I said that I was going to do this, and I totally did:

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… the kids will just end up in the backyard in diapers and bathing suits, faces unwashed, playing with sundry bits of Goodwill-bound baby equipment and also a skateboard.

I am sometimes told that I come off as intimidating. This always surprises me, because I’m pretty convinced that I’m a giant dork, which, I know, is what everyone says, but still: in my case it’s absolutely one hundred and sixty seven percent true. I mean, I have spent pretty much the entirety of my life so far – with the exception of the times that I was doing this stuff – huddled in corners reading books and scribbling stories and that, my friends, is a sure-fire way to grow up with no life skills.

Life skills like, agreeing to do things like ‘ride a zip line’ without knowing what a zip line is (the evidence presents itself about a minute in):
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We knew that Jasper was going to be Jasper for months before he was born. From the moment that we found out that he – hitherto referred to as Sprout – was going to be a he, he was Jasper. Jasper. It was a name for eccentric old English uncles, for suspender-wearing artists pottering about in skylit attics, for crusty old men with beards restoring boats and smoking pipes on pebble-strewn beaches, for boys in knee-britches chasing rabbits in heather fields. Jasper. I loved the name. I knew that it was his name with as much certainty as I’ve ever known anything.

My mother hated it. Oh, honey, she said when I told her. Oh, honey, really?

The lesson, don’t tell anyone what you’re planning on naming your child, hadn’t sunk in from my first pregnancy, when she pulled an oh honey no on Emilia’s original name, Theo. Really, Mom. And it’s not up for discussion.

But what will you call him for short?

– What does that matter, Mom? We’ll call him what we call him. Which, I thought, was a perfectly sensible response. After all, we couldn’t have guessed in advance that we’d refer to Emilia as Budge (my mother calls her Milly, Jasper calls her Maya, but she is and will always be, to her father and me, Budge or Budgie. And no, we do not know why. She just is Budge.) How could we know what we would call Jasper? That would sort itself out after he arrived.

Or not. (continue reading…)

Emilia is not a morning person. I am also not a morning person, but as an adult I recognize that I don’t have any choice in the matter of whether or not I get out of bed, and also I have coffee. Emilia is a child, and she doesn’t drink coffee, so she’s oftentimes – and read ‘oftentimes’ as ‘pretty much almost always’ – cranky in the morning. I would be sympathetic about this – as I said, I’m not a morning person myself, so I get it – except that her way of coping with mornings is to whine like a banshee. A sugar-jacked freak-banshee with no off button.

Mommmmeeee! I want toast! But no butter! NO BUTTER MOMMY! NO BUTTER! And don’t make it warm! It’s TOO WARM MOMMMEEEE! IT’S TOO WARRMMMM! OOOOH! WHY DO I NEVER GET TOAST THE WAY I LIKE IT?!?

She whimpers, heartbroken by the lack of unwarm, unbuttered toast in our house. WHYYYY, MOMMY? WHYYYY? I grip the counter and resist tossing the bread in the sink and/or hollering something about starving children in Africa. (continue reading…)

Ain't no heart tug like a sick baby heart tug.

There comes a moment in every parent’s life when all the contrary forces of the universe collide – you are scheduled to make an appearance on a television program, say, and are rushing for the train to make it to the studio, and you haven’t yet had coffee because getting the kids to school and daycare was a frantic exercise in wrangling rabid badgers and just as you’re about to hop on that train your phone rings and it’s the daycare and your toddler has spiked a scary fever and is very sick and you need to come get him NOW and so you reverse course and hop in a cab and abandon all other obligations in favor of getting to your baby IMMEDIATELY – and, although you experience that collision as stressful, you kind of just roll with it, because you have to, and you know it, and you’re okay with it, and that, you realize, is maybe what being a grown up is all about.

Maybe. Ask me again after I’ve gone another day without coffee.

It’s my birthday. I’m forty years old today. Forty years old. Isn’t this the birthday where I get canes and bifocals as gag gifts and t-shirts that say things like I’m not old, I’m vintage and at least one coffee mug with the words lordy, lordy look who’s forty printed along the side?

I’m not old enough to be forty. Really, I’m not. It’s not that I fear aging or think that anyone over forty is hideously uncool – it’s that I just cannot believe that I am grown-up enough to have the numbers 4 and 0 apply to me in any context other than grade point averages. I’m not a grown-up; I’m a girl in a state of arrested adolescence. Sure, I have kids, but if anything that has only driven the point home more clearly: ain’t nobody here but us childrens. (continue reading…)

I received the following message via Facebook today. I think that it’s pretty awesome. And by awesome, I mean, so profoundly insulting and ignorant that I actually yelled out “REALLY???” and scared some flamingos. (continue reading…)

I suppose that the following conversation with Emilia was inevitable. I just didn’t expect to have it when she was four.

Emilia, having spilled some juice down her shirt: “oh, f***.”

Me: “Emilia Elizabeth Ann! What did you just say?”

Emilia: “I said, oh f***.” (continue reading…)

My mother was and still is an inveterate teller of tall tales, especially in conversation with children. She delights in the wide-eyed fascination of children with all things fantastic, and decided very early in her career as a mother that it was part of her job to keep the eyes of her own children and those of any children who accidentally wandered into range of hearing as wide as possible.

Accordingly, I grew up in a home in which it seemed entirely possible that there were sea creatures living in the plumbing and gnomes hiding in the closets. There were fairies and elves and imps and other magical creatures in the woods behind our house, and they lived in harmony with the animals there – the squirrels and birds that I saw every day, and the raccoons and skunks that I saw less often but knew well from the tracks in our backyard, tracks that my mother was very careful to point out and explain as evidence of the late-night forest creature moondances that occurred a few times each month. I knew that the forest creatures maintained harmony in their community through the frequent town-hall meetings that they held in a mossy stump – I knew this because my mother showed me exactly where they all sat during these meetings and held up various broken twigs and branches (used as benches) as evidence. I knew that I should never, ever pick toadstools, because if I did so I would be destroying the shelter of the littlest creatures of the forest.

I also knew that my sister and I came from a cabbage patch, and that if we unscrewed our bellybuttons, our bums would fall off. When I got old enough to start doubting these tales, I would confront my mother upon each telling: are you telling me a story?

Of course I am, my darling, she’d reply. But that doesn’t mean that I’m not telling you the truth. (continue reading…)