damn damn damn

Tempest broke something tonight.

It was, on the surface, a little soy sauce dish. But it was a soy sauce dish that belonged to my grandmother, that she bought on one of her trips to Japan. Although I have a lot of my dead grandmother's things, losing even one of them doesn't feel good.

My fault really. I have no idea how that dish got in her room, why it was on a high shelf, why it was in the way when she decided to climb up preposterously on an ad-hoc step-stool made of a giant stuffed unicorn and a giraffe-coat-rack in order to retrieve an equally ill-placed package of glow-in-the-dark sidewalk-chalk...but clearly I must have had a hand in creating the situation, somewhere along the line.

Which brings me to a problem that's been plaguing me of late. Really the problem is a plague. A plague of crap. Crap on every horizontal surface in my room, stacked in piles that would alarm even the Cat in the Hat on a rainy day visit. Pre-school art, toddler shoes, tiny little doll accessories, stuffed animals, Legos, crayons, plastic fruit, blankets, puzzle pieces, comically giant paper clips, regular paper clips, fingernail clippings, stray pieces of string cheese...all in vertical piles three feet high on every available surface. There's no "away". I can't really give in to my barely-containable urges to beat the children within in an inch of their lives when I step on the sadistically painfully sharp fluke of a plastic whale in my family room if said whale has no "away".

So what will I get for my disorganizational crimes? Tally for today:

• broken soy sauce dish, probably made by some adorable septuagenarian artisan in Kyoto
• broken foot (the whale is unscathed of course)
• children who will, in all likelihood, be swearing like sailors by the time they enter kindergarten
• a hangover tomorrow
• one less thing to remember my sweet Gram by

My Gram probably would have called Tempest a rapscallion or a rag-a-muffin. I call her a fucking-remorseless-asshole-sent-by-the-Devil-to-torment-me-daily.

Not to her face, of course. She's way too cute.

Of fantasies and crushed spirits

One of my favorite lines from The Simpsons is when Homer observes of Bart: "He reminds me of me before the weight of the world crushed my spirit." I don't think of that when I look at my kids, but rather when I look at my childless friends and coworkers. You know, people with lives.

When I was married-but-not-yet-a-mother, I made many resolutions about how I would conduct my life, post-baby-birthing. Some of these resolutions were long-held from childhood, others from as recently as my first pregnancy, forged to steely resolve by observing Other People's Kids. Now, I see these resolutions for what they are: pure fantasy, spun from the purest hubris. Perhaps someday I'll release my attachment to them, but for now I continue to wallow in my crushed spirit.

When you're pregnant for the first time, people with kids, both known and unknown to you, bombard you with this message repeatedly, and unrelentingly: "It will change your life forever." They are completely right, of course, but you know what? It's not like one can prepare for one's life to be changed forever, and you wouldn't want to prepare even if you could. If anyone had a clue about the misery they were about to shackle themselves to, nobody would ever have kids again. If you listen very carefully, you may be able to detect that when they say "It will change your life forever!" they really mean "Oh man, your life is about to turn to shit! Shit I tell you! Literally, shit!" It's just not something you want to know about ahead of time. And so as a defense from this onslaught, you polish your resolutions, hone them fine, until they glint in your mind with the shininess and solidness of the Code of Hammurabi.

So here I offer to you, Dear Reader (that would be me), my top 10 fantasies (nee resolutions) about life after babies:

1. I will see my childless friends from time to time
2. I will still watch entire 49ers games on Sundays
   
3. I will never spend 60-90 minutes putting my kid to sleep
4. I will still travel, with baby strapped to my back
5. I will never go more than a month without sex
6. I will never allow myself to get fat
   
7. I will never seriously contemplate going out for milk and not coming back
8. I will never let my kids watch more than an hour of TV a day
9. I will not let my child scream on a bus/train/plane
10. I will never yell at my child for smearing jam/paint/soap/snot/shit all over her/me/the walls

Parenthood is messy (especially when there's shit on the walls). It's a good thing they are so damn cute when they sleep, and that my love of sitting on the couch drinking and watching Survivor is so strong. And that I'm married to Zen, who never seems to tire of telling me that we're doing fine, and it's all going to be okay. Yay Zen! Yay Chartreuse! Yay almost-series-finale-of-Lost! I've just found my will to live for another day.

Giving away my expertise

This past week marked Tempest's fourth birthday (well, fifth if you count the day she was born, but you know what I mean). According to my calculations, even allowing for time spent sleeping (very little), and in the care of her nanny (lots and lots), I have still far exceeded the requisite 10,000 hours required to be considered an expert parent.

The problem is that I still suck at it. I am an expert sucky parent.

Friends have offered a few explanations and excuses, but I buy none of them. E.g. "your kid is constantly changing, and so the skills you need are continuously changing, so you can never get in your ten thousand hours." But if that were true, I'd have to play the same piece of music on the same piano for ten thousand hours before becoming an expert, and we all know that's silly. The skills required to gain expertise in any field grow more complex and difficult the more you practice. One does not become an expert programmer by writing "Hello World" in every language. Yet every day with Tempest I feel as though "Hello World" is all I've got in my toolbox.

Tempest: I don't WANT to go to school today! I want to watch Mulan!
Me: You're going to school.
Tempest: NO! NO MOMMY! I WANT MULAN NOW!
Me: Hello World!
Tempest: AAAAGH! ARGLE BARGLE! WAHWAHWAH!!!!
Me: HELLO WORLD!! Hola Mundo! Bonjour Tout le Monde!!

You can probably guess that this approach is not very effective. And yet, in any other field other than parenting, people would be paying me a lot of money for my experience. Somehow, when it comes to raising children, you only pay dearly for consulting time from people who aren't parents. If I were to have that conversation with 100 children, I could build me a website and charge hundreds of dollars to exasperated parents who can't motivate their pre-schoolers to get their asses dressed so they can go to school. "I've motivated hundreds of children to joyfully prepare for school, and I can prepare yours!" See how easy? No ten thousand hours required.

I'm gonna be rich.

Oh, how I've missed you, my little blog! So many months, so little change. Sunny is sunny, just with more teeth. Tempest rages on, just now with pre-school. Zen and I have been married for 7 years, yet can never seem to remember our own anniversary. Where does the time go?

We're just getting over Christmas and Sunny's first birthday. She needs a bed. Believe it or not, it's hard to have a normal marriage, with the whole sleeping together thing intact, when there's a baby sleeping in the middle. We'd like to move her into Tempest's room, but it's unclear how well she'll sleep when Tempest wakes up at 3am in full on reptile-brain mode, screaming because she's wet the bed but too upset to allow anyone to touch her. When those episodes happen, all logic circuits in her brain are shut down, in full-on lockdown mode, and all attempts at reasoning with her or explaining patiently what needs to happen and why are met with violent opposition.

Tomorrow night, I'm going to add i or Fourier transforms to my argument. Clearly my odds of success are better in imaginary space.

I'm told the first 4 years of a kid's life are like a tunnel you have to go through as a parent, with your life waiting for you on the other side. Tempest's 4 years are almost up, but Sunny has 3 to go. That's a long tunnel. While I'm working on those FFTs, maybe I'll take a crack at bending the space-time continuum too.