Play: Even Steven, fair and square

One day when I was eight and my brother was four, as I sat in my third grade classroom laboring over my cursive letters and erasing holes in my math worksheets, my mother and my brother spent a fantastically fun day at Showbiz Pizza.

Showbiz Pizza was our Chuck E. Cheese and a place I had been only once, for a friend's extravagant birthday party.Hearing from my happy, blond bowl-cutted little brother about his exciting day, seeing his telltale helium balloon bobbing merrily in our living room, I felt stabbed in my pizza and skee ball-loving heart. My mother, hoping that I might respond rationally, downplayed the whole thing: he'd only had a hot dog, just a dollar's worth of tokens, they'd found the balloon in the ladies room.

None of it mattered to me. For months, I simmered over the two of them and their failure to spend their days sitting quietly on the living room couch waiting for the school bus to bring me home and signal the all clear to resume activity. For years, I included that day in my mental list of family slights.

It all ended last week with a  double chocolatey chip frappuccino.

I was out with Little E trying to kill time before we had to go home to the guys who were installing our cabinets and who tend to greet my midday return by smiling at me in a tolerant-but-just-barely way that makes me feel like I am their teacher and I have just invited myself to join their lunch table. Out of desperation for something to do, in the belief that I deserved a reward for my four hours of work and for putting up with the inconvenience of increasing my counter space, I decided that the conditions merited a mocha frappucinno.

As I steered toward Starbucks, I began to falter. Last spring during a frappuccino happy hour promotion, I had inadvertently (and ridiculously) gotten the girls hooked. A trip to Starbucks while Big E toiled in the classroom would be a jab to her heart, I knew, but I really wanted that drink. I realized then how my mother must have felt when, trying to entertain a preschooler and likely bored herself, she sought solace in a midday quickie at Showbiz Pizza. I decided that I couldn't just sit home and wait for the school bus, that Big E could get hers another time.

Torn between not wanting to hurt Big E with the knowledge of all the frappuccino-fueled fun that her sister and I would have that day, and not wanting to enourage overt dishonesty, I concocted a fiction that I thought would serve us all: I told Little E that sometimes if hearing about something would make someone sad, we should spare that person the upset and not tell her at all.

You can, of course, imagine the upset that ensued the next morning when the girls piled into the backseat for the ride to school and Big E saw in her sister's cupholder that telltale cup, with its taunting mermaid and haze of whipped cream residue. She was appeased only by the promise of her own trip to Starbucks that weekend.

And when that trip came to pass, Little E was furious to be left behind and feigned total ignorance of the concept of fairness and equity. More promises were made, and one day soon we will all be going to Chuck E. Cheese.

Fair's fair.

Unpacking

From the time that I was in fifth grade until I started college, my family would pack into the station wagon each summer for our annual vacation week.  Over the years we took a lot of trips to Washington, D.C., spent a cloudy week in Montreal, tried Williamsburg, Virginia, and racked up some free nights in my grandmother's Florida condo.

I remember the monuments and museums, sure, but the comedy of the family travel drama tends to overshadow the travelogue.When my younger brother and I reminisce about these trips we talk about the time that my mother burst into tears upon first sight of our dingy Holiday Inn room and made us spend the rest of the night driving around searching fruitlessly for a new room, or the time she forced us on a sweaty march through site of the Battle of Bull Run and the ensuing interfamilial blowout rivaled the war between the states for hurt feelings and residual tension.

This talk always shocks my mother.  Though she did her fair share of fuming in traffic, weeping over accommodations and threatening to shut the whole trip down, her memories center around family togetherness and the sense of shared adventure. Until I became a mother I thought she was pretending not to remember the messier moments, but now I know that just as nature protects the species by dulling women's memories of the pain of childbirth, it protects the great tradition of the family vacation by filtering mothers' memories of the trips through a soft focus lens.

Though on our recent family vacation, I threatened more than once to call the whole thing off, by the time we hit the Delaware Memorial Bridge on our return trip, the frustrations, resentments and various sore spots I'd developed through the trip began to slip away. Though I'd tearfully apologized to my husband more than once during the trip for inflicting this expensive week and a half of punishment on us all, I turned to him as I drove across the bridge and sighed, satisfied, "Well, that was a nice trip."

I was telling the truth, because as I sped us up I-95, the hour that we spent driving around D.C. trying without a map to locate the zoo morphed from infuriating to humorous.  I remembered pointing out the Capitol to the girls each of the 15 times we looped past it, but not so much the tears of frustration that sprung forth somewhere after the tenth sighting. I smiled at the memory of my husband offering to run into a medical center in a questionable neighborhood for directions despite the fact that it housed only a detox center, an STD clinic and a psychiatric emergency room, and glazed over the part where I told him that if he dared to leave his wife and daughters in that parking lot I would be forced to lock him out of the car.

I thought back on the evening I spent getting reacquainted with a close high school friend I hadn't seen since college.  We sat with our husbands and watched our children play together in her very grown up home in Florida, far from our high school days in Central Massachusetts, and yet she was as fun and comfortable a presence as she'd been half a lifetime ago. On that drive back north I let slip away the hours leading up to our visit in which I'd been seized by high school-era anxiety about my clothes, my weight, my hair and the ridiculous spoiler on the back of our rental car.  And I tried to let go the haunting feeling I'd had woken with the morning after the visit that if high school me had been sitting next to me on that couch she'd have been less than impressed and not at all understanding about the rental car.

I remembered our visit to the Nickelodeon Hotel, the grand finale of the vacation, for the thrill the girls got from sleeping in their Spongebob-themed room and not for their teary souvenir demands.  The woman who crowded onto a small bench with us in the lobby during check-in and immediately began muttering angrily to herself and scratching as if infested became another travel anecdote punchline and not cause to search the suite so aggressively for bedbugs that Little E refused to sleep under her covers and would only allow us to drape her with a towel.

It is likely that someday my daughters will sit all grown up at my table finishing off Thanksgiving desserts and laughing about the time I used being desperately lost in D.C. to point out to their father why we really should have smart phones.  They may mock my shouting about how lucky they should consider themselves to have the kind of parents who would take them on vacation and shake their heads at the ridiculousness of dragging two young girls around a sweltering southern college campus so we could show them where we ate, where we went to class, where we lived, where we studied, where we bought books, where we went to parties, where we got our mail, and on and on.

If this happens I will probably remind them of bobbing in warm gulf waters, spotting dolphins, riding waterslides, seeing elephants feed and sitting in the gazebo on the campus pond watching the ducks land, but I hope that I'll also appreciate the humor in their memories. And I hope that they'll someday plan their own family vacations, so as to to prove to me that they weren't too traumatized by ours.

The Road Trip, Revised

Right now I'm feeling thankful for the surge in the bed bug population, high gas prices and Little E's recent claims of car sickness.

These are the things that convinced me that the road trip I'd planned for this summer was a really bad plan.  When we take off on our summer tour of the hot and humid states, the driving part --the part where I planned to learn to love the journey as much as the destination-- will be truncated by half.

We'll still stop at my husband's parents' beach house at the Jersey Shore, not the fist-pumping part but the part that is apparently referred to as the Irish Riviera.  There we'll negotiate bizarre traffic patterns banning left turns and will feel like underachievers when every other couple we see has at least four children in tow.

We'll still stop in Richmond, where we'll drag the kids around the campus where we met, because, of course, kids love brick buildings and their parents' reminiscences.

And then, and this is the best part, we will get on an airplane and make the rest of the trip to Florida in two hours --a trip that I originally thought would take two days.

I will enjoy sipping from the warm Diet Coke balanced on my knee in my cramped quarters on the plane and I will enjoy watching reality show repeats on the seatback screen. Mostly, I will enjoy hurtling through the air 30,000 feet above the motels along I-95 where I'd have peeled back the sheets and studied the mattress for signs of infestation, above the countless stinking, dingy public toilets I'd have had to endure with the girls, and above the hundred squealing arguments that would have spilled forth from the backseat.

I will, in my way, enjoy the journey as much as the destination.

Play: Home alone

When I was a child, I prided myself on my long blond hair, which garnered me many compliments from smiling grown-ups and which my mother would threaten to cut off every morning as I screamed and cried with every little tug and snarl.

My mother promised me then that someday I would have a little girl who screamed and cried and threw a fit no matter how gentle I was as I brushed her hair and then I would understand. And, yes, here I am with not one but two little girls who scream and cry and kick and yell every morning when I brush their hair. 

The other day after my husband and I smirked at the long list of instructions that we would have to carry out to dogsit my parents' coddled Boston Terrier, my mother promised me that someday we, too, would have no children around and would devote ourselves similarly to a dog.  I rolled my eyes, but I know that she's probably right. Since becoming a mother, I haven't done well in my children's absence.

Officially, I want my children to be independent and brave and capable of thriving even when they are away from me.  I also like to think that my marriage is built around more than just our shared children, and that I can enjoy my husband's company even away from the children's presence.  I just haven't done a great job of acting on these convictions.

It's not that I haven't spent time away from my kids, it's that I haven't spent it wisely.  When Big E was a baby my husband and I longed so badly for a few childfree days that we actually booked a trip to Vegas for when she was 18 months old.  The anticipation of the trip was glorious. Imagining leisurely meals out and late nights that involved activities more glamorous than trying to quiet our sleep-averse daugher got us through months of temper tantrums and diaper changes.  By the time we had to leave her with my parents and board our plane, however, our little escape seemed less glamorous and more neglectful.  I spent our few days away so racked with guilt and longing for my daughter that I actually started lactating after a six-month hiatus. Perhaps the least glamorous I've ever felt.

This past weekend I proved that even six years after that miserably failed attempt, I'm still no good at appreciating my kid-free time. My in-laws were in town and on their second night here they offered to take the kids so that we could go out to dinner. I was more than happy to take them up on it but was itching to call and check in with them before we even made it through our entrees.  My husband helped me resist the urge to call, but when we ended letting them spend the night with my in-laws in their hotel room he couldn't keep me from wasting the rest of the night worrying that Big E would miss me and crying because Little E wouldn't miss me enough. It's possible that I should have skipped that second Stella at dinner.

The next morning my husband left early for a class he's taking and I had the house to myself.  I could have read a book, done some writing, started backing up all the photos on my computer like I've been meaning to; instead, I made elaborate lunches for the girls to bring to the beach that day and then I sat down, folded my hands in my lap and waited for them to get home.  Also, I berated myself for my complete inability to be a fully-functioning individual without my children by my side.

In a couple of weeks we'll be sending both girls off for a few of nights of camping in my parents' backyard. Those nights of freedom have been getting me through the screaming and tears that comes with brushing out two heads of beach-snarled hair. This time I swear I won't waste my child-free time.  I already have plans to clean and rearrange the girls room. . . which is probably not necessarily a step in the right direction.

Play: Their mother's gardens

"I notice that it is only when my mother is working in her flowers that she is radiant, almost to the point of being invisible except as Creator: hand and eye. She is involved in work her soul must have. Ordering the universe in the image of her personal conception of Beauty.

Her face, as she prepares the Art that is her gift, is a legacy of respect she leaves to me, for all that illuminates and cherishes life. She had handed down respect for the possibilities - and the will to grasp them."

--from Alice Walker's "In Search of Our Mother's Gardens" 

When I read that essay as a senior in college, I found the subject matter as tedious as the microscopic type and tissue-thin pages of the Norton Anthology in which it appeared.  Sure, I was all for women expressing their creativity, especially oppressed minorities, but gardening, to my mind, fell strictly in the realm of ladies like my grandmother and was thus irrelevant to young, vital, important me. 

When I was young, my grandmother grew lush flower gardens that lined her driveway.  She spent many hours teaching me the names of her plants and hoped that they would someday be useful.  When I was in high school an applying to college she would wistfully suggest that after spending all those early years learning the difference between a pansy and a petunia I might want to become a florist.  I nodded politely, but not encouragingly, at the suggestion which seemed at the time an incredibly frivolous way to spend a life.

Years later, when I was just starting out in teaching at a school where most of my colleagues were on the opposite end of their careers, I used to spend my lunch break listening to the older ladies talking about weeding dahlias and pruning roses. One of them explained to me that though her rose bushes were a lot of work, she thought they were an important tool in demonstrating to her children, high school age at the time, the beauty of nature.  Back then, this struck me as unnecessary.  Everyone knows what a rose looks like, how is seeing one in the front yard going to be any different from seeing one wrapped in cellophane and tossed in a bucket at the supermarket?   

You know where this is going.  With becoming a mother and a homeowner, I have also become a gardener.  My beds are nothing compared to my grandmother's and I've never pruned a rose bush.  I am certainly not a radiant gardener like Walker's mother, but then nor do people come from miles around to admire my work as they did hers.  Really, I'm still not great at planning out a garden, often realizing after a thing takes root that a may not have picked the best spot for it.  Also, dirt grosses me out and worms occasionally make me gag. 

Still, I feel compelled to open up the earth and embellish it with a living thing that I will then nourish and nurture and endeavor to help in fulfilling its promise to be beautiful.  And though I doubt that they'll grow up to be florists or landscape architects, I want my girls to be a part of that. 

I'll likely never be able to teach them what a dahlia is as I have no idea myself, but there are some more important things I hope I might pass on:

You may never own a home with an indoor pool like that classmate whose birthday party Big E attended a while back, but you can always plant a few of those rose bushes that grow on the dunes and imagine yourself beachside.

Though last night's dinner came from a takeout menu, that needn't be your only source.



A little dirt never hurt anybody. . . but you really must wash up before dinner.

And, most important of all, even when you have no confidence in your ability to propagate a lawn, throw out some seed and you just might end up with a lush, verdant patch of loveliness like I did.

Play: Footballer's Wife



 



I know I've complained about soccer's pernicious creep into my life (and maybe a bit hyperbolically by invoking 1984), but I survived our first double soccer weekend of the season --Big E on Saturday and my husband on Sunday.  I'm trying to keep a more positive outlook, which in spring is made easier by the fact that the weather is getting warmer rather than colder and high school soccer isn't in season so my husband's coaching duties are restricted to Saturday afternoons.

Of course, I still have some gripes.  For one thing, calling the field the pitch and cleats boots makes me uncomfortable in the same manner that Madonna's and Gwyneth Paltrow's British accents do.  I also struggle to find patience for any game that can end in a tie and in which the referee adds injury time at the end seemingly on a whim.  I've always been a basketball girl, and in my world all games have winners and playing time is kept with precision and transparency.  I won't even get into the business of what happens when an injury occurs; suffice it to say it's all very well-mannered and involves passing to the other team and clapping.  Weird.

But, despite my complaints there is at least one thing I love about soccer, the thing that makes it okay to drive over an hour and cross state lines to watch a game that ends in a one-one tie.  What I really love is my husband's Sunday morning soccer alter ego.

My husband is a genuinely nice guy most of the time. He takes the first shower every morning so that I get a few extra minutes of sleep and uninterrupted hairdrying time.  He is effusively appreciative of my cooking and doesn't complain about cleaning up my mess in the kitchen. He delights the girls, though probably not the dog, by using our Boston Terrier as a puppet to act out scenarios like Cleo is a supervillian, Cleo is a lifeguard and Cleo is the Great Cleodini.  He is a kind and patient coach to Big E's soccer team and reminds them before every game that their goal is to work hard and have fun.  

But if you only knew him from watching him play soccer, you would guess none of this. That is because my husband --the man who tucks me in at night and then irons my clothes for the next day-- is that guy on the field tugging on people's jerseys, throwing discreet elbows and generally raising the ire of the opposing team.  He is the guy who provokes his opponents to say within earshot of the wives and children on the sideline words that make even me a little uncomfortable, and he is the guy who can feign utter shock and innocence when the man who is marking him retaliates with an angry shove.       

At a game this past summer the wife of one of his teammates turned to me and marvelled, "He's just like a bull in a china shop.  I mean, you go up against him, you're on the ground."

I opened my mouth to explain to her that it really wasn't like that, that I really hadn't married a brute, but instead I nodded in agreement.  "Yup," I said, accepting the compliment.

Maybe he is the guy that the other team delighted in crashing to the dirt in front of where the girls and I sat on Sunday, but he's also the guy who turned to me a few plays later as he stood on the sideline awaiting the ball for the throw in and reminded me that I could wear his jacket if I was chilly.  That tenderness, along with the toughness to get right up and dust off after the dirty hit (and, honestly, to inspire the dirty hit in the first place), is what I love.  It's how I survive a double soccer weekend.

Play: The slippery slope from intention to reality

Even before I had children, I was an expert in child rearing.  No, especially before I had children, I was an expert in child rearing. Okay, okay.  Only before I had children was I an expert in child rearing.

Back in my mid-twenties, I had such plans for my hypothetical children.  They would wear gender neutral clothing and scorn television for playing happily with decor-friendly wooden toys.  Their interests would include sitting quietly in restaurants and waiting rooms, as well as eating whatever I served them.

There were a few things for which I, as a pretend mother, would simply not stand.  My children would never kick the back of airplane seat.  Not once.  Also, they wouldn't require portable DVD players because on long trips they would be content to play "I-Spy", or just gaze at the scenery, or --worst case scenario-- bliss out on Dramamine.  Also, we would never, ever become one of those Disney families that heads to the Magic Kingdom every vacation.  My hypothetical children and I would enjoy authentic experiences, and they would understand that there was more to life than their personal entertainment.

Right.

Ten years later, I have two actual flesh and blood children, who do on occasion speak above a whisper in public.  I also have a house full of sparkly pink tutus and a playroom full of plastic.  I know where to find an episode of Spongebob at any hour of the day and I've been known to hop up from the dinner table to make a pb&j (or to demand that my husband jump up and do it).  And we've been to Walt Disney World, um, a few times.

The first time seemed innocent enough. I mean every little girl does to Disney World at least once in her life, right?  Who knew it was a gateway to a much darker habit?

After my parents heard what a great time the girls had the first time, they sprang for a Disney trip for the whole family the following summer.

Fearful of turning into one of those families, my husband and I vowed that we would not return to Walt Disney World the following summer.  We booked a trip to Southern California and then, discovering a loophole in our oath, decided to spend our a couple of days, including our tenth anniversary, at Disneyland.

Incidentally, spending your milestone anniversary at a sweaty theme park with two tired kids is not as enchanting as it sounds.  However, the couple in front of us on the line for the Tomorrowland Speedway thought it was the height of romance. They were thirteen.

And tomorrow we will pack up our portable DVD players and board a plane to Orlando. Try as I might, it's likely that seatbacks will be kicked (apparently a hazard of child-sized legs).  This time the trip is a Christmas gift from my in-laws, and, I swear, the last visit for a very, very long while.

This summer we will, instead, head out on a road trip in search of that authentic experience my hypothetical children so appreciated.  Also, we will surprise the girls with a couple of nights in Orlando at the Nickelodeon Hotel, Little E's lifelong dream.  Please don't judge as harshly as 25-year-old me would.

Play: It was a very good day

Yesterday was one of those days.  No, not one of those.  It was the good kind, one of those where all of the parts, big and small, come together to make the kind of day that is so soaringly happy that you almost feel sad in knowing that most other days will not feel as good. 

It was the kind of day I dreamt of when motherhood was still hypothetical.

There were excited preparations.

There was family and rides on the same shoulders that held me aloft when I was four.

There was Big E's spring skating show and celebratory flowers.

There was Little E's very first signature (and her proud big sister's embellishment).

 There was Chinese take-out.

And there was homemade ice cream pie.

There was also my fortune cookie, which told me this: Don't be pushed by your problems.  Be led by your dreams. 

When Big E has a momentary slip in her skating routine I jump up and wait anxiously for her to get off the ice, afraid she'll be crushed.  I stay up nights and fret over my four-year-old's college prospects. 

But I dream of days like yesterday. 

Thanks to the good folks at Szechuan Taste for reminding me not to let my pursuit of these dream days be overshadowed by puzzling over my problems --big and small, real and imagined.

Play: The view from the sideline

Little E returned to swim lessons this weekend after a year-long hiatus.  It was her first class without parent participation and I went to bed Friday night thinking that I was relieved that I wouldn't have to wedge my pale winter weight into last summer's suit and start my weekend in a chilly pool.

Then I woke up in the middle of the night with jiggling blob of anxiety filling my chest.

It was tough when I was shunted to the sideline of Big E's activities.  At her first kids-only story hour while all of the other mothers chatted or browsed the library, I set myself up on a chair about three feet from the door to the activity room and popped up every few minutes to be sure she wasn't sobbing disconsolately in my absence or being quietly tortured by the other children.

It's even harder to watch Little E shed her Mommy and Me activities.  This may be because when Big E began leaving me on the sideline, I still had a baby on my hip.  It may be, too, that, though I often imagine Little E as a second coming of Big E, they are very different children.

I want to be the calm and reasonable mother, the one who manages to maintain some perspective as she watches from the sideline, who loves her kids but knows that the minor disappointment of losing a soccer game or not passing on to the next swimming group will be good preparation for the big bad world.  I am not there yet with Little E.

A couple of weeks after we sat in a meeting to help write Little E's IEP, my husband and I watched as her skating teacher sighed impatiently at her slow shuffling and then steered her by the shoulders to a lower group, demoting her on the spot.  The fire that welled up within me right there in the bleachers burned so strong that had I known her license plate number I'd likely have fled to the parking lot to do some damage. 

In the absence of that information, I sent death rays onto the ice and my husband gushed pointedly to the teacher of the lower group about how pleased we were to have her back.  And while I can admit that Little E was much happier back in that group, where the teacher seemed to actually like her and the lesson consisted of more than spending 45 minutes of skating from one side of the rink and back, it hasn't really squelched that fire. I still glare snake eyes at the old teacher and whisper snarkily to my husband, "Check out Speedy Gonzalez there in the Bruins jersey.  Good thing our daughter isn't there to slow him down."

When I thought about signing her up for a gymnastics class, the kids-only follow-up to the parent-tot class she'd enjoyed last spring, my heart began to race at the slew of what-ifs that I conjured before I'd even asked her if she was interested.  What if she couldn't do it and the other kids laughed at her?  What if the instructor rolled her eyes?  What if Little E told them all she was a puppy and got on her hands and knees and growled at them the way she does several times a day at home? 

But on Saturday, despite some impassioned protest in the locker room, she was great.  She did everything her teacher told her to: slid into the water, dipped in her chin, paddled across the pool. In between she held tight to the side of the pool, bobbing and blue-lipped, and beamed up at us on the sideline. 

It now occurs to me that she's spent a lot of time there herself over the last four years while her sister took center stage. So, I'm (bravely) planning to sign her up for gymnastics during the next session. 

And we're taking a needed break from skating.

Play: What happens in Weirs Beach

Nine years ago my husband and I spent our February vacation week in Las Vegas.  We dressed up, gambled unsuccessfully, ate in restaurants with no children's menu, drove a convertible to the Hoover Dam, and saw Tom Jones live in concert.

Yesterday we commemorated our long ago trip with a day at the Guinness-confirmed World's Largest Arcade in Weirs Beach, New Hampshire --sort of like a kiddy Vegas.  Actually, as it is in a part of New Hampshire that sorely lacks the glamour of Vegas, it's more a kiddy Reno. Maybe a kiddy Laughlin? 

The arcade was a two-hour drive north, only a day trip but completely outside of our realm.  As snowy mountains came into view and the road dipped down next to a frozen lake dotted with ice shanties, my husband remarked, "This is a real adventure." 

And in that instant he reframed the day for me.  What I had seen as a way to pass a winter Sunday, a trip to a glorified Chuck E. Cheese, was lit with the spark of the unknown.  I love adventures, the novelty, the possibility, the discovery, and suddenly this was one.

The arcade, like Vegas, was a lot of bad carpet, dimly-lit rooms and people with cups full of change shuffling around glassy-eyed.  The girls and I left my husband in a dark upstairs room filled with towering rows of classic arcade games and blaring Boy George.  In this room, which intimidated me just as much as those roped-off areas in Vegas where high rollers play inscrutable games like Baccarat, my husband passed some time with Ms. Pac Man and recorded the high score on Galaxian.

Instead of spending the night blowing our cash at video blackjack in hopes of scoring a few free Heinekens, the girls and I spent the afternoon dropping $20 winning the tickets that we traded in for two ring pops at the end of the day.  Rather than spinning around on a thrillride 1000 feet above the Strip, my husband and I watched the girls take turns on mini ferris wheel that lifted them at least 5 feet.

On the way home, we did not have kobe beef carpaccio for dinner.  Instead my husband made a quick turn in to a strip mall "diner" with a rusted pink Cadillac for an awning, and before I could question the cleanliness or the menu he reminded me meaningfully, "This is an adventure."  The sides featured cottage cheese, mashed turnips and pickled beets and every plate came adorned with a frill of kale and an orange slice, and save for the newborn that the elderly hostess was cradling we were the youngest people there by 30 years.  We had breakfast for dinner and it was delicious.

Before we had kids our exploits used to go well beyond Vegas: snorkeling in foreign waters, flying off to Europe, bargaining with street vendors, navigating public transportation without the benefit of understanding even the alphabet in which our directions were written, riding a tuk-tuk through crowded Bangkok streets, riding an elephant through a Balinese forest.  I loved these trips, loved the thrill of stepping off the plane and breathing in the air of a place that I'd never been before and where I knew not a soul.

There are days when I really, really miss the grand scale of our old adventures.  But yesterday was not one of those days.

Play: A love letter to Ikea

When I woke on Saturday morning, I was confronted by a week's worth of untouched mess and clutter and the nagging sense that I had definitely missed some vomit in one of the many middle of the night emergency cleaning efforts I'd conducted as a result of the stomach flu that swept through the house last week. 

I had, in fact, spent much of the week searching out errant puke, along with working, shoveling and feeling not quite so achy, nauseated and awful that I could justify staying in bed, but enough so that I wished everyday that I had.  So, yearning to be held in strong, competent hands and convinced of the curative powers of Swedish hospitality, I popped an ibuprofen, packed up the girls and headed an hour south to Ikea.

I wondered on the way down whether I were delirious.  Normally, I would consider a shopping trip of this magnitude  --long drive, sprawling furniture mecca-- a full family affair, but with my husband stilll suffering through the thick of the illness, I was on my own.  I'd badgered promises of best behavior from both girls, but I was skeptical.

Oh, Ikea, how ever could I have doubted you?

As we ascended the escalator to the showroom floor, our pockets stuffed with free golf pencils, I felt the burdens of a long, dark winter slip away.  How could I not find hope in a place that so aptly demonstrates how fabulously one can live in less than 600 square feet?  There is something miraculous about furniture so capacious as to conceal all evidence of the clutter of human occupation and yet so compact as to come in a box that fits in the back of my car.

Comforting, too, is Ikea's universality.  The bunkbed that delights the girls on our jaunt through the showroom probably does the same for little girls in Paramus and Paris.  I get just as much pleasure now knowing that while they're at the Jersey Shore Ronnie and Sammie sleep in beds that match my Ikea Malm dressers and nighstand, as I did ten years ago on recognizing my own Ikea cafe table in an actual cafe in Budapest.

By the time we were enjoying our reasonably priced lunch in the restaurant, it was easy to pretend that we had somehow escaped dismal, snow-battered Massachusetts and found ourselves in happy, efficient Stockholm.  I was so absorbed by the fantasy that I twice left the girls alone at the table while I went for napkins and utensils.  I might hesitate to do this in the mall food court but couldn't imagine how anything bad could happen there where wheeled carts are provided for maneuvering heavy trays and tastefully designed signs pleasantly explain the personal benefits to bussing your own table.

However, because the Ikea shopping experience is sometimes more satisfying than the owning experience, there was also the matter of replacing the mid-beam of our bed, broken by the girls' over-zealous jumping. 
Browsing the showroom, eating in the restaurant, shopping in the marketplace: sure, these were delightful, but the self-serve warehouse was where I feared our whole trip might fall apart.

Again, my doubt was unfounded.

The lyrically named Skorva was in plentiful stock, light enough to carry under my arm, packed for easy travel, and about $40 cheaper than I had imagined.  After we'd stocked up on Swedish snacks for the ride home, an automated ramp called a "Travelator" bore us gently back to earth, cart and all.

Thank you, Ikea.  I needed that.

Play: A day in Girl World

I don't have a lifelong friend --the kind who's known me since the sandbox, who would have been the only choice to be my maid of honor-- but I want that for my girls. I blame my own lack of this friend on school transfers, long-distance moves and the passage of time.  But I'll be damned if these things will come in between Big E and her first friend, M.

Though they live in different towns and go to different schools I have made it my mission to ensure that M really is Big E's BF-F.  I make sure that they get together every month or so and with that in mind, I took Big E, Little E and M to the mall to see Tangled this weekend.

Big E and M first met in the toddler room at their daycare when Big E was not even two and M was six months older.  That half a year put M a grade ahead in school and a notch higher in sophistication; with each get together that last part seems a little more apparent.  This time I noticed it as soon as I picked her up, when her entire conversation with Big E was whispered behind a concealing hand and punctuated with giggles. 

And quickly I realized that the open, ingenuous days of pre-school and kindergarten were gone.  M and Big E are headed to Girl World.

This became even more clear as we walked through the mall to the theater and M noted that she "loved, loved" the tank top in the window at Old Navy, Big E, whose wardrobe preference is whatever I lay out for her (with special enthusiasm for shirts with cute dogs on them)  nodded in solemn agreement.  With time to kill before the movie I agreed to take them into the oddly-named Justice for Girls, a tweeny-bopper chain M had deemed "so perfect."  The two of them pawed earnestly through the racks and discussed the relative merits of glitter and sequins but gave me a little hope when they blushed and giggled at the racks of festively patterned training bras.

They are hovering at the threshold, singing along expertly to the Jonas Brothers in the car but unself-consciously holding hands all through the mall.  M, the second-grader, is a farther gone than first-grader Big E.  She wears Ugg boots to Big E's OshKosh snow boots and dishes out plentiful advice of varying value.  To Little E: "Never start smoking.  It's a terrible habit."  (So true!)  To Big E:  "You should always hang all your hair over your shoulder and tilt your head like this." (Impractical and not terribly becoming...)  Little E, I fear, is not as far behind as I would hope; recently she gravely announced that she would be giving up red as her favorite color, as it was time for her to like pink.

It is not just that it is bittersweet to watch Big E growing up, it is that I remember my own years in Girl World and I worry.  I'm hoping that the extensive character education curriculum at her school will spare her some of the girl-on-girl nastiness that was business as usual in my elementary school. Just last week she chatted about empathy with a level of understanding that I think I only developed myself in the last few years. I feel cautiously optimisitic on this front, but even if the girls manage to play nice, there's still all the rest. 

There are  movies like Tangled, which, while enteraining, sent some dubious messages.  For example, when the woman who says she's your mother tells you she knows what's best for you, you may find that she's simply an evil old lady who stole you from your real mother, a sweet, beautiful, eternally-young queen.  Or, when you meet a roguish bad boy, you will effortlessly charm him and with love and understanding reveal his heart of gold and, naturally, live happily ever after.  Neither outcome is very likely in my experience. Oh, and there's long blond hair is magical and when it is not, it turns brown.  (Note to Big E:  Your long blond hair will turn brown, and hopefully you'll manage more gracefully than I did when it happened to me.)

Of course nothing in Tangled even compares to the trailer we watched for the upcoming Disney teen movie Prom, which proclaims that prom night is "about who you are" and "who you are going to be."  Thank God this movie didn't exist when I attended my own prom, which would have spoken very unflattering about who I was and augered terribly about who I was to become.

At the end of the day, after the girls had insisted that we stop to watch enviously as girls not much older than they flirted with the camera and swayed to bad techno at a "Model and Talent Search" in the food court, we headed to back to the car.  There I struggled mightily to wedge the three of them in the back seat with a car seat and two boosters.  And though M happily chirped that she hadn't used a booster in years, I continued to mutter G-rated curses under my breath and search for the seatbelt socket.

I had a government-approved product that promised to protect these girls.  I have a feeling that it won't be that simple in the years to come, and I wasn't about to give it up that easily.

Play: I am not my shoes

I have always been willing to sacrifice for my footwear.

In college I had a pair of black suede Mary Janes.  They had a slight platform that made them especially cute with little skirts and slick soles that made them dangerously incompatible with my hilly, brick-laned campus.  I first felt their peril in front of the dining hall when my feet flew out from under me and I cracked my shin open on the brick curb just before landing flat on my back --to the amusement of the dinner crowd.  I was wearing those same shoes later that semester, when I left a good-sized chunk of my left knee stuck to a brick walkway on my way back from class.  And still I kept the shoes.  I have scars to this day, but damn did they ever make my legs look skinny.

I have negotiated Parisian cobblestones, eight-hour teaching days and 18 months of pregnancy in pointy-toed high heels.  Late in my pregnancy with Big E, I had to attend an orientation meeting for the natural birth center where I planned to have her.  Just before the meeting, the wool-sweatered, Birkenstock-wearing earth mother in front of me turned, stared at my feet and sniffed to her husband, "I didn't know there would be hospital people here."  When I pushed out a nine-pounder after 24 excruciating hours of drug-free labor, I had half a mind to track down Ms. Flat-Foot Sensible Shoes so I could tell her this: I am not my shoes.

I have spent many a winter morning mincing daintily through snow drifts and parking lot slush all in the interest of arriving at work fashionably shod, and when the girls have managed to drag me out to play in the snow, the best option my shoe wardrobe has offered has been a quick-to-sog pair of old running sneakers.  So this winter, because I'm trying to come to terms with the season and because I've designated play a priority, I came to an uncharacteristic decision: I need a pair of practical, comfortable, weatherproof boots.

The clearance rack at Marshall's tempted me with a heavily-logoed pair of Coach snow boots and a shiny rubber pair with a chunky 2 1/2 inch heel by Kate Spade.  But in my new found spirit of sensible shoes, I opted for a very reasonably priced pair of utilitarian, flat black rubber boots.  They've served me well already: tromping up the sledding hill, strolling through a slushy New Year's Day at the zoo, walking the dog along the shore at the beach.

Still, I am keenly aware that they look like something you'd wear to milk a cow or tour a slaughterhouse.  I try to remind myself that I am sacrificing for a good greater than my own footwear vanity.  I try to imagine that I've slipped them on to stroll through a dewy meadow in the English countryside.  But mostly, I tell myself this:  I am not my shoes.

Play: The turd or the treasure

Until last week, I had only been to one water park in my life. From that one day I have two very vivid mental snapshots: one of a fly-infested wound, the other of a lone piece of excrement lying poolside.  And so it surprised even me when the grand gesture that I proposed to alleviate my birthday party guilt was an overnight trip to a local indoor water park to celebrate Little E turning four.

Let me first explain my previous water park experience.  It was Water Country USA, during a family trip to Williamsburg, Virginia the summer before ninth grade.  As was the case with most of that vacation (and most of being 13 in general), I enjoyed it but chose to focus on its least enjoyable aspects. 

My most indelible memories, besides those of the water park, are miserably posing for photos with my head and arms in stocks in Colonial Williamsburg, watching a mulleted couple pass cigarette smoke mouth-to-mouth as they made out in a roller coaster line at Busch Gardens, and leaving much of the skin from my left knee on the sidewalk of my cousins' suburban Jersey neighborhood after tripping during a jog.

The last of these resulted in the gaping wound that after a day of soaking in chlorine attracted a swarm of tiny flies, many of whom became stuck.  I discovered the insects adhered to my flesh only after I spotted a piece of feces abandoned by the edge of the obstacle course pool. 

I still have a scar on my leg from the festering scrape that attracted the flies, but it is that second thing that has really haunted me.  When I told my mother about it at the time, she brushed it off, saying that it had probably been inadvertently dropped from a sagging diaper.  I maintain to this day that it was far too large, perfectly formed, and, well, mature for that to have been the case, and its origins confound me. 

With this close in mind, I stepped into the water park on Thursday night.  As it turned out there were no skinned knees, no flies and, best of all, nary a bowel movement in sight.  And just when it seemed I'd been all wrong about water parks, an enormous bucket perched atop the structure where we stood dumped a torrent of water upon us that nearly swept Little E away.  I now had a new image to add to my previous collection: terrified child, wrapped shivering in a towel and refusing to budge from her lounge chair.

I was tempted to revert to my 13-year-old self, as I often do.  But I realized I had a choice:  I could choose to focus on the bucket-dumping disaster or the fact that I was lounging on a chaise in 80 degree heat on a December night; I could see the turd or the treasure.

I'm proud to say that --at least this time-- I made the right choice.

Play: You know you're a mother when...

You know you're a mother when even a birthday party comes wrapped in guilt.

Big E's first real party, when she turned 3, was a direct result of my guilt about the baby that was about to shatter her attention-soaked little world.  She had some friends over to do craft projects, eat pizza, ransack our home and force their hovering parent to make awkward introductions and small talk.  This was nice and all, but it couldn't quite offset having to share a bedroom, so she we threw her another party with the family.  Then we sent her to school with cupakes.  Then we had a smaller, more intimate party for the three of us.  And I still felt guilty.

By the time her fourth birthday rolled around, I realized that all that baby guilt was unnecessary.  Big E had taken easily to big sisterhood and was proud to have Little E at her party, held in the gymnastics center at the local Y.  Kids bounced on the trampoline, parents walked the balance beam, and I very nearly escaped any feelings of guilt.  I would have called the whole thing a success had it not been for the one little boy who clung to his mother's leg and covered his ears at every loud noise.  I felt bad for the boy, but, having been there myself at many a party, I felt worse for his mother.  And so I fretted for days about whether I'd appropriately communicated my sympathy.

The year she turned five was rough.  Her closest friends had left daycare for kindergarten, but, because of her December birthday, Big E was still there and not too happy about it.  Determined to make sure that she had high attendance at her party, I invited all of the girls in her class and all of her old friends to a party at Build-a-Bear, followed by a restaurant lunch.  It was great, until, as I led a line of teddy bear-toting little girls through the mall, I remembered that not only were there starving children in Africa, but possibly within spitting distance of the mall.  And my daughter was dressed in a tiara and tutu.

Last year's pool party at the Y was fine, and still I woke at 2 a.m. consumed with guilt.  Despite spending the rest of my pre-work sleeping time replaying every minute of the party, I couldn't pinpoint the source of my self-reproach.  Apparently, at that point it was simply habit.

This year Big E has asked to have her party at home.  There will be a craft, pizza and a movie.  The only extravagance, assuming I can pull it off, will be the from-scratch cake decorated to look like a puppy.  I should feel okay about this year's party; I'm fulfilling her wishes while maintaining a reasonable scale. 

My guilt this year comes from doing for one child what I'm not doing for the other. I am not having a full-blown party for Little E.  There are various reasons for this, chief among them the fact that I just don't think she would enjoy it.  Instead, we'll spend the night at a local hotel with an indoor water park and have a family party, where both sets of grandparents can make awkward small talk and I will again attempt the puppy cake.  So as not to deny her the spotlight that I suspect would ruin a party for her, I'm also going to send her to school with goody bags and cake.

I think I'm doing the right thing, and yet I worry that Little E will see it as inequity and that it may breed resentment for her sister, become fodder for a therapy session down the road, or, worse, make her feel less loved.  Here's the truth:  I love them both to a degree so unmeasureable as to make it impossible to compare my love for one to that for the other, yet I love them as individuals.

And I really hope that I'm right to treat them as the individuals that I know them to be.

Play: Share and share alike

Last weekend, I took the girls out for doughnuts before we went to watch my husband play soccer.  As usual they ordered different flavors and then coveted each others', while each jealously guarded her own.  They traded stingy "bites" pinched off between fingernails and then, just after Big E had popped the last of her chocolate frosted into her mouth, Little E requested one last bite.

Big E told her that it was gone but offered her what was left in her mouth, which Little E happily accepted...and enjoyed.  I was disgusted, mortified and, I must admit, touched.

The previous weekend I had focused on giving each girl solo time, and while I enjoyed it, I also chastised myself a fair amount for not doing it frequently enough and then fretted over any irreversible long term damage I had caused them by treating them so often as a package deal.  And yet, here they were willing to cheerfully (and hopefully unnoticed by any other Dunkin' Donuts patrons) share breakfast pastry and saliva.  I chose to see this in the happiest possible light: they really do love each other, so I must have done something right.

This is something that I've actually been noticing a lot recently.  The day before the doughnut incident, I listened to Little E wake up Big E at the crack of dawn by chanting her name over and over and shouting (albeit a bit prematurely), "Wake up, wake up, it's Halloween! Wake up!  Wake up! I need you!"  They sing along together to Phantom Planet as we drive down the highway.  They entertain each other at soccer games with complicated games of pretend.  They have always been sisters, but, to my delight, they are also friends.

I hope that this continues, that even as they get older and busier and collect more friends from outside of the family that they will still be each others' companions.  I hope that they can always play as well together as they do now, that as they grow older they will be for each other the unconditional, truly forever best friend I always imaged a sister would be.

And now that I've come to this heartwarming realization, I hope that I never see Little E eat someone else's pre-masticated food ever again. 

Play: Flying Solo

My very first mental snapshot of Little E is from the second after her birth as I pulled her from the birthing tub.  In that very first instant of seeing my baby, I was focused not on her face --I didn't even notice that it was obscured by the birth membrane-- but on the spot between her legs where I was convinced I would see boy parts. 

We'd opted not to find out gender at the ultrasound, but I was convinced that I was having a boy and was almost as shocked to see a girl as I would have been if the technician had told us it was a boy back at 18 weeks. When I got over my astonishment, I realized that I had given Big E something I had never had but always wanted: a sister.

I grew up with a younger brother and my husband had two older sisters; this territory of same-sex sibling relations is somewhat unfamiliar to us.  We try hard to be conscious to avoid quagmires like unwarranted assumptions, unfair judgements, and unattractive hand-me-downs, but we aren't always vigilant about is making sure that they each get some solo time with us.  Dictated by time constraints or practicality, or as a result of our attempts at fairness, the girls tend to travel as a pack.

This weekend we took a tiny step toward giving the girls a little more solo time.  On Saturday, I took Big E to Starbuck's, inexplicably one of her favorite places, where we got hot chocolate and Chai and split a brownie and on Sunday, while Big E was at a friend's house, my husband and I took Little E to her favorite lunch spot, a grungy local diner.

No magical moments of bonding or spectacular strokes of insight sprung from these outings.  But I think that the solo time was worthwhile.  As much as I cherish the sturdy foundation that we as a family provide each other, I value the individuals, as well.  I'll continue to find opportunities to complement our family time with one-on-one time, so the girls can see how much they each mean to me --together and apart.

Play: Pushing, not plodding

Although our plans for the long weekend included a sport a day (college football on Saturday, over-30 soccer Sunday and the Tufts 10K Monday), it was Friday night's dinner with my friend Carole that got me thinking about the value of sports.

Carole is many things --mother, blogger, career woman-- but not a sports enthusiast. Still, over burgers and beers the conversation turned to what she considers her hyper-competitive nature.  As she bemoaned her need to be the best, my own hypo-competitive personality was thrown into stark relief.

I know that competition spawns excellence. But as it also invites failure and disappointment, I have long retreated to the safe haven of apathy. When a competitive situation arises, I smile politely and slowly back out of the room.  I loved basketball as a kid but gave it up to avoid try-outs.  I withdrew from sorority rush days before it began, unnerved by a roomful of girls scrutinizing me.  I don't fly Southwest anymore; the jostling for position necessitated by their lack of seat assignments gave me a stomachache.

This is not what I want for my girls.  Much as I adhere to the youth soccer league's no score policy, I truly wish that Big E cared enough to keep a running tally.  When I lament her politely abandoning the ball to any defender who challenges her, my husband dismisses my concern by telling me that she's smarter than all of them.  I like to think this is true.  And still, I know from experience that the world is skewed more to those who are first to the ball than those in the top reading group.

I thought maybe this weekend's events would provide me with some teachable moments for the girls:  this is how one cheers on one's alma mater, this is a penalty kick...please don't grow up to be a pushover like your mother. 

The football game, it quickly became clear, would not be the place to inspire an appreciation of competition.  Within the first few minutes, our University of Richmond quarterback threw an interception that resulted in a game-ending injury for him and a touchdown for the other team.  It didn't get better from there.  The only teachable moment came when a sloppy coed in faux-denim leggings and facepaint whiskers plopped herself onto the visitors stands and slurred "Richmond sucks..."  The take away: leggings are not pants.

The soccer game was equally fruitless.  Over the last couple of years, the girls have seen enough pushing, shoving, swearing, sweaty men to inure them to the competitive spirit out on the pitch.  They did marvel, though, at the artificial turf's ability to at once look like dirt, and yet not be dirt.  Perhaps there's a lesson there, but not the one I was looking for.

And so it landed on me to create the teachable moment with my race.  I thought I had an idea of what the takeaway would be.  On my training runs, I had reminded myself that all I really had to do was keep my breath steady and put foot in front of foot.  At the time it seemed an apt metaphor for life.  Yet when I found myself in that pack of 8,000 women all heading to the same place, I felt less slow and steady wins the race than go big or go home.

So, instead of plodding safely and breathing evenly as I'd envisioned, I jostled, struggled, surged, and gasped. I finished six minutes ahead of my target time, beat 5,645 of the 6,696 finishers, and felt elated for having actually competed.

The girls were less interested in my triumph than in the Happy Meals that my father had bought them while I was running.  But that's okay.  I learned the lesson and now I can teach it.

Play: Managing Expectations

As a child, I cried myself to sleep on Christmas night nearly every year.  I would count down the days starting in September, begin decorating in October, wake before sunrise on Christmas day, open mounds of gifts, visit with relatives, eat lovingly prepared meals and then lie in bed and realize that it was all over...and that, again, it hadn't quite measured up to my expectations.

It's not gifts that I fetishize these days, but family time.  I don't cry on Christmas night anymore; I pout on family outings...like Sunday's family ice skating trip. 

My husband and the girls got me a pair of ice skates for my birthday.  Though Big E has been in skating lessons for over a year and Little E recently started lessons, I haven't owned a pair of skates since I was in ninth grade.  There was no rink near where I grew up, so every winter I'd wait for the few days between when the lake down the street from my house froze and when a foot of crusty snow covered the smooth ice.  Sometimes that window of clean ice never came, and when it did it was brief. 

So, you can see why I might aggrandize the prospect of an afternoon at the rink with my loving family, wearing their overwhelming thoughtful gift --the one I've wanted since I was 15, sharing with my kids an activity that would have made my winter when I was their age.  Big E and I would hold hands and fly around the rink; Little E would clutch my hand in her little mittened paw as I supported her tentative steps.  My husband and would smile at each other over our happy children.  It would be just perfect.

Or maybe it wouldn't.  Maybe Little E would cling to my husband and glare at me, refusing to hold my hand.  Maybe Big E would decide that she'd rather die than hold my hand and that, actually, she'd rather pretend to play the arcade games in the lobby than skate with me.  Maybe some totally irresponsible little girl leaning on a training bar would wander into my path and I'd fall on my ass trying to avoid her.  Perhaps some older girls would even rush over to see if I was okay, looking pretty certain that I'd probably broken a hip, making me feel approximately as old as Betty White. It would be just typical.

I'll admit that the girl who cried at Christmas emerged for a bit.  But I soothed her by pointing out that not only do I have the skates now, but, even better than a mound of gifts, I have the family that knew to get me those skates for me... and we can work on the rest.

Play: Endless Soccer

I just finished discussing George Orwell's 1984 with my students.  I really should have been pondering parallels to the Patriot Act or U.S. involvement in the Middle East; my students did and they're only 17.  Instead, I thought about soccer.

The lives of the citizens of Orwell's Oceania are controlled in part by their nation's Endless War and its revolving enemies; my freetime is controlled by Endless Soccer. Just as Oceania wages an eternal battle with, alternately, Eastasia and Eurasia, soccer seasons, leagues, and obligations loop ceaselessly and undistinguishably through my life. 

It began when Little E was a baby and my husband took on a soccer coaching job, from that sprung our occasional fall afternoons watching him coach, his winter Thursday nights playing indoors, our fall Saturday mornings watching him play outdoors, our spring Sunday mornings watching him play outdoors, our summer Wednesday nights watching him play outdoors, our spring Saturday afternoons watching him coach Big E's soccer team, and our fall Saturday afternoons watching him coach Big E's soccer team.  This is not to mention the week of soccer camp enjoyed by both girls, the seven pairs of soccer shoes that have moved in, the bags of variously sized soccer balls in the trunk of the car, or the chirp of British "football" announcers that has become the official background noise of our living room.

I did not grow up in a soccer family; my parents didn't let me play until third grade --ancient in youth soccer, according to my husband-- and when they did they were unenthusiastic.  My two most defining soccer memories: my coach forcing me to play with my arms clasped behind my back after I was called for a handball while cowering in terror, and my mother not buying shin guards until my younger brother began playing, when we shared a pair between us --his size, not mine.  So, I get it when I tell Little E that it's time to go to another game, and she wails, "Not Soccer!"

I am out of place on the soccer sideline.  The intensity of the parents at Big E's games gives me stomachaches and their smug satisfaction at their children's prowess makes me wish that reading group were a spectator sport.  And I learned the hard way that when the other soccer wives compliment your husband's foot speed, it is not appropriate to point out that while it may appear that way in a short sprint he is so not able to keep up with you over any kind of distance.

Lest I be disappeared by the Suburban Thought Police, I must say it's not all bad.  Endless Soccer has gotten my husband in great shape, given Big E some much-needed toughening up, and allowed me to pretend that I'm seventeen again, cheering on my man.  It has also forced on me some needed perspective: my children are not me and I cannot always mold them in my image...sometimes I have to give my husband a turn.