Oddness-y

Last year (as those of you who have been tolerating me for an extended period of time may recall) I felt that my annual holiday letter needed a fresh, untrammeled narrative form.  After giving the issue some deep literary thought, I penned the resultant work as a “Choose Your Own Adventure”. 

Having tapped that genre for all it was worth (about $1.49), this year I decided to switch things up again.  Thus, for 2013 In Review, we’re going with “epic poem”.

Hey!  Wait!  Where are you going? 

According to Wikipedia, the ten main characteristics of an epic are as follows:

1.       Begins in medias res.

2.       Features a vast setting, covering many nations, the world, or the universe. (Does a single passing reference to the Hubble Space Telescope count?).

3.       Begins with an invocation to a muse.

4.       Begins with a statement of the theme.

5.       Includes the use of epithets (e.g.“Foul Incubus”, “Lord of Javascript”, “He of the Monstrous Nether Regions”, etc.).

6.       Contains long lists, called an epic catalogue.

7.       Features long and formal speeches (not included in the CliffsNotes).

8.       Shows divine intervention in human affairs. (Blame Apollo; it’s totally his fault).

9.       Features heroes that embody the values of the civilization. (Would that be rampant consumerism, or adulation of vacuous celebrities?).

10.   Often features the tragic hero's descent into the underworld or hell.

Since all these requirements overlap nicely with what one ought to find in a holiday letter – I already get a lot of epic catalogues in the mail at this time of year -- I felt I was on the right track. However, my Muse was lacking.  Which classic epics could I call upon for inspiration? 

The Odyssey has some good elements to work with, offering verisimilitude in the form of an impossibly ancient dog – but the older of our own canines is characterized more by crotchetiness than enduring faithfulness.  And, while I undoubtedly feel some affinity for Polyphemus based on our shared monocularity, he’s not precisely the main character in Homer’s classic.  In fact, he comes off rather badly, what with his rude habit of eating his guests and all. 

What about the tale of Gilgamesh (king of Uruk) and his good buddy Enkidu (a wild man created by the gods to be Gilgamesh’s peer, and to distract him from oppressing the people of Uruk)?  That one works really well, inasmuch as my life is indeed a thinly veiled gay male love story full of odd power dynamics and endless drama.  (Lemme tell you, my “friend” and I often “journey to the Cedar Mountain” to “defeat Humbaba, its monstrous guardian.”)  In truth, the Epic of Gilgamesh is an awesome tale, and I do relate to all the perilous journeys and bonds of love and whatnot, but the ending is just too heart-breakingly Brokeback Mountain for me to embrace it entirely.

The Faerie Queen?  Oh., good lord, no.  And while Beowulf offers some gripping stanzas (“Hrothgar Moralizes”: XXVI; “Reminiscences (continued)”: XXXV), I find that once I’ve killed a terrible beast feared throughout the land, I hardly ever want to have to go back after all the feasting and kill its mother.

Ultimately, I realized I would have to, as they say, “draw upon a broad range of literary references”.  As for the iambic pentameter and ABAB rhyme scheme, those are most likely merely a side-effect of translation of my life from the original Mesopotamian. 

Ready?  Ready.

In which we find the Protagonist in media res in the underworld, which, let’s face it, is more of a Zamhareer, really, because it’s just stupidly dark and cold.

O Muse -- where are you, gods-forsaken Sun?

Help craft this tale of travels far and near,

Of petty strife, and battles lost and won,

And random crap that happened this past year.

For hark!  Protag’nist’s foot with beads impaled,

She finds no solace in the handiwork

Of two Young Acolytes. Her sanity assailed,

Her epic quest is Not To Be A Jerk.

In which Our Heroes travel to a land of mighty chasms

Twelve full-moons past, cold winter gripped their hearts

When forth Protag’nist went with Kinfolk Band,

And thus this tale of epic rambling starts

With journey to a fabled Canyon (Grand).

Chance strangers met did oftimes deem them fools

For braving precipice and frosty tent.

Small Hikers, fearless, tamed Voracious Mules

By sharing Tasty Grass where’er they went.

In which the Protagonist’s spouse does a prodigiously magnificent amount of snow biking while the Protagonist limits herself to only a slightly unreasonable amount

When icy dark portended slothful doom

Protag’nist’s Stalwart Comrade groomed his steed

By dripping chain-oil in the living-room

(The grease goes nicely with those star-shaped beads…)

He harkened hence, with Gu and Gummi Worms;

“Iditarod” the trail was named, by Lords of Ice.

Protag’nist praised his deeds, yet still confirms:

For her, a hundred-miler will suffice.

In which the Young Acolytes try to spell “elephant”, earn actual money, and produce lumpy clay objects

With fearlessness of duct tape, wood, and yarn

The Daughters of the Clan did hone their minds

Reading heavy tomes (“Pa built a barn!”)

And crafting Things of many useless kinds.

O Second Grade!  O wondrous new hijinks!

Your fourteen questions asked all in a row,

Your knock-knock jokes too subtle for a Sphinx,

And troweling sled-dog poop to make some dough.

In which Our Heroes travel to a land of wind, ice, geysers, and adorable equines

Forth once more, as fickle summer waned,

Protag’nist went with all her tribe, plus one --

The Fearsome Tom -- to country where it rained

And blew, but yet was Mighty Fun.

By bicycle the Ped’ling Pentad went

From geyser’s plume to coast to water chute.

Yea! Iceland could not slay the Mighty Tent!

And lo! The ponies were so very cute!

In which the Protagonist produces epic catalogues and formal speeches -- but probably not enough

Though online comments presaged flying fruit,

Protag’nist gave her talks on climate change,

And found the crowds remarkably astute.

The weather -- not the public -- was deranged.

Reports were written (Hark!  The passive tense!)

For use as ballast, steps, or booster seats.

Protag’nist strove to muster common sense,

Yet failed in sundry academic feats.

In which Our Heroes travel to many other lands replete with mud, snow, hot water, and eight-headed monsters

Their journeys not complete, Young Acolytes

Soon found among their youthful hardy peers

Brave Warrior Kids possessing of a might

Beyond the reach of stature or of years.

Thus reinforced, the Robust Group assailed

Divers trails and hot springs most sublime,

Despite the Fearsome Mud such quests entailed.

So many Acolytes, so little time.

In which the Fair Reader returns to the underworld, where several deities may be necessary to vanquish the cold and darkness and general squabbling

At last, bone-weary, so Protag’nist fell

Through storm of paper-snowflake snipped-up chaff

To sniping, griping, tinsel-scattered hell.

The Sirens coaxed, “Eat gingerbread, and laugh.”

O Sun -- Apollo, Helios, Sol, or Ra --

Invoke yourself with this full-spectrum light!

Drive back the Scrooge-like Grinchiness of “Bah,”

And let us hear the sleighbells in the night!

“Minerva raised her voice aloud, and made everyone pause… 'Cease this dreadful war, and settle the matter at once without further bloodshed.’  …Then Minerva assumed the form and voice of Mentor, and presently made a covenant of peace between the two contending parties”

–The Oddyssey, Book XXIV (Homer, 800BCE)

Peace on Earth, a happy Saturnalia to all, and to all a good night.

[You’ll be glad to know that my goal for 2014 is to live the entire year in the form of a single haiku.]

Take my kids, for example...

She is a conscientious student and always strives to do her best.  She is a pleasure to have in class.

 “Do I haaaaaaave to?”

You’re sure you didn’t mix up the report cards, Mrs. Impossibly Patient First Grade Teacher?  Because… I don’t think you know the child that I know. 

Do you have to?  Um, yeah, kid.  You. Have. To.  Despite all indications that the vast magnitude of my cruelty is overwhelming your neural circuits, I’m not, in fact, asking you to read Plato in the original Greek or walk across a wasteland of smoldering lava in your Dora the Explorer socks.   I’m asking you to amble over to the cutlery drawer and take out some spoons.  You know, those things that make it possible to eat pudding without getting it on your ears?  Yeah.  I’d like a few of those.  On the table.  And really, I’d like this to happen without any whining.

“But Mamaaaaa…”

There are times when parenting feels rewarding: truly, deeply, I-am-part-of-the-future awesome.  For example, a few days ago, one of my kids wanted to know the length of the human genome.  We Googled it together, and discovered that there are TWO METERS of DNA in every human cell, and that all the tiny encoded chains of nucleic acids in your body would reach to Pluto and back.  Yeah, how cool is that? 

There are times when parenting feels peanut-buttery: that is, run-of-the-mill, with occasionally chunky niblets of humor value to keep me going – like reading aloud all six novels in a series about Humphrey the classroom hamster, whom, despite myself, I’m kind of starting to bond with. 

And there are times when I wish that the notion of child-theft-by-gypsies were not a myth (and a racial slur to boot).  Or maybe not theft, per se, but child trading.  Because I’m pretty sure those gypsy (sorry, Romani) kids would be way more tractable than my own – and not have the same three knock-knock jokes imprinted on a mental Mobius strip.

At those times, of course, I am consumed by guilt.  Because Nice Parents do not have such thoughts.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my children.  I adore them; I dote on them; I would take on an angry bear on their behalf, armed only with my bitten-down fingernails and a pocketful of hair-snaggled rubber bands and used Kleenex.  I love my children… and yet I’ve often wondered why it is that despite the fact that I am viewing them through the lens of my positively-biased genetically-related bonded-since-infancy gaze, they nonetheless sometimes appear to be nightmarish little demons.  Conversely, I’ve wondered why other adults – who are under no particular imperative to love, like, or even tolerate my kids – often seem to see them as relatively functional small human beings.

I was proud of her courage to speak in front of her peers… Great job!

Ah.  So… the other twin doesn’t talk much at school, huh?  Uh-huh.  Yup.  THAT MUST BE BECAUSE SHE’S SAVING IT ALL UP.

“But I don’t want to go to bed!  I’m not tired!  Wait, I need to tell you about my book… so in the first part….

“… and then after they go into the cave, then their flashlights run out of batteries…

“…and they have these walkie-talkies… wait, Mom, I need to tell you about the walkie-talkies…

“…and then the one girl with the pony…

“…so then after they switched the batteries…

“… and then there’s another girl, and she’s in the cave too… Mom, wait, I’m not done yet!  Wait, listen!”

I meant to listen.  Really, I did. I mean, who could resist a twenty-minute oral book report on a novel entitled “Pony Pals”?  But my brain had melted fifteen minutes previously, and leaked out my ears.  Maybe it puddled somewhere in my stained hoodie, I’m not sure.  It was really too bad, because I’d been hoping to use it to help me parse the intricacies of the crisis in Syria, or to write a couple of scientific journal articles, or at the very least to make a marginally erudite pun on Facebook.

Facebook.  Facebook is where my parental guilt goes to metastasize.  On Facebook, given my place in the over-educated-middle-aged-people demographic, many of my friends went through the Kindergarten Rite of Passage with the baby of the family this fall.  The last one! On Facebook, there were many bittersweet parental sighs.  But… when my first one and my last one set off for their first day at University Park Elementary School two years ago, I did not weep; I exhaled.  And then I zoomed off to work, my spirits and my bike both free-wheeling.  Because someone else was taking care of my kids. 

Yeah, I know.  Not nice.  Wasn’t I supposed to be mourning the end of their babyhood?  Regretting the loss of some portion of my time with them, and some portion of my influence over their little lives?  Wasn’t I supposed to be concerned about the not-me influences they would be prey to in a big, bad world full of Other People? 

 “Mama, it’s not faaaaair!” 

At times like these, the Other People can have my kids.  On any given day, there are at least seventeen things that are “not fair”.  I’ve leveled with the kids: yup, life isn’t fair.  I’ve pointed out to them that most of the time, the not-fairness of the world has been working heavily in their favor.  This is commonly known as the “You should be grateful, because some kid is starving in a country you’ve never heard of” strategy.  It doesn’t work.  Or, maybe it only works on other people’s children, who invariably seem to remember, when in my care, to say “please” and “thank you” and “I had a very nice time” and even “Wow, you’re so cool”.  You think I’m making this up?  No, really, someone else’s offspring thinks I’m, like, awesome.  My own?  Not so much.

“You gave her the bigger piece!”

The thing is, I LIKE kids.  I always have.  I revel in their imaginative energy (“I will give you a ticket to our kingdom.  But you have to paint yourself with cranberries.”)  I am amused by their disarming honesty (“You have a really big nose, Nancy!”) I appreciate their peculiarly abstract view of the word, as evidenced by the poetry-magnet ode that appeared on the fridge (“He is warm butter.  He is a chocolate sandwich.  He is gorgeous.”)  Why, given that I genuinely like hanging out with kids, am I sometimes driven ape-feces loony by my own? 

Nice Parents definitely do not offer to sell, barter, or trade their children. 

Or… do they?  Maybe I’ve just been focusing on the positive.  I have a problem with that – always seeing the stupid glass as half-full, even when someone has clearing been filching my lemonade. 

Ok, I told myself.  Let’s go back and dig deeper.

Jackpot. 

In the past few weeks alone, two different friends of mine publically confessed (with photographic evidence) that their toddlers had decided to “decorate” the family car by creatively engraving its exterior with a rock.   One mom shared deadpan and marvelously unsympathetic reports on just how often her three sons were vomiting.  Another parent offered dark humor regarding little-kid nightmares and being woken from well-deserved slumber for the eleventeenth time.  And one, a peculiarly honest fellow, suggested that he would like to divorce his ten-year-old. 

I commiserated with a coworker whose two-year-old will not put on his snow boots for her, although the same task goes over just fine at daycare.  Why, she sighed, were all his meltdowns directed at her?  Another office-mate chimed in from behind the next segment of carpeted wall: “It doesn’t get any better as they get older!”  She just sent a kid off to college.  “It just shows they’re normal.”

Normal?  Someone out there has kids who are “normal”?  Then again… if every kid is abnormal in a different way, perhaps it makes sense that dealing with someone else’s normally-abnormal child feels like a gulp of fresh oxygen after being locked in a gym locker room for a week.

A couple of weeks ago, our family headed out on a three-day 20-mile hiking excursion that included nine adults and six (six!) kids between the ages of 6 and 10.  Although I wouldn’t bet my life on it, I’m pretty sure all fifteen of us managed to have a (mostly) good time, despite mud, hills, the ultimate inevitability of bedtime, and the innate unfairness of being between the ages of 6 and 10.  And for me, one of the greatest things about the trip (besides the hot tubs, because I can’t let this go by without mentioning the hot tubs) was the constant and sometimes hilarious shell-game of siblings and parents. 

For example, at one point, a kid from family A and a kid from family B were grooving together in the somewhat distant charge of the parents from family C, who had left their teenager at home in the nominal care of family D.  An extra adult with no kids of her own was happily hiking with the other kids from families A and B, who were getting along marvelously with one another, despite wanting to have nothing to do with their awful, terrible, respective siblings.  Meanwhile I hiked with Child E, who even ten miles into a long day was unfailingly charming.  Child F was the only one hiking with a parent.  By mile nine, she was moaning piteously.  However, she was sweet as a snickerdoodle a very short while later, splashing in a hot tub with me -- because she is normal.

Yes, it seems that this is precisely correct.  So says the Official Psychology Literature, and so says the common wisdom, and so says my cubicle-neighbor.  Kids do their very best whining, sniveling, and sociopath-impersonations for their parents – and only for their parents.  The teacher who thinks they are angels is not lying.  Neither is the neighbor, the friend, the anybody-but-you person who gets all the pleases and thank-yous and holding-together-of-emotions.  The tedious complaints?  The screaming, door-slamming awfulness?  Those are just for you.  Why?  Well, because your little Beelzebub knows you love him unconditionally.  Even when he’s lying on the floor shrieking.

Part of me wants to greet this harsh reality with a wail of my own:  “That’s not faaaaaair!”  But… in my heart I know it is fair.  For one thing, it’s payback for what I probably did to Dear Old Mom and Dad three decades or more ago.  But I also realize now that it’s more than fair – it’s actually good.  There’s a silver lining somewhere in the cumulonimbus of parental despair.  Because, ok, you can’t actually sell your kids, but occasional trading isn’t just a-ok, it’s necessary.  Kids have something to learn from Other Grownups.  And grownups have something to learn from Other Kids.  Somewhere out there is an adult with new ideas, a novel perspective, and some thoroughly exciting snacks to share.  Somewhere out there is a grownup who hasn’t been worn down by this particular child’s set of idiosyncrasies.  Somewhere out there is a grownup who has not yet heard those three knock-knock jokes.

A couple of days after the trip, Jay and I received a kind-hearted and eloquent thank-you message from the parents of family F:  Thanks… for giving a parenting break: most times, [Child F] did not even want us around, and we indulged in that freedom for a bit.

Oh, you are very welcome, my good friends.  I’m always happy to hang out with your imaginative, energetic, sharp-witted kid – on a hike, on a bike, in a show, on the go… (but keep the green eggs and ham out of the hot tub, okay?)  Besides, you are among the ranks of those who have spent their oh-so-valuable time with our own children.  To you – and to all who have talked to them, babysat them, taught them, or even biked around Iceland with them – thank you.

Today, by some peculiar serendipity related to half-written blog-posts, another friend made this comment on Facebook, directed at family A:  You should follow Nancy's advice precisely… Just keep her away from your girls or they, like ours, will suddenly find themselves happily involved in Fairbanks Shakespeare Theater productions for the next decade or two!

You hear that?  Lend me your kids, and I will corrupt them with four-hundred-year-old plays full of bloodshed and sexual innuendos!  Meanwhile, I’ll send you the twins.  I hear that one of them “speaks up” and that the other “always strives to do her best” so I’ll bet they’ll make a really good showing when they tell you those knock-knock jokes.