didaink

Perfectionists Need Not Apply

 

Tickle Maria

My “Tickle Maria” turns 17 today, and exactly 17 years and 6 months ago, I began my writing life, thanks to her, expressing myself in ways I’d never done before. I’d been given this incredible chance at parenting at age 39, after my body finally agreed to do the job. I’d also been given a chance to document the experience, and I began to admit all of the things I didn’t know, I didn’t know, and openly shared my "goofs and gambols" with others. It was exciting. It was terrifying. It was unimaginably gratifying.

Observing this tiny Tickle’s perspective through her true-blue eyes, her very first year on the planet, and watching her discover herself and the big, wide world around her, was an experience like no other for my (then) 40-year-old self, a woman who didn't think she was good enough to be a parent. Writing helped me to cope with the new position, a job I felt I was totally under qualified for.

But I loved to work and embraced the working world at 14. I had a plethora of jobs from 14 until 39 to support my “music career” (a job that didn't cover my rent or even the cost of some of the clothes I wore to the gig), but I earned my own keep and tried to make my mark on that big, wide world. Then motherhood catapulted me into a role that magnified a new reality and realization: no matter what you thought those qualifications were or weren’t for the gig, you will never be fully “qualified” nor will you ever stop learning on the job. If only its description read like this 25 years ago when I first contemplated applying for it:

PARENTHOOD

Now Available

Hours:

24 per day, every day (and twice on Sundays)

Pay:

Hugs + Kisses (when earned)

 Benefits:

Lifetime

(COBRA may extend into the afterlife)

Applicant Must Have:

Self-awareness

Flexibility

Humility

A strong back and backbone

Ability to learn on-the-go

Cooking skills a plus!

* Perfectionists Need Not Apply *

 

I just hope that when I'm up for my “review” this year, I am half the person my Tickle is on her 17^th birthday.

The Day After: What Mothering Myself Post 9/11 Taught Me

It's the day after 9/11, the buzzing of my alarm at 6:35am both sickening and soothing to my ears. A new day arrived, but the pounding of my heart nails me to the bed frame. I can only move my eyes, my body too defeated and disgusted by its own inconsequential problems to move. I have an appointment with my doctor at 9am to discuss my test results.

Eighteen years ago, I was almost thirty-seven and dreaming of becoming a mother, even if my ovaries hadn’t given their approval. Then, less than twenty-four hours later, I’d aged a hundred years, or so it seemed, and I was no longer convinced that I wanted to be pregnant.

How could you bring another innocent child into this vicious world? I asked myself on 9/11, watching the horrors play out across the television screen.

And how blinded had I become to the unspeakable violence that existed in the world, too busy sloshing around in my own infertility bubble to look up and see what was happening anywhere else. Maybe you could adopt, I said to myself so often. There are so many foster children in need of dedicated parents. You could be one of them. Maybe then I could buy the rocking chair I'd come to admire each day I passed it in the storefront window near my office.

Like I always did when I drank my coffee before work, I turned the TV on around 6:50am to watch the news. The South Tower was on fire, then I watched in disbelief as another plane plunged into the second tower while I sipped from my coffee cup. That TV stayed on until my husband finally turned it off somewhere around 1am San Francisco time. But throughout the wee hours of the night, I could still hear their cries in my dreams: the parents, brothers, sisters, and then the unheard children I'd imagined, stunned and shocked into silence from the news that their father or mother was inside the Twin Towers when they collapsed.

Like everyone, everywhere, I couldn't stop thinking about the brutally of it all -- the pain those families and children were suffering, and would continue to suffer as the knife of reality lodged itself deeper into their hearts.

My mind swirled with haunting images and cries of real and imagined grief, as I heard the alarm clock buzzing on 9/12. The idea of adoption still floating like an angel above my head, I managed to lift my arm and hit the “snooze” button every five minutes. At least one of my arms appeared to be functioning, but there was no snoozing, just a repetitive motion that was getting me nowhere fast. I could see a sliver of light through the bedroom curtains which revealed the sky might be blue. The sun actually rose again, which was surreal in and of itself. 9/12 began to look like the exact replica of the morning before it, yet it felt nothing like the morning before it. It was the anti-Christ of the morning before it. If 9/11 was a living nightmare, then 9/12 was surely hell personified.

I kept staring at the digital numbers on the clock, the even numbers soothing me, the odd ones egging me on to make a decision. Would I make it to my doctor's appointment on time? Would my eyes be half closed on the way there? I knew I wasn't alone in the decisions I faced, even though my husband had left for his office before my alarm went off. I wondered if he'd gotten any real sleep. Had anyone slept the night of 9/11? Including George W. Bush? This might've been what worried me the most -- a president and an administration running the country on raging insomnia, an endless supply of coffee and revenge at their fingertips.

I wanted to call my mother for comfort and ask her what I should do, but I didn't want to wake her so early. Do I drive into work and carry on with business-as-usual? Is that what Motorola and corporate America expects of me? And if I say no, and the rest of the team says no, then what? We lose our jobs? I wanted to tell my boss, None of this matters! I don't care anymore about corporate earnings, market-share, and the latest, greatest consumer gizmo. Thousands of people were obliterated in front of our eyes on a sunny Tuesday morning.

I quit! I wanted to say. I'm going to do something with my life that matters, but I was afraid to lose my income and you need the money, I convinced myself. Adoption costs money, and your future adopted child needs stability.

I smashed the alarm clock buzzer down one last time, punched the mattress afterwards, and made my way to the bathroom. I splashed water into my face and eyes and realized I could call in sick. Isn't that the truth? I asked myself.

Wandering around in a daze, I found myself in the living room again, the TV remote in my hand, the news reporters talking about the numbers of fatalities. I began to shake --my stomach, my head-- I couldn't calm down, the numbers were too much for my body. I could no longer make the phone calls I needed to make to my doctor, my boss, to the staff. The only thing my body could do was hum, and I recognized the melody from a lullaby I'd written years earlier for a friend's baby, though I never met him. Then I collapsed on the floor and began to rock myself back and forth. I could almost see myself from above and knew it didn't look good -- a woman who wants to be a mother rocking herself on the floor, singing a lullaby for a baby she'd never even met. That's something a "real" mother would do when her child is inconsolable. Now I was inconsolable. But I kept telling myself again and again how much the world needs love and comfort, and I kept rocking and singing.

Though I knew I was mothering myself, though some call it self-care, soothing myself helped me to grab hold of the oars in my own lifeboat. My body and mind began to respond as I took hold, and I was finally able to get myself off the floor. My heart and soul were still confused, still frail and partly cracked, but at least they seemed to understand one another, and they began to row in sync. They consulted with my legs and hands, and I was able to get up, walk to the kitchen and dial my doctor's number to say I'd be late, but I would be there. Later that morning, on September 12, my doctor gave me the news that my ovaries were still functioning. Less than two years later, my daughter arrived. Three years after that, my son was born. I still think about adoption, lament over it actually. And I'll never forget the thousands of children who lost their parents on 9/11 -- and when those thoughts are too heavy for my heart to hold, I sit down in our rocking chair and sing myself a lullaby. I just wish it were enough.

 

If the Kardashians Can, Why Can't the GOP?

I admit it, I've never kept up with the Kardashians. My teenage daughter hasn't either, but she does admire Kourtney Kardashian for keeping up with reality and bringing her younger sister back down to it with her iconic "Kim, there’s people that are dying," after Kim cried about losing her $75,000 diamond earring in the ocean in 2011. So, when I asked my daughter what she was going to draw or write on her sign for the March for Our Lives in D.C., she didn’t hesitate. She knew exactly what she wanted to do.

 

The image below is from Kourtney Kardashian's Instagram "Story" on March 24. Countless teenagers took a picture of my daughter's sign and the sign took on a life of its own, getting thousands of likes on Instagram and Snapchat, and Kourtney's attention.

 

Because I’m in my 50s and had never seen the meme on social media, I didn’t fully get it. Then, as I watched my teenager bring the image to life with a black Sharpie in our D.C. hotel room before the march, it hit me. Yes, it was poignant, and maybe even funny, to replace “diamond earring” with “Second Amendment rights,” but what hit me the hardest was that my 9th grader got the point immediately while my generation is still trying to wrap our heads around it.

 

In the early ‘80s, when I was in high school, no parent or child had ever heard of a “school mass shooting.” That changed in 1989 after the first mass shooting at Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, California thanks to the popularity of assault rifles like the AR-15, but mostly due to an antiquated Second Amendment and lackadaisical gun laws that allowed U.S. consumers to accumulate millions and millions of assault rifles for entertainment and “sport” in the mid ’80s, ‘90s and beyond.

 

Then in 2016, after the mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Florida, Mother Jones provided a clear, comprehensive time-line on America’s gun-buying habits spanning four decades. Yet, the GOP did nothing to change its views on the Second Amendment or gun laws. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/06/gun-industry-nra-assault-weapon-timeline/

 

When will this change? When money is no longer part of the equation? When politicians' pockets are no longer lined by the NRA and gun manufacturers' profits?

 

Because we know the numbers -- 96 people die from gun violence every day. That amounts to over 35,000 people killed by guns every year.

 

http://www.bradycampaign.org/key-gun-violence-statistics

 

And last month, Newsweek published that the number of children killed by guns since the Sandy Hook massacre outnumber the amount of soldiers killed since 9/11:  7,000 children killed by guns in five years.

 

Still, the GOP doesn't care enough about children to actually do something to stop this preventable disease. More children have been killed by guns since Sandy Hook than U.S. soldiers in combat since 9/11

 

More children have been killed by guns since Sandy Hook than U.S. soldiers ... The number of children killed by gunfire in the United States since the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Element...

 

If Second Amendment rights and America’s passion for guns actually reduced the number of deaths from gun violence, my teenager wouldn’t be marching on Capitol Hill with hundreds of thousands of her peers pleading for gun reform. Our youth wouldn’t be dying in their classrooms, their churches and on the streets, and survivors wouldn’t be shouting, “Enough is enough!” and “Never again!” -- and above all else, the courageous youth that represent poor black and brown people and neighborhoods, who've known and seen gun violence their whole lives, wouldn’t need to remind politicians that poverty isn’t a crime, that bullets don’t discriminate and guns don’t vote, people do.

 

The youth standing up against gun violence are also soon-to-be registered voters. America is now awakening to new gatekeepers who will no longer tolerate those in power who benefit from the gun lobby, and they will vote out lawmakers who continue to do nothing.

 

Even privileged Kim Kardashian is ‘woke’ now, as my teenager would say. She was at the March in D.C. with her family, standing with the rest of us, her life forever changed by men with guns who held her captive. She has evolved as a woman and mother, and like me, I imagine she’s worried sick for her children’s future. She knows all too well that no diamond is worth a life, and no amount of money will ever stop a bullet from an AR-15.

 

Thankfully, Kim and her sisters have changed since 2011. If only the elephant in the room, the GOP, would do the same.

 

Saving Brock Allen Turner: what a mother says with her silence

 

“As a mother and friend, I would do anything to help my child and save him,” wrote Joni Magnus-Ramsey, a close family friend of Brock Turner’s parents on a now defunct financial support page on Facebook.

I am a mother and friend, but would I do anything to save my son after he sexually assaulted a woman? This is the question I believe all mothers need to ask themselves, and is ‘saving’ your child helping them or additionally hurting them and the person they’ve victimized?

I cannot begin to imagine how Emily Doe and her parents felt when they heard Judge Persky’s statement about the “severe” impact that prison would have on Brock after being convicted of sexual assault with intent to commit rape. The judge's "I don’t think he’s a danger to anyone" had to be a knife through their hearts. What about being a danger to Emily Doe the night he raped her? Did the judge not factor that in?

How does a young woman who was sexually penetrated and left behind a dumpster live with that? How will she and young women everywhere start to believe that college campuses are safe places for them if judges are more concerned for the rapist than the victim?

Given Judge Persky’s prison sentence for Brock Turner, why would any victim of rape ever come forward again at Stanford University or any other college campus when their voices and even eyewitness accounts are dismissed so carelessly, and the rapist receives the equivalent of a summer camp stay in a county jail?

But I digress -- I’m still waiting for Brock Turner’s mother to speak up about what she will personally do to make sure that campus sexual assault and rape does not happen to another Emily Doe, who was on the night of her rape the same age as Brock's older sister.

If Carleen Turner is like her husband or their friend, she may be doing anything to save her son, covering for him because it’s too difficult to face the truth about your own son’s sexual behavior, blaming alcohol for it, blaming fraternity parties, blaming promiscuity, but what is she really saying to young women, including her own daughter, about victims of rape?

Your voice doesn't matter.

Since this story has gone viral, her son’s name and picture are now plastered all over the Internet, her husband’s character statement to the judge forever part of public record and public scrutiny. Just "20 minutes of action," Dan Turner wrote in his request for leniency for his convicted 20-year-old son. The audacity and the infamy of that statement likely stabs at every mother's heart, Brock's mother, Carleen, at the top of the list. But what can she do about it now? How could she use her son's infamy to help Emily Doe and all women like her? What would I do if I were standing in Carleen Turner's horribly squeaky shoes?

Would I talk to high school and college students about the percentages of rape on campus and off campus? Would I tell them that 23% of female students are sexually assaulted on campuses every year, yet those numbers are drastically low according to two Mother Jones’ articles stating that sexual assault on or near college campuses have reached epidemic levels and that authorities don't receive accurate information from schools? Would I tell them that it's because victims of sexual assault are too afraid to speak out against their attackers, too busy blaming themselves, so the true number of sexual assaults are vastly under reported? 

Would I meet with rape victims and form an organization that supports their recovery? Would I ask my son to do the same? Would I tell my son that in order to truly help him, first he and I must admit that what he did was not consensual, what he did was rape and that’s why a jury convicted him. But that would require a mother and a son to openly admit that he raped an unconscious woman. It might also entail both a mother and a son giving thanks to the two eye-witnesses that put a stop to the rape. Could Carleen and Dan Turner and their son, Brock, ever find the courage and decency to thank those Swedish Stanford grad students? 

I look over and see both my young son and soon-to-be teenage daughter doing homework, just a few days now left in their school year, and I think about that sentence again and again.

"As a mother and friend, I would do anything to help my child and save him.”

How will I help educate my children about campus sexual assault? What will I do differently starting today? Will I teach my daughter about what it means to give consent? Do I share with her Emily Doe’s statement? Will I talk to her about the statistics? That at least 1 out of every 5 female students will be sexually assaulted or raped at colleges this year, and 1 out of every 3 college seniors will become victims? I say to myself, yes. YES.

And my son, do I keep quiet and let his father handle that conversation when he too turns thirteen? Because it’s uncomfortable for a mother to talk to her son about his sexual urges, right? My answer changes, No. I don’t care how uncomfortable it is! I need to have that conversation with my son in three years with or without my husband. I need to have that talk many, many times throughout puberty and into his young adult life. I need for him to also hear Emily Doe’s voice and what she wrote to her young attacker. I need to tell my son that I will not “save” him should he decide to sexually violate another person, whether he’s been drinking alcohol or not.

A son's actions must speak louder than his words, but his victim’s words must speak louder than everyone else’s.

 

Christophe Bill Henry, RIP (January 5, 2014 - January 6, 2014)

Christophe "Bill" Henry, our snowman with the red Captain Marvel cape, melted last night, pounded by rain and wind in the wee hours. We found his carrot nose floating this morning in a muddy puddle that used to be his life.

Like Christophe William Henry’s nose, I too have floated in puddles like that, face down in muddy transformations, having moved too many times in the last four years ~ the first of which I found myself loading and unloading boxes in three different houses, in three different neighborhoods, in two different states. When you start over that many times, in that many places, there is bound to be a cesspool that forms around you, each place still clinging to you like algae, muddying-up the next “new beginning” that would much prefer to swim in fresh, clean, purified water.

So as I passed Christophe this morning after driving the kids to school, I slowed down and took a picture of him for posterity. I didn’t want to forget him, move on so quickly to the next place I had to be. I wanted to remember how handsome and strong he looked last night, even though the new morning had erased most of him. After all the time we'd spent building him in the late afternoon, we ran back to the warmth of the house in haste, forgetting to take a picture with him. Instead, we patted him on the back, kissed his soft white cheeks and wished him a peaceful night, leaving him all alone near the road. But he was a renegade snowman.. a pioneer, really. He insisted on going without a traditional scarf or a wool hat, preferring instead to brave his new, uncertain conditions on the East Coast with some of the favorite things he’d acquired along the way. I knew exactly how he felt. I just wish I had the guts to do it in a cowboy hat and a cape that said, "Shazam!"

 

A strange, earthly place

11:11am

Place: my unborn baby’s room, rocking in her big yellow chair. 11 years ago.

I look around the room and see all the pretty warm things I have put into place, all the soft colors, pale pinks and yellows, lavenders, sweet-pea greens and fine white organza. The iridescent curtains catch the streaks of gold hitting the windows and I pray that she will like it here on Earth. I want to protect this mystical angel growing inside of me with every ounce of strength that I have left. I want to keep her peaceful and warm in this chair, in this little room, while I try to prepare us to walk through the big world outside in heavy overcoats -- a world that in ten years might be colder than it is today and too painful to explain.

“I will protect you from all that is yet to come. I will teach you well. I will try to not repeat the mistakes I made before I found you, before I rocked us here in this sanctuary,” a promise I make with my hands connected across my enormous belly. 

“We will spend our days and nights rocking in this big yellow chair with the baby white stars and moons. We will sort this world out together. My secret angel, I promise you this.”

I look over to the empty crib and see him sitting all alone on newly laundered lavender sheets. He is the very first present that I brought home to this room and this chair, a placeholder, the size of a newborn. His colors match the gingham crib bumper that I picked for her at first glance. He is patchwork, made from bits of tattered pieces of cotton that gives him the form of a young rabbit, sporting a tummy that might make a lovely pillow for her heart-shaped face. I see this baby girl, whose eyes I can only imagine, hugging him with her buttery arms and lacy fingers. He’ll bring her comfort when she’s alone, I think, when she awakens and there is no one there, when she needs someone or something that is just her size. She will tell him about her world of magnificent shapes and hands and colors. Oh, the stories she will tell him as she giggles and bites and chews on his tender paw.

I wish that I had never given that old safe-haven away, wish I hadn’t replaced it with another. If only I could rock her in it now, eleven years later, glide and roll her worries and the pain away… but at least he is still here, even if he clashes with all the new colors. He is still as patient as he ever was, content to sit alone, awaiting her return to this strange, earthly place.

 

 

You just don't get it, do you lady?

"Juice boxes are for babies," she tells me in a tone that hits me like a Hail Mary throw to home plate.

I'm packing her lunch now in an insulated purse that has "LoL" and "BFF" and peace signs plastered all over it, her old Princess Ariel lunchbox collecting dust in the garage. 

"They are?" I say, "When did this happen?  Because I don't think I got a memo from school about it." 

Is this some kind of Pig Latin trick? She could be speaking in tongues, her tone has been very preachy lately. There is a new sound in her voice and it has me wondering where my little girl went. Is she just hiding or is she gone for good?

"Mom... I'm ten years old now."

She might have well said she is twenty one and moving to Paris. And when did I become Mom? I thought I was still "Mama." But, that was a whole week ago. Apparently, I've been upgraded or downgraded, depending on how you look at it, to "Mom...,"  a title used with a long, condescending pause, punctuated by the "...". It fills the kitchen with the invisible yet necessary, You just don't get it, do you lady?

It's true. I don't. I must have blinked -- while she was dancing in her favorite dress, her crown and wand pinker than pink, spinning and spinning until she almost crashes into the bushes, putting on another impromptu outdoor performance while I make lunch. Her baby brother is seated in his bouncy Megasaucer, clapping his dimpled hands to the best ballet performance he has ever seen, we have ever seen. A juice box nearby in case she's thirsty after the show.  

Now I'm scratching my head, trying to find a canteen? It's a ten year-old's 'must-have' accessory at lunch. Are they hiking to lunch tables in the middle of the Petrified Forest now in fifth grade? It appears my little mermaid grew permanent hiking legs while I was busy trying to figure out how to turn her back into a baby with a juice box.  

I find an aluminum "canteen" which I used yesterday for my coffee, and I fill it with lemonade instead. It could be worse, I think. Just wait until you are filling it with piping hot coffee for her hike to the airport to catch that plane to Paris. I know exactly what she would say if she could hear my thoughts.

"Mom..."

As good a day as any...

"She keeps me warm... she keeps me warm...," the notes grow higher and sweeter.

I grab the carton of eggs from the refrigerator and keep going.  My ten-year old daughter joins me, “I can’t change… even if I tried, even if I wanted to. My love, my love, my love…”

It was one of the best songs we heard this summer. The only one they really listened to on the radio when it played a few times on our long drive home after visiting Washington, DC. They didn’t attempt to sing along and neither did I. We just listened -- a first from two children whose mother was once a singer.

My son walks into the kitchen and starts to hum the melody with us. 

“Love is patient, love is kind,” I sing. “Love is patient, love is kind,” my daughter mimics. “I’m not crying on Sundays. I’m not crying on Sundays… I’m not crying on Sundays,” all three of us singing in unison while I scramble up eggs on Monday, the first day back to school. 

My daughter is in fifth grade now. My son just turned seven, a “second grader” this year. He can read well at seven, and sometimes I’ll see him sounding out the words on the tabloid magazine covers in the checkout line at the grocery store, absorbing all the pictures and the headlines as he chooses a pack of sugar-free gum. Some of the most memorable this summer, “Paris Jackson tries to commit suicide, takes pills and cuts her wrists.” “Glee star, Cory Montieth, found dead in hotel room.”

So, when is the right time to talk to your children about subjects that they are inevitably going to read about or hear at school? And how do you approach a fifth grader about important issues when her little brother has the ears of a fox? Do you separate them? Then, during alone time with the older one, you breach the subject? Or is it better to discuss it as a family? But should you wait until they ask you about it? Is the “best” time to talk to your kids before or after the fact? After they’ve heard the word “faggot” from one of their friends who uses it against another boy who cries easily? Do you wait until after they’ve stood there in silence and uncertainty, not knowing what to do or say next, watching that boy run away and hide in the bathroom until he pretends to be sick so he can go home early and contemplate how he’s going to tie a noose around his neck? Should we sit back and let pop music and celebrity do the job for us? Those last two questions scare me enough to make a decision.

They sit down on their stools at the counter and I realize today is as good a day as any.

“So, do you guys know what the song ‘Same Love’ is about?”

“It’s about someone’s childhood?” my daughter says, the question mark in her voice still hanging in the air.

“Yes, that’s partly true,” I say. “It is about someone’s childhood, and it’s about equal rights. It’s also about discrimination against people for being who they are. It’s about the rights of gay people who want to be married, just like me and Papa.”

I see my son’s eyebrows go up and his eyes are listening now, too. It’s the first time I’ve said the word "gay" out loud to him. My daughter asked me what the word meant in the car the first time she heard “Same Love” on the radio. It was just the two of us that day. So, as I was changing lanes, I told her very matter of factly, “Gay means happy, and it also describes someone who falls in love with a person who is the same gender, like our friends Jon and Mark in New York.”

“Mom… What’s discrimination?” my son asks between bites, and I look him straight in his intelligent brown eyes and begin.

“It means treating someone unfairly, calling them bad names, or taking away their rights just because their skin is a different color or because they love someone who is the same gender, like Jon and Mark.”

My daughter speaks up, “Mom, one time on America’s Got Talent, a man was singing opera and he said say that his family didn’t want anything to do with him anymore because he was gay. The only person that was there to hear him sing at his audition was his boyfriend. He could sing opera really, really good.”

“Figaro, Figaro, Figaro!“ they sing in their best operatic voices, remembering a scene from Mrs. Doubtfire, a movie they just saw for the first time. Their mother had told them it was the other best ‘movie of the summer’ when Despicable Me II was sold out.

My son goes back to eating his breakfast quietly and doesn’t say another word, something that rarely happens unless it involves popcorn or ice cream. I realize that last week’s Time magazine is sitting there on the counter next to my son's plate. The cover has a picture of Martin Luther King Jr. on it and it reads, “Founding Father.” My son saw me read the issue cover to cover last week, and he heard me talk about it afterwards with his dad. He heard me say that it was the 50th anniversary of the "March on Washington." He heard me tell my husband, a Brazilian, that this was the very first peaceful march of its kind during the civil rights movement and that Martin Luther King’s speech changed people’s attitudes about equality for black people, not just in the United States but all over the world… and new laws were passed because of it.

I had shown my son last week the picture in Time of all the people standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial, in the exact same spot where he and his sister stood this summer. I showed him that famous black and white picture and I asked him how many people he thought were there that day, August 28, 1963. He guessed 200,000. “Oh my goodness! You are so close,” I told him, “There were 200,500 people there that day. Just look at all those people. They all stood up and changed the world.”

I look over at the clock and realize it’s almost time to leave for school. On the first day back to school, let’s be early, I say, and they go gather up their backpacks.

“Mom, am I black?” he says.

“Black?” I answer, laughing. “What?”

“Look how dark my skin is now.”

“Honey, that’s because your tan… from being in the sun so much this summer.”

“But, look how dark I am.”

“I know, but that’s because you’re Italian and Brazilian.”

“No I’m not! I’m black, Mom.”

“Okay.”  I decide to let him be who he wants to be today. This is a day for firsts, even for a 'second' grader.

“Hey, you know the rapper that wrote ‘Same Love,’ Macklemore?”

“Yeah,” he says, stopping to look back at me.

“Well, he’s not black and he’s not gay, but he is the first rap musician to stand up for gay people’s rights, and that’s why he wrote a song about it. So, guess what that makes him?”

“Brazilian?” he answers.

“Maybe… ” I say, smiling, trying very hard not to laugh. Then I start again, “It also makes him a hero and a fantastic human being.”

He turns around and puts his new backpack on and runs out to the car to join his big sister. I have no idea if he’s gotten anything I’ve just spent the last fifteen minutes trying to explain. He seems completely oblivious. Or is he? Well, I tell myself, at least he heard about it from me… at least they both heard it from me, first. 

Welcome, Alonzo. So good to see you.

 

My Dearest Alonzo,

My wish came true just after midnight in lucky Room 7 ten years ago today. That's when I saw you "put out your hand,'' exactly as the song you were named after predicted.

And here I sit, a decade later, wanting to tell you all over again about the night you were born.

I don't even think I pushed. It was more of a giggle. The doctor said, "Anyone know a good joke? Because if you laugh you'll get to meet your son -- he is that close!" And then your strong, enormous hand appeared.

Alonzo declared that he must reach to Heaven, for Heaven. The song's prophecy fulfilled, my dreams fulfilled. My son had arrived safely. I was almost forty-three.

When I was scanning through all the lists of popular boys' names while I was pregnant, I found nothing that spoke to me or sang to me the way "Alonzo" did. Your Papa, however, found many Italian names he loved. His favorite, as you know, was "Umberto." But, all I could see was a big, hairy baby wearing a gold medallion around his furry neck and chest. I was convinced you'd come out of the womb saying things like, "How you doin'?" or "Ya got any leftover veal parmigian, Ma?" My sweet, sea prince with feet of sand and clay couldn't possibly be a man named Umberto.

Papa and I put it up for a vote. To every unlucky person we happened upon in those last few months before you arrived, we asked, "Which name do you like better, 'Umberto' or 'Alonzo?'" But if anyone chose Umberto, I'd say, "Yes, but who would you want your son or daughter to fall in love with?" It was clear. Not one person wanted poor Umberto in their family, let alone watch him become their son-in-law.

I couldn't have been more than seventeen the first time I tried to sing your song. Al Jarreau was my vocal hero. I judged the quality of my voice by the songs he wrote and sang, the most incredibly difficult note locked inside the "zoh" of your name. I could never hit the note quite right when I sang along with Al, but I had such fun working on the note and the melody, imagining the story of mysterious "Alonzo" as he emerged from the water the way I saw him in the lyrics. I thought to myself, maybe when I'm a grown woman -- maybe then my voice will be ready, more mature, and I'll finally reach that note. Someday, I'll sing "Alonzo" as good as Al Jarreau and my dream will come true.  

Guess what? I still can't, not by a mile -- but my dream did come true, and now, as a "grown" woman, a mother, I sing and speak your name with more pride and more joy than any other boy's name on the planet.

Welcome, Alonzo. So, good to see you. Welcome, Alonzo. My Señor. My Belinki. My courageous, kind-hearted, hilarious son -- who, at ten years of age, has more integrity in his little finger than I have in my whole hand. You are a precious gift to us and the world, born from the deep blue sea on the 7th day, just after midnight, who will also make, one fine day, one terrific son-in-law. (Eat your heart out, Umberto.)

Finding everything in the art of doing nothing

Today I cancelled everything on my list and delighted in doing almost nothing at all. Alongside my daughter, though, I accomplished all the things that weren't on my list -- the things I hadn't anticipated, the things I forgot and neglected. A Friday spent snuggled up on the couch with my little girl leaning on me under baby soft blankets gave me back the perspective that I lost during the busy, itemized week. 

It took an unforeseen fever, a sore throat, and a missed day of school, but it is a day that I’ll look back on in ten years and miss the living daylights out of -- my daughter and me shuffling around in matching slippers and dirty hair, but cozy and warm in our clean pajamas. 

We wrote and made a donation to our favorite charity and watched the sky flurry. Then, when the sun warmed it up with big patches of blue, we decided on macaroni and cheese for lunch and watched all of our favorite home improvement shows, our bowls balanced and steady in our laps, commenting on curbs that appealed to us. Yet, I felt no need to improve my own "curb" or house today. I cleaned nothing, and the kitchen counter is littered with medicine bottles and dishes, the trash is over-flowing, and the boxes lined up in my office and bedroom still sit alone and cold, awaiting my attention after almost five months in our new house. They can wait some more. My daughter’s temperature is down and she is smiling again. The house and my life is perfect as is today, my to-do list still chuck full of “do's” and not one “done.”

What I did today cannot be quantified with a check mark, but I suspect in ten years it will be all that really mattered. I'll watch my daughter pack up her own boxes soon enough while she makes, then crosses off, her own to-do list in the world. And when I help her unpack those boxes in her first apartment, I'll think back on quality days like this one, mastering the art of doing nothing while accomplishing everything I was supposed to do.

The sun is sliding down the sky and the light is fading, the television still on. My son is back from school and they are cuddled up under the blankets now watching cartoons, his big sister still sneezing and blowing her nose. The cat and dog have joined them, and there's hardly any room for me. I tell them all to scoot over, I want my sweet spot back.

Kleenex tissues and slippers, popcorn kernels and Legos scatter the floor, but I resist and tell myself, don't get up, just sit and let it be. It can all wait. The cleaning lady comes tomorrow... besides, she’s never seen this episode.