Flashback August 28, 2011: What I Have Been Doing Instead of Blogging

Photo Credit: Morguefile by cohdra

I am sorry I haven't written. I have been spending all my spare time working out soccer carpools on Excel spreadsheets and composing emails to committees of helicopter parents and haven't had time to do things like write or talk to my friends. Also I threw up in the middle of the night Wednesday. I think I have evening sickness. Which is what you get when your teenager is being born from his slimy, decaying chrysalis shell. Come over and we'll have coffee and talk about it.

My oldest son is fourteen today, which is surprising because I'm only twenty-four. At least, I was when I last remembered. He spent the weekend at a Coming of Age retreat, which is a Unitarian thing. We do that instead of a bar mitzvah. The food is not as good, but they got to do a ropes course.

I started a new position at work. I am the reading coach. So I have been testing first graders to see if they can read. They can't. Later I am going to test my dog on his algebra.

Anyway, I miss blogging. I should do that instead of post stuff to Facebook, which no one cares about anyway. Or I should grow up and stop trying to express every thought that crosses my mind in public.

Not likely.

 

Fences You Can't Pass

I wonder how the family dog must feel the first time he encounters the invisible fence. There he is, just moseying over, as he always has done, to pee in a nice, shady spot on the tire of your car, when suddenly an unpleasant static charge jolts through his body. Does he immediately connect this sensation with the necessity  to remain within a defined area? If he is my dog, he will try it twice and then look around dolefully, as if the world has suddenly become a place full of cruel electric spankings visited upon very nice dogs. He will whimper and skulk off to mope under a patio chair, defeated. Invisible things are hard to navigate. Give me a nice chain link fence any day. I want to see where I cannot go. I like neither the indignity and surprise or the sudden electric shock of the buried electric alternative.

I don't want to talk about dogs, though. I want to talk about social class. I keep stepping over the boundary. Static charges prick my senses over and over, the adrenalin of my awareness that I am out of place. If I am faking it well enough, no one else notices. Or maybe they do. I am so charged up with my fear of their noticing, I don't think I can see if they really do.

I am a woman destined to feel out of place. One frequently hears the heartwarming story of the first child of an immigrant family to go to college. Imagine this in reverse. I am the child of an educated family, and I have managed to distinguish myself by being virtually the only relation to fail to earn a college degree. My maternal grandfather was a noted minister, the kind of man who had influence over politics from his pulpit, and the author of ten or more heady and beautifully written books. His wife, my grandmother, had a degree in Latin and was a gale force of intelligence in her own right. These were educated people. My father's parents, I believe, were not college-educated but his father was a relatively successful businessman and smart as a whip. My dad went on to study music on the graduate and post-graduate level. My mother worked, while I grew up, as an instructional assistant, just as I do, and then completed her degree, graduating summa cum laude in English with a creative writing emphasis. Brilliant, talented, and certified.

I grew up in a household where correct grammar was spoken, classic literature was read to me, and critical thought was encouraged. I always assumed I would go to college. Two things got in the way. As a teenager, I developed disabling depression and then drug addiction. By the time I got clean and sober, at the age of seventeen, while I did go straight to community college, I lacked any meaningful experience of hard work. I tended to take classes of interest to me, with no particular goal in mind, maintain an almost 4.0 grade point average, and drop anything that bored me or with which I had made any academic fumble. I was aimless and immature. The second death knell in my academic future was my extreme fertility. I got pregnant at twenty-one, when I could easily have finished college already had I had any sort of plan in mind, but hadn't, and ended up on bed rest for pre-term labor. I had a little boy. Then another.

The next years of my life were consumed with children. I was basically a child myself when I had my first son. Still believing that the world would rise up to cradle me should I prove my inherent worthiness to it, I fumbled forth, armed only with an array of cloth diapers and wooden toys, to be the right kind of mother. Here's what you may not understand about this if you have done this the right way yourself, marrying first, completing college before that. When you essentially give up your future to raise a child, you damn well put your heart and soul into it. This makes you less likely to return to school, not more. Having had to answer every kind of question from the well-meaning "Are you sure you are doing the right thing?" to the utterly appalling "Do you know who the father is?" (Yes, I'm engaged to him!), I was prepared to prove to the world that raising children was the best use of my time and talents. The rest is history.

The one time when, after I divorced, I prudently returned to school again and decided to major in Sociology (hence my interest in class), I was again interrupted by becoming pregnant and ending up on bed rest. I bore baby boy number three. I always meant to go back. I waited until we could afford it. I waited until the kids were older. When I was diagnosed with the multiple health conditions that now cause my life to be a daily compromise between my grandiose visions of clean houses and brilliant blog posts and my need for rest, I let the door on my academic future shut gently and finally behind me.

I will never have a college degree.

I work as an instructional assistant. My job employs my mind in a brilliant sort of way. Interweaving a gift for humor, love of children and the lightness of heart it takes to work with them, a knowledge of child development, and something critical to learn and be good at, I am privileged to be able to work with as many as thirty students a day teaching reading skills, and see a concrete difference made with the work I do. I love my writing as well. I feel like it provides something both for me and for the world–on my best days– that I want for the world to have. Parenting is perhaps the best of my jobs. There is nothing more worthwhile than the privilege of helping to shape a human being, to see who that person is growing to become and try to provide some resource for their greatness. I  am, I think, a good mother. These are engaging and worthy acts. They do not, however, come with award, certificates, recommendations or special associations.

None of this has ever bothered me a day in my life. Until I tried to fill in my profile for LinkedIn. Suddenly my life started to have the quality of poverty. No awards. No certifications. No degree. Do you think people will be impressed if I write that people say I am very, very smart and always show up on time?

Sitting amidst groups of women at the Erma Bombeck Writer's Conference, I was lost in a frenzy of rules I didn't understand. Books were mentioned I have not read, although I read avidly. (I have apparently read all the wrong books. How was this accomplished?) I cannot remember which is the correct fork to use when they give me two forks at my place setting. When is it O.K. to place my cloth napkin on the table? I do not have a business card. I have only one cardigan. Will anyone notice? What is the protocol for awaiting a cab at a nice hotel? Apparently, one does not have to stand out on the curb. The driver will come in and retrieve you. Who knew? I felt continually as if I was impersonating someone else. I might be caught out at any moment. Although I was enjoying myself, the tension felt like something I could bite.

People have said very encouraging things and this has been immensely helpful. I have been told I am a good writer and sweetly reprimanded not to be so self-effacing. It occurred to me only this morning that what I am pressed up against is larger than an issue of self-esteem, although it certainly is an issue of self-esteem as well. It is an issue of class.

Class is not so permeable in our society. Data proves this. It tends to stick to generations moving down, more so than in some other countries, more so–much more so–than we like to think. Granted, it sticks much less so than in many, many less fortunate places. Education is, in so many ways, the golden ticket. This is not a political blog, and I am not going to illustrate the inherent unfairness of education for you here, but suffice it to say, that it's not a level playing field out there, but if you can get an education, in a lot of ways, this can be a ticket to an elevation of class. I did the opposite. Through choices I made of my own free will, I moved myself downward. It is not so easy to get back up.

I have two final thoughts about all this. One has to do with my parenting. I go to church and otherwise associate with a community of perfectly lovely people (and I don't say that tongue in cheek–I mean they are. Perfectly. Lovely.). They are, as far as I can tell, all educated people. I believe it may be true that my family is perhaps the lowest class family in our congregation. Again, I don't mean this in terms of anything snide. I mean that we struggle financially, that we drive old cars, and that neither my husband nor I have degrees. Sometimes, someone will say that they very much want their child to take a year off of after high school before going to college, that they don't think grades are all that important, or that, having gotten a PhD themselves, they think college education is overrated. Whenever I hear this, I want to turn on this person and scream like a crazed banshee.

I tell my kids: It does matter. It matters more than you can imagine. It will matter over and over and over, when you are eating dinner with friends, when you want to put your kids in a sport, when you want to go see Europe. Your education will give you choices. If you have a choice and you want to move off of the grid and build a house with your own two hands and grow quinoa, do so with my blessing. I mean this from the bottom of my heart. But please, please, please allow yourself that choice before you do so. No matter how smart and how talented you are, no matter how much potential you have, life wants you to show your credentials. Have some. Know how to work. Know how to jump through hoops. Hoop jumping is a really useful skill. Know and protect your passions like fragile shoots from hard frosts, but do not be afraid to do what you have to provide for yourself. There is a great deal of inspiration to be found in the luxury of not having to work your ass off doing manual labor, day after grinding day.

Here is my last thought: If this is hard for me, (And it is. It really, really is.) what is it like for someone who has a raw talent but cannot use standard written English well? What is it like for someone who did not have the advantage of my exposure to Shakespeare, to Greek mythology, to history? Are we really saying none of these people can write?

I can get on the grammar Nazi bandwagon as quick as anyone. Or at least I could until I realized I was surrounded by my betters in the writing world. I am annoyed by misspellings, driven crazy by misused apostrophes. But what if all I am doing is setting up invisible fences all around me? Fences past which you can't pass if you are dyslexic. Fences you can't pass if you are raised in East LA, exposed to a grammar that follows rules we might find equally hard to follow. Fences you can't pass if you are still learning and growing as a writer. (Aren't we all?)

I think I will stop cracking wise about people's misused apostrophes. The world would be a richer place if it were filled with the voices of all of us–voices edged with the hard beauty of the street vernacular and the southern drawl and the fascinatingly off-kilter English of the immigrant. Imagine the written world a cacophony of voices and all of us a little more able to listen for the beauty in every one.

Images are used according to allowable terms from MorgueFile.

A Mirror Held Up to Our System of Education

When I first arrived for work at an elementary school in the late summer of 2007, the thing that surprised me were the lines. In all of my life, I had never fully recognized the pronounced importance of an ability to walk in this specific way, one child behind the other, in order that a system designed to educate 500 of these creatures might function. At the time, I felt slightly as if I had been tumbled into a video documentary on the societal stifling of the Individual. I quickly learned, though, that 500 children allowed to prance the halls like merry goats, singing loudly by open classroom doors would not a tenable situation make. I began, in fact, within the months that followed, to experience enormous agitation at the sight of lines that were out of order, lines that an adult failed to properly constrain, loud lines. However, somehow the lines–the necessary, quiet, orderly lines stuck with me. Maybe this is why. Children–and the systems we use to instruct them–hold up a mirror, which if we dare look in, might show us who we really are and what we really value.

The mirror says we value order more than we say we do.

I am confused sometime. I am confused about worksheets. The way that some parents speak about them you would think that they were talking about crack pipes or dead rats. On the other hand, I have this child that is, perhaps dysgraphic, or for some other reason cannot make his vast mental landscape confine its wealth to the small line where a word or sentence must be written on his first grade worksheet. His work is pretty crappy, but he is capable of an ingenuity and imagination, a sort of corvine-like facility with his thought life that won't translate to the damn worksheet. It makes me hate worksheets. I want to gather them in a great pile and burn them like the library of Alexandria. Honestly though, how the Hell would would we be expecting all our teachers to teach without them–lessons aligned to standards, appropriate to each of twenty-five children in her class, all composed with the eight or so hours of planning time she has a week for teaching every subject she is responsible for? We don't give enough time for a teacher to thoughtfully create dynamic lessons, we don't provide materials that support it, we think it can be tossed off.

The mirror says we think education is a recipe or a science, when it is really an art.

I am also confused about standards. It keeps landing for me like this. I am 5'6. " Perhaps the standard for my age, decided on by legislators, is that I be 5'8."  I'm not. I'm just not. There is so much wrong with an education that is focused entirely on standards that it makes my head spin. I don't think you can throw them out entirely. I actually think that human beings become lazy quite easily, that we are happy to sit around, chewing gum and letting the kids have extra free time while we check our email. If we don't have a goal, a target, a ribbon to run through, then we often putz around. But the standards need to be based on each individual child. If you are 5'4" now, you might reasonably gain two inches and be 5'6" by the end of the year. That growth should be celebrated. A sixth grader who begins the year reading at third grade level and ends it at fifth should be congratulated. Within the system we have now, he is going to feel "low" no matter what. A fourth grade special ed. kid who I worked with one year was rewarded at the end with a certificate that said he had made "the most progress in creative writing," something of which he was extremely proud, but he was later confused and disappointed that he still had to attend summer school. "I thought I made the MOST progress, Ms. Adams!" How do you fix that situation? How do you even answer that question authentically?

The mirror says we want sameness, however much we say we celebrate diversity.

I am confused about what we are teaching. My child's sixth grade book report instructions read like the instructional manual for a washing machine. If one could only understand all the elements of fiction–identify the rising and falling action and regurgitate them into a bland essay, surely one could say one has mastered English. The writing he is taught is terrible. It is as if art were taught by instructing students to sketch a person, using the crosshatched lines artists compose to define space, and then leave the lines in place on the finished product. The writing is all schema. It lacks breath. Last Sunday, I stood in a room with four middle school students, two of whom are actors, while they were instructed, in pairs, to devise their own short skits illustrating a bias scenario that was given them on slip of paper.

"Do you want us to read it?"

"No, I want you to create a skit. Make it up."

"I don't understand."

And this went on for five minutes or so. Although incredibly bright children, all of them, they were more or less incapable of taking a known thing and translating it into something original.

The mirror says we value skills, but not knowledge or ingenuity.

My observation is that this isn't personal. This isn't specific to a classroom, to a school, to a district. It is suggestive of a society that has certain values.

The mirror says we are losing our way.

How to Completely Misunderstand Capitalism

So, recently they published my salary in the newspaper. They did this, I guess, so that, in the interest of transparency, all of the citizens of New Mexico can know my name and later check to be sure that I am giving them their due, since they are currently shelling out $10,588 a year for my labor as a reading instructional assistant. I won't say a whole lot more about that. I could, but I won't.

My husband works for local government. In all honesty, we are both lucky to have stable work and live in a great community. Also, I truly love my job. It gives me something I am accountable for–somewhere I am known as a reliable, competent person and it makes me feel happy and worthwhile. I enjoy the kids I work with, and I go to sleep every night knowing that I make a difference. It's better than crack, actually. Well, truth be told, I have never used crack, but I am supposing it's better. 

Truly, Mike and I are blessed in many, many ways. However, we have crappy stuff. 

Our thirteen year-old minivan has a big stupid crack across the windshield that was caused by one tiny pebble many years ago. We have never shelled out the $300 to replace it. Things have been falling off of the van for years–weather stripping, the passenger side visor, various knobs. The side mirror is cracked and we stuck a new mirror with an adhesive back on top of the old, cracked one. The heating and cooling system periodically makes so much noise that it sounds as if a dead body is rattling around in the dash. One has to decide how important it really is to be cool, when weighed against the assault on one's senses. Our small house is filled with areas of duct tape over glass, chipped porcelain, uncovered insulation, and un-patched sheet rock. Our carpet looks like it has been used to wipe down a muddy pig, which is not too far from the truth. We are the people of the broken things.

Because of all this, I would not necessarily be opposed to making money for some of the fifteen to twenty hours a week I spend writing, even though I also do this because I love it and I want to. Consequently, I realize I should submit some of my writing for publication. This, however, is a bit overwhelming to someone as mentally scattered as myself. Below are some thoughts I wrote on this earlier this month to my friend Tangled Lou: 

I was looking through Writer's Market this A.M, trying to find a target for either a re-worked version of my What is not Simple piece or a piece on the decision to home school, explored from a personal, non-polarizing angle, and what I find is that mostly the expectation if you are a writer is that you should work your ass off for free, carefully acquaint yourself with each publication's last six months of offerings, and do everything but offer blow jobs for the privilege of being published. Of course, I will happily follow all of these rules and submit my blood, sweat and tear-covered writing for rejection, in the faint hope that someone will publish it, so that I can say to myself, with conviction the words: "I am a writer."

I will keep trying. One of you probably needs to sponsor me, perhaps call me every day and give me specific task items that I can complete in this area. Right now, Submitting Written Work lives in the category of Things That Fill Me With Terror, along with Blog Design, Blog Promotion and Networking. So, I think I need to keep thinking of other things that might make me some money. What I'd really like is to be discovered in a "Wow! You're great. Let me pay you lots of money to do just what you're doing!" sort of way, but I fear this may never happen.

I would be willing to run ads, if I liked the ads. I hate paper towels, so I don't want them on my site. I also don't like packaged snacks or disposable diapers. I would be willing to advertise treatment facilities of good repute or wildlife centers or progressive think tanks. And these are always looking to run ads on small blogs with a monthly readership just under 3,000 page views a month, so I'm pretty much just waiting on a call there. I wouldn't mind running ads for other bloggers, artists, wonderful non-profits...

In fact, during this thought process, I have gotten so inspired in realizing that I could use my blog as a pulpit to promote the people and organizations I care about, that I am all ready to offer ad space for free as a public service...and this is why I suck running a business. If I was a hooker, I'd probably just start giving away sex to poor homeless guys who couldn't afford it on general principle. I'm that good at this.

I think I'll just go back to my socialist phonemic awareness curriculum. In the meantime, please send checks. Make them out to "Hopelessly Deluded Ninny."

What is Not Simple

"Lovely Weed"

Easy as ABC. Simple as 123.

What could be simpler than setting pencil to paper, than cutting and pasting a letter in the proper position? What could be simpler than standing and walking in line, than sitting in a seat?


These things are so easy when a child is equipped to do them, it is hard to imagine that they could be difficult for anyone. Almost as simply done as flipping a light switch, the proper instruction is given and the light will turn on. This seems to be the hope and expectation of almost every teacher.

Frustratingly, though, often we flip the switch and the room remains in darkness. The child, though obviously intelligent, sits fiddling with his pencils and the worksheet is incomplete. The temptation is to flip the switch again. Again. Again. Now the child, although he has not completed the worksheet, has still learned something new. He has learned that there is something wrong with him. The light switch is simply not wired to work in this way. It cannot be cajoled or punished into triggering. It will not light until you discover the secrets of its wiring.

Children are not simple.

I work in education and what I know of teachers, generally, is that they work harder than you know, and that they care more than you suspect. Teaching is more difficult, more draining than you think and classroom dynamics quite different than people outside of classrooms understand. The comments left by parents on some blogs I have read, criticizing teachers for what seem like completely ordinary acts of discipline–which I have observed in every classroom I have worked in–leave me puzzled. What do these people want exactly?

I have two children with IEPs and have worked in a school for five years, and I will tell you that implementing an IEP, as it is written can be extremely difficult, in a room with twenty-four other students and limited staff. Sometimes it will dictate that a student have a scribe, but there will be only two adults available to the entire class. Sometimes a student needs a quiet environment and the classroom is small and crowded. They need additional time to work, but from where should this time come? From their play time? From recess? Often IEPs are written in ideals, and when translated to reality, things look entirely different.

Teaching is not simple.

My six year old son reads at third grade level. His handwriting is illegible. He demonstrates higher order thinking skills but can't fully understand the difference between reality and make-believe. He understood how to increment a digit in hexadecimal when shown by my husband, but has trouble completing addition worksheets because...they are worksheets. His teacher knows he is incredibly bright and grasps the concepts she has taught but has very little physical evidence to demonstrate his mastery of material.

Mikalh (MEE-koll) spoke late and didn't string sentences together at the typical age. He received the services of a developmental specialist which were, at one time, almost entirely focused on encouraging him to play imaginatively. This, for a child who now, has more costumes than clothes and spends every unscheduled moment of his day involved in make-believe. I felt then that none of this "help" hurt him, but I hardly felt that the diagnosticians had really seen my child, in all his beautiful complexity, for who he is.

Development is not simple.

Throughout all of Mikalh's years of being watched and diagnosed, notes have been made on his tendency to wiggle, his inability to "pay attention", his general spaciness. To anyone reading his file, flashing red lights appear around the obvious truth that Mikalh has AD/HD. Mikalh can't pay attention. It seems perfectly obvious.

Is it?

If there is one thing you should know, it is that I am not opposed to diagnostic labels. I also am not in any way categorically opposed to psychiatric medications. I have only somewhat jokingly written that my entire family has AD/HD. Two of my children currently take medications for this condition and I am the person who asked for the team meetings at school on the subject and who asked the questions that led to these diagnoses. My intuition as a mother told me that this was the right thing to do. 

With Mikalh, I just don't feel so sure. There is, at this point, no resounding "clunk" of recognition within me when it is suggested that my youngest child has AD/HD. He may, but I don't know how much of who he is can be explained by that particular label. My intuition tells me to be skeptical but still cooperative.

Parenting is not simple.

Mikalh is so young that no one really knows fully knows what makes him who he is. He is currently being served at school for language processing, fine motor and sensory issues, and is also seeing a therapist to deal with the fall-out of his extreme emotional sensitivity. He has a high IQ and a tendency to think creatively. How all of these factors complicate what we are seeing in him is impossible to tease out.

This child, who is apparently paying no attention, will walk up to his teacher, as the other children are leaving for recess and recount for her the most interesting portions of the story she read while he wandered aimlessly around the room. After a day of completing no work on a science unit on liquids and solids, he will come home and conduct experiments in our sink, chattering happily about why the table is solid and why his soy milk is liquid. In a quiet classroom with the attention of his sweet teacher or in our own kitchen, he blooms.

My deep suspicion is that the world comes at Mikalh undistilled. He seems to be attending to the sound of his teacher's voice, to the motion of classmates in the room, to the rhythm of the noisy heater, to the graceful ballroom dance of swaying branches in the wind, visible outside the window. The world gushes into him, full of beauty and horror and confusion to attend to, and he vibrates with the sensation of its touch. The endless worksheets shift like pieces of a Rubik's Cube, meaningless as clutter. The seat beneath him confines him.

He is a song composed of golden riddles and velvet images, forged to evoke instead of explain. The world wants not music, but a simple explanation from him.

Mikalh feels intensely the softness of fleece and the hardness and scratchiness of a plastic school chair. He stops to examine the beauty of individual snowflakes. He feels, with eyes wide and full of contemplation, the pain of toiling slaves, who lived and died one hundred fifty years before his birth, and the fear and bravery of Helen Keller. He wonders why it is ethical to put an injured animal to sleep, whom we cannot heal, but not an injured person. He is fascinated by the intricate design on the back of a spider.

Who is not paying attention?

My child is not simple.

Simplicity can be the ultimate truth and essence of the world. The room free of clutter, the Japanese garden, the raw and uncomplicated gorgeousness of a sunset over mountains. A moment of quiet meditation. Many things have been written in praise of simplicity, and they are beautifully true.

But simplicity can also be a shackle. When your heart is full of poems and the world wants neat demonstrations of knowledge. When creation settles on you in a bedlam of rich color and detail and you are asked to name the thing most important, but perhaps, not most interesting. Simple plans and objectives fail the child who is a swirl of lovely chaos.

He is a rangy, delicate wildflower in a garden of orderly tulips, and I am dumbstruck by his beauty.

I do not want for him to be more straight and tidy. I want, instead, for the world to love wildflowers as much as I do and renounce its blind devotion to simplicity.

I Don't Get It

A recurring theme throughout my life has been that I don't quite "get it."  Despite all my best efforts and intentions, I somehow fuck shit up.

In second grade, I remember first noticing this when my class was playing kickball, as a large playground ball collided with my head. I had been scanning the sky for signs of bird activity that might indicate that the people from the parallel universe from which I was sure I had been ushered were coming for me soon. Several classmates expressed a great deal of irritation at the fact that I was "not playing" when my classroom teacher explained to them sharply that I "didn't understand."

This situation has not necessarily improved.

I park crooked. After carefully aiming my minivan, carefully backing up to straighten out, carefully driving back in again, and turning the engine off, inevitably I get out and see that yes–once again the car has been parked as if by a drunken teenager. I don't even bother to parallel park, except under extreme duress, my relation to spatial matters being such that somehow my car is invariably parked two feet out into traffic.

I have worked at my job for four and a half years, during which time we have used the same time sheets to record our work hours, and yet, I fuck these up. I record my work hours in the leave column. I miscalculate my  leave. I scribble. I cross out. Often, I throw out a whole time sheet and transcribe an entire two week period onto a new one out of sheer embarrassment. Sometimes, I transcribe the errors onto the new sheet, too.

I cannot adjust swim goggles, bicycle helmets or ice skates. I have to get another adult to assist me with these matters. I cannot remember how to tie slip knots. In fact, I cannot tie a child's shoes in such a way that they will  remain tied. When I open a Band-Aid package, I invariably twist the Band-Aid so that the latex adheres to part of itself and sticks on the child in a lumpy way. I cannot fix a little girls's pony tail or braid when called to do so. At least, not unless it's Crazy Hair Day at school. When called upon to perform basic mental math, as often as not, I am wrong.

And yet, I am allowed to instruct your children to read.

My students, who regard me mostly with affection–especially my second graders–often giggle to themselves as I routinely knock over water bottles, drop dry erase markers and wonder aloud where I have put something. I suppose this allows them to feel that, although I am there to instruct them with their reading, perhaps they may be of some assistance to me in coping with my basic life skills, and so the situation is more egalitarian than a normal teacher-student relationship. I am good for their self-esteem.

I am not entirely sure why it is that, although I believe my intelligence to above average in general, I am so sub-par in these basic life skills. It does seem to be an experience common to many recovering alcoholics and addicts. I think the source may be a basic defect in attitude. While most people, when discovering a major defect or deficit in their situations, I believe tend to deal directly with it, alcoholics and addicts tend to try to adapt to it, thus learning nothing.

For example, we have an older dishwasher and the silverware basket has worn a hole in one of its sections. The result of this is that utensils dropped into this section fall partway through and prevent the entire rack from rolling in and out. It is massively irritating. So, literally for months, my husband (also a recovering alcoholic) has contrived a specific strategy of placing utensils in this section just so and attempted to teach this to the five other people who load the dishwasher in this house, with the level of success you might expect, which is quite limited. My strategy, which is even less effective, is to ignore the situation until I become extremely irritated by the blockage caused by utensils in the dishwasher.

After four months, it just occurred to me that I could replace the silverware basket. And for about twenty dollars, and the investment of  ten minutes of time online, I was able to order a new part. Duh.

This, I think, is what is wrong with me. After almost twenty years of continuous sobriety, I have taken on a lot of really important flaws in my character, but I have ignored most of the little ones. I suppose I could undertake to actually learn how to adjust a swim goggle, tighten an ice skate or properly park a car.

But I am pretty busy blogging, so I might not have time.

Letter to a child's therapist, teacher, counselor: Remember my kids.

Dear Therapist,

Dear Teacher. Dear Mediator. Dear School Counselor. Dear anybody whose job it is to labor largely unthanked on behalf of children day in and day out, trying to find some way to help the ones who no one can help, to patch up garish wounds that gape large and ugly and bleeding with small Band-Aids, to take a child with no background knowledge and no winter jacket and teach that child to read, to teach that child to think and imagine; I have to talk to you.

I have three sons. And I don't know about your children, if you have them, but mine come with some of their stitching showing on the outside. Some of that stitching is faulty impulse control, faulty attention-paying wiring, faulty mood-control, faulty auditory processing. These three boys are the most beautifully wrought works of art I have ever cast eyes on, and part of that beauty is this faulty thread-work. Like the lazy line across a Navajo rug, it makes each of them more authentic. It can also make them first class pains in the ass.

Let me tell you a story. I have to tell it so that you will understand me. It is my story. This story is the reason I am writing.

I was a gifted child. I brought smiles of indulgence to the lips of every teacher that had me, teased by the delight of having met a child who could take what they taught further than they they imagined. Teachers; you know the tickled amusement I mean. I can appreciate it now that I have felt it myself teaching, now that a kindergartener has asked me politely how to spell "ocean" correctly. It is the unparalleled delight of knowing that, for once, you are not needed, that this child has bettered you, and you can bask in the delight of their blazing unfolding.

But when I hit middle school, I moved to a cruel and image-driven community, my family suffered a divorce and alcoholism, and a flaw that lay hidden in the weft of my own stitch-work (clinical depression) was pulled. 

The thread unraveled. My grades plummeted. The child that had once been a source of delight for teachers became, when considered at all, someone to sigh over. I skipped school, spending days hiding six or seven hours under a blanket in my own bed, concealed, rather than face the confirmation of my personal worthlessness that was middle school. My English teacher would read my creative writing with pride to the class in my absence, but he didn't call my parents to ask why I wasn't there. No one pursued me into the darkness to try to get me to come out. I fell hard from great heights.

The world that had only cast its approving light upon me up til then, in expectation on my greatness, turned away from the embarrassment of my broken body on the ground. I made a lame suicide attempt, resulting in a traumatic trip to the ER, one psychiatrist visit and nothing. I made countless visits to a school counselor to tell him that I felt I was slipping off the cliff of sanity while he quietly nodded his head. Attempts to talk to talk to friends resulted ultimately in having no friends. I was twelve and I was alone in the dark, in a world suddenly changed from what it had been.

I spent six years of my life in active clinical depression, daily losing the battle fought with a darkness that consumed the edges of Truth and cast Life in shades of bloody, lonely pain. I developed drug addiction and later, bulimia. There were angels along my way who reached out to try and  do what they could, but, for the most part, the world in general was more than willing to lose me. Most of my angels were losing their own battles with Life. The people who were winning were too busy looking away to grant the gift of seeing me.

At the age of eighteen, I fought my way crawling on my stomach with my bloody fingertips to Alcoholics Anonymous and taught myself, with help, to live. I am still learning. But I have learned a lot, if only through having made such absolutely prodigious mistakes. I have recovered from problems and events that many people cannot say out loud without a shudder, and I have stitched them into the fabric of my life, so that they have made me stronger and more flexible.

I have this to say to you out of all this experience: We cannot afford to lose children. Not without fighting. We need to stop acting like it is OK or it is inevitable that children suffer unbearable pain in this world. If, in truth, we can do nothing to stop or ease this pain, we need not let them suffer it alone. If we lose them to drug addiction, to illiteracy, to mental illness, let it be only after we have unleashed the Spanish Armada on their behalf, after we have shot every bit of ammunition in our stores, after we lie out of breath, exhausted from the effort. Let it not be for lack of imagination, lack of focus, lack of compassion.

Think about the times you have suffered the greatest pain. Maybe you were injured. Maybe you were giving birth. Maybe you lost a loved one. I hope that you did not do this alone. I hope that someone held your hand and kept holding it, and that this person looked you in the eye and did not look away. I hope that they did not get up and leave while you were most afraid. 

Please do not tell me my child is just going through a phase. Please do not tell me that all we can do is wait. Please do not imply that their failing to reach their potential as human beings is just OK, somehow inevitable. They may be one of many to you, and you may be tired. You may have seen so many, so many that you could not help and for whom the future was lost. Their faces may pass by you in a collage of hazy images. I understand. But let my child never become an item on your calendar, a name on a  list.

I don't need you to have the answers. I need you to look me in the eye and tell me you are willing to fight with me, for the life of my child. It is all I have ever wanted from you, for all these years, when I stood here talking about my child's ADHD, my child's language processing problem, my child's depression. Fight with me. You may have weapons I do not know how to use. Together, we can give my child what he needs.

Remember: These boys are the most beautiful things ever wrought. They are born to inspire. They are born to be inspired. I brought them forth out of pure possibility, knowing nothing of how to parent and without a cent to my name, with nothing but the power of my unspoken promise that they would never go without a single needed thing that I could fight for them to have. They never have. And I will crawl again on my stomach, my fingers bloodied anew, for as long as it takes, to see any of them safe and empowered while there is yet breath in my body. 

I woke this morning and heard this song (below) on my playlist. Judy Collins' son killed himself in 1992 after years of alcoholism and depression. I don't know his story. She wrote this song long before his death. You can hear her trying to hope for his future in the lyrics. I can't stop listening to it. I need to do more than hope. 

Compassion and persistence are my promise to my children. Can you help me?

Sincerely,

a mother

So, if my husband left me, I would probably just pole dance to support my three kids.

Today's #ReverbBroads11 prompt: If you could have any job, what would it be? via Dana at http://simply-walking.com/.

This question is rather fraught for me. You see, I don't have a "real" job.

Photo by Greg Sloan

Don't get me wrong. I have an awesome job. In fact, my daily work includes things like having kindergartners compete to see which one gets to "wake up" my room with the motion control lights and demonstrating the vocabulary words "imaginary" and "proceed" by proceeding into in an imaginary door in my room to the addictive sound of their resounding laughter. I cannot communicate how cool this job is.

I work as a part-time instructional assistant teaching reading to kids. And I make a tiny little paycheck. (Like, if you suddenly sneezed, my paycheck is what you would wipe off your chin afterward.) There is no real possibility for advancement and the district has frozen our pay for the last three years or so as a budget-saving measure.

So, the upshot is, if my husband left me, I would probably have to pole dance to support my three kids.

The poster from my day care's art center

Prior to getting this job, I had worked as a family day care provider, a waitress, a veterinary assistant and a cafe barista. I do, however, have one claim to fame: For two years, I was paid five cents a word to write a monthly community column for the Russian River Monthly, so I am a professional writer, bitches.

Other than that, I was a full-time mother (By the way, what the Hell does that mean? Who is a part-time mother?) And I was a serial volunteer (but not a cereal volunteer.)

I have always been bugged by the fact that I could not support a family, or myself, or probably even a pet dog, on my own earnings. So, I have spent years trying to imagine what I might do that would elevate me to the category of people with careers. Here are some of the ideas I have had:

Job# 1: Devin, 4  and Rowan, 2004

1. Project manager for the community environmental project I helped spearhead
2. World's most qualified family day care provider (pays the same as poorly qualified day care provider)
3. Sociologist (requires PhD, which seems totally do-able since I'm already one third of the way to a Bachelor's of Arts right now)
4. Computer Graphic Design Specialist (This is only funny if you know me.)
5. Permaculturist (allowing me to bring five thousand layers of philosophy, planning, list-making and mental masturbation to growing a fucking garden. The perfect job for me!)

This list is partial, but you get the idea. I have spent the larger part of my adult life wondering what I was going to turn out to be when I grew up, sometimes taking some actions toward doing something about it, sometimes not. In this pursuit, I have generated countless lists, which I still have on file, in case they are needed. I have consulted multiple web sites, studied child development tirelessly, and visited UNM to make a decision about entering their Professional Writing program. I have discussed all of these options in agonizing detail with my parents and husband, year after year, while they patiently supported me, with the result that I have not done a damn thing but be a mother and work with kids. Still.

Fine motor practice (otherwise known as screwing around with pom poms), 2007

I am thirty-six now, and I have worked long enough to say that I think I do at least have a basic outline of what I need in a job to be happy. If I had any job in the world that I wanted it would need to include three things:

1. Making a difference 
2. Working with children
3. Writing

Crap. I have that job now. The writing part happens on the side, and is unpaid at present, but basically I already have the perfect job.

 So, one question. Can I have a raise now?  

People who take Topomax should never do anything.

Today's #ReverbBroads11 prompt: What are your biggest pet peeves? via Em at  http://warmedtheworld.blogspot.com/

I'll focus on one: forgetfulness!

I hate when people forget things. It makes life like this: everyone else is a cub scout but me-I'm the den mother. Did I mention my whole family has ADHD? (My middle son leaves socks around our house the way the Easter Bunny leaves eggs.)

Here's the worst part:

A couple of months ago, my neurologist prescribed me Topomax for my migraines. And it dramatically reduced my migraines. Which is a big deal, since, prior to that I had UPGRADED to an average of 15 migraine days a month.  But it made me an idiot.

The first week, I lost my credit card, forgot to pick my six year-old up from school, and tried to set fire to my house over and over again with a glue gun. Now it's a bit better. But I can't write letters backwards in the air anymore! (Shut-up. I need to. It's part of my job. I'm a reading instructional coach.)

A funny thing happened today.

I can't hand-write the addresses on my holiday cards anymore, because of my fibromyalgia, and my husband had the brilliant idea of using Excel and Avery labels to make the job easier. So, last night, I was carefully aligning and sticking labels onto holiday cards. Which I send to everyone in the goddamned world. 'Cuz I'm that good. I even wrote a cute holiday letter.

So today I'm carefully, lovingly folding each letter to include with the photo cards of my three kids and my canine-donkey hybrid dog. I've got through about thirteen when I notice they all say

"We hope 2010 finds you happy and well."

Maybe it will be construed as a joke?

Just when I was feeling really low, though, my mother, a brilliant woman and writer who graduated summa cum laude with a degree in creative writing, calls me:

Mom: "My car is gone."

Me: "WHAT?"

Mom: "It's just completely GONE. I parked it on the side street, on Bathtub Row, outside the Senior Center, and when I came out, it was just...gone."

Me: "It isn't."

Mom: "What do you mean?"

Me: "It's not gone. You just can't find it. Do you need me to come and get you and help you to find it?'

Mom: "Yes, because I'm about to cry."

Me: "OK. I'll be there in a minute."

Mom: "I'm in front of the Senior Center. I'll be the one crying."

So, I got in my car, my self-esteem having already been slightly elevated. My mother, although having been blessed with a well-honed wit, has been given short shrift in the mathematical and directional skills departments. But, to be fair, this was her first visit to the Senior Center since moving to Los Alamos.

I drove up to the square grey Senior Center building and adjacent parking lot, and came immediately upon my mother's silver Toyota Corolla, with her sunglasses perched on the hood. She was nowhere in sight.

I phoned her. The ringing ceased and a loud rustling sound commenced, which continued for about forty seconds, until I hung up. "God damn it, mother!"

I put the car in gear, rounded the corner, drove down a side street and discovered my mother standing on a snowy sidewalk outside a brown apartment building, looking expectant.  I honked.

She got in the car. "Well, I don't know where the fuck you think YOU were but your CAR is at the Senior Center."

And we both started laughing. It's good when you can laugh through the dementia.

It eases the pain.

Another life saved by a sick sense of humor.

#ReverbBroads11 prompt: Name and explain the one guilty pleasure you can't live without. Then explore the idea of how you would feel if you gave that thing up for a year. via Neha at whereyouarehere.blogspot.com

Let me explain. A terrible accident has happened. I have allowed myself to be swept up in the enthusiasm of writing and pretending to be a grown-up writer, and ended up here: Writing on an assigned prompt with a group of women. 

I hate both assignments and being part of a large group of women. In both cases, it's because of the rules that I just can't seem to follow. This post being a good example of that. 

Hello, ladies, it is good to meet you. I will introduce myself and my blog today by announcing that I indiscriminately hate both members of my own gender and the activity in which we are all engaged here. I will now show myself to the door...

Shakespeare speaking at a Writer's Convention

The guilty pleasure I cannot live without, not even for the length of time it takes to make a good impression?   Snark. 

Snapshot #1:

I am standing at my locker, first year of middle school, in direct violation of the official stay-the-Hell-away-from-your-locker-between-classes policy, attempting to extract some item which, naturally, I have forgotten. The principal, a twig-like ghost of a man to whom I have never before directly spoken, comes upon me and regrettably asks the following question: 

"Are you at your locker between classes?' to which I reply..."No."

Twenty-five years later, I would still 100 times rather serve detention than have answered that question any other way.

Snapshot #2:

I am twenty-five, lying on my own bed, in a country cottage in the primordial redwood forest of Camp Meeker, California, engaged in the act of giving birth to my second son, Devin. I have reached that critical, consuming part of childbirth just past transition labor where I will soon begin to push. My midwife, an officiously capable ex-hippie in her fifties, is urging me to get on my hands and knees, which I do not want to do, in order to ease my labor. In order not to appear rude and to accommodate her obvious concern for my well-being, I assure her, 

"I will. I promise. Just as soon as I am done having this baby."

Snapshot #3:

I now work as an instructional assistant and teach reading to kids. One particular lesson component for second graders a few months ago centers around using descriptive words in writing. It includes a minimally passable example of descriptive language titled Student Model, depicting a red bicycle, which I read to my group of three boys and one girl. In order to then solicit a response of some kind from them, I add,

"But this is not what you guys write. You write", I say dully," 'I like my bike...because it is cool.'" 

 "You want to bring the reader in and make them see what you see! Like this: 'I love my bedroom. It has pink walls and a canopy bed. I have a tiara tattoo on my wall and a bedspread that says Princess. It is my favorite place in the house.' by...MICHAEL."

Michael, and everyone else, erupt in uproarious laughter, having already become long used to Ms. Adams' Reading Class and Comedy Half Hour.

My dog got into the garbage. And lived. Because I wanted to take a photo and post it on my blog. Otherwise, I'd have just asphyxiated the sucker. There. Another life saved by a sick sense of humor. 

I'm going to have to cheat on this assignment. I cannot actually imagine what would happen to me if I gave up Snark for a whole year. All I can reasonably say is that I would stop being me. Which, I guess, is why I find it so difficult to give up for family reunions, staff meetings and parent-teacher conferences. 

If I stopped being snarky, I guess I would just have to rely more on my other defining traits. 

Like compassion. 

And I'd probably end up working in a leper colony. No, a sanctuary for hedgehogs with leprosy. And no one wants that. Least of all the hedgehogs.  So, just live with it, people. OK?

I went shopping on Fourth Avenue in Tucson and decided my son can go to college there because they have newspaper stands that look like robots.

This is my son Rowan. 

Rowan is smart. We are pinning a lot of our hopes for the future on him because he can do math, as well as vacuum and unload the dishwasher. 

We figure this more or less qualifies him for just about anything he wants to do. The sky's the limit. 

And once he makes it good in the world, he can take care of us.

Right now, he is fourteen and in eighth grade. So, he is pretty much only interested finding places in conversation to say "That's what she said." and setting things on fire. 

But you can see that potential just simmering underneath everything he does. (Like telling "That's what she said" jokes but with impeccable grammar and reading comics, but comics based on Greek myths, that kind of thing.)

I think a lot about his future, mainly since mine is already pretty much botched, and I would like to be able to send him to a good college. 

In order to fulfill on this, the method I am currently employing is to check his grades online repeatedly and question him about every mistake he has made so that the prospect of failure becomes a sort of unlivable disaster in his mind. This is what is called positive reinforcement. 

It is a very powerful parenting technique. You should try it. As a result of my approach, my son has very high grades and will probably kill me in my sleep before he ever graduates high school.

Anyway, as I've said, I was recently in Tucson, Arizona, visiting my extended family. On the last day before we had to depart, my two oldest kids had already flown home to spend Thanksgiving with their dad, and my husband, my youngest son and I had dropped my father and his girlfriend off at the airport and were looking for some place to act like tourists. Primarily, I wanted to buy a spoon that said "Tucson" so that when I am an old lady, I can have a wall covered with an array of tacky spoons to prove that I once left my house.

We ended up visiting Fourth Avenue, which is the hip college area of Tucson. I was just looking to kill a few hours and find a spoon, but based on my findings, I have decided that Rowan can go to college there. 

I haven't actually seen the actual University of Arizona, nor do I know if they have any programs that will be of interest to my son, when, four and a half years from now, he graduates high school. I can't afford the out-of-state tuition, either, but a little debt never hurt anyone anyway. Stay with me, though, because THIS is what the newspaper machines look like:

We looked around for several hours and entered various stores. I shopped for a long time because choosing a college for your fourteen year-old is an important decision which requires a lot of browsing. Some of my additional findings were:

Awesome garbage cans!

A communist coffee shop. Every good college town needs one.

Excellent pop culture stores with cool signs. 

A hydroponic store for growing "vegetables".

A nearby hookah lounge for smoking "vegetables".

(I am not trying to promote drug abuse. I have not smoked "vegetables" for the last nineteen plus years. I am just documenting the fact that there was a hookah store. I associate hookahs with Alice in Wonderland. That's because I'm so geeky highly literate. I figure if there are hookah stores, there may also be walking chess sets and talking eggs. It just seems logical.)

A mural depicting dead hippies on the wall at a major intersection.

This is some seriously bad-assed shit. AND, as if that's not enough,  you can buy your own mason jar wine glass in a store there!

So, the upshot is that what I really want is for my son is to go to a school where he can grow marijuana, become a sort of New Edition Beatnik and then drop out to join the Communist Party. All so I can go visit a place that makes me feel like I am still sixteen and shopping on the Haight, except without as many people trying to sell me acid (probably just because I'm with the six year old).

I can hardly wait to come visit him there. It solves all of our college problems! It's close enough to drive. We can make sure our relatives keep on eye on him and I can save up until I have enough money to buy a complete set of mason jar wineglasses (you know, for when we have company). We don't drink wine, but we can use them for grape juice, or perhaps, cooled mint tea sweetened with a hint of organic agave nectar (since we can't even drink juice these days, either). 

I've looked into it online and I think, if Rowan continues to get good grades, they may accept him at an in-state rate.  But if you say anything to him, please don't mention the hookahs. 

I'm trying not to be a bad influence.

And now even my front yard has ADHD.

Image by Joe Hall

The first person in my family whom we suspected of having AD/HD was my oldest son, Rowan. This even was before he was born, when my mother began referring to him prophetically as "that ADD boy".

(Some of you are now sure that our expectations created a reality wherein my child was bound to occur as defective. Judge all you want. All the expectation in the world does not make a child violently hyperactive in an environment with no TV, video games or sugar. However, on the genetic front, my former husband was apparently once tied to a chair during his elementary education. That is all I will say about that.)

I tended to agree with my mother's suspicions. At one point, I was in the hospital thirty-four weeks pregnant with him, on bed rest for pre-term labor, when, obviously bored with the dull conditions caused by my being stuck in bed, my baby spent the afternoon going breech, head down, breech and head down again.

After he was born, we had to swaddle Rowan so tightly that he couldn't wiggle because his arms upset him. Christmas lights made him excited, then hysterical. Then, when he was six months old, he started bouncing. He would "stand" on an adult's lap, holding onto their hands, straighten his legs briefly, and a maniacal grin would cover his face as he would bounce incessantly until the adult got tired of this and handed him to someone else.

In preschool and kindergarten, this evolved into a tendency to hurl objects of all kinds across the room without malice or forethought. He delighted in sneaking up on little girls and roaring at top volume into their ears, and, later, deprived of all media but nature shows, played a game he called "Sharp-tooth Slasher". He spent quite a bit of time in the principal's office, thinking of himself as a bad person.

So I started a "Please Label My Son AD/HD Rather Than Labeling Him An Asshole" Campaign. And people thought I was weird.

I was right, though.

The thing is I liked Rowan just fine. I didn't, and don't, think there is a single thing wrong with having AD/HD, other than not being able to function according to societal expectations. Born to hunt and go to war, these kids really bog down in classrooms, and other rule-based environments. To me the label is a gift to help others understand them and get them resources. I was pushy and got my son a Section 504 under the Americans with Disabilities Act to force his school to accommodate his special needs.

Anyway, label in hand, Rowan got done with this early phase of having absolutely no detectable impulse control and a great love of all things over-the-top, and he settled in. At the age of eight, he somehow became a good student, with occasional, less than totally catastrophic brushes with authority. He was the bad kid no more.

Late in fifth grade, he elected to start taking medication so that he would stop losing his train of thought in the middle of reading a page over and over again, and be able to complete his increased workload. Now he gets straight A's.

I married ADD, too, albeit undiagnosed.

My husband, Mike, is the kind of person, though unusually intelligent, who keeps forgetting what day it is.

For example, one day I called him from work to ask him a favor. I got his voice mail, thought "Whatever", hung up. He called back, but at a time when I couldn't answer and left me a message saying, with beaming pride that, if I was calling to remind him to take Rowan to allergy shots, he was already on his way to get him. So I called back.

"It's Monday. Allergy shots are tomorrow."

"Oh", he laughs, "and I was so proud of myself for remembering".

Also, every night when he loads the dishwasher, he rinses the dishes, loads them according to this extremely perfectionistic, rigid system he has devised, adds soaps and then shuts the door and leaves. Without starting it. EVERY NIGHT.

And so on.

(People think I'm a control freak, and it's just because they don't realize I am managing a houseful of dingbats. Very, very smart dingbats.)

Anyway, I guess I shouldn't have been surprised the first time that school suggested that perhaps our son, Mikalh, who is now six, may have some attentional issues. (Typically, teachers only suggest this if your child is more or less catatonic with inattention, so I gave it some serious thought.)

I know that Mikalh has language processing issues, so it makes it hard to tease that out from attention issues in particular. How do you separate the fact that someone can't process what is being said to them 80% of the time from the fact that they aren't paying any attention to you anyway? It makes an interesting quandary. Anyway, I am taking a wait-and-see attitude on this one, given that he already has accommodations for his sensory and language processing needs. What remains seems to me to be giving him medication, and I am inclined to wait until he is older to even think about that.

Then, that leaves my middle child, whose claim to fame has been that he is the single child with no IEP living in our household. He is very bright, but does not require a differentiated program due to his IQ, and has appeared to have no learning disabilities or deficits of any kind.

Except if you watch him sit in a chair. 

Devin has actually destroyed multiple items of household furniture due to his tendency to view them either as bucking broncos or as poorly made see-saws. Then there is the fact that when directions are relayed to him, his execution of said directions resembles them just enough to be sort of a good parody. Despite, again, the well-over-average intelligence.

This last week, in sixth grade, things came to a head when he lost (not misplaced, but actually permanently lost) his lunch order with attached check, a book borrowed from his brother AND his lunch box. I helped him exhume the contents of his binder, and what followed might aptly have been titled Night of the Unfinished Assignments.

In summary, his teacher thinks that, since we mentioned it, it might be a good idea if we all took a look at his attentional capacities.

I think the lunch box may turn up, though. (Never lose hope.)

(There is something sort of simultaneously defeating and vindicating about considering the possibility that I may in fact be completely surrounded by people suffering from attentional deficits. It does explain the fact that I often find myself drifting off to sleep, hanging onto some mental to-do list like a life raft: "Must remember...to schedule...flu shots...")

So, here's the upshot:

For a few years now, in an effort to act like we are normal people, I have been planting bulbs in my yard. For two years in a row, I just bought several boxes of Dutch bulbs on impulse at Smith's while grocery shopping, and made my older children help me plant these in the yard. With the use of the proper bulb planter, this only took about half an hour per bulb.

Clay soil is a bitch.

Once, my husband came out and saw what we were doing. "This", he said, "is ridiculous."

And then, he said, "There has to be a tool."

Enter the Awesome Auger. (Don't watch this whole link. The first few seconds give you the whole gist.)

So, I am hittin' this mother fucker out of the park this year. I bought one hundred-fifty assorted tulips to guarantee me two full months of angiosperm joy all across my front yard. And with the Awesome Auger this shit would be no trouble at all.

Except that all this activity burned my husband's cheap drill out. So, he had to go get another one, and then I had to make dinner. But, no prob, he and Rowan could finish it on their own.

And they did. Bravo!

The next day, Rowan, who, as I've said is very smart, reflected  aloud, "You know, we planted ALL those tulips on the left side of the yard, Mom."

 WTF???

When confronted with this, my husband sheepishly informs me,

"Well, I ASKED you where you wanted them."

Me: "I am unable to SPECIFICALLY tell you where I want one hundred-fifty bulbs to go."

Mike: "Well, I DID ask."

Me: "Part of the problem is, you don't really LISTEN. I SAID I wanted them in GROUPS scattered across the yard."

Mike: "They are in one BIG group."

Me: "It will look like the yard has measles on one side of it. It will look like a fucking tulip INFESTATION."

Mike: "You just weren't clear about what you wanted."

Me: "If I had a normal husband, I wouldn't need to explain that I DON'T want tulips ONLY on ONE HALF of my front yard. That is IMPLIED."

And so on.

I can hardly wait for spring.