electric boogaloo

Funny to look back on this now! I hardly ever want to hide under the couch cushions to escape this child. He tells me many times a day how much he loves me. Age seven has been a lovely place in Grahamland. But lest I fail to appreciate the glories of seven, this post was from mid April 2012. It was supposed to be a follow up to this one: http://www.electricboogaloo.net/wordpress/archives/2012/02/16/moppety-moppety-wombat-wayne/
A post which I must point out does not have words in it like kill, murder, strangle or sell in relation to my child. To my credit.
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We are having fewer days where Graham tries to test the term “unconditional love” to its limits. And even when he has a day of acting like the Singing Bush, I have to admire his natural comedic timing and talent for fart jokes. He’s really something special when it comes to bathroom humor. I know, I know, every mother thinks that about their child but in my case it’s true.

A few days ago, he told me in a very sweet voice: “Mama, you are very loved.”

“Aw,” I was surprised since he often tells me how much he does not like me because I’m the meanest mother who has ever existed and ever will exist, “That’s so sweet.”

He clarified, grinning but completely deadpan: “Not by ME. But the man you got married to probably loves you…”

He says things like that all the time. His favorite jokes are the kind where you drag out and set up this whole long thing and then get the person in the end. He also likes anti-jokes: Knock knock. Who’s there? A butt. A butt who? YOU SAID BUTT I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU JUST SAID THAT.

and the kind where you pretend to be overly literal. It confuses people sometimes because he’ll order his food, “And I want steamed rice, but not rice that was LITERALLY turned into steam Hahahaha Get it? And I also don’t mean that I want rice that’s steaming now because that would be too hot! Just rice that was cooked by not frying it because I don’t like fried rice. Please.”

So in a noisy restaurant what does the young, childless waiter hear? A little kid’s confusing monolog about rice that seemed to end with the words “fried rice, please.”

One afternoon when the weather was perfect, I threw the boys outside and told them to pretend they were in one of those survivor man shows. All I really meant was don’t come back inside right away because goodness sakes they’re old enough to spend time outside without an adult and they often refuse. BUT they took the assignment seriously. We’re SURVIVER-MEN. They immediately started pretending that their very survival was on the line.

I checked on them fifteen minutes later (I want them to learn independence but let’s not go insane with the free-range kid business). They were hard at work preparing for OOS (Outdoor Orphan Survival). Nicolaus had constructed a working bow and was experimenting with different arrow shapes and sizes. He was gathering wild onions and strawberries which we have instead of grass. It’s a rental.

Meanwhile Graham… Well. Okay. This is what I’m talking about with this young man’s brain. Graham was set up on the driveway with a ukulele and bongo drums. He played open chords with his hands, played the drums with his feet. When he saw me watching from the porch he paused to demand tips from me. “And no imaginary invisible money is allowed!”

Which of these kids is better prepared to survive out there? I don’t know. But Graham’s approach is very similar to the survival skills that my youngest brother still uses, except he sometimes does let people pay him with invisible money. And he’s doing okay.

So yeah. It’s getting easier, whatever crazed Daffy Duck relative had invaded Graham’s brain over the last year seems to be relaxing its grip a little. The other night he asked us to take him to the park even though it was dark, cold, raining, and only 10 minutes till we needed to leave to go somewhere. I felt a tantrum welling up so I said “hey! I’m at the park right now! Want to go down the slide with me?”

That business would NEVER fly with the Graham from last summer. But he stopped. Something shifted… and he jumped into a long, detailed, very weird narration game about us being at a playground in our living room. It was a weird playground, he’d say things like “ohhhh nooo I forgot to tell you there is extra gravity over there so you are going to slide down that slide extra fast haha watch out!” Or “You got me going almost the speed of light on this spin-around-thing and there’s no friction so I will never ever stop!”

“Or oh sorry, I can’t play tag with you because I’m on the swings right now and I might be somewhere where time is going too slow, I’m not sure but anyway I don’t think tag will work when time is like that.”

So yeah. Still bumpy, every phase ends in fits and starts but I’m thinking we might keep him after all.

The other night I forgot to take my Zoloft. Weird zappy-head sensations, intense dreams I can only describe as thick, and in the early morning hours a bonus migraine which thankfully I mostly slept through.

Which, if you’re ever bored of how boring your dreams are, I recommend starting on Zoloft and then every now and then either forget a dose or accidentally take double. Oh the next day will suck a little bit, or maybe a lot, but! You will have amazing, crazy and deeply rich dreams. Not the when you wish upon a star kind. If your when you wish upon a star dreams are boring I don’t know what to tell you. Watch more exciting TV shows maybe?

Anyway, the zoloft thing wombled up my whole week’s sleep. And there are female things — certain times if you must know — that happen and they’re unpleasant and that makes me grumpy.

I promise this will not be graphic but I have to say it is an outrage that women deal with this business so often. If it were a rare thing that affected one in a thousand women, it would be described as a life-ruining disease that must be cured. We sufferers would go on talk shows and sob about how much of our lives we spend dealing with this horrifying and often embarrassing condition. And we’d have charity walks! I mean, not ME. I wouldn’t participate in walks because I have cramps and because I’d be fairly likely to have an embarrassing feminine product failure and (perhaps mainly) because charity things always start at like 7:30 in the morning, but other good people would be raising awareness and racing for the CURE for this devastating ailment.

Anyway so that has me grumpy.

And the house is so messy. So so so so messy. I had it so clean! And then a huge new batch of flashcards arrived and we started collating them in the living room and Nicolaus made a board game and set it up in the middle of everything and I accidentally joined Amazon Prime which is basically a cardboard box subscription run by the recycling cartel and our recycling didn’t get picked up last week so the bin is crammed full and so now all of that is piled up everywhere.

Then I got the idea to go through the boys’ old clothes and toys and get rid of stuff. Yay! Look! I’m cleaning! I put all of the “probably get rid of” stuff in my office. Pulling things out of closets and going through them and piling them up FEELS like cleaning but really it is the opposite of cleaning.

What else… oh! The boys discovered stop motion animation. Which I am not complaining about! Because stop motion animation is amazing and because it only took them five minutes to figure out how to make it look like their characters were eating each other and then pooping each other out so strong is their talent. But the modeling clay and whole setup took over the dining room table.

Which led to us eating meals on the couch. Which led to more messes.

Which led to me surrendering the kitchen to the mess until I had to order pizza. Which led to more flipping cardboard to recycle even though the massive bin IS FULL and there’s already a mountain of recycling waiting politely by the door.

That’s why I said yes! Totally! when our neighbor invited us to join her yardsale. PERFECT. People will buy things, things will go away, clear that space in my office, then recycling and flash cards can go into my office, then we’ll have our living room back and maybe N will move his game and then we can put the clay animation project on the gaming table, and that will allow us to have the dining room table back and the kitchen nicer to be in. See how it works? This could be a whole article in Real Simple or some shit.

So we did the garage sale. In two days we sold $59 worth of stuff which is impressive until you know that one of the items we sold went for $50. So. Yeah. And then! Nicolaus bargained his way into an ipod and a big comfy chair.

The ipod turned out to be a fake, so now we have a little extra-difficult-to-use FM radio. And the chair is hideous, though I have to admit very comfortable. Which is all nice and everything except that the house is still a giant jumbled up wreck.

I’m going to tag this entry Spring Cleaning so maybe you will search for Best Spring Cleaning Tips and find this and read it and feel better because no matter how bad you are at Spring cleaning and how much you think you need helpful easy spring clean housekeeping organize tips, you can’t have their act any more not together than me.

Honeyfern is an accredited little pocket of pedagogical bliss outside of Atlanta. Project based, warm and brilliant and full of muchness. Last month, the founder Suzanne fell off a cliff. You can read about it here . Spoiler: and then all of a sudden, her husband died.

Just like that their twelve year old daughter was sobbing and trying to understand this new world where nothing is for sure, the very sidewalk might fall out from under you any time, and no amount of nice safe parks and convenient Hobby Lobbies and chain restaurants can keep it from happening. It could’ve happened anywhere, in any kind of childhood, in any size town. But here even here? We live in a bubble! This is an outrage. What do we even live here for if we can’t ban things like this from happening? We have home owner’s associations for everything out here and it really seems like deadly car crashes is something they’d work on.

So yeah, like I said maybe kids who experience hardship turn out stronger, richer in character. But counter to that point, screw that. Cicily should have her dad back.

I don’t want my kids to feel unsafe or ashamed, like ever; those are the kinds of things that change who you are down to your DNA. But I also wouldn’t want them to be devastated by something like this because my goodness.

When we talk about how stress builds character, what is that? What does character even mean? We want kids to grow up to be compassionate and resilient and adaptable. We want them to be able to solve new problems, to have original insights. That’s the stuff of character, the texture of a healthy, fully-formed human mind.

Of course we can’t and shouldn’t protect them from every sad or difficult thing that might ever happen, but like someone said in the comments — there’s no reason to go looking for trouble either. Are suburbia’s rubber-padded playgrounds too safe? Maybe. But there’s a difference between challenges and trauma, and we don’t need to add alligators just for the sake of alligators.

Do you ever worry about the easiness of your children’s lives? Is it too safe, too comfortable, too even? Not textured enough to be remembered? I worry. If hollywood has taught me anything it’s that kids who overcome great adversity grow up to be great successful humans. I know the best thing would be for me to get hit by a train, not because they’d be better off without me and my pork chop dinners but because the tragic event would be a good defining moment. But I’m selfish and I want to stick around so we will just have to think of something else. We had a neighbor in Texas whose house burned down and the kids were shaken by it for a long time. What kind of fantastic luck is that? It was a defective lamp, nobody’s fault, no one has to feel guilty. Just a good old fashioned life-crystalizing event.

Since I can’t know if we’ll ever buy a defective lamp, I have decided to toss out my guilt over raising kids in the suburbs. For all that we find soulless and predictable about living in between the Target over by the yoga studio and the other Target next to all the gas stations, there are good things going on here. There are interesting people here with their lives and worries and hopes and humor. We had to look for them, but that’s true everywhere isn’t it?

Besides, I don’t feel like we can really escape it. In the first world, isn’t every town almost the same as this? Stores go up, restaurants close down, traffic lights change, elevators move people vertically, buses move people horizontally, schedules and clocks make people change what they’re doing and smart phones make people freeze in place. You can read headlines through the window of those little newspaper stands, you can go to McDonalds and watch cable news, you can go to the doctor or the dentist or whatever.

You can run away from suburbia. You can go south across whatever highway marks the perimeter of your nearest big city, and once you move there you can walk to things and feel better because your children are growing up meeting real people and playing in real parks and listening to traffic and construction echo off of concrete. There’s a gritty, literary texture that makes everything seem a little more serious and exciting. There’s also pollution, traffic, and crime — bummers, all — but you can work around or avoid those things. It’s a good life.

Or you could run away up northeast into a far little town, and after you move there you can eat your own chickens and buy illegal raw milk and feel better because your kids are out fishing in the creek and they’re seeing a real circle of life and a real connection to the past. There are bummers here too; you’ll feel isolated sometimes and sometimes people will dump their unwanted pets on your property and/or paint confederate flags on the side of their barns, but most of the time being out there is like living inside the chorus of a bluegrass song. Good life.

The thing is, if you’re poor in America life is hard in every kind of town. Rural, urban, suburban doesn’t matter; you still have to spend a lot of your time as currency. You wait in long lines at the discount store and wait for your number to be called. Wait for the bus, wait in bunches or wait in lines or wait in a harshly lit hallway for your chance to see the low-cost dentist.

And if you’re rich in America, well! You don’t wait for anything. You are safe, you are important and other people wait on your behalf. It’s nice, I imagine, whether you’re an urban rich person movin on up to a deeluxe apartment in the sky or writing tips on how to pack your priceless antiques when moving to a different amazing rural farmhouse (click it, holy crikes you have GOT to read this).

And middle class, well your time is always in play. Car payment so you can drive to work, work so you can pay for swim lessons and a safer car, rush kids to school, wait in line at the DMV, take kids to practice, come home fix dinner help with homework. It’s a life that’s full of logistical hassles created and solved by modern conveniences. But I feel like that’s not suburbia’s fault. That’s life in the middle class.

Because matter where you live you need to tread water enough to make sure your kids and grandkids are firmly in the middle class. You can do that almost anywhere anywhere.

So yeah, my kids are living in an area that isn’t very interesting at a glance. Residents are not allowed to keep chickens, we have to drive to get groceries, we stay too busy. But we have honeysuckles and fireflies in the summer. We can go to the farmer’s market, we can talk to strangers.

I don’t know if middle class life is interesting or challenging enough, but contriving hardship seems like a lot of work and I’m too tired. So this is the childhood they get. The little suburban world these boys are growing up in is not poor, not rich, just busy and noisy and full of laughing and hugging and arguing and reading and eating clementines after dinner. It’d be that way in a little mountain town or in downtown Atlanta.