Chameleon

photo credit: Heike Merkel

“I tightened your brakes,” said Adam.

I took me a moment to register that the mechanic was trying to give back my bike, because I was focused on cramming greasy, blackened chunks of grilled cheese sandwich into my mouth, while at the same time crouching down to rummage through my drop-bag for my supply of frosted Pop-Tarts. 

Besides, I was distracted by the lyrics of Karma Chameleon, which had been bopping around my head ever since I’d overheard a few strains at the previous checkpoint.

Every day is like survival… 

That might not be true of every day, but sixty-five miles into a hundred-mile trail-race that included roughly sixteen thousand feet of elevation gain (and loss), it seemed somewhat apropos.

“Umph…”  I swallowed, and tried again.  “Thanks so much!”

Adam was looking at me as if he thought I might injure myself, or the bike, or both – even while not riding it.  “You had nothing left.  The rear brake…”  He shook his head. 

Well…yeah.  I was sure he had no idea how hard I’d been riding those brakes.  Why would he?  Any half-way-competent mountain biker can pick a line through roots, ruts, bogs, puddles, and rocks without getting all white-knuckled about it. 

I, however, was not a half-way-competent mountain biker.

In fact, I wasn’t any sort of mountain biker.  I was a bike-commuter and kid-trailer-hauler.  My trail-riding experience was almost entirely limited to an occasional shortcut through the UAF campus.  I showed up for the Sluicebox 100 with no rear shocks, no padded bike shorts, no Camelbak, and no clue. 

…How to sell a contradiction… Karma karma karma chameleon…

If anything was a contradiction, it was me.  I’d known, when I registered for the race, that I wouldn’t have time to train properly.  So, why on earth had I signed up for this madness?

There was a short answer: because I like crazy challenges, even though I can never adequately prepare for them.  I’ve muddled my way through the Sourdough triathlon, the Susitna 100, and the White Mountains 100 despite a lamentable inability to swim, bike, run, or ski with finesse, grace, or speed. 

There was also, I suspected, a longer answer – but I hadn’t quite worked out yet what it was. All I knew was that I’d started this event with my usual handful of goals: don’t embarrass myself, don’t hurt myself, have some fun, play well with others… and finish the darned thing.

I grabbed another chunk of grilled cheese.  Seeing me do so, Andrea grinned and did the same. 

Andrea was my best friend.  That is to say, she was someone whom I’d never seen or heard of, ten hours previously – until we discovered the happy coincidence of our similar pacing.  Due to her willingness to tolerate my intermittent prattling, Andrea now knew all about my six-year-old twins, my research at UAF, and my pathetic lack of knowledge of the trails that we were navigating.   I, in turn, knew that she was a nurse (handy if I pitched over the handlebars); that she had a twin sister in Boise (I picked her brain for twin-raising wisdom); that the following day was her birthday; and that she’d covered much of the course in the past couple of months, with her boyfriend Ben, as well as Jay and many others – during the Thursday night rides that I’d so completely failed to attend.  On Thursday nights, I either stayed home with the kids, or attended meetings of my writers’ group while Jay did the childcare.  Neither activity did much to improve my mountain biking skills.

The margarine-saturated charred white bread and the cold, congealed cheese were like ambrosia.  I washed the sandwich down with a lemon-lime-mud-flavored swig from one of my water bottles.  Someone immediately rushed to refill it for me. 

Last year, I was that bottle-filling someone.  Last year, the kids and I spent seven hours at this checkpoint – and there wasn’t even a race going on.  The event was merely the test-ride (and test-run) of the course.  Even though the day was bone-chilling, torrential, and involved neck-deep mud, Jay’s excitement was ebullient.  Contagious.  Jealousy-inducing.  

Was that why I’d signed up?  Was I competing with my husband?  No, that was preposterous.  Jay actually knew how to mountain bike, and had done a lot of it in recent weeks, months, and years.  I figured he was probably hours ahead of me.  Almost done.  I thought slightly wistfully of my coworker Amy and her husband Cody, somewhere slightly ahead of me, biking this thing together. 

Meanwhile, I’d already flubbed the first of my goals: don’t embarrass myself.  A mere dozen miles into the race, Andrea and I had gotten lost at the Ester Dome single-track.  The single-track, for heaven’s sake!  One of the few trails I actually had done before – because on our tenth anniversary, Jay and I hired a twelve-year-old to watch the twins.  Nevertheless, Andrea and I clocked an extra thirty or forty minutes, and several unnecessary miles on our quads. There was no reasonable excuse for my idiocy, I thought -- because, yes, my own husband had flagged that part of the course and loaded the GPS for me.

I glanced at Andrea again.  Ben – whose own relay team had fallen through at the last minute – was seeing her off.   Time to get moving. Despite everything, I couldn’t help feeling a surge of optimism.  Ester Dome and Murphy Dome were behind me.  I hadn’t yet developed any bog-related foot ailments, even though my first drop bag – the dry-shoes one – had failed to show up at the far side of the Sheep Creek Slosh-and-Slog.  I was not yet begging anyone for Vaseline, despite the disapproval that Heike (cheerer extraordinaire of Checkpoint 2) had expressed about my unpadded posterior.  I wasn’t yet nauseous, either, notwithstanding my iffy culinary choices.  Thirty-five more miles. How bad could it be?

That is inevitably the sort of question not to ask oneself before spending eternity hauling a bicycle uphill through a mosquito-infested swamp.  How can a swamp also be a mountain?  In Fairbanks, it just can.

Moss and mud sucked at my ankles.  I was a picture of inelegance shoving my bike over logs… over tussocks… across O’Connor Creek… and then across the same creek again. Or was it a different one?  What was this trail, if not fickle, a chameleon?  You come and go… you come and go… You string along… you string along… Despite repeatedly sacrificing speed for sanity by stopping to douse myself – and Andrea – with bug spray, the whining little creatures persisted in feasting on my ankles, my neck, and my shoulders.  Perhaps this was because I sweated off the Picaridin in about ten minutes.  Wasn’t the weather supposed to cool down in the evening? 

What time was it, anyhow?  I looked at my watch.  Two hours had gone by.  It was with something akin to despair that Andrea and I finally made it to the next unmanned water station.  A small sign mutely rebuked us: Mile 72.  We’d covered only seven miles since the Ken Kunkel aid station.

“Is the next section easier?” I asked my savvy guide, trying not to sound as if I were pleading.

Andrea hesitated.  “Well… we ride along the pipeline…”

That sounded promising.  A gravel trail! 

“But…” Andrea hesitated, then broke it to me gently.

Down I went.  Over-using those brakes again.  And then, after staring at the impending Wall of Doom throughout my descent, I met an oh-so-helpful little sign: “Steep grade – use low gear.”  My bike doesn’t have a gear that low.  But, up I went.  Trudging. And sweating.

It didn’t help that through this entire section, we were being followed by a stray dog.  Miles from civilization, she trotted along happily, round little torso swaying, short legs pumping, ears perked.  She looked less athletic than the average guinea pig – but she beat me up the pipeline trail without losing the spring in her step.  I swear she was smiling at me condescendingly at the top.

Either that, or I was just getting a little loopy.  Several miles later, when the gloriously ridable trail that we were enjoying took a sudden left turn into the woods and tilted upwards like a rocket at Cape Canaveral, I found myself more amused than depressed.  “Well, no one rode this,” I said.  Not Jay.  Not even Heather, or Tyson, or Kevin.  So, Pedro Dome was sort of an equalizer, right?  An equalizer with more sweat pouring off my shoulders, and more mosquitoes flocking to my sticky, damp, carbon-dioxide-panting self.  Too bad the other side of the dome was a sadistic rumble-o-rama.  This is not even a trail I told myself.  It’s not!  But Andrea was still refraining from using even a single expletive, so I wobbled onward.

When we finally made it to Skiland, just ten miles from the finish line, it was after eleven and the sky was rosy.  Nothing seemed unexpected any more. When my family doctor plied me with brownies, I said, “Hi Corrine!” and took one, before remembering to ask how her husband Eric was faring. 

He was better now that he’d gotten some extra salt into him, she reported.  Then she sighed, and lamented not having signed up for the event herself.  I nodded.  I knew that feeling – and I’d seen the same look on Ben’s face, at every checkpoint.  “Next year,” I told them both.

Onwards.  Midnight sun.  It was gorgeous, in a losing-all-depth-perception kind of way.  Actually, given my monocularity, I never really have any depth perception -- but things get even more squirrelly in dim, flat light.  Nevertheless, I could still read my watch, and it said twelve.  Thus, I immediately started singing.

No, I didn’t sing Karma Chameleon.  I sang happy birthday to Andrea, of course.  It seemed perfectly normal at the time.

I lost ten minutes in the very last stretch of the race when my rear rack began slamming around like a demented percussionist.  It took me a while to figure out that I’d somehow blown a bolt.  It took me longer to find a single precious zip-tie in my little bag of gear, to thread it through the bolt-holes, and get everything ship-shape again.  But after more than 17 hours, what’s an extra few minutes?  I still managed to finish before one o’clock, with most --  if not all – of my original goals intact.  I was unhurt (assuming bruises and scratches don’t count), I was having fun, and I got pizza and camaraderie at the finish line.  It felt like a party.  It was a party.  Ben was congratulating Andrea.  Corrine was congratulating Eric.  Cody and Amy were congratulating each other. 

Jay had gone home hours ago, of course, to relieve the baby-sitter.  I figured he was already snoring.  I checked his finish time.  He’d done well. 

I gratefully accepted a ride home from Corrine and Eric.  Corrine expected, quite reasonably, that the racers would sack out during the drive.  But instead, we relived every rut and hummock, every joy and misery of this chameleon of a race.  We were much too jazzed for sleep. 

So, it seemed, was Jay.  When I finally got home, much to my surprise I found him still wide awake.  It seemed that he wanted to share all the details with me just as much as I wanted to share them with him.  He didn’t even torment me about my detour on the single-track. 

Every day is like survival…I’m your lover, not your rival…

“I told Jeff that you were doing amazingly well for someone with maybe 30 miles of mountain biking experience,” my husband enthused.  Jeff, a super-human biker himself, was out there supporting his super-human wife Heather.

“What did Jeff say?” I asked, feeling a little foolish, but at the same time silly-happy at the back-handed compliment.

Jay grinned.  “He kind of shrugged, and said, ‘Well, she has more experience now.’”

How to sell a contradiction… Karma karma karma chameleon.

I laughed.  Partly because I was so tired that everything was funny -- but also because I was just plain happy.  Jay was proud of me.  I was proud of him.  We hadn’t raced the same kind of race, but so what?  We were still a team.  Rivalry and solidarity, I realized, are not polar opposites.  In fact, they can be a heady blend.  I finally understood that although I’m never competing against Jay, and rarely competing alongside Jay, I’m definitely competing with Jay.  And if that’s what helps draw me into insane events like the Sluicebox – well, that’s not a bad thing.  Not a bad thing at all.

Next year, I’ll be out there again. I’ll still be hours behind the “real” competitors, including my husband.  I’ll still be riding the brakes.  But – maybe I won’t be riding them quite so hard.

Just Kidding

“Hey, you’re a good climber!”  The speaker, a boy of about eight, is staring at me.  So is a little girl in a polka dotted sundress.  In fact, every kid on the playground is staring at me.  With equal avidity, every adult on the playground is NOT staring at me.  Because, you know, it’s not nice to notice the obvious lunatic.

I’m at the top of the twelve-foot-high poles of the swing set, with two feet hooked around the end supports, my belly stretched along the ridgeline, and one hand firmly anchoring me.  The other hand is untangling the swings. 

Up, over, down.  The chains rattle and crash, and the black rubber seats dance.  With a modicum of triumph, I realize that I can manage the tasks of pole-shimmying and swing-unwrapping just as well as I used to back when the playground aids tooted their whistles at me in consternation, exasperation, and possibly genuine fear. 

However, my exhilaration is tinged with misgivings.  Those other grownups are REALLY studiously ignoring me.  Forty-year-old moms just don’t do this stuff. I’m obviously getting it all wrong.  Again.

This isn’t the first time that I’ve been the parent who just doesn’t know how to act like a parent.  At Chena Lakes, it took me a good hour to realize that I was the only grownup who was leaping in and out of the frigid water right along with the hordes of squealing children with their inflatable orcas and sand-filled bathing suits.  The other mommies were wearing bikinis and gossiping under umbrellas.  The daddies were firing up barbecues, and perhaps wading in knee-deep in order to prevent toddlers from tumbling face-down into the water.  Meanwhile, sand was sticking to my wet hands and knees as I crawled around wielding a shovel.  “Should I dig a little deeper?” I asked.  My co-architects eagerly concurred, and trotted back and forth with buckets to ensure that the moat was properly filled.  They also wanted me to swing across the monkey bars, play tic-tac-toe on the giant playground-sized board, and allow them to bury my legs in sand.  And I did.  I like sandcastles.  I also like mud, and snail ponds, and kites, and snowball fights. Still, I worry about acting so childlike.  It is, as the Victorians would say, unseemly. 

Aren’t parents supposed to act responsible?  Grown up?  Dignified?  Parent-like?  Telling knock-knock jokes probably doesn’t fall into this category.  Neither does ordering my ice cream cone with sprinkles and getting a chocolate smear on my chin while I eat it.  Building with Lego, hiding in treehouses, licking ketchup off my fingers, constructing a snowman in front of my workplace, and skipping in public are all taboo.

My kids are starting to notice the dichotomous worlds of kid-stuff versus grownup-stuff.  “Poor Mama, you don’t get candy from the Easter Bunny,” Molly tells me, with obvious sympathy.  Santa doesn’t put a pomegranate in my stocking, let alone a remote-controlled car.  When I had to have dental surgery to remove a renegade leftover baby tooth, my daughters insisted that I put the nasty, sawed-in-half remains under my pillow, in a Ziploc.  The tooth fairy came through for me, and they beamed.  They are immersed in the joys of being kids – the sticky, illogical, fantastical gleefulness of every new discovery – and they don’t want me to miss out just because I’m so ancient.

On the flip side, they are well aware that increased age commands increased status, at least in those who are young enough to be impressed by the enormity of teenagers.  From my perch atop the swings, I can see that they are both wearing the T-shirts they earned the night before, when we walked, jogged, skipped, and hopped our way through Fairbanks’ annual Midnight Sun Run.  They were tremendously proud of covering all ten kilometers of this very-grown-up race on their own two feet.  They were thrilled by crossing the finish line at exactly midnight -- an adults-only hour if ever there was one. 

Being not-so-little anymore does have some rewards – so much so that Molly has started to be suspicious of anything that might be not grown-up enough.  “How come kids’ underwear has pictures on it?”  She squinted disapprovingly at a faded Dora the Explorer, and dug through the drawer until she found a plain blue pair.  “Just like yours,” she smiled.   She was right, except for them being about seventeen sizes smaller.  Climbing the swing poles, I had a lot more posterior to haul along than when I first tried this trick.

Like underwear sizes, some things do change with age, regardless of whether we want them to or not.  Santa just isn’t going to make an encore in my imagination, even if I have a free hand with the eggnog.  Unlike the child cowering on my lap, I was not terrified of the Wicked Witch of the West at last week’s puppet show at the library – although I grant that she was pretty scary, as far as foot-high marionettes go.  Tic-tac-toe lost its luster after I figured out the never-lose algorithm by playing dozens of games by myself in the dirt under a picnic table at the age of six (I was the shy kid at summer camp).  No one has told me recently that they won’t be my bestest friend unless I share my cookies.  And it’s been a few years since anyone has frightened me into proper behavior with the magical words, I’m telling!

So, yes, some things are different.  But some things aren’t.  As I cling to the sun-warmed metal of the swing crosspiece – where no self-respecting adult should ever, ever cling – I contemplate the more-than-semantic difference between being childlike and being childish.  Maybe the best part of being a grownup is getting to choose which of the kid-stuff to retain, and which to toss to the four winds.  Grape popsicles, running through sprinklers, tearing downhill on a sled, holding a ladybug gently in the palm of my hand?  Yeah, I’ll keep those.   Sniveling for a Bandaid for every semi-invisible scratch; hiding wide-eyed under my quilt after reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; whining “are we there yet?” seventeen thousand times on a twenty minute drive; and cowering before the taunting prowess of junior-high harpies?  Not so much. 

As I consider edging myself just a little farther along my perch in order to reach that pesky final swing, I hear a voice from below.  “Here, let me help.” 

I look down in surprise.  A guy about my age – one of the dads who seemed NOT to be looking at me – swings the chain into my grasp.  Quickly, I haul the swing up, over, up, over, and up and over once more.  The chains rattle down.  The seat bounces.  The job is done. 

I thank my helper, and he offers a small smile.  “You’re a lot braver than I am,” he says as I slither back down the poles.  He sidles away quickly, but I catch a glimpse in him of the little boy he used to be – and I realize he’s not so different from the eight-year-old who hollered a compliment across the playground. He thinks he’s commenting on my bravery with respect to heights, but I think he might mean something else, too. Maybe, I think, he really wants to order his ice cream with sprinkles, but has almost forgotten how.

The twins leap onto two of the newly freed swings, and pump their legs skyward.  They are still chattering about last night’s race.  “Do you remember the outhouse costume?”  They were impressed by the water guns, the raucously cheering barbecue-and-beer fueled fans on the sidelines, and most of all by the grownups who saw fit to cover more than six miles while dressed in wedding dresses, Oompa-loompa outfits, or cardboard boxes cut to resemble rock, paper, and scissors.

I consider their enthusiasm in a new light.  “Was it fun to see grownups acting so silly?” I ask.  “Acting like kids?”

“Yes,” they agree, their eyes shining at the memory.  And then they tell me, again, about the guy with the dinosaur made out of dozens of animal-twisty balloons.  The runner-turned artist (or was that artist-turned-runner?) seemed justifiably proud of his creation, and of the attention it garnered.  His grin beamed out a heady mix of mischief and joy.  Childlike.

I glance at the appreciative eight-year-old who is now barreling down the slide; the gaggle of mothers who are still studiously ignoring me; the polka dotted girl who snagged a swing as soon as it jangled down within reach; and the dad who helped me.  Adulthood, I think, is no time for diffidence, nostalgia, and regret. 

I hop on a swing, and take a turn.

Phone on mute, arms like Kali

“That was fast,” says my coworker Brook.  She is invisible behind our bilge-colored Dilbert-wall, but I can hear the laughter in her voice. 

It takes me a moment to figure out what she thinks is funny.  Then I realize she has just received an email from me in response to the one she sent five minutes earlier -- despite the fact that she has heard me yakking away on the phone for the past hour. 

Well, sure, I send emails while on teleconferences -- but isn’t that normal?  I protest -- my phone on mute -- that everyone does other stuff during long meetings.

They do, Brook admits.  “But not when they’re actually presenting. That’s beyond my level of multi-tasking.”

She has a point; I might be taking this a bit too far. In my world, multi-tasking is not just an occasional spurt of hyperactivity; it’s hard-wired.  The kids’ bike trailer is littered with Corn Bran and desiccated raisins, because breakfast, commuting, and comically inadequate bike-race-training are all simultaneous activities.  My laptop is full of cat hair and crumbs.  I listen to novels while skiing, and I have Serious Conversations -- phone wedged under my ear -- while assembling Lego dump trucks.  I can’t remember the last time I ate lunch while 1) sitting at a table and 2) not discussing downscaled climate change models.  I think it’s been six years since I shopped for groceries by myself, without small people on hand to assist (“The apple I dropped is only bruised on ONE side, Mommy”), philosophize (“Why do the bad-for-you cereals have the best pictures on the boxes?”), and editorialize (“Look, Mommy, that man has only one arm!”).  If I’m not doing two things at once, it’s because I’m doing three. 

The voices of my project collaborators are still burbling from my headset.  Every once in a while – even as I triage the rest of my inbox and chat with Brook -- I leap into the conversation to answer a question about permafrost thaw or biome shift.   I try to make sure that when I do so, my mouth is not too full of scrambled eggs and spinach.  Still, I feel guilty – and worried.

I’d like to think that all this activity is a mark a great efficiency and productivity, but I fear that it’s actually a mark of being a frenetic stereotype.  Sure, I’m doing three things at once, but what if I’m doing them all badly?  I wonder whether I’m a parody of myself, my gender, and my generation.  Haven’t there been articles recently about how everyone manages this a lot better in France?  Or maybe it was Sweden.  I’m not sure of the details, because I only read the first paragraph, and I was creating a spreadsheet and settling an argument about Scotch tape at the same time.

The folks at the other end of the phone line can’t see my dirty dishes, or anything that may be lodged between my front teeth.  In fact, none of them have ever met me.  For all they know, I could be a willowy bombshell who does not ever scrawl notes on the back of kindergarten worksheets while slapping together peanut-butter sandwiches. But Brook knows better. 

“Of course, I don’t have kids,” she adds, kindly offering me a ready-made excuse.  But I’m not sure I can use it.  My kids aren’t signed up for Tai Kwon Do, gymnastics, math tutoring, or basket weaving.  By the standards of the era, they are total slackers, hanging out making mudpies and chasing stink bugs all summer instead of learning about Mozart – or being Mozart, for that matter.  And they’re hopeless at doing more than one thing at once.

A few weeks ago, as the clock was creeping toward nine p.m., I was watching with mounting frustration as my children meandered through their getting-ready-for-bed process.  “Mommy, you know what I was wondering?” One of the twins was standing stock-still in the middle of their bedroom – which was so littered with toys and half-complete craft projects that I had to shovel a path to the bunk beds – and holding a sock in her hand.

“You can tell me about it WHILE you put your pajamas on,” I snapped.

Her face crumpled.  “But Mommy, I don’t LIKE multi-tasking,” she wailed.

Oh. 

In the game of name-that-emotion, I couldn’t decide if I was more perturbed by the fact that: a) this particular neologism was part of her kindergarten vocabulary; b) I was forcing my child into my own hyped-up mode; c) her mental capacities were such that simultaneously dressing and speaking were a challenge; or d) I was never ever going to get the kids to bed so that I could check emails, write novels, play online Scrabble, and munch chocolate (simultaneously, of course).

Back in the last millennium, I remember hearing my dad bemoan the fact that more and more reporters – his coworkers at Newsday – were eating lunch at their desks.  Couldn’t they take a few minutes to sit down in the lunchroom with a sandwich?  A few years later, he did an extensive piece of investigative journalism in which he brought to light just how many people were trying to make phone calls, drink coffee, wolf down breakfast burritos, and apply mascara all while piloting a vehicle at 70mph down a traffic-choked freeway.  The results were ugly – and I don’t just mean with regard to the mascara. 

Now everyone seems to be talking about it -- how we’re all kidding ourselves into thinking we have as many arms as an octopus, as many eyes as a spider, and the processing power of Google.  This modern era is destroying us!  We’re all going to Hades in a Multi-Purpose Canvas Messenger Bag with Leather Accents! 

There’s obviously some truth in this.  A while back, I almost got mowed down on a sidewalk by someone who was texting while biking.  But at the same time -- hasn’t This Modern Era always been destroying us?  Sure, our technology has changed so fast that I’m already bordering on being a techno-fossil.  But have we really changed all that much?  True, when I was little, our family didn’t eat in the car, the phone was firmly fastened to the wall, and a Blackberry was something that grew on prickly bushes at Heckscher Park.  But my mother did plenty of multi-tasking back in the days of wide lapels.  She sewed her own wardrobe, and mine as my sister’s as well, all on a hand-crank Singer from circa the Pleistocene.  She cooked dinner while listening to me read Frog and Toad are Friends from my perch on the kitchen stool.  She got her exercise by pushing a stroller, mowing the lawn, and hauling groceries.  She squeezed in her socializing from the vantage point of a playground bench, while being called upon to “Look at me!  Look at me!” every fifteen seconds.

Somewhere in the background of my teleconference, a dog barks.  I check that I’m still muted, although my dogs are safely at home.  I grin, imagining someone with papers scattered on a kitchen table, half eaten bagel balanced on a plate, and puppy trying grab a piece of attention from its on-the-phone owner.  Ok, so maybe that participant missed a few words of my cogent synopsis of projected shifts in growing-degree-days in the Northwest Territories.  But the tiny interruption makes my faceless collaborator human.  And I like humans.

The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that multi-tasking was not forced on me by my generation, my ovaries, my computer, or my shoe size.  To one degree or another, our species has always done more than one thing at once, and been more than one thing at once, simply because we can.  We have convoluted, bulky, non-linear brains.   And I like that, too.

The truth is… I enjoy multi-tasking.  I’m kind of bored if I don’t have way too many projects going on at once, and I feel pigeon-holed if I don’t have more than one identity.  I like being a scientist, a mom, a wanna-be-writer, a baker of gooey cakes, a do-it-yourself builder, and a back-of-the-pack athlete.  Maybe I don’t do any of this very well, but I don’t want to give any of it up.  Is this really so bad?

I don’t think multi-tasking can be pilloried if the tasks in question are walking the dogs through a nice squelchy swamp, searching for ladybugs and cranberry blossoms, collecting mosquito larvae in plastic cups, blowing soap bubbles, snacking on fresh peaches, and discussing the hydrologic cycle (can you say “evapotranspiration,” kids?)   On Tuesday, the twins pedaled behind me on our goofy-looking double-tag-along to the park, the library, the thrift store, and the grocery store.  While pedaling, we discussed gardening, the transit of Venus, and the local wildlife: “Do you see the ducks under the bridge – no, not there, on the left!” (We were also, apparently, learning to tell left from right.) 

I figure there’s a happy medium in there, somewhere between doing-it-all and Hang Up and Drive.  I was browsing an article on cognitive psychology (you know, just for fun, while sorting socks) and learned about the Goldilocks Principle.  Infants, it seems, will seek out the just-right level of stimulation to meet their learning abilities: not too simple, not to complex.  I like this idea, because it allows me the freedom to be my own Goldilocks.  I can send emails, talk to scientists in California, and eat eggs, all at once -- even if Brook thinks I’m nuts. 

There are only (in my mental rulebook, that is) three caveats regarding multi-tasking:

1.       People matter.  The lost lunch breaks that my dad mourned weren’t really about his coworkers doing more work; they were about his friends socializing less. 

2.       Be your own Goldilocks, not your kids’ Goldilocks.  If they want to stare at a leaf for half an hour, fine.  Unless it’s bedtime, in which case, brush your teeth already, will you?

3.       Don’t be an idiot.  You don’t need to put on that mascara right now.  Really.

My teleconference ends at last – just in time, because I need to hop on my bike.  I’ve got kids to pick up, and I think I promised to bake a pie for a charity barbecue.  It’s been a productive morning: I’ve led two presentations, answered a bunch of messages, picked the spinach from between my teeth, and started work on the next project – the one I promised to do for Brook, in that email I answered.  I told her I would lead a teleconference next month.  It should be a fun one – although I’m guessing she won’t let me answer emails at the same time. 

Now We Are [almost] Six

When I was One,

I had just begun.

When I was Two,

I was nearly new.

When I was Three,

I was hardly me.

When I was Four,

I was not much more.

When I was Five,

I was just alive.

But now that I’m Six I’m as clever as clever.

So I think I’ll be six now forever and ever.

--A.A. Milne

                “Mama?”

                The room was dark.  The stories had been read, the kisses given, the blankets tucked.  Both twins were supposed to be asleep, but one of them clearly wasn’t.

                “What’s wrong?”  I crouched by the bottom bunk, the inhabitant of which was dwarfed by her giant Winnie the Pooh.

                “Mama… I don’t think I can all the way brush my teeth myself when I’m six!  I can’t make the little circles like the dentist said!”

                As far as nighttime terrors go, this one was pretty easy to address. “It’s ok,” I reassured her.  “I can still help with brushing, if you want.”

                “Until I’m seven?”

                “Sure.”

                “But that’s only two years away.  Maybe until I’m eight.  Or nine.”

                I teetered between amusement and pathos.  This was the same kid who had told me, a few weeks previously, that she never wanted to be done with kindergarten, because she feared that first graders needed to know how to tie their shoes.  I could easily teach her how, I’d said.  “No…” she moaned, as if shoe-tying were akin to juggling live rattlesnakes.  She won’t let me throw away her favorite size-three corduroy pants or pass on the shape-sorter box to friends with babies.  When she was barely two, she used to hide in a cupboard to fill her diaper.  She knew she was perfectly capable of using the potty, but she didn’t want me to take the diapers away.

On the upper bunk is the other twin, the one who gave up the diapers right at her second birthday, pretty much the moment she realized that big kids wore underpants.  She’s also the one who spent an afternoon alternating between rigid focus and howling frustration because she was determined to be the only kid in preschool who COULD tie her shoes.  She’ll try to lift an eight-year-old or wrestle with a boy who outweighs her by thirty pounds.  During University Park Elementary School’s Graphing Week, this was the twin who was furious to find that the mathematical questions intended for fifth and sixth graders were too hard for her.

Now they are about to turn six, an age somewhere between little and big, between “I can do it all by myself” and “I want my Mommy.”  And I’m not sure which twin’s camp I’m in.

I used to know.  Six years ago, I had two newborns and a not-quite-completed dissertation. One day, when I was peeling one of the tiny, squirmy little creatures out of her oozing onesie for the umpteenth time, I noticed the tag on the small garment.  Underneath the Carter’s logo was the company’s tagline: “If they could just stay little.” 

I stared at the tag.  The baby shrieked because she was chilly (babies never shriek because they are covered in poop, only because you try to take their poop away from them).  The other baby shrieked because she wasn’t being held, or because I hadn’t nursed her for a whole 37 minutes, or just because she was a baby.  These things were sometimes a bit obtuse to me, and I hadn’t slept in several weeks, so my logic was off.  But one thing seemed pretty clear.  Much as I adored my children, with exactly the overwhelming devotion that had once seemed slightly daft in other parents, I definitely did not want to have two infants forever.

This self-admission made me feel a little anxious.  Was there something wrong with me, or insufficient in my love, if I was eagerly looking forward to a time when my kids could communicate in a manner that didn’t involve howling, and maybe play a few games of Scrabble with me?

Although my anxiety never entirely disappeared, it was somewhat assuaged by the passage of time.  The Sack of Flour stage of babyhood is rapidly replaced by the Wiggling Worm stage, and then the Barrel of Monkeys stage.  Infants change so quickly that there’s always something new for parents to gush about.  A smile!  A burp!  Neck muscles that don’t flop about like overcooked pasta!   I enjoyed every stage, despite the curdled drool, the awkwardness of trying to get through a door while lugging two car seats, and the necessity of installing dozens of little plastic gizmos on outlets, drawers, and cabinets, rendering them kid-proof and adult-proof in one inconvenient step.

My enjoyment was real, but it was also forward-looking.  I didn’t mourn the outgrown 3-6 month snowsuits because I had sacks of larger hand-me-downs lying in wait.  I was cheering the kids along as they grew teeth, gnawed on Cheerios, and learned to walk.  In retrospect, it was predictable that one kid seemed to find crawling demeaning.  It made her angry.  She was so desperately eager to get on her feet that she became fully bipedal at ten months.  It was also predictable that the other kid waited until 13 months, when she could be sure she wouldn’t totter and fall, then ambled around without fanfare. 

I don’t recall greeting a new stage with any pangs of regret until it came time to (finally) wean my little milk-monsters. I didn’t really plan to keep breast-feeding long enough to have toddlers who marched up to me and announced, “Want nurse!” but it happened kind of quickly.  I wanted to be done with it… and yet I didn’t.  My biologist sensibilities and my mom-sensibilities were equally entranced by the nonchalance with which my body, after doing nothing of the sort for 33 years, was able to produce two complete human beings, and then a couple of hundred gallons of milk.  Some women feel insulted or grossed-out by being reminded of their kinship with cows, but I kind of liked the simplicity and sisterhood of mammalhood.  I enjoyed being one with all the shrews, gnus, dolphins, and elephants who had done this long before me.  So I felt a little sad when I told the kids that the milk was All Gone, and ceremoniously re-sewed Boppy the Nursing Pillow into two smaller pillows, one for each crib.  One kid – I probably don’t need to say which one -- took this transition a lot harder than the other, and required a bedtime pacifier – not just for a couple of weeks, but for two more years. 

Despite this small blip, I was still gazing ahead to the horizon: to age three, the minimum for preschool; to age four, when their legs would be long enough to hike appreciable distances and pedal a tag-along bike; to age five, and the beginning of formal education.  When I was sick of reading Touch and Feel Farm, Corduroy seemed like a reprieve.  When I was sick of Corduroy, James and the Giant Peach was a treat.  Each birthday felt like a real celebration, not just because of the fire truck cakes, fruit dragons, and sunny playgrounds.  Each year, each new number, seemed like a new chapter, a new adventure.  Why bother being only three when one can embrace the excitement of being four, or even FIVE? 

This year, though, I find myself starting to notice not only the positives of growth, but also a few of the downsides.  Two kids are hard to cram onto my lap these days, although they still want to be there.  For how much longer?  The bunk beds will be too short pretty soon.  The peer pressure is starting to kick in, escalating the requests for tacky plastic toys.  In these peer groups, the restrictive gender lines are becoming more tightly cinched.  Life is more complicated, more scheduled.  There are tests and report cards – report cards!  What does it mean if my child does not yet Meet Expectations in kindergarten music class? 

On the flip side, though, I now get to spend my free hours with two distinct and fascinating individuals who ask questions about how static electricity works, how often whales need to breathe, whether the Easter Bunny can receive mail, and why the cement doesn’t harden inside the mixer. My answers are circuitous and fumbling.  I find myself jogging around the living room holding a beach ball and saying, “Now, if you can imagine that this is the sun…”  Yet my children still think I’m brilliant -- mostly.  Their ideas have the chaotic orderliness of poetry, and they play point-counterpoint to one another like a scientist who has been locked up for six years with an architect. 

“Look, every strawberry is different,” says one, rolling the fat fruits between her small fingers, examining each dent and seed.

“Of course,” says the other, cramming one into her mouth.  “They all have different DNA.”

Young Christopher Robin Milne once loved his teddy bear.  He built things out of chairs.  He was afraid of invisible Heffalumps.  He was six, and as clever as clever.  But he didn’t stay six forever and ever.  He got older, and went to boarding school, where he was mocked for the stories his dad had written.  He came to hate the books.  In their pages, he would always have a pudding-bowl haircut, a nanny, and no idea how to spell Wednesday.  He was furious at his father for exploiting the person he used to be.  Cuteness is all very well, but it has a sell-by date, after which it’s about as appealing as a fermenting haddock.

Luckily, my writing has an audience of no more than a hundred people, and it’s unlikely I’m dooming my kids to infantile notoriety.  They probably won’t, like Christopher Robin, have to take up boxing to defend themselves against Pooh tormentors.  Still, I know that no matter how obscure I am, there will come a point in time when I will embarrass my kids.  They may not cringe over my writing, but they will hate my socks or roll their eyes at my jokes or try to convince their friends that they have not in any way been influenced by my appreciation for Thai eggplant, They Might Be Giants, or E.B. White.

For now, though, they’re willing to appreciate Charlotte’s Web from the vantage point of my lap.  How long will this last?  A year ago, they couldn’t read.  Now, they can, albeit with a lot of stumbling.  This transformation, like so many others, is wonderful.  I can’t wait to invite my kids to meet the residents of Prydain and Middle Earth and Wildcat Island and Hogwarts.  But I hope they let me keep reading out loud for a while longer, so that I can go there with them.

These days, we read four bedtime stories each night, with each family member taking a turn.  Then I tuck in the blankets, and the kids snuggle down with their heads on those old halves of Boppy.

“Good night, my big girl!”  I give my child a kiss.

“Mama!”

I pause.  “What’s wrong?”

“Mama… I’m NOT big.  I’m little.  And… I want to be with you!  I want to be with you forever.”

I’m immobilized by surprise.  Not by the sentiment – but by whom it’s coming from.  My five-going-on-twelve girl.  Little Miss I-Can-Do-It-All-By-Myself.

Of course, there’s only one possible answer. “Ok, little one,” I agree.  I give her another kiss. 

She’ll change her mind, I know.  I’d be devastated if she didn’t, eventually.  But as to when she makes that mental transition – next year, or in ten years, or every day, back and forth, from now until college?  It’s up to her.  I’m in no hurry.  And yet… I can’t wait.  Because the only thing more fun than letting them be who they are is seeing who they will become.

Under the spell of English

“There can’t be a silent ‘gh’!”  Lizzy looked up from her literary selection, Clifford Goes to the Doctor.  She glared at me accusingly, as if I had personally invented the English language and imbued it with all its peculiar inconsistencies just to confound her.  “That doesn’t make any sense!”

“I know,” I sighed.  She was right.  ‘Light’ should be spelled ‘lite,’ just as it is on the rows of pink-dyed aspartame-sweetened yogurt at Fred Meyers.  I couldn’t uphold the existence of that ‘gh,’ and I wasn’t even trying.  If I was the court-appointed lawyer for my mother-tongue, I was doing a terrible job.  But given the unassailable claims being brought forth by the plaintiff, was a defense even warranted?

Helping two five-year-olds wallow through Puppy Mudge Finds a Friend and painstakingly hand-write their entries for the University Park Elementary School Annual Poetry Contest has reminded me just how agonizing English spelling is – but that’s only the tip of the iceberg.  Last week, Molly asked me why the Three Little Kittens cried when they found their mittens. I had to explain that “cry” means not only “burst into tears” but also “call out in excitement.”  A few days later, one of the twins’ friends looked at Lizzy suspiciously when she claimed to have “several” toy horses, and demanded to know what “several” meant – and, having been given a definition, how it compared to “a few” and “some.”  Our language is so full of superfluous synonyms, irregular verbs, double-meanings, multiple definitions, context-dependent connotations, impenetrable idioms, and maddening silent k’s that I can’t really blame my kids for their peevishness.  Back when I was discovering that ‘weird’ is spelled weirdly and that ‘flammable’ and ‘inflammable’ mean the same thing, I too was pretty sure English had been invented by sadists or lunatics.

I can recall debating with my second grade teacher, Mrs. Monteiro, about whether it was possible to hear the difference between the ‘wh’ sound and plain old ‘w.”  She suggested that it was; I hotly denied -- in my enormous experience as a seven-year-old -- ever having heard anyone speak that way.  She listened to my argument with her usual gravity, and agreed that perhaps the distinction was too subtle to be of much use in ordinary diction.  Mrs. Monteiro took me seriously, and in return, I adulated her.  She was an elegant, sharp-eyed, wry-humored woman who challenged me daily.  She taught me about planets, dinosaurs, and – when I asked what the word “boycott” meant on her lapel pin – labor unions, workers’ rights, and injustice.  On the first day of school, she told the class that her first name was Joan.  “You can call me that when you’re twenty-one,” she deadpanned.  I’m not sure the other kids understood the humor, but I felt teacher-awe wash over me. 

It’s a powerful force.  These days, I see Lizzy’s eyes light up when she tells me that Mrs. Claar showed her a caterpillar, or that Coach Davis is teaching sign language in gym.  I see Molly swell with pride as she holds up her paper maché globe and repeats what Ms Lewis told her about continents.  “Isn’t Eurasia a funny word?” she muses.  Yes, I think – and just wait until you try to spell it.  Both kids are thrilled to report that not only do their teachers and the school librarian read stories to the kindergarteners, but so does Mr. Bob the custodian.

Molly and Lizzy have always been huge fans of stories – as was I.  It might seem odd that I was frustrated with English as a child, given that I wasn’t a victim of academic despair.  On the contrary, I was an inveterate little bookworm. However, I was also fond of logic, and incensed by the lack of it.  I was good at remembering how to write incorrigible words like ‘neighbor’ and ‘necessary,’ but that didn’t mean I liked how they were spelled.  My parents still refer to Grand Union supermarkets as Grand Onions, because that’s what I insisted the sign said when I was four.   I can remember being personally affronted by the fact that ‘doctor’ does not end in ‘er.’ 

Mrs. Monteiro had a fine appreciation for language.  She glanced at the picture books I was selecting from the school library, and scoffed.  I could read much harder stuff, she told me. She was right; at home I worked my way through a lot of Sarah’s books, so I knew I could handle the selections of a precocious ten-year-old.  Still, I was miffed.  I shot back, “What, like War and Peace?”

She granted me the barest flicker of a smile. “Oh, are you watching that on PBS?”  She was too.  Over the following weeks we discussed all 751 minutes of the series, then moved on to the next production: I, Claudius.

As a result of all that PBS, all those books, and parents who peppered the dinner table conversation with words like obfuscate, penultimate, and kerfuffle, I had a vocabulary large enough to earn me blank stares on the playground. Using too many words was a social impediment.  Kids who want to know whether something is ‘cool’ or ‘gross’ or ‘ok’ are suspicious of ‘exceptional,’ ‘repugnant,’ and ‘mediocre.’  Big words were not only impenetrable, they were also snotty.  I learned not to use them at recess. 

I don’t think Molly and Lizzy have yet reached the age of disillusionment, when they will realize that other children may not like them for entering poetry contests, or for saying, as Lizzy did earlier this week, “Look, a mosquito inserted its proboscis into my arm!”  Sometimes I worry that they’ll hate me for telling them that the talking bears in Goldilocks are ‘anthropomorphic.’

On the other hand, I never resented or discarded my vocabulary, even when I hid it.  Although all those words didn’t completely assuage my annoyance over the illogic, flaws, redundancies, and omissions of English, they were gradually seducing me.  There were patterns hidden in their depths – amble, ambulance, perambulator, ambulatory – and poetry in their syllables – mellifluous, susurration, onomatopoeia.  Grown-up words were also a free ticket into the world of adults – or, at least, the adults I most wanted to communicate with.  I played Scrabble with my dad.  I gave my mother whole notebooks full of pencil-scratched stories, and blithely asked her to copy-type them. I was allowed to join my parents and their friends in a game that involved inventing fictional definitions for words so obscure that only the dictionary knew which was correct.  And I chatted with my teachers, not just as authoritarian dictators of spelling quizzes, but as people. 

Mrs. Monteiro talked to me as if I were a grownup, but she also had a knack for connecting with me as a kid.  She noticed that my handwriting was nothing but a hasty scrawl.  She could have forced me to practice writing letters and words by rote.  Instead, she loaned me a book of poems, and gave me a special lined notebook.  I could read whatever poems I liked, she said.  I should copy my favorites into the notebook.  But it was a special notebook, so only the very best handwriting would do.  I glowed with pride.  I was a big kid!  I had a special poetry journal!  I was also a little kid.  I copied Jabberwocky, and a lengthy work by AA Milne: A bear, however hard he tries/ Grows tubby without exercise...

This week, Lizzy’s appreciation for language was bolstered by winning third prize in the school poetry contest – with a masterpiece about wearing underpants on her head.  She came home with a plastic kite and a smile that appeared to be larger than her face.  For a shining moment, when her class applauded, she was a poet, a wordsmith, a writer.  By bedtime, though, she’d remembered that she really doesn’t appreciate that ‘who’ and ‘eight’ are spelled as if someone pulled letters randomly from a hat.

For now, it seems fair enough to commiserate with her that ‘gh’ doesn’t make sense, that ‘knee’ has at least one letter too many, and that ‘knight’ is afflicted with a double dose of insanity.  Falling in love with words takes time and patience. Maybe it wasn’t until second grade, in Mrs. Monteiro’s class, that I first started to view our language in the full light of all its wondrous possibilities.  Maybe it was then that I began to realize that I was angry at English not because I hated it, but because I loved it so much. 

The internet wasn’t at our fingertips in 1979.  But today, thanks to a memorably-offered first name, it yielded the street address of an 81-year-old who donated money to a Political Action Committee called Voice of Teachers for Education.  I could be wrong, of course, but I’m guessing that’s the same sharp-eyed woman who taught me about labor unions and corruption within the Roman Empire while whipping my handwriting into shape with Winnie the Pooh. 

I’m a lot older than twenty-one now.  Maybe – with my fingers crossed, in hopes that I’m not too late -- it’s time I dropped Joan a thank-you note.