Hey! That's My Therapist.

I have a great idea for a show to add to the increasing and increasingly disturbing line of so-called "reality shows." What about a show that features ordinary people in extraordinary but real-life situations wherein they encounter their psychotherapists engaged in strange, often embarassing public displays? Wouldn't that be funny?

Like, for example...

• Subject spots some lunatic mowing her front lawn in the dark on a Tuesday evening. He wonders aloud, "Who is that crazy person?" Camera zooms in for the close-up as the subject slaps his forehead and exclaims "Hey! That's my therapist!"
• Subject is browsing the aisles at her local organic foods market when some lunatic brings down an entire display of glass jars of caramel and fudge sauces. Subject makes small but audible noises of disapproval, then loudly exclaims "Hey! That's my therapist!"
• Subject is driving to church one frigid Sunday morning when he spots a red-faced jogger execute one of those disgusting sideways booger-blows that runners and other disgusting individuals are so fond of. Subject emits noises of disapproval and, of course, disgust, then after a double-take that nearly causes him to crash his car exclaims "Hey! That's my therapist!"

Seriously, the material for this kind of show would be endless. And endlessly amusing. Unless, of course, you are these people's therapist.

To Sydney, on the occasion of your 4th birthday

What a difference a year makes. Last year, I wrote here about the incresdible force of your personality, your energy, your compassion and nurturing demeanor. I wrote about how incredibly impressed I was at your adjustment to life as a big sister; I talked about your love of baby dolls and playground games. One year later, all these things remain true, and there is so much more to talk about. You are one amazing little person.

First of all, that little booty dance you do just makes my heart trip all over itself. One day, after dropping you off in your classroom at Abeona House, I happened to pass the half-opened doorway and stood for a moment, watching you. There you were, up on a chair, shaking your money maker and the whole class, including the teacher, was laughing along. One part of me wanted to tell you to get down--we don't stand on chairs--mind your manners, calm yourself down. The other part of me was shaking with joy and pride. Your exuberance is one of your greatest gifts.

I love watching you interact with Evan. He is at the age when he's into everything--particularly everything that belongs to you--and while I know this causes you distress, you rarely show it; instead, you are patient but firm. "Please give that back," you will say, in your sweetest voice, prying the object from his tiny hand. You monitor his activities from the corner of your eye, and are quick to catch him on his way to a dangerous activity, or making off with something he is not allowed to have. You give him hugs at school, take him down the slide at the playground, fall into hysterics when he gets annoyed with you and tries to push you down, share your animal crackers with him on the way home from school. When I was pregnant with Evan and was having trouble imagining how things would be when it came time to share my love with another child, a friend told me that the best feeling in the world comes from watching your children play together. She was right: it is magical. You are magical.

Speaking of magic, you have fallen in love with Harry Potter. We talk a lot about the stories, the characters, the good and bad, the scary and the exciting, the happy and the sad. You have a lot of empathy. You like Harry Potter because "he is a good boy and he is nice to his friends." You admire his courage and enjoy the scenes where he acts bravely in the face of fear. I think you harbor the secret hope that one day, on your birthday, Hagrid will come to our house, break the news to you that you are a wizard, and cart you off to Hogwarts.

You can write your name, and most letters of the alphabet. You can count to one hundred. You can carry a tune like nobody's business, and you have an almost frighteningly good memory.

You are in full-blown princess mode, and love dressing up and putting on lipgloss and wearing your "clip clops"--chunky, bejeweled light-up shoes that match your Cinderella and Snow White dresses. Despite this desire to emulate the fairer sex, you also love farting, making fart noises, and talking about butts, farts, and boogers. This, again, fills me with joy and pride, though I know I should tell you that these are not polite topics of conversation.

This is your last year at Abeona House. When the time comes, you will be ready to go--you will be ready for kindergarten, for the next step. But it is hard for me to imagine you leaving this family behind, this place that has held you and all your exuberance for these precious years of your early life. You are in a wonderful place, surrounded by people who see you for exactly who you are, who don't try to change you to fit a program or some notion of what little girls should be. I will fight to make sure you continue to have these experiences, but more importantly, I will try to make sure that I teach you to fight for yourself.

You are so beautiful, so strong and vibrant--every day with you is an incredible gift, one I never take for granted. Thank you for your hugs and kisses, your laughter, your compassion and honesty. Words could never express the love I have for you; hopefully, my actions will. Happy birthday, baby.

Love always,

Mom

Dirty Little Princess

Mommy: Hey! Why are you so dirty?

Sydney: We were playing ice cream.

M: You were eating ice cream? At school? Cool.

S: NO. We were PLAYING ice cream.

M: Playing?

S: Yes. The sand was vanilla, the mud was chocolate.

M: ....

Evan.

My dear son,

You made a year nearly 3 weeks ago, and I am just sitting down to write this letter. I can blame it on the fact that your birthday fell during our big vacation to an area devoid of every type of modern technological coverage, or the insane schedule we've all negotiated since coming home, but the reality is probably closer to this: as the second child of two people with questionable organizational skills, you will likely be subject to this sort of thing over and over throughout the course of your childhood. Things will be late, or rushed, or half-done, or not done at all. I am truly and deeply sorry about this, I wish I could promise to make it otherwise, but here is the good news:

We are absolutely, positively, almost frighteningly WILD about you.

I mean, who wouldn't be? From the instant you were born, every moment has felt incredibly precious. The first night we had you, I sat up in bed at Touro and held you close, staring at you while you slept and nursed and stared back. I saw in those early minutes and hours what has proven true over this first year of your life: how alert you are, how engaged, how wise and persistent and curious. We brought you home and you watched with quiet attention as your big sister danced and squealed around your seat and patted your cheeks and hands and feet. You spent the first 3 months of your life nestled in the crook of my arm, where you slept each night; I couldn't bear to hear you cry when I laid you in the crib. At 4 months you seemed ready to spend the night in the Pack-n-Play in our bedroom, and I was more than a little sad to let you go, even though you were only moving to the other side of the room. I can't even imagine how I'm going to feel by the time you read this, when you are old enough to truly leave--but no, I won't go there now.

At 4 1/2 months you managed to roll yourself off the edge of our bed--although you were not yet rolling over--and ended up having a CAT scan and a concussion. It was then that we were reminded again of your persistence, your curiousity, your ability to get to whatever and wherever you want, regardless of your supposed abilities. This will undoubtedly serve you well in life, and means that we, as your parents, will have to exercise extraordinary vigilance in the service of keeping you safe.

At 1 year, you are a sweet, bright boy with a beautiful laugh and a generous spirit. You are good at playing alone but love to engage with other kids. You are pickier with food than your sister was at this age. You are good at getting your needs met: you shake your head and push hands away when you don't want to do something, you clap and yell and nod when something favorable grabs your attention. And you are so much like your Daddy--that persistence, that quiet intelligence, that penchance for problem-solving that often leaves me speechless and smiling as I watch you from across the room, unraveling a piece of ribbon from your sister's tiara or poking a piece of plastic into the air-conditioning vent, over and over and over, in quest to discover just how far it will go and what the heck might actually be down there.* And these similarities are wonderful, not just because I love your Dad more than anything and love to see his qualities in you, but because it is living proof of the connection, the handing down, the circular nature of things. And that makes me happy. You, my son, make me wildly, completely, and sometimes inexplicably, happy.

I hope we can do the same by you. I hear a lot about parental failings and ineptitudes during the course of an average work day, and it leaves me with a sober sense of all the things that are working against us. But for now, we will try, to do our best, to love you for everything you are, to hold you close enough for comfort but not too close, to show you all that is good in the world but teach you also about the injustices, the sorrows--to make you into a whole person, with hopes and fears and compassion and strength. I love watching you grow up. I just wish I could slow it down a little.

Happy birthday, my boy--three weeks late, but no less sincere. I love you.

Love always,

Mommy

* I recently learned that your Dad used to do the exact same thing when he was your age. Amazing.

Update

• Sydney: 3 years and 10 months, swimming, able to name most letters of the alphabet, incessantly curious about the origin and nature of all things, losing her baby fat, finally potty-trained, sleeping in Mom and Dad's bed, jealous of her brother, totally in love with her brother, incessantly curious about the ramifications of picking up her brother by the head/arms/waist/legs, mourning the loss of Hermit Crab #1 and Hermit Crab #2, ready for a dog, talking about kindergarten.
• Evan: 11 1/2 months, walking, eating finger foods, rejecting baby foods, demonstrating object permanence, slightly afraid of his sister, loving the big bathtub, protesting violently during diaper changes, incessantly curious about the contents of everyone's dinner plate, demonstrating some serious musical talent, nursing at night, getting ready for Ms. Gwen.
• Chrissie: 33 years and 8 months, walking, swimming, regularly forgetting her letters and numbers, running less frequently in the summer heat, looking forward to Maine at the end of the month, proud of herself for flying solo with 2 little ones, slightly obsessed with smoothies and daquiris, filled with sadness for a friend, no longer pumping at work, needs a haircut, would love a massage, could never be a SAHM, thinking about kindergarten, already missing Ms. Gladys, cannot wait for Ms. Gwen.

Are You There, Benevolent-Creator-Type-Being-Who-May-or-May-Not-Exist? It's me, Chrissie.

So Sydney's been really into ontologies lately--a welcome break from endless rounds of Baby and Mommy or Grocery Store or Road Trip With Unspecified Destination But Plenty of Snacks, which are pretty much the recreational mainstays around here. I'm not sure where this interest in the nature and origin of all things (and I do mean all things) came from,* but lately our conversations have grown increasingly complicated. For example:

Sydney: "Mommy, where do babies come from?"

Mommy (stalling): "What kind of babies?"

S: "Baby lizards."

M: "Baby lizards come from Mommy and Daddy lizards."

S: "But how?"

M: "Well..."

S: "..."

M: "The Daddy lizard gives the Mommy lizard something, and that makes the baby."

S: "...."

M: "...."

S: "But how are baby babies made?"

M (stalling): "What do you mean?"

S: "Like, babies like Evan."

M: "Well, Daddies have a, uh, special thing, and they give to the Mommy, and she has a special thing, and they put the special things together and that makes a baby."

S: "..."

M: "Does that make sense?"

S: "Yes. Mommy?"

M (struggling to find a child-friendly equivalent to semen): "Yes?"

S: "But how is the the world made? How is everything made?"

************

So obviously this is some sort of payback. Right?

************

First tactic: Total Transparency.

M: "Well, there was this thing called the Big Bang-"

S: "--like a big explosion??"

M: "Well, sort of..."

S: "Things blew up? That's scary."

M: "Well, they didn't really blow up, they sort of imploded.."

S: "What's imploded?"

M:

***********

Second tactic: Mystery

M: "Well, no one really knows how those things were made."

S: "...."

M: "..."

S: "But Mommy. Tell me."

M: "I don't know, baby. No one knows."

S: "I don't like you. You're an idiot."

***********

Times like these, I wish we were believers. It would make it easier--not just for me, but for our little girl, who just wants to understand how the world works. I wish I could just tell her, with great conviction, that God made the world, that God is waiting in Heaven; I wish I could provide that consolation and that promise. But I can't--and not because I do not believe, but mostly because I am unsure, and believe like Richard Dawkins that:

Humans have a great hunger for explanation. It may be one of the main reasons why humanity so universally has religion, since religions do aspire to provide explanations. We come to our individual consciousness in a mysterious universe and long to understand it. Most religions offer a cosmology and a biology, a theory of life, a theory of origins, and reasons for existence. In doing so, they demonstrate that religion is, in a sense, science; it's just bad science. Don't fall for the argument that religion and science operate on separate dimensions and are concerned with quite separate sorts of questions. Religions have historically always attempted to answer the questions that properly belong to science. Thus religions should not be allowed now to retreat away from the ground upon which they have traditionally attempted to fight. They do offer both a cosmology and a biology; however, in both cases it is false.


But you try explaining all that to a 3-year-old.



* Which is in itself an ontology. Ha ha.

James Carville Will Kill You

I recently purchased a new t-shirt. This purchase was exceptional for several reasons:

1) The shirt is bright blue, and I never wear brightly colored clothing.

2) I bought the shirt after spotting it at Jazz Fest, covering the expansive gut of a scraggly-bearded hippy-looking college kid. It probably goes without saying that I (rarely) attempt to emulate the clothing patterns of scraggly-bearded hippy-looking co-eds.

3) The shirt is funny, so so incredibly funny, but also a wee bit controversial. Check it out and you'll see what I mean.

***********************************************************************************

So anyway. The other day I changed out of said t-shirt, into my running clothes, and hit the streets for a short jog. I was at the corner of Broadway and St. Charles, thinking about the shirt and wondering if it would be appropriate to wear to a (child's) birthday party that afternoon, when a car turning right at the red light came dangerously close to crushing me. The driver slammed on the brakes and glared at me and I glared back at this person who nearly ran me down in his slick black mid-size sedan and then I realized that this person was...have you guessed it yet? James Carville.

I guess he lives here now, which is cool, but I suppose I will have to be extra-vigilant on my runs from now on.

Runners, take heed: Look both ways, because James Carville will kill you.