la femme follette

tulip birthdays

Garçon's birthday has come and gone and now my sweet little baby is nine.  I remember when they handed him to me in the hospital, all ten and one-half pounds of him, and he was like a little ham with a face and a cartoon hairdo.  I looked him over and handed him back.  As with everyone I have ever loved madly, in our first meeting I was not entirely impressed.  He is my favorite, in so many ways; of the 2 children, he is most familiar to me.  Mothering him is what I was born to do, the purpose for everything leading up to him. Fillette requires that I grow with her, which is a formidable challenge for the rest of my life, but makes me tired and peevish, even as she has wooed me into the ranks of her considerable fan base over the last 7 years.                              

Both children had an ugly cake.  I know that I have a very lazy attitude about baking and birthday cakes, but jesus christ these cakes were ugly.  Also, not delicious, though the rest of my family liked them, proving that there is no accounting for taste.  I did not make the same ugly cake twice.  I baked for each child an ugly & terrible-tasting cake.  Nigella!  You!!

Mari got the child a brace and bit for his gift.  I did not know what this was.  It sounded like something of which I might have availed myself in my girlhood, for a Saturday-into-Sunday kind of lark with the right fellow, a latex dress, and a lot of good liquor.  In reality it is a kind of manual drill for Garçon to use in his next woodworking efforts.  Garçon has already hammered together an excellent workbench down in our basement.

(Our basement is centenarian-plus and is totally grody.  It is dry, at least, but I swear someone is buried down there.)

When I was a little girl, my (s)mother's idea to wake me for school was to bang my door open and switch on the light.  I have all my life been photophobic so that this was like the torture of the martyrs as far I was concerned.  Never again has anyone been so cruel.  There was one guy who would sit on the edge of our bed in the mornings and sort of pin me while coaxing me with about a million tiny kisses.  This reveille was my favorite and best, not to mention the method by which I now in this life have always awakened my children.  Anyhow, today is the day he was born and I would bet he had a cartoon hairdo, too.

Happy birthday, guy.  Many happy returns to you. 

transition

Garçon's new guitar came late this afternoon.  His first guitar was a silly little thing I picked up on a whim, a kid-sized piece, something nicer than a toy, perfect to see if he would take an interest.  So it seems that in the last six months, he has spent quite a lot of time being interested.  His instructor told me we should grade him up to something in a 3/4 size.  Sure thing.  I ordered Fender's Squier MC-1 Classical.

It is so pretty.  I can barely breathe around it.  The rosette kills me.  Never fly on a small aircraft, my baby. 

stitch and bitch

I knitted some little fingerless mitts from Melanie Falick's Weekend Knitting over the ... weekend!  I like the idea of that book much more than I have actually knitted anything from it, though I have been feeling much more knitty confident lately about abrupting actual patterns and their technical instructions in order to get what I want instead of just writing my own pattern based on an idea using the simple techniques I already know.  Well, and my technical knowhow is expanding necessarily as I go along.

Anyhow, I do not like them.  I mean, whatever.  They are fine.  But I would have liked them to be longer on the wrist edge.  They were fast, about 4 hours for the two and that includes a. distracted knitting and b. knitting the first one on black needles.  Dumb.  Dumb!!  I'll just keep tugging on them until they get longer on the wrist edge.  I used a worsted weight wool/alpaca blend from Nashua.

Yesterday I stopped by the LYS near the children's afterschool program and had a go at Agressive Knitting Chick who works there.  She wanted to have a unsolicited discussion about gauge.  These people.  I mean, I know there are people who always use the yarn used with the pattern in the book.  I know there are and go with god, little knitters, but I cannot.  It is hard for me to describe what I am after when I decide on fiber or whatever, but I want what I want.  I can feel it. 

In this case, I wanted to use Debbie Bliss's Baby Cashmerino to knit the legwarmers in Weekend Knitting.  Largely because the color was just exactly right.  AKC came up to me in an accosting way and told me I could nevah use that yarn because it would never be the same.  Well, what?  And why are you talking to me?  I mean, these are legwarmers for Fillette for her dancing endeavors.  I wanted them to be serious and also year-roundish (she currently does not study in the summer, but I pre-emptively rue the day) 

AKC was very concerned on my behalf about the product of the Falick pattern and the Baby Cash.  I could tell that AKC has never never frankensteined a pattern in her life, mostly because when she said, "this knits at a gauge of 25st/in and the pattern calls for 18st/in."  I said, "Um, on 3s?  I plan to use 6s or 7s?"  In the end, I did not feel like the microfiber (of which Baby Cash is 15 or 18%) issue anyhow, because it is a great deal spongier than I felt I could predict, although this is hardly the only pair of legwarmers I see myself ever knitting for my tiny dancer.  So, I ditched the Baby Cash for an xf merino with a label from Sublime (though I suspect it is all milled by Rowan.  Rowan is like the Anhauser-Busch of yarn). 

While still holding the Baby Cash, I did have this very satisfying exchange with know-it-all AKC:

Me:  well, I don't see what you mean that the gauge will not be the same; this yarn has the same specs as the yarn in the book.

[I frown at the yarn specs in the book -- 145yds/2oz]

AKC:  [pertly] Fifty grams is one and three-quarter ounces.

Me:  [unable to suppress an eyeroll]  Cha, I know.  [more frowning]  That means the equivalent yardage for a 50g ball is ... one ... one hundred twenty ... seven?  Point ... seven?  Five-seven?  Is that right?  [AKC shrugs]  Well, that's too bad for you, huh?

I actually wasn't sure about the .757, I just was being an asshole.  Hahaha.  Actually, I wouldn't swear to those numbers at all, because math in my head, but just from eyeballing it falls out between 115 and 128, most definitely.

Alex, I wanted to use y0ur line:  This is why no one loves you.  But maybe that would fall within your moratoria for 2008?  I must disagree on one thing regarding customer service, because it is my favorite complaint:  Fuck a bunch of self motherfucking checkout.  If I wanted to be a cashier, I would get a job as one.  Also, the very least a company can do is have someone available to take my money and thank me!  The very least! 

There is not an advantage for me to ring my own purchases, all it does is save the company on their labor costs and what do I get in return?  Heckled by the person whose job it is to assist.  Fuck it.  I do not care about standing on line, that is what the tabloid magazines are for.  Also, the knitting of tiny things like socks, mitts, and legwarmers.      

exhibit a

Wednesday it "snowed," which is to say that there was something in the air, but what landed is not even enough to bother scraping from my car's windshield.  This is why a car is equipped with a windshield wiper.  Whatever.  While it snowed, Fillette and Garçon crowed and wished and hoped for "real snow," which has entered their lexicon as our children.  Whenever they complain about the "cold" or exclaim over the "snow," I vow to take them to Siberia.  They used to be afraid of it, but lately they get excited.  The thing is, Mari does not want to go to Siberia.  "It's cold there," he says. 

The funny difference between he and I is that he does not miss the weather back home.  He scoffs at the simulacrum of winter here, but at the same time he is grateful that he does not have to haul out his cojones and face weather well below 0 for a quarter of the year.  This is why every winter I am wracked by a tubercular homesickness and he just steps around me where I am prostrate with longing so he can cheerfully get into the car and enjoy the driving off without scraping.  He cannot fathom that I would want it to be 5 degrees below 0 just for old times sake.  Not to mention -40 just for a lark -- just in case we go soft. 

We just straightened this out, he and I, because Fillette was expressing a wish to learn ice skating.  I told her that it was not possible.  Mari interrupted and pointed out the indoor ice rink on campus.  I stared, speechless.  Surely I have driven past it a million times and never once equated the Indoor Ice Rink Building with, uh, ice skating.  Because, I explained to him, that is for hockey and also, Olympians, obviously. He laughed at me, while I sat there, stubbornly trying to reconcile "indoor" with "ice skating."  It seemed pitiful to me.  Much as an indoor swimming pool must seem to people from Southern California.   

I explained to my deprived child my life on ice skates.  When I was a girl, growing up not so far away from where her father was a boy, I went ice skating nearly every short afternoon all winter long with an assortment of cousins and neighbors and pals.  The park near my house then, very much like the park near her house now, had a large depression in its landscape.  The fabulous Chicago Park District filled it with water every year and we skated, all the time.  This was in the late 1970s, when even young children in big cities were allowed to go outside and play without the smothering of constant caregiving. 

I was as old then as Garçon is now, and he is barely allowed to play in front of the house with his sister.  Not because I think it is unsafe, because I do not.  They live here.  It is perfectly appropriate.  They are not the heir and heiress to a vast ketchup fortune or anything.  The problem is that the culture says that children must be smothered by my constant vigilance every minute of every day.  So, it is a good thing that the ice skating is indoors where one needs to pay admission, for her father can take her.  Indoor ice skating would certainly break my heart.  Plus, I still think it is pathetic. 

In the area of burden of constant supervision, there was a heinie-showing incident last week at Fillette's afterschool program.  I sure do long for the days when age-appropriate developmental sex play used to mean a box of condoms, a latex dress, an innocent affect, & a fifth of Wild Turkey.  Life was so simple then.  Now there has to be handwringing.  Parenting is so difficult, not for the snap decisions I have to make.  I handled that fine, even though she made her confession while I was trying to read the Sunday magazine section (unfair!  so unfair!) and have a cup of tea.  I could not have been less prepared, unless it had been Garçon, really.  In her words:

Mama, last week?  When I was in the bathroom at [Coyote Ugly]?  My friend [Exhibitionist], showed me her butt.

[I do not hit the ceiling, but instead have spurious reaction of raising one eyebrow while not looking up from newspaper, so she goes on, gathering steam.]

Then she said I had to show me her butt back, I mean show her my butt back.  I told her it was bad behavior, but she said, uh, she told me that no one would find out and I wouldn't get into trouble, so I did.

Then I had to say something.  That is my least favorite part of parenting, the part where the child is waiting and I have to say something. No staging area!  Also, I was minding my own business, reading the newspaper.  Go talk to your father!  I mean!  I settled for saying her name in that way that mothers have, that Garçon imitates so excellently when she is on her last chance with him, all the syllables clipped off and the last long vowel taking a whole breath to get out.  She tucked her head down, "I know, I know!  I am sorry!!"

God.  Anyhow, she got a calm chatter from me about how she already knows that the least she can do to keep safe is to keep her self to herself.  Plus, "no one will find out" is the biggest flag that waves to warn of big trouble ahead.  Also, that she is at the start of a very long road of telling her friends "no" to things that she knows are bad behavior.  Last, that I know it is hard to say no to friends, that it takes great courage, but if she is brave enough to confess bad behavior to her newspaper-reading (!!) mother, that she is way brave enough to say no to her friends, for god's sake.

Her consequence was simple and direct: she could not attend her program for a week.  It was the same consequence -- albeit a longer sentence -- with the same explanation -- children who cannot take care of themselves do not get to be by themselves -- she had for the clothes-on offense of sunburning herself with delinquent sunscreen application at camp last summer.  I did not feel like I was overreacting.  My whole thing about this was to keep it simple.  Upbeat!  Sex-positive!  Which was not my midwestern nor catholic childhood experience at all.

This is why although things are good in my own home, I may be a little rolly inside.  I feel all feeling-y because yesterday, while picking up Garçon, I mentioned to the program director that there was a little heinie-showing incident.  She asked me with who and I said, obliquely, waving it away, "Just girls.  In the bathroom."  But when she asked me who a second time, I caved and gave up the name.  I have no experience in this arena of dealing with administrator types, I tell myself, I told myself.  But a cursory glance at any of my behavior with other "administrators" and "experts" even in the recent past reveals that to be a pretty fat lie.  I ratted the kid out. 

After we left last night, I heard the program director calling the girl's name across the hallway.  I felt so bad.  Because I really want to believe -- I really do believe -- that this incident is not a big deal.  I think that the issue with Fillette is not about heinies, but about her being able to resist the considerable lure of peers.  The complementarity of my children is thus: Garçon wants to please no one, at the expense of himself, and Fillette wants to please everyone, at the expense of herself.  I am much more worried about her long-term resistance to peer pressure than any kind of showing her butt.  This incident was hardly made about bodies at all, except for the larger issues around safety and secretkeeping. 

I have a terrible feeling that this child's mother is not going to see this in the same way.  I am trying so hard to keep my upbringing out of my children's life, but I think I just served it up to someone else's.  This is one of the great misgivings of parenting I think that people without children have -- this idea that one raises their own children, in a deeply-personalized fashion, and no one else's children are any of their concern.  Which is complete bullshit.  Parenting operates within a culture, just like all the rest.  Mari and I have opted out of so much -- institutional schooling, television programming, toys that get on my nerves -- and still, we get hamstrung and caught up by ballet and ten hours a week in a recreational afterschool program.  I can no sooner say that no one else's children affect my parenting choices or my children or my life than I can walk down the street sneezing on people and not expect it to influence my lifetime rate of contusions received.

But whatever.  Judging from the reactions we get on the regular, Mari and I are at the far reaches of still-civilized parenting, verging on the feral.  We let our children call us by our first names.  !!!  So, I guess Ratted-Out Child will have to bloom where she is planted.  I did, once.  I do wish the weather were cold enough to be purgative.  Then I wouldn't even need snow, no.  Just a nice dry day's high in the low teens would suffice.  But!  I am still less homesick than I typically am in these conditions, inside and out.  It might be time to go to the gym, anyhow.  Finally. 

          

puerto rican girls. dying to meetcha.

This trick-or-treating dress-up kidstuff is so boring to me this year.  I just want them to be old enough to hang out and have a witchy little new year with me.  We found a dentist who will buy their candy for $1 per pound.  Thank god they are into money this year, because they are on it.  I confiscate half of it every year anyway, then they can't eat most of the rest.  Allergies! 

I am not one to scrapbook other people's material, but Meli put this out where I could see it today and it made me laugh until I cried. 

I am perfectly aware of the implicit sexiness of Fillette's Halloween costume -- dressing her like a grown-up goth --  but I refuse to get involved in some kind of prissery over how she wants to costume.  I can't really do anything about its perceived bullshit sexiness, since the fact is since so many supermodels and other icons of glamour have the bodies of 6-year-olds. so it doesn't matter what she wears.

She is frequently sexy in grubby old clothes, because she is a beautiful girl with a culturally-idolized, pre-pubescent body in an America that sexualizes children in a way we will never ever be able to come back from.  So, I am trying to keep her covered & not stigmatize her by having a lot to say about it with pursed lips.  I am having a hard time finding the right kind of scary face makeup, the too-light foundation, I mean. 

I am concerned about the tulle skirt, because last year (two years ago?) she almost set herself on fire on someone's jack-o-lantern.  It was more spectacular than that, as I recall.  There was a kind of tripping over her skirt and tumbling down the stairs and knocking over the jack-o-lantern as she fell so that the whole thing was a big open flame next to which she was sprawled.  I think that I am going to have Mari carry a bucket of water.  Honestly.  For a ballerina, she is a little klutzy.  She doesn't get it from me, because my klutziness is rooted in too-flexiness and she is not overly bendy. 

Garçon is dressing as a Whoopee Cushion.  Because he is that kind of boy.  The good thing, I think, is that when he is about 12 years old?  We are going to be very best friends.  Now he is too fisty and oppositional, but I think there will be a sweet spot in there where he still will love Weird Al & whoopee cushions, and model his countenance as Fozzie the Bear + Quentin Tarantino, and we will lay on the sofa together watching the Three Stooges and talking about comics.  I can hardly wait.      

100 words

Kowalski rang early serenading with a recently-worked-out sequence of Wilco on his mandolin.  I told him he had timing issues.  Two close friends I matched up 10 or 11 years ago want a rematch. Now two divorces and 1200 miles between them, they think the time is right.  It seems too hard. Garçon embraces difficulty & fights me every day about whether he or the metronome is wrong.  Dancing in the kitchen after breakfast, I told him Carlos Santana surely once hated quarter-note practice, but he & his mother persisted -- just listen.

"Sorry, I don't have any orange juice," Lara said. 

calm before

Sunday morning, in the wake of 8 quiet hours of sleep, I vanquished The Sadist & His Class Featuring Medicine Balls, plus had it to spare 45 minutes on the down-escalator machine!  I drove home with the roof open, the weather was hot & clear, and Sonny & Cher happened to be on the radio singing "I Got You, Babe."  Last year (two years ago?) I wrote a reluctant post-conceptual love poem, the denouement of which is The Bonos' enduring love swelling publicly when she spoke at his funeral.

All of him/once lived inside of her, like false eyelashes, like a/porpoise, like the brutality of her diversion and/neglect, and the body of her love rose to share/forever in the glory of the collective memory of/their love. 

It might not be clear in a fragment, but listening to them singing from the studio back in 1965, I was bamboozled all over again to realize I got it so right.  I was calm & clear, obviously brilliant, and I felt like the girl from Ipanema.  I could not wait to get home and see the rest of my excellent, lovely family.  The rest of the day was amazing, winding up with Mari and I divvying up the Sunday NYT alongside the  hometowny & welcome interruption of playground chat with acquaintances while we all watched our children play in wholesome, outdoor, co-educational, self-actualizing, team-building playground games of their own design.

I was thinking about thinking about poems again, or as people will sometime tease, Hey, remember when you wrote poems?  Then it was bedtime and we were reading stories and then we had to go to the children's hospital's emergency room and then in the wee hours of the night -- or the first hours of the morning -- I had to downgrade my judgment of our nearest children's hospital aloud while on the premises from I would not take a dog there to I would sooner let Joseph Mengele treat my kids.  Then I had to go all triple-x, plus-plus Emperor Xerxes on them while they tried to keep me from taking my son out of their shitty facility AMA.  I mean, I am the mother, hello?  Additionally, I made it through The Sadist's class at the top of my game which means that on the inside I am like one of the 300 extras, duh!  Recognize!      

Emperor Xerxes did not write poems, I do not think.  Poetry is definitely the girl from Ipanema's game.   Maybe I could start wearing a bikini everywhere.  The point is, that is over.  Sunday night and all of Monday were devoted to getting my son's grave medical mystery sussed out at the farther-away-but-far-superior children's hospital over the river.  He seems to be fine, in the main, which we knew going in, since Garçon is the very picture of fine fettle.  We have to wait and see.  Tests, appointments with specialists, ultrasounds, next week.  Whatever.

I am glad something like this waited to come at the end of a super-relaxing day.  In spite of all the sleeplessness and up-all-nightiness of it, it turned out something of a Grand Family Adventure.  There was reading aloud from Roald Dahl books and funny face games and Life Skills Exposition.  Fillette rolls her eyes at the midnight rumble in the ER, saying of the fresh supervising physician, I can't believe she tried to boss you, Mommy.  Neither could I.  I cannot believe there are people in the world who actually let themselves get bossed, not outside of the gym.              

not in the least what I sat down to write

Every year for the past four, I have planted dahlias in the front yard.  Each year, they come up in the spring, and I eye their weedy countenance with great suspicion each and every day until I rip them out and then, upon seeing the tubers unearthed I say OH CRAP another year.  This year, I restrained myself, since I put Fillette in charge of weeding the garden (and she was only to pluck one kind of weed, as presenting in weeding training), and here they still bloom.  A little.  There is something magical and sweet about the waning summer garden, picking ripe fruits from dying plants. 

I got an email from a friend the other day, in which I think she may have articulated what several others were merely thinking when she pointed out that yes, my weblog is admirably vague about a great many things -- not so much about where we live, true -- but that the whole Veil of Anonymity might be more opaque if only my cartoon avatar did not look exactly like me.  Yeah, but, whatever. 

In the spirit of being only vague about where we live, and not secretive, I will say that it is niiiiiice to be living among a populace burnished with a palpable glee, for the source of which one need look no further than the sports pages.  It is the kind of thing that I missed without realizing it when we lived inside the Beltway, along with a. billboards and b. little old ladies.  Not Kennedy Center dowagers with garden gloves and Tod's driving mocs, no, I mean honest-to-god little old ladies going on their walkers with their maiden sisters to eat the Early Bird Special at the neighborhood diner.  Also, construction machines on regular roads; I cried the first time the children exclaimed from the backseat over a real live  cement mixer.

I may cry yet that my children care who wears the Number 8 jersey and know somehow (??) that he is called The Flying Hawaiian, because jesus, god, all I wanted these children to ever have is a hometown, even if it is not mine.  Then, one day, they can show me around it.   Because I am going to have to know where to totter over to for the Early Bird Special.    

will not star Natalie Woods & Steve McQueen

I spent close to two hours on the backwards escalator thinger at the gym, and it seemed like a good idea at the time, since "ER" was playing two episodes at a time on the TNT channel, and the Sirius Classic Alt guy was churning out a fun playlist, but I can hardly move now.  I almost did not make it to the not being able to move, for when I left the gym, all spaced out on endorphins and Oingo Boingo, I could barely keep it together and almost crossed the (busy, downtown) streets against the light three different times.  I was reading them wrong, or something.  I made a few cab drivers very angry with me. 

What I was thinking about, which was the bulk of my distraction while I was kind of wobbling down the street on jelly legs:  Weird Science kicks Superbad up and down the block.  Twice. 

I have been watching a fair amount of teevee while at the gym, since every little cardio machine has its own television display.  Mari and I were thinking, for several months now, of maybe getting satellite teevee service, but I had to tell him that I have been watching television and there is nothing on it but a bunch of crap.  Just! a! bunch! of! crap!!!  112 channels at the gym and the most compelling things I have found to watch most days are 1. episodes of a medical drama six years out of date (at at time that the show was 4 years past its prime) and 2. Japanese baseball games on IFC.  For this we should spend $60 each month?  No way.

Besides that, we would have to get a new television, since our 15yo teevee set a. does not have what it takes to adopt modern-day auxiliary and b. is about to blow its picture tube any day now.  I just five minutes ago finished up a teevee market survey and I have to say that when this television set goes, there will not be another one.

It is the same predicament -- "predicament" -- we were in 12 years ago when we were married.  We each had not a television set and then got married and still had not one.  People were astonished by this, and frequently reacted as if we had told them our home lacked indoor plumbing.  We would defray the endless examination of this anti-establishment choice by coyly reminding our inquisitors that we were newlyweds, and so had more interesting ways to pass the time.  This was not entirely true.  I happen to think that watching paint dry is more interesting than watching what passes for acceptable broadcast entertainment. 

Eventually, a friend of ours upgraded his television set and gave his (still really brand-new) set to us.  We took it, and we use it to this day, but that is how we got a television set.  Before that, there was never a chance we would actually spend money that we worked to earn on something as crazy as a magic box that would help us waste a bunch of time.  Occasionally, we would find ourselves in a store that sold television sets -- Sears, Target, wherever -- and we would get distracted by the shiny flickerings of the television section.  Then we would start to think that maybe we could get one, it wouldn't be so bad, we did miss watching rental movies, etc, etc, and then we would see the price tag and straighten up and get the hell out of there.  $200 for ... what?  No way.

I still feel the same, browsing the Electronic Superstore's website now -- a friend had mentioned that to replace our same old 19-inch set, one with a boxy countenance, would be "dirt cheap" -- I just cannot bring myself to part with any amount of money to have ... what?  My son endlessly harassing me about whether or not I will let him watch a program on PBS that is for children half his age?  Or haranguing me about letting him rent The Simpsons on DVD?  I would not spend 50 cents to ensure such torment, let alone the cost of three brazilians! 

God, all Garçon wants to talk about is television, and he is a child who is lucky to get to watch as much as three hours of A-V entertainment every month.  He wants to discuss television and also the jokes he heard on the television shows he watched.  It is like living with Quentin Tarantino, if Quentin Tarantino were crushed-out on Fozzie the Bear.  Mari and I considered that maybe if he had all the television he could hold, he would become sated with television and then we would no longer have to hear about it.  That may be true, but I cannot bring myself to purchase a ridiculous television in order to find out.  At least with this one that we do have, its value long-fulfilled, I can fantasize about the day we get to throw it out.  I hope he grows up to have some exciting performance art about the deprivation of culture, but probably, he will just be a sullen delinquent who watches a lot of teevee.  As long as he moves out, I don't care. 

torpor

I could never have imagined I could find something as nominally simple as switching ballet schools to be so fucking exhausting, but there it was.  It was a Big! Deal! and whatever, it is done now.  Fillette is going to a school that is serious about process and not at all about the pornography and slick packaging of performance, which was the case with the previous school, which sent a letter to parents a week ago letting us know that there would this fall be A! Second! Expo!  In the middle of an ordinary day, the mail came, I was downstairs opening it, Mari was upstairs with the children, and then suddenly, all he heard in our otherwise-silent house was me, repeating the word fuck in various combinations for 15 minutes.

Mari and I could barely cotton to the school last year, what with the stage moms and the starfucking.  Even Fillette talks about "those moms and their hollering & hairspray," and she is six.  It was a serious drag.  But this second Expo, well it was just over the top.  Even Fillette, who is six, said when I asked her about how she felt about the performance of last year's production of The! Expo!, she said, "Well, I thought it was fun," then after a pause filled with careful consideration, she said, "but it did not make me a better dancer."

Fillette may be the world's most process-oriented 6-year-old.  I know that Mari and I, as people, respect process, we do, yah, sure, and we talk about it and it shows and we are slightly frumpy and dull and old-fashioned as a result, but this baby girl of ours is something else.  For one thing, Mari and I are adults and have come to respect the drudgery of discipline over a lifetime.  Fillette is a child that was born focused on the love of the grind.  When she was 3, she made a list of things she would accomplish when she was 4 -- she actually came to me and dictated a list.  They were big things for a little girl, huge.  1. Weaning, 2. stop wearing pull-ups overnight, 3. stop having tantrums and start using words, plus 4. something lost in the mists of time at the moment. 

I made the list and it hung out there for 4 months, at least, and the week before she had her fourth birthday, she had a meltdown for a week, filled with anxiety -- how could I almost be four?  how could I have squandered all this delicious three-ness?     how would I cope in the new world of four!?!  with no milk and no pull-ups and all of this self-control???  All of this, rooted in her self-imposed expectations and Mari and I just watched.  In horror.

It was really terrifying, because as much as I love the process, I am a tremendous kind of a slacker.  I mean, I look very disciplined and methodical, but really?  I am the Emily Dickinson of life.  People can figure out what I have really been up to when I am dead.  I am not a performer or an announcer or much of a producer, really.  I do it right the first time because it eliminates the chatty-chat of the do-over.  Mari much the same.  So, we for days resisted the very visceral urge to cut her loose from her little prison -- baby, it's ok, you can skip it -- and instead threw our hats in her ring 110%.  We were behind her.  If she was sad about no milk:  we could put her in the pouch! (until she is 6 and as tall as I am!!)  If she felt nervous about bedwetting:  we could wake her up before we went to bed ourselves!  If she was having a hard time with her tantrums and her words, we could hold her until she got a grip or give her time in her room!  We are behind you, baby!

Jesus, she is exhausting.  Honestly.  But, that was the first time she had a focus, pushed herself and pulled it off and she keeps doing it.  Now that she knows we will get behind her, she will ask for what she needs.  She asks for it.  It is so wild to me.  So, when I said last week, "I hate everyone and everything about your ballet school!  Let's talk!" she talked to me and we found out that she didn't really care about being on the Big Stage for the Big Expo, anyhow, because she said, I mean, Mom, I don't even really know how to dance, why should I be on the stage?  With all those people watching?  Oh, I clutch her to me.  My sweet, old-fashioned, frumpy doll.  Then with a choice between two schools, equally rigorous in instruction and with none of the distraction of early-onset pageantry, she chose the one that has zero performance at her age, aside from a nice, on-site parental observation at the end of each semester.  Phew.

But still, unexpectedly exhausting.  Mostly because it means that I have to put my mileage where my mouth is and now I have to commute to a child's activity, which is not really the kind of thing I am into much.  But whatever.  I act like I have to go far, or to uncharted territories, when really, I have to drive 25 minutes to cross the city limit; to a neighborhood I frequent for a great many household errands.  It is worth saying that the last @&*!@%#*@ school was just a nice 18-minute bus ride on those days when I thought that even the 8-minute drive in the car was too much chauffering & spoiling.

All this triple-plus irritating, parent-culture wake-up-call turmoil has put me in some kind of a sulking mood that is only soothed by a constant playlist from my junior year of high school.  The Bangles, The Police, Bad Brains, and Black Flag.  Yaz, Yes, Joy Division, Bon Jovi, U2, and Human League.  The Violent Femmes.  Midnight Oil.  The list goes on and I have no shame.  Garçon has picked up all the words to Nitzer Ebb's "Join in the Chant."  Yesterday he came down after dinner while clad only in a too-small pair of turquoise Powerpuff-Girl panties and carrying his guitar to tell Mari and I that he planned to work for PETA when he grows up.  I mouthed to Mari the refrain of our favorite joke -- so much poon, dude.  That kid is so foxy.  We will never be ready. 

One of my pregnant friends had her first baby the other day.  I told her Congratulations; welcome to Hell.  I meant it the best possible way.  I mean, not like a Snake Church Hell.  Not even the kind where Virgil shows you around.  More like the kind with Estelle, Inez & Garcin.  The kind where you need TSOL to cope.