Updating

My husband and I spent Thursday night (our first child-free night in months, as the kids were spending a long weekend at my parents') picking out flooring and fixtures with the contractor we recently hired to do some updating in our bathroom and kitchen. As with much of my child-free time, it was neither relaxing nor romantic.

I grew up in a house where for most of my childhood problems from dysfunctional toilets to stalling cars were solved with a trip to the library for the appropriate how-to guide, a fair amount of cursing, and eventually my father's own hands. After our evening with the contractor, I felt stressed and agitated.  My husband, who grew up in a family where every dilemma from an unhung picture to a burnt out taillight was solved by paying someone, asked me what was wrong. 

"I just want him to like me," I told my husband of the contractor, "and also to think I have good taste."

"You don't need to care whether he likes you," he explained patiently, "that's why we're paying him money."

The next morning, I started in on the ambitious redecorating project I had planned for the girls' room. As I set to work transforming a heap of leftover furniture into a new bedroom "set" for their room, I examined my motives for turning a sunny and responsibility-free summer weekend into an episode of Trading Spaces.  I decided that my sudden DIY fervor was driven by a need to prove my own handiness and self-sufficiency so that I might feel better about hiring someone to remove the faux-tile and crumbling vinyl the previous owners left behind.

Later, after we'd filled a contractor bag with the mountain of neglected stuffed animals and torn up board books that would go out with the trash, I announced urgently for the third time since we'd started cleaning out the room, "We need to have another child." 

Calmly, my husband dared me, "Sure."

In that moment, as I imagined rolling back the clock to pregnancy, infancy, toddler years, I realized what it was all about, all my priming, painting, drilling, decoupaging, for goodness sake.

I cannot keep Big E from drifting toward tween-hood, but I can take the bed I slept in through my teenage years, the one whose scrolly white metal and brass accents seemed impossibly glamorous at the time, and spray it a suitably little girl pink for her.

I cannot keep either of my girls from growing out of their clothes, their shoes, their babyhood, their toddlerhood, and, always on my mind lately, their childhood, but I can use chalkboard paint and casters to make personalizable underbed storage of the drawers from the little dresser that held Big E's 2T dresses and footy pajamas.

I cannot change the fact that Little E outgrew her toddler bed (or that we admitted this to ourselves about a year late), but I can paste her big sister's old headboard with cute puppies and kittens and varnish it over and over to convince myself that she will always love cute doggies just as she does now.

And the butterfly wall decals that I affixed above Big E's bed.  I wish that I could say that they are about embracing transformation or something equally lovely, but really they are about the constant scorekeeping between the girls, the arguing and accusing and fit-throwing that has me feeling like the kind of angry, yelling, furrowed-brow mother that I had never planned to be.  These butterflies are about how miffed I knew Big E would be by Little E's dogs and the frustration that I channeled into my vise grip on the handle of the race car cart as I pushed the squealing, squabbling girls through the endless Home Depot trip to stock up on spray paint and casters and drawer pulls.

Chalkboard paint and decoupage medium won't keep my kids from getting older every day, just as mourning the passage of time won't guarantee that I appreciate each moment I'm in. And having a baby to reset the ticking clock won't forestall all the growing and aging and changing.

And besides, where would he sleep?

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: 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.