums of St. Petersburg and the moms in ritzy Fifth Avenue apartments all have children whose arms break when they fall, whose bodies are susceptible to viruses, and whose hair makes a welcome home to lice. We most certainly don’t all have the same access to prevention and treatment of those things, but we all have to deal with them when they happen.

If we could learn to accept our mutual weakness, I believe we’d find it easier to give each other more grace, and give ourselves more grace, too. Our frailty is a place where we can meet with compassion. Our bodily pain is a reality we can feel with true empathy. Our gross physicality is a thing we can laugh about together.

And in that place of vulnerability, we can help each other find the strength to do the next thing.

And the next.

And the next.

 

 Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

 

 

 

Do You See What I See?

Lucy has always been a flincher.

When she was a baby, she’d flinch any time the dog ran toward her, even though he was one of her favorite things on earth. Once she began to walk, she would jump back from moving vehicles that were nowhere near her and pull away when anyone opened a door too fast. For the longest time she was terrified of automatic doors and would only go through them if carried. At age five, she started playing softball. It’s taken years to get her to catch the ball without looking away to shield her face.

For the first few years of her life, I chalked all the flinching up to her being fearful. She was shy. She was cautious around anything new. She was afraid of heights and water and small spaces and men with beards.

It never occurred to me to question why she found certain things terrifying. I just accepted that she did and set about reassuring her that those things wouldn’t hurt her and encouraging her to be brave and face her fears.

Then one day when Lucy was three we visited the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, and I had an epiphany.

If you’ve ever been to our Children’s Museum, you’ll remember the giant work of art that dominates the ramp area. Stretching from the basement level all the way up to the ceiling four stories above is a gorgeous, colorful blown-glass sculpture by artist Dale Chihuly. It’s made up of thousands of individual glass pieces, it’s breathtaking, and Lucy adored it.

She couldn’t take her eyes off it. She wanted to touch it, which wasn’t possible, but I knew that if we went down to the lower level there were plastic reproductions of several of the individual pieces that she could play with. She was thrilled and could barely be made to keep hold of my hand as she strained to go down the ramp as fast as possible. We got to the bottom, rounded the corner, and there it was: a little cavern under the sculpture, where the beautiful glass was lit up right over our heads and whole racks of reproductions were waiting to be touched and held and rearranged to her hearts content.

Lucy stared with longing at all of that color and shape. But when I tried to walk toward it, she planted her feet and wouldn’t take another step.

“Right over here you can play with them,” I said. “Come over here.”

She shook her head.

“Don’t you want to touch all the pieces?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s go then.”

“No.”

That’s when I realized that she was no longer looking up at the glass or forward at the toy reproductions. She was looking at the floor, and there was fear on her face.

I saw that she was standing on the edge of the carpeted section and that the ground between her and the beautiful toys was covered in shiny black tiles.

It was clear that for some reason, she didn’t want to walk on those tiles.

“It’s okay, baby,” I said. “They aren’t slippery. Look, I’m walking on them.” I took a few steps to demonstrate their safety.

Lucy shook her head. Then she looked longingly again at the beautiful glass. Then, slowly, very slowly, she lifted one foot and tapped the tile in front of her. When her foot hit solid ground, she left it there for a minute, then carefully took another step. She reached for my hand and when I gave it, she hung on tightly as she took one delicate step after another over to the bank of beautiful toys.

While she played, I sat on a nearby seat and watched. Other kids came and went around her, but she was focused on the arrangement of colorful pieces she was making. I looked at the floor again, wondering what had sparked her fear. Lots of people were walking on the tiles. Nothing looked dirty or moved weirdly or was in any way dangerous.

Then I thought about the way she had so gingerly tested the ground with her toe and I looked at the tiles again, trying to see what she must have seen. Suddenly it all made sense. Those tiles were so polished and so dark that in that dim light, they didn’t look like tiles at all. They looked like holes in the ground.

Once I knew the right questions to ask, Lucy confirmed my theory. Yes, it looked like a hole, like nothing at all, and it was hard to believe it would hold you up. This perception of hers was so strong that even though she saw other people walking on it, she still couldn’t fully believe it was solid ground.

It was one of those moments that makes you re-evaluate all the other things you’ve experienced. It dawned on me that she had her own way of seeing everything. The dog. The escalators. The automatic doors. Her dad when he put a hat on.

Her unique combination of acute visual sensitivity and overexcitable imagination made her perception of the world different from what most people experience, and her perception was more real to her than anything explanation anyone could give.

I haven’t always reacted perfectly to her fears since that day. I haven’t always been able to see things the way she does. But it’s pretty wonderful to try. Her mind is a fascinating place.

As it always is, her blessing and her curse are the same. She can see experience the world on a level beyond the ordinary, but to get to the beauty she longs for, she has to find the courage to walk across the holes that open up in the earth.

She doesn’t need me to hold her hand for that any more. Instead I hold my breath as I wait to see where she’ll go.

I Have to Tell You Something

She was three years old when I sat her down and tried a new strategy.

“When Mommy is talking to someone else or busy doing some work and you have something you want to say, don’t just start talking. That’s called interrupting. You may get my attention by saying, ‘Excuse me’ or ‘Mommy, I have to tell you something,’ and then you wait until I finish what I’m doing and tell you I’m ready.”

“Okay!” she said, perpetually cheerful when she wasn’t furious.

She took to this new method right away. Sort of. She found it hard to wait for me to finish and focus on her. Often, she didn’t wait at all. But she DID always preface everything she said with, “Mommy, I have to tell you something.”

“Mommy, I have to tell you something…I am so hungry!” “Mommy, I have to tell you something…I can’t find my Hello Kitty!” “Mommy, I have to tell you something…my bandaid fell off!”

She became the expert in having to tell me something. In fact, sometimes she would say it without any follow up plan at all.

“Mommy, I have to tell you something.”

“Okay, I’m listening.”

“Um…um…look at my shoes! They’re red.”

They are indeed red. They’re also a year old, sweetie. Not exactly breaking news.

“Mommy, I have to tell you something.”

“Just a minute, babe, I’m on the phone.”

“Mommy, I really have to tell you something.”

“Please wait patiently.”

“Mommy, I HAVE to tell you something.”

“Okay, I’m done. Go ahead.”

“Um…sometimes Luke Skywalker wears a helmet.”

Well, I respect your Star Wars knowledge, darling, but I’m not sure if I see the urgency of that communication.

“Mommy, I have to tell you something. Mommy, I have to tell you something.” It took me a couple of weeks of the endless refrain to finally catch on to what was happening. Sometimes I’m a little slow.

“Mommy, I have to tell you something.” She may have just been repeating what I told her to say, but the words were exactly accurate. It wasn’t “Mommy, I have something to tell you.” It was “Mommy, I have to tell you something.” Something. Anything. It’s not important what I have to say but just that I get the chance to say it. To have your attention. To talk to you and know that you are listening.

Annoying as it often was, she was definitely onto something. She instinctively understood the heart of communication. The point isn’t the exchange of information. The point is the relationship.

I mean, think about it. Anything she truly needed, I would give her without her having to ask. Regular meals. Clean clothes. Exercise and activity. Naps and cuddles. Correction and discipline.

But she still needed to tell me things. Lots of things. Big things and little things and things that were barely even things at all. Because that’s how we connected. How I came to know her and she came to know me.

How we’re still coming to know one another, actually. She doesn’t use the whole sentence any more, but there’s still usually that little intro. “Mom?” Pause. All the thoughts and questions.

After all these years, I still sometimes forget to slow down and listen. I still sometimes think I’ll lose my mind if I hear the word “Mom” one more time. But I’m learning. I’m learning Stranger Things trivia and more about the wives of Henry VIII than I ever wanted to know. But I’m also learning about this wonderful person that lives in my house. How her mind works and what she loves and who is inspiring her today.

Okay, sweetie, I’m listening. Go ahead.

Noo

Scott was one and already he was the master of many words, most in English and a few in Spanish. Papi. Mama. Hi. Chau. No. Yes. Ball. Juice. Cookie. Mas. All the really important things.

Except one.

“Can you say Ellie?” we would ask, pointing at his beloved older sister.

“No,” he’d answer, and run off to play.

“El. Ly,” we’d coach. “Can you say Ellie?”

“No. Mas juice?”

“I’ll give you more juice if you say Ellie,” I tried.

No.

And then one day, I heard him calling for her, and I stopped, not sure if I had heard correctly.

“What did you just call her? What’s your sister’s name?” I asked like it was no big thing.

“Noo.”

Please read that correctly. He didn’t say “no” in a long and drawn out way. He said “noo” pronounced like “new.”

And I kid you not, he proceeded to call her that for the next several weeks.

“Say goodnight to Papi and Ellie,” I said at bedtime.

“Chai Papi! Chau Noo!”

And at play time, “Noo! Noo! Tum here!”

Noo? Really?

For those who contend that kids are blank slates and are formed into who they will be solely by the environment around them, I submit to you my son. Being absolutely his own self from the moment his little mouth could form words.

Kids are weird, people, weirder than you ever imagined.

Luckily, that’s the way we like them.

Loopholes

If I had to list the top five skills of my children as preschoolers, packing would easily make number one. Through some freak of genetics, they inherited their father’s instinct for collecting things and my predisposition to be constantly mobile, and they combined these traits into the habit of stuffing every toy they owned into any bag they could find and carrying them around wherever they went.

Sometimes they wouldn’t even play with the toys. Just pack and carry. (And leave in an unlikely place so the next time you want a particular toy it can’t be found by any logical method.)

When Ellie was four and Scott two, the habit was starting to wear pretty thin for me. Anytime we were trying to leave the house, I’d look over and two little people would be stuffing things into purses, no shoes on, no coat on, no time for hair combing. The bags must be packed!

One day, after previous unsuccessful attempts at reasoning with them, I put my foot down. We were headed to the swing set outside our apartment building, and Ellie began packing for a two-week vacation.

“We don’t need to take toys with us,” I said. “We’re just going outside to play for a while.”

“I just need a few little things,” she begged. “Please. Just a few little things.”

“You may bring one thing,” I relented. “Only one. And you are responsible to bring it back inside when we’re done.”

“Three things, just three things.”

“One.”

She began to cry. “I really need these two things,” she sobbed, holding up two overstuffed purses.

Please note that each purse was filled with a myriad other items, so I felt that I was being generous when I said, “You may bring one purse.”

The tears went on for a few more seconds and then stopped abruptly. Ellie jumped up from the floor. “Mommy, I just need one minute!” she said cheerily and disappeared into her bedroom.

A few seconds later she reappeared with a giant purse, quickly stuffed both smaller purses inside it, then added a few random toys for good measure. “Okay, Mommy!” she said, holding up the purse that was now half her size. “I have my one thing!”

You know what? I let her take it. In fact, it may have been one of my proudest parenting moments.

I just figured, if you’re smart enough to find a way around the rules without hurting anyone, you should get the rewards of your cleverness. And if you’re paying attention, you’ll soon learn on your own that all that crap you’re carrying is only slowing you down.

In the mean time, enjoy the win, kid. You earned it.

She Walks In Front

When I was pregnant with my first child, and still young enough to be overly invested in my own cleverness and originality, I used to tell people openly that I hoped it would be a boy. “Of course,” I would say. “I will love whoever this is and be grateful either way, but you asked what I’m wishing for, and the honest answer is boy.”

I would give you the even more honest answer if you pressed, which was that I was terrified to have a girl. I have one brother and no sisters, and I always felt more comfortable around boys than girls. If I had a daughter, she might want girly things like the dreaded pink clothing or dance classes attended by other little girls and their <gulp> dance moms. And then there’d be hairstyles, my Lord, the hairstyles, which I was incapable of creating and not inclined to censure. Then she’d grow up and I’d have to teach her all the things, and frankly, I’m not that good at all the things. And what if her friends were petty and horrible? Of course they’d be petty and horrible. I’d be lucky if they weren’t vapid and giggly. I really didn’t think I was up for giggly. And most likely we’d have other kids someday, and then she’d be a a big sister. I’d never had a big sister, but what I’d seen didn’t impress me.

On the day of our first ultrasound, I was nervous. I really wanted to know who this little person was, and I suddenly realized that while I’d been half joking about the gender thing, I actually cared. This day was the defining moment, the big reveal.

Except that it wasn’t. The baby was strategically positioned to hide anything revealing, and the tech told us we’d have to wait another month. Then right at the end, he tilted his head and pointed at the screen. “It’s not clear at all,” he said in Spanish, “but from what I can see, if I had to guess, I would say that it’s a girl. Don’t hold me to that, but that’s what it seems like. But, you know, only paint one wall pink, just in case.”

My heart sank. A girl. Most likely a girl.

True story? That night I cried a little. It was partially from my fear of being a girl mom but mostly, if I was really honest, it was because I’d had a neat little picture in my head of our family (first boy, then girl, then another boy for good measure) and this turned my picture on its head.

I admitted this truth to Nate, and he was sweet and didn’t make me feel guilty for it. He did laugh, though, when I sat up and said, “Screw one pink wall. Boy or girl, this baby is having green walls.”

She had green walls. And stars on her ceiling. And lots of pink clothes. And a little black onesie with baby jeans that made her look like a tiny hipster. And there were no dance classes but the hair struggle was real.

When she was two months old, I was invited to be the visiting missionary at a ladies’ prayer circle. I took my daughter with me. I sat on an overstuffed sofa in a sweet grandmother’s living room and drank tea with a bunch of women in flowery dresses. I couldn’t have been more uncomfortable, except maybe if one them had accidentally seen my tattoo. When the baby fussed, I took her out of her car seat and held her close, and realized that I was once again by myself in a crowd of strange ladies, but I wasn’t alone anymore. “It’s you and me, little girl,” I thought. “We can make it through this.”

We did. We have. And then some. Because, spoiler alert, I had two daughters in the end, and the girl power in our house is set to high.

This fall, our family went for a walk in the woods as we often do. I found myself trailing behind while Nate and Ellie set a slightly faster pace, as they often do. There was this one moment when I looked up and saw her ahead of me and thought how there was nothing more perfect and right than walking behind her. There is something uniquely awesome about having girls in my life who just…get it. I could walk behind that girl forever, watching her move confidently forward into the world.

I won’t lie. There have been a lot of giggles and a lot of tears. There have been a few complicated braids and more nail polish than I ever hoped to see. But I’m eternally grateful that I didn’t get to plan my own life. Because those are the smallest, most insignificant parts of having daughters, these firebrands who fascinate and inspire me. These girls who are my people in any crowd of strangers.