UnchartedParent.com

I’m not sure why, but I’ve been on the receiving end of the following question an awful lot lately: “So, are you gonna have that third kid soon?”

Let me state this unequivocally and for the record: NO!  Not soon.  Not later.  As long as my husband and I have anything to say about it, there will not be a third child.

(Now in case there is any doubt here—especially in the minds of my two children who may be reading through their elderly mother’s yellowed blog printouts one day when she is too befuddled to reassure them—I love both of my children very, very much.  I would not trade either of them for anything; I am very, very glad that I have them.  I swear.)

I’m not sure why this question has popped up so often lately.  My younger child is two-and-a-half; maybe that length of time is considered an optimal interval between children.  Maybe my frenzied, periodically snarling persona is not as obvious to others as I think, and I actually appear bored, like I need something more to do.  Maybe I have secretly telephoned people in my sleep and said, “I wish I was pacing the floors with an infant now.  And really, I need to change more diapers.  There’s just not enough poop in my life.”

So let’s establish this now, for once and for all: my husband and I are done.  We have two children we love, two children who are bright, beautiful, energetic, engaging and full of surprises.  Two children who love each other, taunt each other and collaborate already in ways to defeat their parents.  My husband and I spend our twenty-six hour days doling out kisses and reprimands, occasionally damaging the walls of our house in frustration (okay, so that last one is just my husband).  We juggle everybody’s schedules, we make sure everyone is fed, bathed, clothed and rested, we try to keep their lives stimulating and our lives sane.  Our plates are full and then some.

For us, one more child would surely translate into a lengthy stay in a padded room.  We are done.

I don’t by any means wish to disparage those of you who have or are planning or considering more than two children.  For some people, eight is not enough.  For some, one is all they could ever want or hope for.  I’m just saying that our number is two.  I’m saying to everyone, definitively, right now, that we’re stopping at two kids.

Oh, but if you’re one of my friends or acquaintances I might run into out there, don’t think I won’t ask you, “So, are you planning to have another child?”

Yes, it’s the incredibly famous first line of a renowned song from a legendary musical:

I feel pretty,

Oh so pretty,

I feel pretty, and witty and bright.

And I pity

Any girl who isn’t me tonight.

 It’s also my two-and-a-half year old daughter “Emmie’s” latest mantra.

Over the course of the last month, Emmie has begun to approach us on a frequent basis to pronounce, “I pretty!”  “My hair is pretty!”  “My dress is pretty!”  Naturally, we smile and laugh and confirm her suspicions.  Thus encouraged, she returns again the next time the mood strikes her.

Sometimes, particularly after donning a new dress or blouse (or ragged sweatpants passed down from her brother), or after struggling against my efforts to pull her hair into a ponytail or otherwise tame it, she insists on obtaining proof: “I wanna look in mirror.”  She then runs, smiling, to the full-length mirror in my and her father’s bedroom.  She turns her body away from the mirror and examines the rear view over her shoulder.  She puts a hand up to her hair and fluffs it, a parody of a midget model.  She beams at her reflection.  Then she turns to me or her father and delivers the conclusion: “I pretty!”

Yikes!  Where does she get this?

Um, I think that’s from us.

Yes, we are the guilty parties who constantly fill her head with this notion that she’s pretty.  Of course, we pay her other compliments, too.  “You’re very smart.”  “You did that very well.”  “You’re funny.”  “You behaved very nicely.”  (Sadly, we don’t get to deliver that last line as much as we would like.)

But the one she’s latched on to is “pretty.”

When I realized that I, the feminist, and my husband, the feminist’s spouse, were probably responsible for instigating in Emmie what, odds are, will be a lifelong obsession about her looks, I felt a moment of panic.  What are we teaching our daughter?  What are we teaching her brother?  Are we part of what’s wrong with our appearance-infatuated society? 

Well, probably, yeah.

What a bummer: it’s all our fault.

But what am I going to do: tell Emmie, “No, you’re not pretty”?  Yikes, that would be so much worse. 

So my husband and I will keep confirming Emmie’s belief that she’s pretty.  But maybe we’ll step up instruction on the ABC’s a bit, too.

Confession time: I am not a scrapbooker.  I know that fact groups me with only five or less percent of American moms (or maybe it just seems that way), but I am never going to sit at a table for hours and make cute pages of memories for my children out of irresistible photographs, adorable little stickers and colorfully patterned paper.

When does everyone do this, anyway?

In addition, while I used to be great at selecting photos I like and placing them in albums, I no longer do that, either.  I am, actually, slightly ashamed about this one, and I do plan to get to it someday.  Unfortunately, with each passing month, the number of giant plastic bins storing these to-be-culled photos grows; the task is now nearly as daunting as raising my children.

So baby books, as you might imagine, are also not my thing.  I was actually pretty diligent about maintaining my son’s baby book for a while; for three years and eight months, to be precise.  But then my daughter came home.

Since then, I’ve barely touched either of their books. 

I have long felt guilty about this fact.  After all, feeling guilty is something you can do anytime; it’s perfect for multitasking.  But then I had an epiphany about my kids’ neglected baby books: this blog is their baby books.

It may not be pretty, or decorated with pink and blue swirls and cute little elephants.  But if they really want to know what their childhoods were like someday, they won’t get a better record anywhere.  Yes, I’ve got their weights and measurements on their growth charts and in my PDA, and those photos are stored on CDs and memory cards somewhere, but the real memories of their childhoods, from the perspective of their mother, are here.  (And here is also where they can see what the heck Mom was doing all of that time she was sitting in front of that darn computer instead of doing housework.)  Maybe I’m just caught up with the times in my hip and modern use of technology.  (Okay, so that would be a first.)

Just don’t look for me at any scrapbooking parties. 

So it’s been a tough day.

Here it is, past 10:00 p.m., and I’m just coming up with the day’s post now.  Why?  Well, I spent most of the day cuddled up with a novel I’m reviewing, a book that, upon completion, turned out to be so depressing it’s a wonder I didn’t just crawl, whimpering, back into bed and stay there until someone could prove to me that life isn’t hopeless after all. 

Then I picked up five-and-a-half year old “Jack” at school, and, feeling a bit bad for the lack of attention I’ve paid him lately (and hoping that some of his recent dismal behavior might be the result of this inattention), I offered to take him on one of his favorite seasonal activities: a jaunt through a corn maze.  Yes, this is a labyrinth made of tall cornstalks.  Unfortunately for directionally challenged individuals such as myself, the proprietors do not equip adventurers with magic wands, Harry Potter-style, with which one can shoot red sparks into the sky when you just can’t find your way out of the darn thing.  Having learned this lesson the hard way last year, however, I now keep a compass in the car so that I am always ready for any chance encounters with a maze, corn or otherwise.  Being a mother is being prepared.

So, compass clipped to my belt loop, Jack and I went through the corn maze.  I didn’t need the compass because Jack somehow knew exactly how to find our way out when the time came.  He didn’t complain when I said it was time to leave to pick up his sister and we had a lot of fun.

One-on-one time with Mommy may not be the cause of his poor behavior lately, though, because once we arrived home, Jack had roughly 394 meltdowns before bedtime—over nothing.  Not to be outdone—two-and-a-half year old “Emmie” can’t bear for anyone else to be in the spotlight, for any reason—his sister then set out on a course of bad behavior that culminated in her hitting me repeatedly and then laughing at me when I scolded her and gave her timeouts.  Then Daddy had a meltdown, Mommy had to tell him to leave the room . . . well, you get the picture now.

Two-Tylenols-and-I-still-have-my-headache later, however, I have decided that I won’t blog about that stuff tonight.  Too depressing, kind of like that book I just finished.  So let me end this post by relaying one of the more endearing things I’ve noticed about my children over the last few weeks.  (Maybe then I’ll smile when I see them in the morning.)

Jack must be woken by his father or me late each night to visit the potty; one of us takes care of this task before we go to bed for the evening.  Though we’ve done it for a year, Jack is so asleep during the entire process that he still doesn’t realize we do this.  It’s not generally a rewarding task, but occasionally, I’m given a surprise.  Like one night last week, when I guided him, more or less sleepwalking, back to his bed and tucked him in.  “I love you,” I whispered as I tucked the comforter under his chin and kissed him on the cheek.  “I love you, too, Mommy.” 

If they say it when they’re sleeping, you know that it’s true.

This blog post evolved several times before I even began to put words on (electronic) paper.

Initially, I planned a lighthearted entry about how my five-and-a-half year old son, “Jack,” suddenly and without warning on Tuesday, cleaned up his mess in the playroom.  By himself.  Unprompted.  I wrote down the exact time on a piece of paper because this was such a monumental and unprecedented event.  I gave him hugs, praise and a handful of chocolate chips to show him how well I thought of his behavior.

I decided to switch gears on the blog post during dinner, however, when Jack spied the small, enamel flag pin I wear on my shirt each September 11 and asked why I was wearing it.  He did the same last year, but then he was content with a few basic answers to his questions.  Now he probed substantially deeper.  His questions were pointed, logical and persistent, and I gave him honest if painful answers. 

“Why are you wearing that?”

“Because on this day six years ago, some very bad people did a very bad thing and a lot of people died.”

“What did they do?”

“They killed a lot of people.”

“How did they kill them?”

“They flew planes with people on them into some buildings.”

“How did they get the planes?”

“They killed the pilots.”

“How did they kill the pilots?”  (This one was too much even for my philosophy of honest answers, and I refused to answer him.)

“Did people in the buildings die?”

“Yes, some of them did.”  At this point, I interrupted the interrogation to reassure him.  “But they have changed things on airplanes to make them safer now so that nothing like this will happen again.”  I hope I wasn’t lying.

“Which buildings did they fly into?”

I described the buildings.  The exchange continued, with Jack wanting to know more about why the Twin Towers collapsed but the Pentagon still stands, and so forth.  When he finally finished asking questions, I told him he could always ask more or talk to me more about all of this anytime.  Then I prayed I’d done the right thing by answering him honestly.

Unfortunately, that conversation isn’t the main subject of my blog post today, either.  Later that night, Jack himself gave me a new, very personal lesson in terror.

My husband was over an hour away at an evening meeting.  I’d settled the kids into bed and begun the nightly chores of dishes, school lunches and 89 miscellaneous tasks that needed doing before my own bedtime.  The TV was on in the kitchen as I washed dishes.  I thought I heard light thumps above my head, but when I turned off the water, all was quiet.  I turned the water on again and continued my work, but I heard the noises again.  I turned the water off and listened.  Nothing.  I repeated this procedure several more times and finally said, “No, I am not imagining this.  Someone is out of bed—Jack.”  I went upstairs to see what excuse he would offer me.  Indeed, he was not in his bed.  Busted.

I looked around his room.  No Jack.  I went into my bedroom and glanced at my bed.  No Jack.  I looked around my room.  No one. 

With just a touch of anxiety accompanied by a touch of anger, I searched upstairs.  No Jack.  I went downstairs and looked around.  No Jack.

I returned upstairs, expecting to find him in his bed, grinning at me.  I would not grin back.  But all I saw was an empty bed with a crumpled, pulled back dinosaur comforter and top sheet.

My heartbeat quickened, just a little, and I re-searched the upstairs, this time opening closets, pulling back shower curtains, going into his sleeping sister’s room (generally a big no-no).  No Jack.

I rushed downstairs and undertook a thorough search of all rooms, closets, the shower stall.  No Jack. 

I ran down to the basement, flung on all the light switches, checked the rooms, the bulkhead door to make sure it was secure.  It was.  No Jack.

I began to have a little trouble breathing my short breaths.  I began to wring my hands.  “Jack!  Jack!”  I called.  I checked all the doors and windows on every level.  All locked.  No Jack.

“Oh no, no, no.  Oh God.  Oh no.”  I rechecked everything.  I went into the garage.  I looked outside.  I rechecked every room and closet in the house at least three times.  Nothing was amiss, except I couldn’t find my son.  I ran back upstairs, looked several times in his bed hoping I’d imagined it and he was there, but the bed was empty.  Just like in the movies.

Real panic set in; I was shaking, I couldn’t see anything that wasn’t right in front of me, my throat pulsed.  I started to cry.

Downstairs again.  I grabbed the phone, called my husband. 

“Hi,” he said brightly.

“Honey, Jack’s gone.  I can’t find him.”  My voice choked with my tears.

“Oh God.”

“I’ve looked everywhere; he’s not here.  He’s not anywhere.  He’s gone.”

“Okay, I’m coming home now.”  He began to walk me through places to look, things to check, but I’d already done everything he suggested.

Finally, I kicked him off the phone.  “I’m calling the police.”  I stood in the living room, trembling, crying.  I dialed 9-1-1.

They picked up.  I have no idea what the operator said to me.  “I can’t find my five-year-old son!”  I blurted. 

“Okay, I’m patching you through to the [town] police.” 

My eyes moved upward.

There, behind the oversized chair in the living room, stood Jack.  He was fine. 

He’d been hiding.

I switched off the phone.  I didn’t acknowledge him.  I called my husband and told him.  We both expressed our profound relief, and my husband continued his trip home in violation of all speed-limit laws.

I won’t share too many details about the conversation that then took place between me and Jack.  My words were less important to him, I think, than the fact that I was crying and shaking the entire time I spoke to him.  He’d never seen me like this before, and I think, indeed I hope, it scared the devil out of him.

For me, the whole experience, which lasted no more than twelve minutes, was terror.  For a very brief period of time, I thought that the very worst thing in the world had happened. 

The final cap in the evening came when the local police arrived at my house, responding to the call.  I apologized for not alerting them that everything was okay.  (I had conveyed that message to the dispatcher who had called a few minutes earlier, but they sent two officers anyway.)  The officers were extremely kind and understanding, and then asked me if I wanted them to talk to Jack.

“You know,” I said, “if you really don’t mind, I don’t think that would be a bad idea at all.”

So Jack received a short lecture from the police officers, in his own house.  As I told my husband later, they were easier on him than I would have been.

I returned him to bed with hugs, kisses, admonitions and professions of love.

I’m pretty sure Jack won’t repeat this behavior.  His father and I took away the privilege of participating in a new, favorite activity next week, just to punctuate our point.  I think the experience has left quite an impression on all of us.

And now, after this September 11, I’ve had enough terror to last me for a long, long time.

So you think your kids don’t know exactly what they are doing when they whine, scream and protest until you’re nearly ready to take them to the nearest public town square and ask complete strangers if they know who’s kids these are?

Don’t let them fool you.

I picked my five-and-a-half year old son up at school yesterday and drove home while carrying on a perfectly normal conversation with a small human being, punctuated occasionally by tangentially relevant comments from his two-and-a-half year old sister.

Then we pulled into the garage, and the screaming, protesting and denials began.  I was incredulous at the lightening-fast change.

“What is it about coming home that turns you two into monsters?” I demanded.

“We’re not monsters,” “Jack” replied.

“Well, you’re certainly behaving like monsters,” I retorted.

“No!  Monsters don’t whine!”  Jack was indignant.  “Monsters roar.  And we’re whining.”

Wait a minute: you know you’re doing this?  You have acquired this high a degree of self-awareness?  AND I’M STILL LISTENING TO YOU WHINE? 

They were both in the house and ripping apart the playroom by the time I’d recovered enough to grab all of the belongings dropped between the car and the door and drag everything into the house.  I think I’m going to need a whole new strategy.

                                                                     _________

On a much more serious note, Uncharted Parent asks everyone reading today to take a moment to remember the real monsters who visited what ought to be unimaginable horror upon our country six years ago.  Please remember the nearly 3,000 innocent people who died.  And know that no matter how much I whine, complain and even occasionally mock my own kids, I still believe that “evil” has no greater opposite than “child.”  Give your children an extra kiss tonight; I know I will.

Please click here to see my latest article, a review of the book, A Taste of Jewish Tradition, at InterfaithFamily.com.

Tuesday marked a monumental milestone in the adoption of our two-year-old daughter , “Emmie,” from Korea: we finished all of the paperwork.  “Emmie’s” adoption was finalized a year-and-a-half ago, at which point she became, by law, an American citizen, but those facts did not put an end to the paperwork.

We concluded the bureaucratic requirements with one last mandatory visit to our local sub-office of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS) for the interview necessary to obtain Emmie’s Certificate of Citizenship.  We’ve experienced many adventures with this agency before—see my essay, “The Small Things that Count,” for some of our earlier escapades—so it seemed appropriate to cap off the adoption process with a final farewell.

We had received a letter several months earlier noting our appointment time, and Emmie, my husband and I dutifully reported to the office about twenty minutes ahead of schedule.  Our early arrival turned out to be fortuitous.  Although we were accustomed to the security requirements of emptying our pockets and stepping through the x-ray machine, I was caught off-guard by this new request: “Please empty the contents of all of your bags into these bins.”  The two bins to which the toneless security guard gestured were small, Tupperware-style plastic containers, each of which might hold something the size of the guard’s lunch and no more.

I looked at the guard in disbelief.  “Empty everything from this bag into those bins?”  I pointed to my diaper bag, which could easily have swallowed several of his bins.

“Yes.”

“Okay,” I assented.  “But I don’t think your bins are big enough.”  I know better than to argue with government security guards and/or bureaucrats engaged in Napoleonic defense of their small territories, so I complied.  As the guard watched, I drew the following items from the diaper bag and placed them in the bins and, when those were full, directly on the guard’s desk:

• My sunglasses case;
• My glasses case;
• A large Ziploc bag filled with small Ziploc bags of veggie sticks, animal crackers, pretzels and Cheddar Bunnies;
• A fold-up toddler potty seat;
• Two travel-size first-aid kits;
• Two partial pocket packs of tissues;
• Three pull-ups, size 2T;
• A Sesame Street coloring kit;
• A Ziploc bag of baby wipes;
• A magnetic Mr. Potato Head game;
• Two small Color Wonder coloring books;
• A travel-size doodle board;
• An uninflated dinosaur beach ball;
• A one-time careful record of my children’s immunizations, mysteriously neglected for the last year or so;
• A travel pack of Wet Ones wipes;
• A plastic bib;
• Two expired grocery-store coupons;
• A colorful bendy-thing that has no name but can amuse children for five to ten minutes;
• Loose change;
• Scraps of paper;
• A collection of six curiously deformed crayons and six Color Wonder markers;
• Broken pieces of additional crayons;
• My checkbook;
• My wallet;
• My business-card holder;
• My writer’s notebook and pen;
• My lip balm;
• Some personal, uh, “feminine articles” in a discreet bag;
• A stash of crumpled, plastic grocery bags; and
• Dirt.

“Okay, there you go,” I said cheerfully. 

The guard didn’t even blink.  “Walk through the machine.”  He then held up the entire line of people waiting to enter the building while I repacked my diaper bag, article by article.

We then waited in the reception area until our appointment time, when we were called back into the cubicled office area.  There, an expressionless CIS officer motioned for us to sit down in the chairs in his office, offering no indication that he even noticed Emmie, who was flirting and putting on her most adorable face for him.  He guided my husband—who volunteered for the job—through a series of seemingly purposeless signatures and notations on photos of Emmie and assorted documents, then left the gray room, which was sparsely decorated with a few New York-related baseball caps, a bulletin board of photographs and a too-large head shot of U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. 

When the officer returned to the room, however, he bore Emmie’s Certificate of Citizenship, a small American flag and a smile.  “Congratulations!” he beamed, handing the certificate to my husband and the flag and the smile to Emmie.  Then he shook our hands, we thanked him, and we left the paperwork and red tape behind us—for good, we hope.

In the parking lot, my husband turned to me with a smile.  “Do you want to be the one to break it to him that Emmie was already a citizen when we walked in the door this morning?” 

“No,” I said, “not me.”  Never interfere with a man’s fiefdom if you can help it.

Besides, we had Emmie’s certificate in hand, which is what we came for.  The adoption paperwork is finally complete—and it only took three months short of four years.  Bye-bye, bureaucracy.

I can hear it now, even as I sit down to type this blog post.  The cheering, the screaming fans, the screamers themselves merely background noise behind the clear voice of the announcer: “a time-out, 11:20 to the half . . . what a tackle.”

The sounds drifting into my office from my living room are as sure a sign that fall is here as my son’s lunchbox and backpack lined up against the wall for the first day of school.  They are as reliable as the sign at the apple orchard informing us that the crisp, ripe McIntoshes are now ready to be plucked from the trees.  My kids have outgrown nearly all of their clothes, I couldn’t be more excited that school is beginning . . . and there’s football on television.

It’s that time of the year again.

I know, I’m supposed to be an enlightened, twenty-first century wife and mother.  Gender roles be damned: if the man of the house needs to watch football, then I at least ought to be able to watch it with him. 

But here’s the problem: I just don’t get the appeal.

It’s not that I haven’t tried.  I’ve learned a few of the basic rules, I’ve attempted to watch games on TV, I once nearly drowned in freezing rain in the stands to watch my husband’s most beloved team.  Heck, I’ve even elevated Army-Navy Day to a bona fide holiday in our house, with myself and the children dressed in appropriate colors and matching M&Ms on the coffee table.

But honestly, I’d rather read a good book or write than watch more than five minutes of football.  Or cook.  Or do laundry.  Or play sixteen rounds of Chutes and Ladders.  (Okay, so I’d take football over the dentist, but really, that’s not much of a standard.)  I just don’t get what’s so fascinating about masses of young men pushing, shoving and generally whaling on each other over and over again all to gain tiny bits of territory, yard by yard.  It’s violent, it’s primitive; it’s animalistic.  (Oh, wait, I think I’m seeing the part of this that is supposed to appeal to women.  Nope, sorry, still not working for me.)

But I’m nothing if not supportive.  I have the good fortune to be married to the most patient man in the world.  (We’ll just ignore moments like tonight’s, when I had to kick him out of the kitchen because the kids had strung his nerves so tightly I was afraid his head might actually combust spontaneously if he didn’t put several walls between him and his beloved children.)  So I’ll do my thing, my husband will watch football for the next several months, and we’ll spend time together again after the Super Bowl.