Karate

Kempo Karate has turned my little ruffians into gi-wearing ninjas, well almost. For the past month and a half Yenny, our wonderful au pair, and I have been taking them 3-4 days a week to a one-room dojo with ancient florescent lighting and dirty mats. It smells like a bottle of turpentine unless the doors are open to the outside because of the cobbler bellow. But, I don't care. Who knew that hitting other children with noodles and kicking, lunging, and punching imaginary villains is the perfect anecdote to hours of good-humored fratricide on the living room rug.

Plus they look so damn cute in their little white uniforms: Miles with his willowy grace, Alec with his wise-guy intensity. I started Karate with them in April and have since earned my yellow belt, something they are erstwhilely trying to do themselves. The class that they go to is a mix of yellow and white belts. The Sensei often divides the class so that a white belt (rank beginner) is paired with a yellow belt (upwardly mobile beginner). This has lead to all kinds of interesting results. For example, yesterday one of the yellow belt boys got wacked in the eye by an overly zealous white belt and burst into big, pitiful tears. But this set up has its strengths too--I witnessed a yellow belt teaching a wide-eyed Alec how to deflect a front-on neckgrab. Learning from other kids seems to help their little egos integrate more of all the information being thrown at them in each session, and they get to go through the motions twice as students and then as teachers, which reinforces each move.

However, the laws of the jungle apply as always when children congregate. In one on one skirmishes before the group, invariably one of the opponents is cheered, "Go Josh! Go Josh!" While the other kid fights on in silent ignominy. I wonder how the sensei allows such blatant inequity. Though, there's only one of him and he has a classic case of ADD if ever there was one. One minute he's looking at the kids fighting, the next he's answering a cell phone, or looking down at his feet and coughing in the weird Tourrette's way he does. So, his gaze is certainly unpredictable, and advancement within the ranks of the fledgling warriors is somewhat random, but everyone is getting great exercise, and the lessons do provide physical discipline. Sometimes, the sensei pays attention, and when he does he seems omniprescient.

Breaking and Entering for a Nap or Mom's Afternoon Off

Facebook status for this afternoon: Meiera Holz Stern snuck into her house with all the stealth of a cat burglar, just to take a nap, so the kids wouldn't tackle her from all diections with their loud needs.

I called the au pair to tell her my plans so she wouldn't call the cops on me. Then I staked out the house from the safety of my black Camry parked on a side street at an oblique angle from the house. A man with a cigarette, who looked like a house painter--he was spackled with paint-- came out and gave me a suspicious once over. I looked down at my iPhone and counted the minutes until I knew the minivan would pull out of the driveway with the kids.

Once I saw Yenny and the morsels leave for Karate I parked the car on the said side street so they wouldn't deduce that I was at home, climbed a low fence and walked over two yards to my own. Despite the innocence of my motive, I couldn't help but feel a bit tainted by my desperation for a quiet afternoon.

When I woke up, the house was still quiet. I had 5 minutes to use the bathroom and get myself a snack before the wee beasties returned. If they knew I was home there'd be no peace. So I hurried and made it back upstairs leaving nary a trace of my presence. I spent the last hour and half before I had to relieve the au pair munching crackers and hummus and reading about Amazonian shamans and healing plants. It was a guilty treat, and one made even more delicious by the fact that it was'nt foiled. When I came downstairs the boys assumed I'd just come home from work.

I definitely won't do this often, but I felt a bit like Ferris in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

Dahlia Took Her First Step Tonight

She let go of my hands and took a step to Hadley. We couldn't get her to replicate it after that, but nevertheless she walked for a brief moment alone. Dahlia has recently shot up. I am amazed that this baby of mine now hits her head on the kitchen table and grabs any willing pair of hands for a loop around the house and another loop, and she is so tall that I don't have to stoop down to walk with her. Then she gets down on her bottom and crawls in her adorable way that reminds me of a gondolier--one leg is the oar going into the water, one leg and her cute little butt is the boat, and her hands are the hands of the oarman as he rows through the canals of Venice.

In the grass and on the shag rug in the living room she will break into a traditional crawl, but she is too smart to do this on harder ground--it hurts her knees. In fact on Sunday I noticed she had yet a third crawl for rough terrain. Our driveway is in bad shape, full of degraded gravel and tar. Instead of risk her tender little knees she arched herself into a downward dog pose and gingerly moved her hands and feet across the hazardous way.

Then there are the stairs. Of course we have the requisite gates everywhere because given the chance she will climb up all three flights of stairs faster than Miles can do a page of homework or Alec can get himself dressed in the morning, which is not necessarily the fastest, but still a suprisingly little amount of time considering the ratio of the length of her body to the square footage of stairs in our vertical house.

I think Dahlia and President Obama have something in common in that they are both tackling many many things at once. Dahlia definitely has a better deal than the president, but she is no less hard working. She is not content to merely master her gross motor skills she now has an arsenal of words too. She is only just 13 months old and she says

1. Mama
2. Addy (Dada)
3. Aleh (Alec
4.ZZZZZ (Miles)
5. Jjjj (Yenny)
6. Te''y ( teddy bear)
7. Do'ee (Doggie)
8. Hi

She shakes her head no when she doesn't want something. She waves goodbye and hello, and she shakes her finger to say no.

She also dances everytime she hears anything resembling music. This includes a number of her toys, the phone, a song etc. She rocks her body back and forth and flails her little arms. And when her brothers are wrestling like good little puppies she crawls right in the middle of all the ruckus. She is not detered despite getting whacked one too many times already. She will be one tough cookie!

It amazes me how early babies have a sense of themselves as little people. She gets right in the middle of the boy's play, and walks, and talks, and pulls clothes from her dresser which she tries to put on by dragging them over her neck BECAUSE she knows she is a little person. She eats what we eat, tries to talk and play as we do, and a little over a year ago she was still a fetus. It is nothing short of miraculous.

The other remarkable thing about little d as I like to call her is that she now has 8, count them 8 teeth!

Will Miles Grow Up with Anything but an Aversion to Literary Gatherings?

Last night I went to hear Paul Harding read at Brookline Booksmith, which is a local bookstore in no danger of going under. Until yesterday I had no idea who Paul Harding was. I ran into someone who was part of my book-group-that-is-no-longer--the mother of 5 children and an aspiring writer--who told me that her teacher, the next BIG WRITER, was giving a reading. She used words like Faulkner and Hemingway, so I was incredulous but intrigued.

"No, I don't think it'll be feasible, but thanks for the invite," said I with 3 kids, 3 clients, a husband, a house, a garden, and aspirations of writing myself. No way, I thought as I bounced Dahlia on my hip in CVS pharmacy where I'd run into this woman on my way to the diaper wipes.

My philosophy of life is to water things in turn, and my writing/reading life has been seriously parched for some time. So despite the lack of feasibility, with 45 minutes to spare until the reading, I arranged it with our au pair and with Hadley that I would go. But the kids, who usually get me on Wednesday afternoon and evenings were not happy. Especially Miles, who is usually the least overtly needy of the bunch. However, last night he showed me that he was mighty dry too, despite the tears that he produced with such dramatic effect.

While Alec was frolicking in the back yard with a stick torturing inch worms and alternately collecting them in a Tupperware container, and Dahlia was crawling and standing, and generally cavorting in the early evening light, Miles was protesting, "But Mommy, don't go!" He pleaded. I explained to him that I wanted to go to meet other writers and that I wouldn't be gone for long, but he wasn't buying it. "Stay!" He whined as he waited with me outside on the curb for the woman with 5 kids to pick me up in her massive SUV. And once she had my phone rang.

It was Miles and he was crying. "Mommy, why did you have to go?" He has a very high pitched cry and it was hurting my ear drum. I moved the phone a little away from my ear and tried to explain again, "Daddy will be right home." I added.

But at this point he just wanted to punish me, "You're a bad mother," he said as he continued to sob. I refrained from calling him an ungrateful little pissant, and told him instead that I was sorry he was so upset and that I would be happy to stay on the phone with him until Hadley got home. He continued to whimper and screech until I said I'd make sure we had some "just Miles and Mommy time" this weekend. Then he said, " Ok, bye mommy," and that was that.

But I was sure that I had made the wrong choice going to hear a reader on the advice of an acquaintance whose judgement I couldn't vouch for. I knew the kids miss me, and that being the juggler that I am sometimes balls get lost or sat on or forgotten until they're moldy. So I had a hard time joining the lively discussion in the Suburban among the other literary women in the car pool that the woman with 5 children was steering.

When I got to the reading I was reminded why I hadn't put all my eggs in the literary basket. It was a gathering of maybe 30 people, mostly middle-aged women with some men thrown in, and a sprinkling of younger students. But the average age of the attendees was probably 55. The basement room was lined with used books and lit with a churchy flourescence. Not very auspicious I thought as I took this in and viewed the little white book that he'd be reading from. I'd rather be home with the fam.

But then Paul began to read, and despite myself I found his words captivating until I'd forgotten all about my drama with Miles and was hearing only the rhythm of the words and the eccentric details of his characters. And then I remembered why such quaint things as novels and readings at book stores attract me. There is alchemy in good writing that overcomes all personal drama and all technological boundaries.

Despite the threat of Facebook and the Kindle and all other new media, there is still nothing quite like the smell of books and the witnessing of a writer reading from his own work--connecting directly with readers in the most immediate form. But is this just because I and the geriatric attendees were raised with this? Will Miles grow up with anything but an aversion to literary gatherings?

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?