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Sophie has this endearing habit where she takes my hand (really, just one finger of my hand: she curls all her little fingers around one of my big fingers) and leads me to whatever she’s finding interesting at the moment. Usually I like playing this game. But sometimes, like tonight, I have other ideas about where I want to go. Tonight I wanted to go to the bathtub, because it was past her bedtime and past time for a bath. She wanted to go exploring, especially exploring in the garage, where her Dad was doing something dangerous-smelling with his bike-tire.
So she hurled herself onto the floor, screaming.
I walked away.
She screamed.
I hummed a cheerful little song.
She screamed.
I got involved in the exciting put-the-toys-away game, and the turn-down-the-lights game. She stood up, she even considered joining me, beause she likes those games. I harbored hopes that my distraction ploy was successful. But then she dashed for the garage and its dangerous fumes. I picked her up and carried her to the tub. She tried to poke at my eyes.
Yesterday, during another tantrum, she bit my shoulder.
The screams are starting to get to me.
Tonight’s screams lasted all through the bath (which was really only a brief wetting) and then all through the towel-drying, daddy-hugging, re-diapering, pajama-cladding routine. Tonight’s screams only began to subside when we got to the putting-on-some-sleep-socks phase of her bedtime ritual, which is followed by ceremoniously saying “Nighty-night” to her pile of shoes. Tonight was a lot of screams.
Yesterday’s tantrum-triggers: I wouldn’t let her climb on the kitchen-table. I wouldn’t let her run into a stranger’s backyard. I insisted that when she walked home from our half-mile walk (after wiggling out of her sling), that she stay headed in the direction of home. And that was just in the first hour of our morning. I can’t even remember the rest of the tantrums. Being outdoors and being around other people was about all that kept her calm yesterday. I had wanted to go to the store to get a pumpkin, but there were way too many tantrum-inducing events on the way to the store, so we ended up spending almost the entire day at the park.
Even that led to some tantrums.
Maybe she’s overtired. Maybe she’s teething with those painful molars. Maybe I’ve already spoiled her, so that placing even minor restrictions on her leads to these outbursts. Maybe this is just the terrible twos.
It hurts my ears. It hurts my heart.
My teammates write incredibly insightful stream-of-consciousness race reports that describe strategy and components and other stuff I don’t yet grasp.
I, on the other hand, spend my race thinking, “Hmm, I’m thirsty” and “Wow, I didn’t fall off my bike yet.”
My race-thoughts are even more inane than that. I think: “Maybe if I pedal harder, I’ll finish quicker, so then I can get a drink of water sooner. Because I’m really thirsty.” Yes, I spend much of the race trying to convince myself to go faster — and using particularly poor logic, since cyclocross races are for a set amount of time, 40 minutes, so pedalling faster won’t get me to the finish line any quicker. Still, I tell myself it will. I think I can actually go faster, I’m just not in the habit of going faster, so I have to talk myself into it. This is clearly a problem.
This race, I also thought, “Maybe if I pedal faster, that odd motorcycle in the air won’t land on my head.” For some reason, stunt motorcycle-jumping was going on in the middle of the race-course. It was spooky.
I started at the back of the pack, since that’s where I thought I belonged, but then that turned out to mean I just had to pass lots of people. I’m not yet great at passing people. Next time I think I may attempt to start in the middle of the pack, to alleviate some of this passing problem. It may also mitigate the problem of oh-no-the-rider-ahead-of-me-just-fell-over-a-tree-root, better-swerve-around-her. The riders in front of me just kept falling. I think this means I may have finished well ahead of third-to-last.
But my race-thoughts were so inane that, when a fellow Celopacific rider lapped me (the older men’s race goes on simultaneously with my race, Women’s 3/4), it took me a long time to understand why he kept slowing up to wait for me. He kept looking back at me. “Is there another older man just behind me that he’s concerned about?” That’s what I thought, till I finally realized, he was generously coaching me. It took me way too long to figure that out. He had given up hope of placing in his race and decided to shift his strategy to trying to make sure I could place in my race.
I love bike-racing etiquette.
He let me draft off him, when I could reach him. He paced me, urging me faster, for what I think was three whole laps. He told me when we were on our last lap and I should put in all my remaining energy. I had no clue it was the last lap of the race. He told me afterwards that he was trying to help me bridge up to the next woman in my category. I didn’t see her. I think we did pass a couple women, though. But I think they may have fallen over tree-roots.
It seems that my one advantage, as a cyclocross racer, is that I don’t fall on tree-roots. Also, I have an amazing team.
UPDATE: Unofficial race results are in, and I came in 7th out of 15. This is good news, and not only because Ben claims that the top 6 people get to be on the podium (I believe it’s only the top 3). Last time I was third-to-last; this time I was eighth-to-last, and I think that’s a decent improvement.
ANOTHER UPDATE: What I didn’t convey in this post is that racing is surprisingly thrilling. All-consuming, adrenaline-inducing, absolutely-in-the-moment, I-can-see-how-this-becomes-addictive thrilling. I’m starting to understand Ben better. And I’m afraid of my own pride and competitiveness.
Sophie is developing by leaps and bounds, it seems. She can now distinguish between play and ordinary life. Piling the sofa-pillows up on the floor, diving under the bed-spread for a half-hour of squealing, giggling uproariously when she spills some food on herself when we’re out and I just lean in and lick it off like I’m a cat-momma, because no washcloth is handy: she now knows what’s silly, and it makes her laugh a lot. She laughs when I make funny noises at her. It’s almost as if she gets my jokes, but of course she only gets the jokes that involve noises like “chugga-chugga-choo-choo.” Still, it makes hanging out with Sophie infinitely more fun – even though she’s also using her new communications skills to ask me to change her shoes seven times a day.
Today we read Mr Brown Can Moo, Can You? and she actually did moo and buzz and even cock-a-doodle-doo, right on cue. It was as if she understood the questions the book was asking.
Every day she asks me to teach her new words. Today she wanted to know the name of the moon.
And on Monday, when we went to a kids’ concert, she was dancing and waving scarves and maracas around with her usual deep joy, until she started to get overwhelmed by the screaming children in the audience. Then she just calmly took my hand and led me out. I’m so proud of her. She may not have the common-sense that it takes to stop climbing on table-tops, but she does have the common-sense to quietly decide when she needs to leave someplace stressful.
Is this too much boasting? It’s just that I see her little thoughts evolving from “Oh no I’m wet and sticky” to “Oops, I just spilled and made a mess and now my tasty drink is all gone” to “Hey, momma is licking me to clean me up and that’s just so silly it’s hilarious.” There’s whole new ideas going through her head. Whole new obsessions with shoes and trains and play-dough and the diving-under-the-bedspread game. Whole new realms of delight.
Sophie and Ben did just fine without me. Maybe I ought to be jealous, but I’m not. I’m thrilled and relieved. He helped soothe her to sleep when she woke in the middle of the night on Friday, he fed her huge meals (they discovered goldfish crackers), he didn’t even forget the sunscreen, he packed more diapers & spare clothes & healthy food for their outings than I’ve ever seen, and he did all this so well that she actually slept through the night on Saturday night. That is a minor miracle.
She was her happy playful self when I returned, just a little clingy and nursing every hour, despite my secret hope that my two-and-a-half-day absence might have weaned her.
She’s got whole new words now. At tonight’s bath, she kept pointing to body parts and asking, “That?” I was taken aback: I haven’t yet thought out whether I’m going to teach her to say “breast” or “boob” or “nipple” or what. She proudly told me the body-part-words she’s learned so far: nose, eyes, mouth, hat (her word for the top of the head), bellybutton, and “my butt.” Yes, while I was gone, my daughter learned to say “my butt.”
She’s also got new habits. Apparently, it’s a new pre-bath ritual that she sits on her baby toilet and actually uses it. But Ben didn’t think to mention that he had successfully started toilet-training. It wasn’t a big deal, to him. So, with me, tonight, she decided that instead of the circle of her plastic toilet, she’d just sit in the circle of her toy train tracks and pee there. One circle-seat is interchangeable for the other, in her mind. She was a little dismayed at how wet she got in her toy train tracks. She has now hugely raised my hopes to toilet-train her soon.
I can’t believe how much could change while I was gone only two nights. I’m impressed with her and Ben.
And it was a great conference. It connected me to useful professional resources, reconnected me to old friends, and inspired me: just what conferences are supposed to do, but usually fall short of. This conference also gave me the chance to stroll around the old route 66 in Albuquerque, and eat good green chile. And, at least three times during the conference, people whom I don’t know well approached me to thank me for things I don’t remember doing. A very nice conference.
I’m going to an academic conference tomorrow. I’ll be gone three days, two nights, and this makes me incredibly nervous. It’s the first time I’ll be separated from Sophie for more than twelve hours. She’s seventeen months old today, but she still nurses first thing in the morning and last thing before bedtime. For the next three days, she’s going to have to get by with plain bottled milk.
And Ben is going to have to adjust to watching her for more than a few hours at a time. Sweet man just planned out every meal she’ll eat for the next few days, something I don’t think I’ve ever seen him do.
I know they’ll be fine.
I realize that it is only delusions-of-grandeur to think that my absence will be hard on both of them. It’s a particular kind of hubris to imagine that I’m indispensable. Really, it’s probably going to be hardest on me. But it may also be hard on them. Worst-case scenario is that neither of them gets any sleep for 48 hours or so. They’ll still survive.
Maybe my fears of leaving are just compensating for that other part of me that is looking forward to seeing old friends at this conference. (Honestly, it’s more like old acquaintances, but still, it may be fun.) I’m going to a party on Friday night AND Saturday night. They may not be great parties, but at the very least, I’m going to have adult conversations and stay out past 7pm. I’m looking forward to this, and I’m feeling guilty for looking forward to it, and I know that I’ll probably spend parts of both parties wishing that I were home with Sophie and Ben. Thus is motherhood.
We have fallen into a habit of sidestepping confrontation. For instance: Sophie grabs the plastic top to the milk and shouts at me when I explain that I need to put it back on the milk-bottle. She’s old enough that it’s no longer a choking-hazard. It’s just an annoyance. I could forcefully take the piece of plastic from her, leaving her to pitch a small tantrum, or I could just ignore the whole Battle of the Milk-Bottle-Top that she’s trying to start. When I ignore the problem, she’ll eventually get distracted and drop the milk-bottle-top, so I can casually pick it up, wash it, and put it back on the milk in the fridge.
Ben calls this “picking your battles.” I call it sneaky parenting. We both do it a lot.
It’s the easiest thing to do, but I’m starting to wonder whether it’s the best thing to do.
We think we’re saving our direct assertions for truly dangerous situations, but those are so rare that Sophie may not actually learn words like “stop”. Asking two rock-climbers to identify truly dangerous situations may just be a futile exercise in relativity anyway. We tend to be overconfident about safety. A friend and fellow adventurer allows her toddler climb on almost anything, as long as the toddler wears her bike-helmet while teetering on toys that really weren’t meant to be mounted.
I probably don’t have enough fears about safety. What I am afraid of now is that we sidestep so many issues, continually choosing the easiest passive-aggressive route, that Sophie isn’t learning that we’re really in charge. Sometimes I suspect she thinks she’s in charge. Right now, she thinks it’s okay to shout at me when I ask her to return the milk-bottle-top.
So I’m working on being more direct in telling her my expectations, even on minor issues that are side-steppable. I know I’m courting many small tantrums. I’m hoping that this teaches her a kind of general cooperation, so that in the long-run, we’ll avoid the huge tantrums of, say, the teen years.
I’m not good at directly expressing my power. I’m not good at insisting on issues that I would rather analyze. I tend to ask myself, “Does this really matter? Why do I assume that the milk-bottle needs its top on anyway? If I insist on politeness, is that really politeness? Doesn’t respect have to be freely given to be true respect?” Can you tell I’m an academic?
In high-school, a good friend of mine decided that he didn’t want to sit at a desk. This drove his teachers mad. He told them that he could listen to them just as well when he was sitting on the floor or on a window-ledge. He thought it was ridiculous that they made an issue out of sitting at desks, insisting on a blind conformity that they couldn’t explain. He thought he learned best wherever he was comfortable. He insisted on sitting on a window-ledge. He wore his teachers down so much that they eventually permitted him to sit wherever he wanted. I admired him hugely.
When Sophie wants to wear only one shoe, or play with my students’ midterm exams, or swing her Dad’s bike-wrench around, or clutch the milk-bottle-top for dear life, I keep asking myself, “Isn’t this just Kenny’s window-ledge? Why do I expect her to conform to some arbitrary norm?”
But now that I’m a teacher, I realize that I need to see all my students’ faces all at about the same level, because I need to see student reactions, continually, in order to teach effectively. I think I might be one of Kenny’s teachers who would insist that he sit somewhere close to the other students. I hope, though, that I could be the teacher who could explain why I needed that.
Sophie is still too young for explanations, though. I’m hoping she’ll reach the age of reason sooner rather than later. I like reasoning. Much more than I like arbitrarily enforcing rules.
Because, I’m realizing, that if one of my students asked why he had to sit in a chair, I would tell him why, but also admire him for challenging the status quo. How do I raise a child who is polite and relatively safe but also adventurous, questioning, exploring, nonconforming? I still admire my silly friend Kenny.
Yesterday when I let the cat in around midnight, she was literally sparkling from static electricity. It’s that hot and dry around here. We’re lucky that our static-y sparkling cat didn’t spark a fire.
Today, I had to check the traffic reports before driving home, because my main highway route (I-5 through Camp Pendleton) was closed at mid-day due to fires. But by mid-afternoon the highway had reopened, so I drove home as usual, as if it were just another highway, with nothing visible to me to suggest that this ordinary stretch of highway had, just a few hours earlier, been engulfed in flames.
Sometimes life in SoCal is surreal.
Sophie only knows fifteen or twenty words, but two of those words are “wow” and “yay.”
I knew I would cave in eventually: the guys finally got me to race cyclocross. I was surprised by how scary it was and how fun. Despite having done no training other than occasionally biking Sophie to day-care, and despite this being my third time ever biking off-road, I managed to do those sandpit hairpin turns and the dirt-hills, and one terrifyingly steep long drop, and finish the race respectably. I wasn’t last, wasn’t even second-to-last. I am proud to say that I came in third-to-last. I won points for Ben’s team.
That’s me on the left. Ben says I need to work on my game-face so that I look as fierce as Dino on the right. He’s right.
SCPS #2 – Psychocross – Women 3/4 and 35+, originally uploaded by daveanddino.
But since this is a mommy-blog, I’ll tell you more about the mom issues in the race. Ben had told me that racing is painful, but he thought that since I gave birth without pain medication, I could clearly do this. I’ll tell you, the pain of racing isn’t even close to the pain of labor. Maybe I wasn’t racing hard enough.
But I did try to motivate myself to pedal harder by thinking, “Just imagine you’re late for picking up Sophie at daycare!”
The woman I ended up biking closest to was in her first race after giving birth seven months ago. When I was withering on the last lap, she noticed and told me, “Go momma!” It was weirdly motivating to join this club of stong mommas.
Then there was the fascination of watching the parenting on the sidelines. Sophie showed interest in a tiny baby, for the first time ever — she usually prefers older kids, but this time she wanted to watch the one-month-old on the sidelines. But she spent most of this race playing with her new favorite third-grader, Drew. Drew made faces at her, shared his robot with her, and, most impressively, noticed even before I did when she wandered under the tree where he was swinging. He quickly pulled his legs out of the way, alert and calm and expertly athletic, narrowly avoiding kicking her in the face.
Drew told me that his dad had declared it a “rule-free day.” His siblings were off having special days with their aunt and grandparents, so to make his day special, the dad said it was rule-free — but Drew told me there weren’t many rules worth breaking. He considered running around with his shirt off. He briefly tried pronouncing every word backwards. There wasn’t anything else he wanted to do. He had won his own youth-race, and his prize-bag included skittles, so that was the one rule he actually broke: he ate some candy without permission. But he didn’t even eat the whole bag.
Drew made me want to move into his parents house, so I can watch them and find out what they’re doing so well.
The other little boy on our picnic blanket was less impressive. He kept on having to be reminded not to harm the expensive racing bicycles all around us. He was smashing toys, getting annoyed and annoying. Drew just rolled his eyes and moved away. Such wisdom. When Drew was throwing a football to this other boy and other dad, Sophie wandered in, wanting to play too. None of them noticed, none of them passed her the ball — except for Drew.
I find myself getting incredibly judgemental. My friend’s kids are wonderful human beings, it seems, without exception. And the annoying kids all seem to have annoying parents. The four-year-old who tried to shove Sophie down a slide the other day: I already hate her mom. Ditto for the six-year-old at the previous cyclocross race who told me that girls shouldn’t play with cars, and Sophie’s name sounds like a dog’s name, mom’s shouldn’t work, and my house is too small. I found this hilarious and disturbing and also a signal that I never want to be friends with this six-year-old’s parents.
But what if I get judged by Sophie’s actions, just as I’m judging others? Sophie can be pushy and whiny and too-easily frustrated. She is only a year and a third, after all, she doesn’t yet have all the deep wisdom of eight-year-old Drew. She and I have a lot to work on together, still.
My friend Kelly is my current model mom because of how she stays calm through any of her own young daughter’s moodiness. What Kelly pointed out is that the problem is not that the kids themselves are mean or impatient or ill-mannered (they’re kids, after all), but that the parents aren’t intervening.
Sophie and I have a lot to live up to, and not just my goal of not being third-to-last in the next race.
The news all week has been about the giant abstractions of the giant wall-street bailout, but what I can’t stop thinking about is one particular house in Oceanside, California. I’m not quite sure how to blog this story, but I need to tell it, so I’m going to try.
This week, we saw an old friend, one of Sophie’s early caregivers. She’s been going through some sudden life-changes which got her depressed. She left her jobs and is living off her savings right now, so she moved into an inexpensive room in a house in Oceanside. But here’s the thing that bothers me: she’s got the only room to herself of anyone in that house.
The house-owner couldn’t pay his mortgage after his divorce, so, to stave off foreclosure, he got some plywood and transformed his living-room into three separate little-small rooms that he rents out to others. He even rents out the garage. It’s not a big house, it’s a typical little California bungalow, and what scares me is that this is probably also a typical story, only it’s not one that I usually hear.
Our friend says she is the only one in the house who speaks English — that’s part of the isolation that the rest of her housemates live with — even though many of the others were born in the United States. But mostly, I think, the reason I don’t hear about this is not because I don’t speak Spanish well, but because people don’t talk about this in any language. Rents in my neighborhood seem to be $3000 a month for a two-bedroom, while in my same neighborhood, a carwash done by hand by three guys working diligently costs only $5. Where can those carwash guys possibly afford to live?
In my friend’s house in Oceanside, there are two adults living in a garage with their newborn twins. They crack the garage door open to get ventilation. There are no windows in that garage. I keep thinking about those twins, that family. I cannot imagine raising infants in a garage. How do they nap? How do they bathe? How does anyone get any quiet? They’re not homeless, but they almost might as well be.
There are three babies living in this house (counting the twins in the garage), and also one two-year-old with visitation rights who is there most of the time, and also two elementary-age kids, who – despite a few years in the Oceanside public schools – still don’t speak English. All those kids’ parents adds up to nine adults in this house, I think, although it might be seven: I started to lose track, really. There is only one kitchen. There is only one bathroom.
I don’t know what the fuck to do with this information. I helped my friend find a much better room. But what about her housemates? Or those infant twins?
