‘This,’ she announced as we huddled over it together at my mother’s kitchen table, filling in the details, “is Grandpa’s Death House. It’s where he lives now.”

“I’m sure that he’s so happy that you made him such a wonderful Death House, sweetie. So happy.”

“He IS so happy. I made it so that every part of it is happy” – she pointed to the clouds made of hearts, the pink motorcycle balancing on the Christmas tree, the friendly shark (”because he needs pets”), the flowers nestled under the window through which the tiny shadow figures of her and her grandpa can be seen standing arm in arm – “so that he will be happy there. It’s where he lives now.” She pulled her crayon back from the picture and studied the finer detailing around the friendly ridgebacked shark. “Can we go visit him?”

Ah. Ah.

“We can’t go visit him, sweetie. He’s, um, in heaven now. That’s where his house is. That’s why he can have heart-clouds. He’s in heaven.”

“Because he’s dead?”

“Yeah.”

“Are the dinosaurs in heaven, too?”

“I don’t know.”

“And Jesus?”

“Um…”

She bent over the picture and added a sunbeam.

“Are you sure we can’t visit?”

“I’m sure.”

We’re three months into this loss now, and I still wear my grief, and she still asks questions. Why? Where? What? If Jesus is in heaven, and Grandpa is in heaven, and Jesus and Grandpa are dead, and the dinosaurs are dead, aren’t the dinosaurs in heaven, too? And, can we go there? Please can we go there? Why can’t we go there?

I don’t have the answers. I make vague stabs at trying to explain heaven and angels and the soul and about how when people die, it’s like going to sleep, but forever, and they kinda sorta go somewhere else, maybe, I hope, and I think that that somewhere else is heaven but I’m not sure and we can’t go there and yeah I wish we could but we can’t because going there means we have to leave here and never come back and no I’m not going there soon but someday and OH HEY LOOK A DINOSAUR!

I don’t know to answer her because I don’t know to answer myself. I don’t know what I believe, only that he’s gone and it’s terrible, so so terrible, and he must – he must – be somewhere good and happy and peaceful – he must, I know that he must – and we will see him again someday, we will, but what that all means in the bigger picture, and what that all has to do with Jesus and dinosaurs, I don’t know. So how do I talk to her about this? How do I talk about death with this small child for whom death just means moving to a rainbow colored house under a marshmallow sky, for whom Jesus is a dinosaur-wrangler and heaven a suburb of Candyland?

And how do I talk about it without my heart shattering into a million pieces each and every time?

(My question here – how do you talk to your kids about death? – will be featured at ParentsAsk later today, where, hopefully, some very smart expert-type persons will have some very smart expert-type answers. In the meantime – and because I believe, firmly, that some of the best answers come from ordinary people thinking with their hearts – I’d love it if you’d share your answers. And while you’re thinking about the core question, you might put your hearts/minds/heart-minds to these: does regular attendance at church help with this kind of thing? Does it matter? Do your kids need to have an understanding of God and heaven to understand concepts like soul and afterlife? Or do you just bust out The Little Prince?)

(Is this why people get goldfish?)

(Help.)

He liked the beaver.

We realized our mistake too late.

Toady.

Beaver.

Sure, Toady is – in form if not in name – pretty literal, whereas Beaver is – in form and name – entirely figurative, but still. The genital general problem, I think, stands: my daughter’s comfort object is an eight-inch long plush phallic whatever, and my son’s is a big furry beaver.

Remind me to think these things through more thoroughly next time, okay?

(The beaver, I’ll have you know, has not proven enough of a distraction to allow my head any respite from its nightly violations.)

(There are just so many things wrong with the preceding sentence.)

(Shoot me now.)

]]> http://herbadmother.com/2009/11/ask-me-about-my-beaver/feed/ 35 http://herbadmother.com/2009/11/the-grabbing-hands-grab-all-they-can/ http://herbadmother.com/2009/11/the-grabbing-hands-grab-all-they-can/#comments Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:15:32 +0000 Her Bad Mother http://herbadmother.com/?p=1165 Things are getting desperate around here. Like, really.

I can’t remember the last time I slept more than two or three hours at a stretch. I had hoped that my brief trip to Chicago would provide a full night’s sleep, but, alas, I spent that night waking up every hour wondering why I wasn’t being woken up every hour. Which, you know: FRUSTRATING.

The source of the problem is this: wakeful little Jasper and his grabby little hands. The boy has been in some kind of continuous developmental spurt/growth spurt/teething bender/WHATEVER since early September and the only thing that calms him down when he wakes – as he inevitably does, every night – is a fistful of my hair, preferably clutched while his little body – conveniently relocated to the master bed – is wrapped tightly around my head. Removal of legs or arms or fists results in high pitched wailing.

Like this, only with my head, and much less charming.

It is not conducive to sleep.

We have tried letting him cry it out. We have tried letting him fall asleep in his preferred, mom-clutching position and then relocating him back to his own bed. We have tried relocating me to another bed. Nothing works. If we leave him to cry it out, he screams with an escalating fury until he works himself into a frothing panic, which then requires an even more intense session of hair-grabbing to calm him down. If we remove him from our bed after he falls back asleep, he wakes and protests. If we remove me from the bed, he wakes and protests. If we move me even a few feet out of his reach, he wakes and protests. If we do anything other than send me off to another city to sleep in a hotel, he wakes and protests, and even then, he still wakes and protests.

It’s all become a bit much. The last few weeks, I tolerated – even took comfort in – his neediness and my own wakefulness, because he was sick, and I was worried – so, so worried – but his breathing has improved and his lungs seem stronger and so there’s a little less anxiety available to fuel my will to lay awake beside him all night.

I am tired, so tired.

I am tired, and my hair is breaking at the ends, and I am reaching the point where little hands – any hands – reaching toward me fills me with cold dread and that just breaks my heart. I think. I am so tired that my heart could have been plucked by crows from my insensible, zombified person some weeks ago and I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t have noticed.

Need help. BAD.

That, and Reese’s Supreme Peanut Butter Cup cookies.

(More on the subject – and my history with the subject, which may or may not contain references to Josh Holloway, Gloria Steinem, and Nietzsche – over at Their Bad Mother.)

Emilia’s never heard that one:

(She was going to go as a witch for Halloween, but then she decided that she would rather invent her own costume, and so she did. What you see above is Jumbo Rainbow Craft Robot, and it is entirely her own creation. So, yeah.)

(That’s “Baby Sally” on her shoulder. You might remember Baby Sally from some of Emilia’s previous experiments with installation art. It’s probably best if we don’t give Baby Sally too much thought.)

(BABY HEADS: The Latest Thing In Shoulder Pads.)

psst: more pics here…

My baby boy is a boy-boy now. I’m still crying. And smiling. And crying.

]]> http://herbadmother.com/2009/10/hey-there-delilah-redux/feed/ 0 http://herbadmother.com/2009/10/mamas-dont-let-your-babies-grow-up-to-be-monsters/ http://herbadmother.com/2009/10/mamas-dont-let-your-babies-grow-up-to-be-monsters/#comments Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:13:19 +0000 Her Bad Mother http://herbadmother.com/?p=1132 A few weeks ago, I said this about Hollywood’s defense of Roman Polanski:

What message does it send to our sons when the rape of a young girl is dismissed as something that is not that bad? What message does it send to the would-be Donalds of the world? To the would-be Roman Polanskis? To all the boys and men (and, yes, perhaps, women) who would grab and grope and hurt and rape, and to all the boys and men who wouldn’t? That sometimes, it’s okay? And that even if you wouldn’t do it, you shouldn’t necessarily condemn someone who does grab or grope or rape… who? Your sister, your mother, your wife, your lover, your daughter, your child?

I could not have imagined, when I wrote those words, that one might also have added this suggestion: that it’s okay to stand by and watch as a young girl gets gang-raped.

I don’t know if the boys who stood around and cheered while their schoolmate was gang-raped this past weekend were paying attention when the glitterati lined up to defend Roman Polanski for anally raping a thirteen year old, but in a way, it doesn’t matter. Regardless of whether one can point to a causal relation between the Polanski case and the terrible story of a homecoming celebration gone horrifically wrong, they both stand as evidence of the same thing: ours is a culture that has not done enough to demonize rape. A culture that refuses to fully deplore child-rape, a culture in which people make apologies for ‘misunderstood’ rapists, a culture in which teenage boys think that it is entertaining to participate in gang-rape: this is rape-culture, people, and it is sickening. Sickening.

As I said a few weeks ago, raising a daughter in such a culture – a culture that does not take the exploitation and abuse of women and children seriously (need more proof? Check out Gore Vidal’s comments on the Polanski case) – is a terrifying thing. But what is equally terrifying is the prospect of raising a boy in this culture. How do I explain to my son – how do I get him to really, really understand – that sexual aggression toward or sexual exploitation of women is deplorable when so much in our culture asserts that it is not? When women regularly appear in music videos and movies and video games as sexual playthings? When sexual conquest is presented, in the same media, as an enterprise that is by turns cool or funny but almost never troubling or problematic? When people still whisper and chuckle about assaulted women ‘asking for it’? When violence against women is a regular occurrence on primetime television? When leading figures in pop culture dismiss the seriousness of the rape of a thirteen year old? When a group of boys (and girls?) think it’s okay – fun? awesome? cool? – to stand around and watch a girl get gang-raped?

How does a mother fight against these messages? How does she assert – against the onslaught of visual and aural media telling a different story – that these things are horrible, terrible, wrong? How does she raise her son to respect women, and to deplore disrespect toward women in all of its forms, when so much of popular culture seems to snicker at the very idea behind her back, when it nudges and winks and whispers to boys, to her boy, that this whole thing about respecting women and girls, this whole story about how it’s wrong to make them do those things you want to do, this big idea that they don’t want it and it’s bad to force it and it hurts them and it’s wrong blah blah blah? Is just a bunch of crap. How?

How do we fight this? How? How do we stop this, here, now? How do we raise our own sons to be warriors against this? How do we make sure that they never, ever, ever stand in such a crowd?

How?

My husband will be relieved to hear that there’s no point in him starting that ‘Her Bad Father’ blog, seeing as I have, apparently, pissed all over that territory for both of us. He’ll also be relieved to hear, that, according to Google, he’s off the hook forever for every and any bad parenting decision he makes, seeing as it is, apparently, a Googlistical impossibility that he ever be accused of bad fathering.

(Which, while we’re on the subject: bad fathering? Why employ the active verb in a Google search? I suspect that a search on ‘bad fathers’ might yield different results. Turning my attention to that, however, would deprive me of the opportunity to say this: BAD DADS ARE THE NEW DRAG.)

(Thanks for all the warm wishes yesterday. Jasper seems to be improving. And the claw marks on my head are healing nicely. Need to sleep for, like, a week, though.)

This is my wee boy, and his cat. My wee boy has been very sick, and his cat has been helping take care of him. Which mostly amounts to curling up nearby and providing nap companionship, but also involves attacking the humans who make the boy wail by holding him down and putting breathing masks on his face, which is a torture that the cat does not understand but recognizes as inhumane. So she attacks. I have the claw marks on my head to prove it.

I’m trying to not worry about the little man and his lungs. He’s a robust boy, a solid boy, a boy made for running and shouting. That his lungs might be compromised is inconceivable – I was a sickly child with respiratory problems that kept me in puffers and masks and that put me in hospital too frequently, but I was a frail, skinny thing, whereas Jasper… Jasper is the very picture of boyish strength, all hale chub and muscle and barely-contained energy, a wee Wagnerian hero ready to slay dragons, or stuffed purple dinosaurs, whichever gets in his way. That he might have inherited some of my physical vulnerabilities just seems wrong, impossible. This is not a child who should wear a breathing mask. No child should, of course, but Jasper… he just shouldn’t. My heart constricts every time we hold him still to get the mask on his face, hear his sobs through the clear plastic, feel him struggle.

And so, it seems, does the cat’s. And so she flings herself at my head, willing me to stop, insisting, with her yowls, that the boy does not like this the boy does not want this STOP MESSING WITH THE BOY and she grips my scalp with her claws and all I can is shake her off, and sympathize, and wish that I had somewhere to sink my claws and tell my frustration and worry and defend the boy against the misguided ministrations of Big People, but I don’t and I can’t because I am the Big Person and this is what it means to be a Big Person, to have to suffer the tears and tell everyone and oneself that it’s for the best and it won’t hurt a bit and Mommy’s sorry and we really have to do this this will make you better and honestly…?

… it’s days like this I wish I was a cat.

I’ve wrestled with this issue before. I always come down on the side of no. Which is not to say that I don’t sometimes lay awake at night, interrogating myself about whether I am always perfectly conscientious in putting the best interests of my children before my impulse to tell stories, but it is a more or less clear-sighted ‘no.’ My children figure in the stories that I tell here, but they are not, for the most part, the main characters. I’m not writing their stories; I’m writing mine. And to the extent that they appear in that story – and, obviously, they do appear regularly – they appear as (as I said the other day) narrative constructions. Emilia and Jasper are not, like the Gosselin kids or the Toddlers in Tiaras, compelled to perform upon a literal or figurative stage. They live their lives, they do their thing, and I write stories about motherhood in which they sometimes appear – characters, sketches, reflections of their real selves.

But, but… can it not be said that living under my writerly gaze imposes a kind of (to mangle the term) performativity to their daily lives? They do not perform, but do I not take their movements and moments and weave performance out of these? Can story be understood as a form of performance, in which it is not just the storyteller who performs, but the story itself and the characters therein? In which case, does my role as a storyteller not put me in a relationship with my children whereby I view them, and the things that they do and say, through a performative lens? Do they not live under (and here I jumble Foucault and Lacan and others into a postmodern psychoanalytic jumble that I may not be able to disentangle) performative gaze? And if this is true, is it any better – any less harmful – than living under the lens of television cameras? Do I exploit my children for my own creative (and, yes, to some extent, material) gain?

Ah.

I don’t know.

That’s not entirely true: I do know that, as a writer, I view my children – about whom I write – somewhat differently than I might otherwise. I view everything differently, inasmuch as everything is potential fodder for narrative. The question is whether my ‘writerly gaze’ has any kind of troubling effect. Is that view distorted? Does it distort? Do I – in engaging with and responding to and thinking about my children – or anyone/anything else, for that matter – amplify or ignore or construct certain details in the experience to better prepare it for narrative. When I watch my children play, am I watching them play, or am I observing them as subjects? Both? Am I more attached/detached in one condition than in the other? Can I be attached to the experience while retaining my critical, writerly eye? Does it matter?

I think that everyone imposes something of this gaze on their lives and the experiences and people in those lives, inasmuch as we are all conscious of what other people think. We are all, after all, bourgeois in the sense that Rousseau meant when he criticized modern, Western man for being constantly preoccupied with the judgments and opinions of others. We think about the stories that we will tell our friends and families about this incident or that, we are alert to what any given experience looks like to outside observers (my children are behaving badly in this restaurant; do people think I’m a bad mother?/my children are behaving so well; does anybody notice? doesn’t this reflect well on me?/I wonder if anyone has noticed how awesome my shoes are?) and in that way, arguably, we are constantly viewing our lives through a critical lens, imposing narratives, editing the details, worrying over the visuals. But is there something different going on for writers, if only because those narratives make it out of our heads and onto the page?

I don’t have a good answer to this question. I worry about it, sometimes. I worry about thinking too much about story when I watch my children strut their lives upon the figurative stage. I worry about how my own narrative impulses impose a certain form and structure and feel to my life and the lives of those around me, not least when I consider writing about the most difficult things, like depression and anxiety and grief  – have I written myself and my loved ones into a story that is all about sadness? Am I turning my struggles into spectacle, and to what effect? (I turn off comments on some posts – some posts about my father, for example, some others about my children – when I want to remain clear with myself that I am writing for myself, and not for reactions, when I want there to be no mistake that I am not writing a given story for attention or positive reinforcement. Why, then, not close comments on all posts? Because the dialogue that emerges from commentary is important to me, as is – obviously – the community. Turning off comments sometimes is just a reminder to myself that I do not write – primarily – to generate vocal response; it keeps me honest about why I’m writing about certain things, i.e. because the story demands to be told, and not because the story will yield tons of comments.)

End of the day, I take the temperature of my integrity by appealing to my gut: why am I telling this story? Do I tell it out of love and/or joy and/or enthusiasm and/or fascination? Out of sincere concern or worry or heartfelt handwringing? Will my children read this someday – or my husband or mother or sister or friends read it now, or my father read it on whatever iHeaven app they make available in the great beyond – and recognize and appreciate the feeling behind it? Will their reactions be informed by (so far as possible) a clear awareness that they appear in my stories because I love them, because they are important to me, because I wanted to remember and understand every moment with them, because I wanted to share all of this, because I wanted to the world to know? Are the stories that feature my loved ones gentle in their treatment of them as characters? Are they – so far as is possible in narrative construction – true? If I can tell myself – honestly, as honestly as possible – that the answers to these questions is yes, then that is the best that I can do.

I hope that it is enough. Is it different enough from what goes on in the cruel and shallow money trench that is reality television? I think so. My writerly gaze, as it falls upon my children and my family and my friends, is a loving gaze. This cannot be said of the gaze of a television camera, and that difference, I think, is key. It is, in any case, enough to help me sleep at night. Mostly.

(What do you think? Do writers invariably exploit their subjects, and if so, are parent-bloggers guilty of exploiting their children? Are we all just Gosselins now?)

(Excellent discussion on this very subject can also be found chez Mom-101. And she doesn’t trip over her words as much as I do.)