Psychotic Little Boat: An Ode to Sleep

What a distant island the rested inhabit
I can barely see it through the fog of my fatigue.
It is a sunny island,
where the clocks are all in sync,
where the denizens eat beautiful fruit
that tastes as bright and sweet as they feel;
where kind words are spoken
and everyone, even the aged,
is embued with dewy youth.

On this now distant island
everyone sleeps when the sun goes down
and wakes in the morn.
At night when the moon is up
everyone's breath evens out and sails up
to the clear night skies
in unison.

But months of waking
to feed the baby how many times a night
waking to change pee-soaked sheets,
waking because of the heat
or the cold
waking because the baby snores
waking and not finding my way back
has exhiled me from this place—
made me an unnatural voyeur
and cast me off in a little leaking boat
farther and farther away
from the spot in my bed
where my body has left its mold
the shape of stolen dreams.

My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nachos

Is something Miles has been repeating under his breath as he commits the order of the solar system to memory. And it brings to mind other fun little mnemonics from my own childhood: Roy G. Biv and Never Eat Soggy Waffles for the colors of the spectrum and the 4 directions. Do any of you remember others?

This week I have needed all kinds of memory devices for things a lot less cosmic than these. I was flat on my back with a fever for most of the weekend, and when I emerged in phlegm glossed fashion it seemed that my brain would just never be mucus free enough to function in the way that makes Miles refer to me as his very educated mother. I might be able to russle up some nachos except for the fact that we have neither corn chips nor cheese in the larder, and I can't remember when I'll have time to go shopping again, let alone do half the things on my to do list before the sun goes down and I succumb to my exhaustion and the ocean of swirling phlegm in my sinus cavities, or are they planets? East or west? How many kids do I have?

Minivan--Looking Back on Our First Year

We purchased a Honda Odyssey Touring, on Halloween 2007, when the dream of having 3 kids was just beginning to unfurl in my womb. It was an act of planning for the 5 that we would become the following April. And now that I look back on it, it felt like another costume we were donning. It didn't seem real, the kind of car that I or my family could possibly own.

At first, owning a minivan felt symptomatic of a larger transformation into petty-bourgeois, thirty-something parenthood. And I for one felt slightly sick because of it. What had/has happened to my youth?

After all, we sold our precious time to buy a moving box with automatic doors and 7 seats. But, oh those seats are heated. We have a retractable moon roof and tires that will drive for miles and miles even if one of the kids puts a nail in them. The car has so many air bags that if it decides to do a pirouette over the guardrail of an overpass it will encompass us all in pillows that inflate at 1/20 of a second. The car really is a marvel. But it is also the emblem of The Soccer Mom, The Suburban Family, and the ultimate death of cool.

But so are living in the 'burbs and having 3 kids. Why do I care? Part of me really had a hard time with this minivan and the demographic it consigned me to. In fact, within the first 6 months of buying the minivan I searched for a hint that I was not the ultimate joiner of the middle-class, near middle-aged nexus of people on conveyer belts who pop kids out between working jobs with ever increasing responsibility just to pay the bills for the minivans they buy.

Really, in my hippy college days this whole concept was light years away. And even through my twenties. I wanted to love and be loved and find self-expression. Now more than halfway through my thirties I am a respectable citizen with a minivan to prove it. And I am mostly on a conveyer belt, even if I like to think I drive the minivan. Sometimes, or most of the time, it still drives me.

But fuck this! That is probably why I went on a communication binge for 6 months after I purchased the minivan, whereby I started phoning, emailing, and Facebooking friends, acquaintances and ex-lovers, anyone who could remind me of who I used to be. I wanted to remember a time when life was not so regimented, when I could go out for a drink and stay out. When I could explore the world freely and taste, drink, smoke or do more or less what or whomever I liked without any horrible fear of unraveling, and the repercussions of stopping the conveyer belt.

Though I still like to think of myself as someone with a deeply bohemian take on life, the fact of the matter is that having children, if not also being happily married has cemented my fate, at least for now. It has been about 15 years since I did the things in the paragraph above with wild abandon. And I am happier, steadier, arguably more creative, and certainly a better person than I was before. So, if all that comes decorated in a heap of steal otherwise known as an Odyssey, I'll buy one again any time, thank you very much. But I can do without the conveyer belt--that mechanized, automatic, unrelenting passage side to my life. Can I dismantle it and keep on driving?

"Where Do I Go?"

Asked Alec, my 5-year-old, when he loped up to our room to cuddle this morning and found nary a spot for himself in bed. I welcomed him to cuddle me, but he answered his own question by wedging himself, in proper birth order, between Miles and Dahlia, to which Miles responded with a slight shove to Alec's back and lots of verbal protests. Dahlia crawled over him. That in a nutshell, or a nuthuse, sums up our family dynamics at the moment.

Yesterday morning I took Alec to the pediatrician's. I had to lie to him about shots to get him in the door. Once he'd peed in a cup, squinted through his eye test, resisted his hearing test, and been weighed and measured it was time. I told him that I had made a mistake, that in fact he'd have to get some shots to get into kindergarden. He hid under my wooden chair.

The doctor came back with the nurse practitioner. I lifted the chair up, and with the doctor's help got him onto my lap where I held his legs and arms with mine while the two other women counted to 3 and shot needles into his arms twice on each side. He cried bitterly, and I felt like a cross between a child who tortures a bug in a jar, and the evil Munchausen-by-proxy mother in The Sixth Sense.

He refused the bandaids that the doctor had laid out for him, something his 4-year-old self would have taken comfort in, but that he is now too old for. He finally stopped crying long enough to stick 2 bubblegum lollipops in his mouth at once. I reminded him and myself that this was for the best—he would be spared the fate of contracting diphtheria, tetanus, mumps, measles, polio, chickenpox, and homeschooling. The last of which he said he'd like to get.

I thought, as I do from time to time, what would happen if I home school my kids? And for awhile I was imagining Miles reading Tolstoy at the kitchen table, Alec out in the yard collecting specimens of lichen, and Dahlia eating lead paint chips from the asbestos shingles. The image of our bed this morning comes to mind. Who am I joking?

Just as it's mostly good for Alec to be innocculated, it's just as important for our immune systems and our souls to be exposed to any number of ordinary germs and adversity— in and out of the home.

Alec cries, but he's getting tougher and tougher each passing day, underneath his hair shirt. I just hope that he'll keep his sweet, tender side and not cover that up in bravado the way boys in our culture do without much conscious training. And the way most people have to in order to grow up. I think I am as deluded in the hope that he'll maintain this innocent vulnerability, as I am that I might be able to prevent this garden variety adversity from entering his soul by some simple vaccines, or by keeping him from them.