Mommy's Pen

A writer's notes on family

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On Empathy, Luck and Gratitude

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I get out of the car and walk up the driveway. Ben meets me at the door. He is shaking.

“Everyone I know is okay,” he says with strange emphasis, “But there’s been an accident. John hit someone head-on and the person died.”

John (not his real name) is someone Ben works with. I know without asking that he must have been driving a very big truck.

I sit down on the steps and Ben tells me a few more details. Then he goes to the back yard to chop wood and collect himself. I head inside.

As the door closes behind me I hear Nora calling, “It’s time to WIPE!” She’s been pooping while we talked.

“Okay, I’m coming!”

“Mommy, are you home?”

“Yes, I am,” I call back in a sing-song voice as I kick off my shoes. I have never been happier to be around to wipe my daughter’s bottom.

It could have been Ben driving a big truck and unable to stop in time as an oncoming car crossed the center line.

It could have been me speeding toward a dump truck. It could have been my fatal lapse in judgment, trying to sneak a quick look at my phone.

What a great gift it is when danger gets just close enough to wake us up, but not fuck us up.

I tear some paper from the roll and bend over my daughter and let myself be grateful. Grateful to be momentarily safe and warm, grateful for a husband who shakes in empathy for a friend and a stranger.

I remind myself never to fall into the trap of thinking that my family has been spared for some special purpose. It hasn’t.

We’ve just been lucky so far.

Lucky, lucky, lucky.

Thanks, thanks, thanks.

May luck and gratitude be with you in the season to come.

 

 

Dear Santa, I Can’t Stop Thinking About You

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Today’s guest post brought to you by my six-year-old’s obsession with Christmas, small animals and magic “cases.”

That’s right, it’s August and Nora’s already two revisions deep into her Santa letter…

Dear Santa,

I love you very much. Thank you for my candy wand last year.

I am now six.

I would LOVE a guinea pig and a cage and a parrot. But I want the parrot in a cage, too, please Santa.

And also a quilt and a pillow, a set of bean bags and a very, very humongous trampoline with a big huge net and a staircase so you may climb up. And make sure it’s soap and water proof.

Dear Santa, I really, really love the bed tent you got me last year. I’d really like a big set of bean bags and an instrument room. It’s a big room you can go in and play music in.

And a bunk bed with three levels of height.

And cases you may throw and they turn into whatever you are thinking about and they are disposable once you have thrown them.

Love,

Nora

A Lesson in Economics

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Nora pulls down one of her pink piggy banks and shakes it mercilessly, the coins clanking against the ceramic in a way that makes parents question their decision to have children with arms.

“Hey,” I interrupt, “I’m going to Freddie’s. Do you want to come?”

She nods with raised eyebrows. “I like to look at the art supplies there.”

Trying to head off the inevitable requests for me to buy glitter, I say, “Why don’t you bring some of the money from your piggy bank and you can buy something for yourself?”

“Okay!”

We talk about how much money to bring. Two dollars may not be enough to get something good, but twenty dollars would be spending too much of her savings at once. We settle on ten dollars.

Over ninety degrees outside, we are sitting in pools of sweat by the time we get to the store. I try to dawdle in the garden section, but she grabs me by the hand saying, “Can I lead you to the water section?”

I think she’s hot and wants to buy a bottle of water.

Oh no.

We go straight to the water toy aisle.

Nora is obsessed with water balloons. They bring together so many of her favorite things: rainbow colors, bathing suits and shrieking.

Fred Meyer sells a blue plastic bucket of water balloons and two fillers that connect to a garden hose. She spotted it one day while we were shopping for floaties and goggles. She’s talked about it for a solid month.

She points to the bucket. Six hundred water balloons in a gallon bucket. Six hundred.

“It’s 12.99 and you only brought $10.00.”

She gives my hand a squeeze and says quietly, “I could use all my money and you could help me a little.”

I have flash back to every time I mercilessly manipulated my mother into buying me plastic shit. It takes several moments.

“Let me see this thing,” I say, picking it up; pretending to inspect it for value.

Six hundred water balloons.

Once popped, this means the potential for 1200 little schnitzels of colored plastic littering my backyard.

I look into her expectant little face. “Okay,” I said. “But you have to carry the bucket through the store yourself.”

“I want to carry it,” she beams.

Examining her treasure on the ride home, she blurts, “Hey, they are trying to trick kids! There’s a big hunk of cardboard board in here with pictures of water balloons that aren’t really water balloons.”

“Yeah, but it tells you right on the package that there are six hundred. They just want to make the container look full and un-inflated balloons don’t take up much space in a big bucket.”

“Well, they’re trying to trick kids.”

“They’ll do that,” I say. In my head, I am beginning to formulate an economics slash marketing-to-kids-lecture to keep at the ready.

Later, as I weed the flower beds, she fills water balloons and loads them into her hammock. As she does, she explains that this hammock is her water balloon shop and if I want to participate in a water fight, I’ll need to pay a dollar per balloon, “And it has to be real dollars, mom.”

Six hundred water balloons.

There’s also a class I can take to learn how to fill water balloons, and then a next level course where I learn how to make the balloons themselves. With those skills, there could be job opportunities for me in her water balloon shop.

I wonder if she offers an employee discount, so I don’t have to pay a dollar per balloon.

 

Hope You Like Bison

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Photo credit: lightfoot via morguefile.com

Photo credit: lighfoot via morguefile.com

Sometimes you have something important to get off your chest before you can settle down to rest.

This was the case with Nora last night. She couldn’t sleep until she told me:

Three reasons you shouldn’t try to kill a bison with a spear.

The first reason is that you may not be able to bury the spear deep enough in the bison, or it may simply bounce off the bison, in which case the bison may become angry and ram you.

I can’t remember the second reason and neither could Nora this morning when I asked her for clarification. So, sorry, hope this doesn’t haunt you. If it makes you feel better, I suspect there were only two reasons, and we were both too sleepy to count properly.

The third reason is that you may actually be successful and then what would you do? As Nora put it, “Geez, I hope you like bison! They’re so big some of it might go to waste.”

So, there you go. Once I was in possession of the knowledge, I had to share it with all of you. Mainly because I really need some sleep tonight.

This is a Test

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file000711900263For some reason, I was awake in the middle of night thinking about something a Buddhist nun said.

I was recovering from the flu and sharing a twin bed with a 5-year-old and a 73 pound dog, so it’s no wonder I couldn’t sleep.

I kept thinking of Pema Chodron telling the story of some folks on a Buddhist retreat. One of the retreat attendants was unpopular due to his general negativity. He was bringing the whole group down.

Finally, the group was out on the grounds of the monastery moving rocks or performing some such act of service and the unpopular guy was in a huff about it and would not stop complaining. He finally got so worked up he stormed off, announcing he’d never return.

Everybody cheered.

When the monk in charge found out about it, he went out and found the man and brought him back.

The monk was paying the guy to be there.

Because of course, the biggest test of one’s ability to practice lovingkindness, a major precept in Buddhism, is to see if you can do it even with people who get under your skin.

So, this little story was playing in my head on a loop that night (as important bits of subconscious have a tendency to do when we are half asleep).

Finally, I drifted deeper and slept until morning.

I woke up before everyone else, and is my habit, I checked email before I was fully awake.

And there I saw a Facebook friend request from a person who is my annoying guy at the monastery.

I closed my eyes for a moment in rueful recognition, shook my head, smiled, and hit “accept.”