Swallow Back the Years (from the Momplex Blog archive)

July 18, 2014February 27, 2023 Jenny4 Comments

I do not want my kids to grow up. There. I said it. I like them little. I like how they smell. I like how my daughter’s voice still sounds about half her age when we talk on the phone. I like how my son says he’s built a Lego structure by following the “durkstructions.” The backs of their heads and their little buns are cuter than any interspecies bonding pic you can throw my way.

A few nights ago, during bedtime snuggling, my 4-year-old son asked me, “Mom, does it make you happy if I’m not growing up anymore?” I didn’t answer right away. I don’t really want my kids to know that I want them to stay little. I don’t think that’s healthy. My cousin suffers from severe anorexia, and last year I read in some old 1970s book on the subject, written by an eating-disorders specialist, that some anorexics seem to have a deep-rooted fear not so much of getting fat but of getting big, as in not a kid anymore.

I don’t need a medical professional to tell me that it’s not wise to try to keep your kids from growing up, though. Kathy Bates makes the most compelling case of all:

But still. When my son asked me the question, he smelled like Mr. Bubble and was wearing his solar-system pajamas and had his tiny fat palms splayed on either side of my face. His eyes were searching mine for the truth.

“Yes,” I answered. “I suppose so.”

“Good! I’m not growing up anymore.”

“How are you going to do that?” I asked, realizing that I should have lied or at least told the other truth. Which is that I do want him to grow up to be a man but to also leave some sort of specter of his 4-year-old self behind, preferrably one that will still come cowlicked and bright-eyed and crunching down the stairs in the morning in his GoodNites protective “underwear” (a.k.a. an XL pull-up, as if we can’t read between the lines, Huggies).

“I don’t do it anymore!” he said. “I stopped growing up! I don’t ever grow up anymore!”

Man, he was really excited about this. Kind of heartbreaking, especially when I think about the comments his 9-year-old sister has made over the past year, about not wanting to turn 10 next year. She’s adamant that all the fun in life is when you’re a little kid, and that the bigger you get, the more schoolwork and life-work you have. Becoming a teenager? Fuggedabowdit. She dreads that. I set a kiss on the bridge of my son’s nose and smiled.

“Well, that’s a neat trick,” I told him. “How are you going to do it?”

“I just swallow it.” He gulped and smiled. “I swallow it down. When it comes up, it goes here [motions to his chest] then here [motions to his clavicles] then here [motions to his throat], and then I swallow it back down, so I don’t grow up anymore!”

“Wait a minute. Are you feeling sick?” I sat up and scrutinized his face. “Do you feel like you need to throw up?”

“Nope.” He shook his head. “Because I swallow it down!”

“Your throw-up? You mean you swallow down your throw-up?” He nodded proudly, giving me his happy-drunk devilish smile with upturned-V eyebrows, a dead-ringer for Jack Nicholson:

A face only a mother could love. And I do, but only on my 4-year-old.

“When do you do this?” I was feeling sick myself now. “Did this happen today? Have you been feeling sick?”

“Whenever I feel it come up.” God, he was so proud of himself.

“That sounds pretty gross.”

“I like it!” he answered. “It tastes good.”

Ummmm, yeah, kid. You can go ahead and grow up now.

(From the archives, originally published 2012)

career · happiness · intentional happiness · motherhood · Past life · preschoolers · writing

See that Mountain? Redefining Glory Days (from the Momplex Blog archives)

January 9, 2014February 27, 2023 Jenny7 Comments

The month before I graduated college, one of my writing professors approached me to ask if the university’s English department could use my senior writing portfolio as a model for future classes. She said it was one of the best she’d ever seen. My sophomore year, there was some sort of essay-on-demand writing-proficiency exam required for all sophomores, and my graded essay came back with a letter saying it was so good, the grader had stopped the rest of the judges to listen to it read aloud. True stories.

My husband and I used to be cemetery fanatics. This one, from Savanna, was always one of my favorites. It was next to the husband's headstone, which was about 10 feet high and inscribed with every freaking thing he'd ever done or joined. Go ahead. Click on it. Behold the last line of the epitaph. That's what I call honest. Makes her husband look like a narcissistic wiener. — My husband and I used to be cemetery fanatics. This headstone, from Savanna, Georgia, was always one of my favorites. It was next to the husband’s headstone, which was about 10 feet high and inscribed with every freaking thing he’d ever done or joined. Go ahead. Click on it. Behold the last line of the epitaph. That’s what I call honest. Makes her husband look like a narcissistic wiener.

I think about these experiences sometimes, mostly how they make me feel (and sound) like Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite: “See that mountain over there? What do you want to bet I can throw this football over it?” He takes his bite of pan-fried steak, his hairpiece glistening, and, oh, it’s such a pathetic sight. I guess I’ll take comfort in knowing I’ve done a few things between my supposed glory days and my current life.

It’s been about 15 years since I graduated from college. Before I even turned my tassle, I was working at a small educational publishing company as its managing editor. Since, I’ve worked from coast to coast. I’ve been a newspaper editor where Southern hog farmers and retired Yankees are fighting the final, fizzling skirmishes of the Civil War. I was the editor for the largest private-equity research firm in the Northwest, on the receiving end of a nana-nana-boo-boo letter from Bill Gates’ dad about a typo he found in a report I edited. (Yes, the rich and famous are just like us!) I’ve been a stringer for public radio. I’ve coordinated publications for the National Endowment for Democracy, where I got to meet some incredible champions of freedom, like escapees of North Korean forced-labor camps, survivors of rape warfare in the Congo, and one Azar Nafisi, the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran. More recently, I received a Pushcart Prize special mention and wrote a book. See that mountain over there?

Let’s be real. I haven’t landed among the stars, at least not the ones anyone expected. To quote a former classmate of mine from my 15-year high school reunion, a guy with something like 17 children and enough ATVs to entertain them all, “I thought you were going to go somewhere, be something big, like a lawyer or a doctor.” To boot, that was said during all the aforementioned accomplishments. He didn’t even know I was about to become what I am now.

These days, I am a mom and a wife in a Wisconsin home with a loud dishwasher that is making it hard for me to think as I type. My day went like this: shower, wake up the kids, make lunches, wake up husband, wake up the kids again, dry hair, wake up the kids again, make breakfast, search for kids’ socks, diffuse tantrum over socks not being fresh from the dryer, replace said socks with better-fitting socks, search for snow boots, drive kids to school, go to work, blog for a camera company, blog for a jeweler, pick up kids, go grocery shopping, miss yoga, make enchiladas, watch eldest pick onions out of enchiladas, go to science fair, do bedtime, and finally, sweet finally, watch some Modern Family. What can I say? I have two kids and came this close—this close—to choking a passive-aggressive, competitive parent tonight at a school science expo in a cafeteria, where the fluorescent lights no doubt showed off the greasy child-sized fingerprints on my glasses. Every day, I am so much more tired at the end than I intended to be at the beginning. Yes, I have #firstworldproblems. But, God, I love my family so much more than I ever loved anything I ever wrote. There’s that. No, there really is that.

Sometimes I’m plagued by the thought that I have not become what I could become. There are still little voices telling me I thought you would be a big deal. This is when I have to remind myself that life is longer than 15 years between college and now. What am I? Dead? It is no small deal raising children well while still becoming who you were meant to be. In fact, in my case, the two are inextricably related. And so I do my best. I march down from curing the hiccups, negotiating over cold or hot lunch, doing so many endless experiments with baking soda, and I try to turn on that thing—that magic thing—that’s still somewhere in there. Usually I can’t find it. It’s so hard to create beauty when you’re exhausted. In the end, I believe this isn’t a choice I have to make right now. I believe the writing will keep. My kids will grow up and move away, for we all know childhood’s fleeting. But the writing will keep.