New Friends

In Kindergarten, my daughter didn’t have many friends at school.  She got along with everyone and was doing just fine, but she was beginning to notice that other people were finding “best” friends and that she wasn’t one of them.

We live a little out of the way of her school, so play dates are hard to arrange.  Kids are so busy these days anyway that finding a day that works with your own kid, let alone with someone else, is hard. Add in an extra 15-minute drive and you just don’t bother.

I wasn’t worried.  Best friends come and go at that age.  I didn’t have a best friend until second grade.  I thought we were the real thing.  I was called January (the month and the middle daughter from the Brady Bunch were the only “Jans” anyone in my class could relate to.  I didn’t want to be the whiney, forgotten middle sister, so I leapt at the month).  My friend predictably became known as February because we were always together and her last name started with an F.  We sat together at lunch, compared handwriting, admired one another’s troll collections and marched in the Bicentennial parade together.  But, by third grade, after a summer of mixing it up with other kids at the community pool, we had both moved on.  She moved in a much cooler direction, but that is another story.

So, I figured there would be plenty of time for my daughter to make friends.  The first week of first grade, she came home beaming that there were two new kids and they were both destined to be her best friend.  There was Andres from Mexico and Sarah, who looked just like her and liked all the same things.

Great – new blood.  I noticed that the revised class list didn’t include them, but there is so much going on at the start of the year, I figured we’d get a revised list soon.  Brett talked about them every day that first week.

I looked forward to meeting them at the back-to-school picnic.  All the new families got special name tags, which I scoured for the names “Andres” and “Sarah” but never found them. Nothing even came close.

A stark reality hit. What if they weren’t real?  Maybe she was so desperate to find friends that she made them up.

First, Andres?  She told me that he was Mexican, but that his family had just moved here from Canada.  I was starting to get suspicious.

And then, Sarah.  She was described has having wavy light brownish, blondish hair, just like my daughter.  And, she was supposedly just as tall as my daughter, which is freakishly tall and highly unlikely.  She liked all the same things – not all the girly-girl princess stuff that all the other girls in the class still liked, this girl liked science and sports and rocks and poetry and Pokemon.  Too good to be true.

Pretend friends are normal for 7-year olds, perhaps a little sad, but normal.  It was nothing to really worry about.  Still, I worried.  I lingered at the picnic in hopes that they might come late.   I asked a few other kids if they had seen Andres or Sarah at the picnic but I only got blank stares.  On the ride home, my daughter talked about her new friends.  Yes, she assured me, they were at the picnic, and they had all played together.

I Googled imaginary friends.

  • It has been theorized that children with imaginary companions may develop language skills and retain knowledge faster than children without them.

So, she is smarter than kids without imaginary friends!

  • According to one study, by the age of seven, sixty-five percent of children report that they have had an imaginary companion at some point in their lives… Children have reported creating or maintaining imaginary friends as pre-teens or teenagers, and very few adults report having imaginary friends. This may, however, signal a serious psychological disorder.

She is either completely normal or, she has a serious mental disorder.

  • On the popular children’s show, Sesame Street, Snuffleupagus was originally portrayed as Big Bird’s imaginary friend. However, the Children’s Television Workshop ended this in light of high-profile stories on paedophilia and sexual abuse of children …CTW feared the Snuffy plot would scare children into believing that they could not tell “fantastic” stories to parents or other responsible adults without being dismissed as a liar or ridiculed, even if these stories were true.

And, confronting her about it will make her a prime target for perverts.  

Shit.  Google sucks.

I waited. I thought about calling the teacher or the school, but what would I say?  She seemed so happy.  And, she was playing with other kids too.  She was playing basketball and Star Wars at recess.  Ok, so she was only playing with boys, but she had friends.  And, they were real — flesh and blood kids that I had actually seen!  Everything was going to be fine.  If she chose to embellish her life with an exotic foreign friend and a future Olympic gymnast (yes, that was one of Sarah’s many talents), then so be it.

When I was a kid I had an imaginary pet chicken named Charlie.  I took him (in his cage of course) everywhere.  I don’t know how old I was, but I do remember him.  I knew he wasn’t real, but I liked having him around.  I would tell fantastic stories about Charlie.  He said all the things I wanted to say but was afraid to.  He told jokes that were way funnier than anything I could tell on my own.  Once, I made my entire family (aunts and uncles too) wait at the base of the Lincoln Memorial in a driving rainstorm so that Charlie could stop and go to the bathroom.  What a bird!

I reconciled that imaginary friends were just one of the many strange traits I’ve probably passed along to my daughter.  She doesn’t bite her nails yet, but I’m sure she will.  She has poor posture and sings off key.  She craves carbs and will probably drink too much beer in college.  Still, I decided it will all be ok.

The truth was revealed a week later at back-to-school night.  She didn’t bite her nails or slouch.  She sang well.  There was no beer or pretzels.  And, she stood right between Andres and Sarah, who were indeed real.

Am I a Runner Yet?

I am not a runner.  I have never been a runner.  But I am trying to convince my body that after twenty some years of neglect, it can become a runner.

I got really good shoes and a really good watch and I signed up for a half marathon.  People say you need to set a really big goal and train for it.  People say that if you start slow and build yourself up, you can do it.  People say you are never too old.  I might be talking to the wrong people.

For three months, I have been running (well, walking and jogging) about three days a week.  That alone is pretty monumental for me.  I started with the run three minutes, walk three minutes drill and just kept going.  I still do intervals of running and walking, but I can do it for longer and go farther.  I’ve actually made it six miles on three separate occasions.  Most days I do four, but I can do six on the right day and with the right music.

This weekend, one of my running buddies and I are going to try to do eight miles.  People say that once you do eight, you “break through the wall” and you just feel great.  Breaking through a wall does not sound great to me.  Actually, every time I run part of me (usually my ankles) feels like I have broken through a wall.  That’s why I am not a runner.  Breaking through a wall hurts.  Who are these people and why do I listen to them?

Still, I am going to try it.  It is two miles closer to the 13 I am supposed to do three months from now.  If I do eight, then can I call myself a runner?  Maybe I’ll just be calling myself a doctor… or finding a good bartender.

Bumps on the Head

"Ohhhh... those curls!"

Written for the third “Night of the Radish” – Theme:  Bumps

“Maaaahhhhmmmmm!  I have a huge bump on my head!”

“What?  Did you fall out of bed or something?”

“No.  It’s my hair.  It’s bumpy again.  I hate it!”

Her hair is a major speed bump every morning.  I don’t know what to do about it.  I have fine, stick-straight hair that I didn’t really learn how to manage until my thirties.  I can’t possibly help my daughter with her thick mop of curls.   Like her long legs and speed-reading capabilities, her curls are completely foreign to me.

When she was little, her hair was the perfect accessory to her ever-changing personality.  At three, blonde wispy curls framed her cherub face.  At five, long blonde curls gathered into a topknot to crown my princess.  At seven, a wavy bob suited her surfer dude persona that emerged when she abandoned the drama of girls to try hanging out with boys.

But by about age nine, the dream hair turned into a nightmare.

When she realized she could (and I realized she should) start taking care of her own hair, it got more knotted and shaggy.  We’d fight through tears to brush it, but it would just frizz.  When we followed a curly-haired woman’s advice and just “finger-combed” it, dreadlock-like masses quickly appeared.

In a moment of desperation, I did what my mother had done to me.  I convinced her to cut it all off.   We hesitated because she was already being mistaken for a boy.  Since she refused to wear anything pink and usually opted for baggy t’s, she didn’t really look that different from the fuzzy-headed boys of her generation.  I spared her the close-cropped pixie cut of my youth and went for today’s trendy wedge – clearly a girl’s cut.

When the stylist was done, it looked adorable.  It was just the fresh and funky look she had hoped for.  She made a crooked smile and cocked her hip each time she caught a glimpse of her reflection.

But once she washed it, the curls took over.  They took revenge for our silly attempt to try and tame them.

Everyday, the angry curls shrink up her hair into clenched little fists full of rage.  We try to tamp them down with water and product, but they always fight back.  Everyday, we dampen and spritz and brush and iron until she can leave the house without shame.    But she goes to bed each night knowing that she will only wake to find massive bumps from yet another fierce battle.

So, the next time you are enviously admiring a woman with a thick mane of wavy hair, know that she has probably had more than her fair share of bumps along the way.

The mop

Baby Feet

My Baby

I love baby feet. When I meet a baby, I can’t wait to get my hands on their cute little feet so I can feel the toes crunch up from a gentle tickle. I love that you can grasp an entire foot in the palm of your hand.

My baby was born with big, flat feet. They keep getting bigger. She is 10 and she is already in a women’s size 9 ½. That’s more than a full size bigger than my feet. They are big and flat and smelly – traits she inherited from my husband. She got the bad toenails from me. I still like to tickle them when they are clean.

This morning, she asked me if I would rub her feet. They were sore from a basketball game where she played almost the entire time (she usually sits out every other period) followed by three hours of skiing. She tried moguls for the first time and survived!

So, my basketball-playing, mogul-skiing baby splayed out across the full length of our couch and plopped her enormous feet onto my lap. They dwarfed my hands.

As soon as I started to rub them, she flinched and twitched and yanked them out of my reach. I fought to keep hold of them and kept rubbing as she tried to wrestle them away. She giggled uncontrollably but kept coming back for more. The giggles grew into full belly laughs and we wrangled and played until we were completely out of breath.

I love baby feet.

Mogul Skier

Stuck in the Woods

Ahhh, the beautiful leaves...

My husband and I both grew up in suburban neighborhoods.  Inconspicuous houses on half-acre lots lined our cul-de-sacs that were clustered together in walkable neighborhoods, anchored by an elementary school and community pool.  We had sidewalks and curbs and circles at the end where kids would gather on bikes and big wheels to meet the ice cream man.  It was a good life.

So why are we here, in the woods, on a bumpy gravel road where you have to swerve to avoid crashing head-on into a pickup going 50 down the middle of the road? They can’t paint center lines on gravel.  There is no city water, no cable tv, no DSL.  Kids learn to ride bikes on dirt and there is no ice cream man.  Hell, there isn’t even trash service.  We have to load our trash up every Saturday and take it to the elementary school where the Ruritan Club has dumpsters – a service they created to stop people from just dumping their trash in the woods.

It was a romantic idea — land, trees, pastures — a simpler life.  Let me tell you, there is nothing simple about it, and we were completely unprepared.  We have been here for more than twelve years now, and we are still completely unprepared.

It took us about five years to learn how to manage the millions of leaves that blanket our property each fall.  I am not exaggerating when I say millions. It might be billions. We are surrounded by 80-year-old oaks (white, red, black, you name it).  Some of the leaves are as large as my face.  There is not a season that something isn’t falling off these trees.  In the winter, it is dead branches that fall.  In the spring, it is pollen – the long stringy green stuff that turns brown and clumps into matted nests.  In the summer, you’ll get strange little black things that I’ve yet to identify, and then in August the acorns start to drop, threatening concussions for anyone not wearing a helmet.  In the early fall, big green branches are ripped off by the winds from hurricanes off the coast.  And, in October through December, the leaves fall.

They are gorgeous at first – crimson and gold and copper in color.  They are beautiful on the trees and even when they fall.  We start blowing them (raking is useless).  We focus on the deck and the tiny area surrounding the house.  To blow it all takes about three hours.  Two days later, you’d never know it had ever been blown.  We repeat this sisyphean task until the first bad storm when we give up and let the winds take over until March.  Each year, we head back out for a few weeks until the blower dies or our backs go out and we realize it is time to call the guys.

That is what we end up doing in most situations.  We call some guys who grew up on dirt roads (here or in Mexico) and know better how to tame this wild land.  But first we need to try to do what we think we learned the last time.  We try, but we always seem to end up getting deeper into trouble.

That is where we are now — deep in the woods in trouble.

It started last winter when we got two unprecedented snowstorms.  Two feet were followed soon after by another three.  We got through it with our industrial snow blower and the help from some guys we found to shovel off our roof before it collapsed.  We got through it, but the snow blower was a little worse for the wear.

When the snow melted, we forgot about that blower because we were focused on the leaf blower instead.  It and the tractor needed tune-ups so we called some guys to help with blowing and mowing until they were out of the shop.  We forgot all about the snow blower until we got 12 inches this winter and it stopped blowing snow after about five minutes.  We called a neighbor who plowed us out a few days later.  Great guy.

With reports of another storm coming, I set out to reposition our tractor so we could use its bucket to push the snow.  That’s all the neighbor had done.  Surely we could manage that.  We had the equipment.

Unfortunately, I didn’t think to go out until too late.  The freezing rain started while I was still struggling to back the tractor out of the mucky leaves it was parked in.

What the hell was my husband thinking parking it off the gravel?  Wait, did I move it here?  Oh yeah, I didn’t like seeing it in front of the house so I moved it back here, out of sight.  My suburban instincts had screwed me again.

I could feel the tractor slipping on the new layer of ice, so I decided to drive it forward, making a loop through the woods and back onto the driveway.  It seemed like a good plan at the time.  Not surprisingly, I got stuck.  Only now, I was deeper in the woods and the freezing rain was driving down fast.   I abandoned the tractor and headed for shelter where I told my husband the bad news.

He was not surprised.  He didn’t even seem annoyed.  I felt helpless.  I wasn’t even sure whom we’d eventually call to help get it out come the thaw.   I wouldn’t want my neighbor to know how ridiculous we really were.  Fortunately, we didn’t get much snow and it soon melted, so the tractor probably wouldn’t be needed until spring.

But, this morning was trash day.  I was hauling out bins of recycling while my husband pulled the pickup around to the garage.  He came back on foot.  Not a good sign.

He explained that there was a tree down across part of the driveway, so he had to back into the woods to turn around and come the other way.  The ground was like a sponge from the thaw, so the two-wheel-drive Ford Ranger didn’t stand a chance.  We can’t use the tractor to pull it out because it is stuck about a quarter-mile from where the truck is currently sinking into deeper into the mud.

I wasn’t surprised.  I wasn’t even annoyed.   But I wondered where that ice cream man was now that we really needed him.