All worth it when the curtain rises

“I thought I’d be really nervous, but once the curtain went up, I couldn’t stop smiling,” my 12-year-old said breathlessly as she hopped into the car after yesterday’s dress rehearsal for her class musical.

Her seventh grade class is putting on a little-known production written specifically for middle schoolers this weekend, and Holly has a minor ensemble role. She didn’t want a big role, because big roles require singing alone, and Holly doesn’t like to sing alone. Instead, she’s a pirate, one of several. She stands near the edges of most of the pirate scenes; some pirates have names and lots of lines, but Holly has no name and just an occasional “Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!”

No matter. Holly is having a blast.

And so as I once again take stock of a complicated, volunteer-intensive effort that left some parents exhausted and others a little bewildered, I look at Holly and remember once again what the merits of this experience can be. She witnessed terrific talent in some of her classmates who do like to sing and dance and who feel comfortable in the spotlight. She saw other classmates assist in designing, building, and painting sets. She helped her fellow pirates learn their choreography. She did homework with a group of kids from the play every afternoon before rehearsal.

Witnessing all of this over the past three months has reminded me of why this is a valuable experience. For a kid like mine who is not particularly interested in theater, it’s really not about having a chance to learn stagecraft. It’s about learning more about life, as seen through the eyes of a seventh grader. It’s a chance to interact with new adults who are sometimes pushed to the edge by the cheerful unruliness of the cast and put their best foot forward anyway. It’s a chance to be reminded that sometimes the kids who never stand out as the smartest or the best athletes have unexpected talents when it comes to projecting lines or blocking a scene.

Unlike most of the towns around us, our middle school does not have a theater program. So putting on a musical – which each class does only once, in the spring of seventh grade – relies almost exclusively on parental volunteer effort, with a couple of professionals – a director, a choreographer, a pianist – whose stipends are paid for out of fundraisers which were also led by parent volunteers. Sometimes it seems like a never-ending process for parents, pulling off all these events.

But seeing Holly’s triumphant glow after yesterday’s dress rehearsal reminds me of why it’s all worth it. Kids learn and grow from these opportunities: not necessarily from standing alone in the spotlight, but sometimes from supporting the other kids who do. 

Holly might well never choose to be in another musical; she has plenty of interests, but theater still isn’t really one of them. Nonetheless, she’ll retain wonderful memories and subtler life lessons from the past three months of preparing for this one. And we parents can take a deep breath as we settle into our seats in the auditorium this weekend and be glad we put forth the effort to make it happen. 

“I just couldn’t stop smiling!” Holly repeated as we drove home from yesterday’s dress rehearsal.

For the moment, I feel just the same.

Back to school - but not all that often, anymore

I had a mid-afternoon meeting at the kids’ school yesterday.

Except it’s not even the kids’ school anymore. I just say that from habit. It’s Holly’s school now; Tim has already been gone for nearly a year. His school is eight miles away, on a campus on which I still have to ask for directions to get anywhere except the main office or the auditorium.

But most of the time directions aren’t required because most of the time I’m not there, trying to find anything. Parents aren’t particularly needed on a high school campus; the administration and students together manage to pretty much run the show without us.

And it seems parents are needed a lot less at the lower school these days as well, although I know that’s not really true. From my friends with kids in the early elementary grades, I know that parents are still checking in and out of the office all day long to volunteer in the school library or run lines for the kindergarten play or chaperone a field trip to Boston.

But Holly is in middle school now, and even though it’s the same campus as the elementary school, my days as a weekly if not daily presence there are over.

So sitting in the brand-new conference room in the building that didn’t even exist when Holly was a grade schooler felt both familiar and strange to me yesterday afternoon. Watching the kindergarteners pass by outside the windows in a jagged line, some holding hands, some skipping, some distractedly shuffling, reminded me of every time I’d ever craned for a peek at my own kids’ classes passing by outside the window while I pretended to pay attention to a parent presentation or sorted book orders as a room parent. Except that if this were either of my kids’ kindergarten classes, I would have recognized every single kid. On this day, I recognized none of them at all. I didn’t even know why they were all wearing matching, neon green t-shirts.

Maybe they had a classroom performance, I thought, realizing only later when I drove past the baseball field and saw the bounce house that it was Field Day. That’s another event to which parents of younger kids flock, to deliver popsicles and take pictures and cheer on their little long-jumpers and three-legged-racers. Holly has middle school field day on Wednesday, but I wouldn’t have even known that if I hadn’t seen it in the school newsletter. At her age, it’s no longer a big event for parents.

All of this is making me sound more wistful than I really feel. Helping out at school was fun, most of the time, but it took up a lot of hours, and there were interpersonal politics involved, and sometimes a little guilt as far as who was doing too much and who wasn’t doing enough. Both kids are past the phase where parents are a big part of classroom life, and I welcome the new independence that comes with these new phases.

At the same time, in two years, Holly will be graduating from our local public school and I’ll have no call to be on that campus at all ever, except when the auditorium is being used for municipal purposes such as Town Meeting. Maybe then I’ll remember the days of classroom volunteering and feel more wistful than I do now. Right now, I still can’t imagine not being a school parent in our town; it’s been part of my identity for ten years.

To every thing there is a season. Now it’s nearly summer and school will soon be over, but Holly – and I – expect to be back on campus in the fall, to varying degrees. In another two years, Holly will cross town lines to the regional high school, and this campus will be mostly just a memory for me.

And that will be okay too. If I really need a fix of elementary school life, I can always take a seat in the back of the auditorium for one more mitten play or go watch the three-legged races at Field Day. But I probably shouldn’t. New parents will have taken my place. And that’s just as it should be.

Small problems, no solutions

Among the more existential questions upon which my father sometimes ruminates is whether there are problems with no solutions. "I think there are," he said to me last week. "When I was younger, I believed that just about every problem had a solution. And not only that, but I thought I could solve most problems myself. Now I see that there are some problems that just don't have solutions."

I think he was referring to fairly large and significant problems, but I recalled his words yesterday afternoon as my 11-year-old daughter and I were making our way through what was turning out to be not a very good day for her. And it just wasn't anything I could solve. It wasn't really anything that could be solved. It wasn't anything momentous or critical. It was just....little things going wrong. And I couldn't do much but sit back and watch.

Yesterday was supposed to be the day Holly got her braces, and she was ready. She'd asked her friends for advice. She'd thought about what to eat for lunch, knowing she might not be able to eat again for a while, and she'd already talked me into stopping for a milk shake after her appointment since her friends had advised her that a milk shake was all she would want in the first few hours after the braces went on. She'd even gotten recommendations from her friends on what color wires to choose for her braces. Pink and blue, she confidently told me in the car as we drove to her appointment.

But the orthodontist examined her x-rays and said not quite yet. There was a baby tooth that needed to fall out first, which it soon would, he assured us.  And there was another one for which he was recommending an extraction. Until those two teeth were out of the way, the orthodontist said, it didn't make sense to proceed.

It's not like Holly had been looking forward to getting braces on, but by the time the day came, she was psyched up for it, and I could tell she felt deflated as we left. No solution, I told myself. She'll just have to wait out the disappointment. "You can still have the milk shake," I told her.

So we stopped at the ice cream stand. Holly drank a little bit of the shake in the car, and then once we got home decided to put it in the freezer so it would firm up a little bit more.

Except in doing so, she tipped it over and the whole thing spilled into the bottom of the freezer.

Holly is a very responsible 11-year-old. After letting out one small scream of frustration, she fetched a roll of paper towels and started mopping. There was milk shake all over everything. The inside of the freezer. The outside of the freezer. The bottom of the freezer. The floor around the freezer. All the other items already in the freezer.

It was a mess. I pitched in to help her, but it still took us nearly a half-hour. "And I hardly even drank any of my milk shake before it spilled!" Holly said mournfully as we mopped.

There was no solution to that either. We were too far from the ice cream stand to go out for another one, and I had to leave soon for an evening commitment. When we were finally done cleaning the freezer out, Holly asked if she could watch TV for a little while. Thinking it might be comforting, I said yes. And then the power went out.

Poor Holly. It just wasn't her day. Nothing all that bad was going on. Just little annoyances without solutions. Because some problems don't have solutions. And even if they are really trivial problems, as trivial as spilling a much-anticipated milk shake, it's frustrating.

When I got home from my evening meeting, the power was back on and Holly was cheerful. I assured her I would set up the appointment for the extraction as soon as possible and we would reschedule the braces.

Some problems are solved only by waiting them out. The freezer is cleaner now than it was pre-spill, and the power company fixed the lines as quickly as they could. I told Holly we would surely find another opportunity for a milk shake before the week is out.

It’s true that some problems just don't have solutions. But for those messes that can in fact be cleaned up, you pull out a roll of paper towels and get to work.

Kitchen clean-up

From upstairs, I could smell the rich sweet aroma of chocolate chips in the oven, and I was a little bit afraid to finish brushing my teeth and head down to the kitchen.

After dinner, Holly had asked me if she could make Seven-Layer Bars, and with a healthy dose of trepidation, I said yes.

Rick is always encouraging me to let the kids do more in the kitchen. His theory is that if I say yes when they want to bake cookies (Holly) or fry French fries (Tim), the same skills will eventually compel them to make their own breakfasts and lunches. And that, I sometimes imagine, could add years to my life.

But it takes a big leap of faith, because although I suspect they do have the culinary abilities to scramble eggs or make sandwiches, it’s the clean-up where they still fall short.

Still, when Holly asked to make Seven-Layer Bars last night, I couldn’t really justify turning her down. I started baking when I was just a little bit younger than she is now; I still love baking to this day.

But I also learned to clean up at around that time, and that’s a skill that seems to have eluded my kids so far. Sure, they understand the basics. They put ingredients away and stack mixing bowls in the sink. 

But they always leave copious amounts of flour drifting across the countertops, and they never remember to fill dirty bowls with hot soapy water so that they’ll be easier to wash later on.

When I finished brushing my teeth and apprehensively headed down to check Holly’s progress, however, I was pleasantly surprised. Granted, it’s a pretty easy recipe – especially since her Seven-Layer Bars are only Five-Layer Bars because she doesn’t like nuts or butterscotch chips – but the mess I expected was absent. She’d wiped down the countertops and put away everything she’d taken out. 

No butter wrappers, stray chocolate chips, or coconut shreds remained to be seen. I was impressed.

Apparently all my pleas to clean up after herself had finally paid off, and it reminded me not to give up so easily. Sure, the kids used to be rather negligent when it came to kitchen tidiness, but as they grow older, I can expect more. If I’m patient and remember to show them how I want things done, they’ll gradually learn to do it. Holly’s Seven-Layer Bars came out of the oven looking lightly browned, bubbly, chewy and delicious – and we had a nice clean kitchen in which to savor the first warm bites.

Not that she crossed every t and dotted every i. The pan in which she’d mixed the melted butter and graham cracker crumbs was in the sink….but not soaking. At first I sighed, discouraged. But then I remember that my feeling discouraged wouldn’t help for next time. Only showing her what to do would be likely to lead to improvement.

So I reminded her to squirt some detergent into the pan and fill it with warm water, and a few minutes after that I showed her how to scrub the pan and put it in the dishwasher. Maybe next time she’ll do it herself.

And in the meantime, we have a really delicious dessert to enjoy.

Sibling harmony

“We have a great plan for early release day tomorrow,” says my 14-year-old son Tim on the phone as I’m driving home late yesterday afternoon. He describes the plan, which involves him, his sister Holly and Tim’s best friend Will going out for lunch together and then coming back to our house for the afternoon.

“Of course, that’s fine,” I say, smiling to myself as we hang up.

I couldn’t have anticipated this particular bonus; it’s been a remarkable and unanticipated highlight of this school year. Specifically, that both my kids really enjoy spending time together after school, and that both of them have friends who are happy to accommodate the other sibling.

For years, whenever the topic of sibling rivalry came up, I’d find myself saying the same thing: “There’s very little that my kids argue about. But it’s because they’re different sexes and four years apart in age. What really would they argue about?” At the same time, I’ve often shared the other side of the coin: being different sexes and four years apart in age, they’ve never really had any interests in common, which didn’t matter much around home but could make it challenging to choose a vacation destination or even agree on a cultural excursion they both wanted to do.

Four years apart in age, yes, but only three years apart in school. Which means that once every four years or so, they end up on the same school schedule. This year was one of those years: with Tim in eighth grade and Holly in fifth, they are both middle schoolers.

And sometime during the fall, they fell into the habit of going to the baseball field once or twice a week after school for Frisbee games with groups of kids – groups that included friends of both of theirs. I certainly didn’t expect eighth grade boys and fifth grade girls to enjoy spending time together, but it proved to work out really well.

What’s pleasing to me is that I never had to ask them to make this work. I never had to say to Tim, “Yes, you can go to Ferns for a sandwich with Will after early dismissal, but only if you bring Holly along.” Tim just expected to bring Holly along, and neither of the boys had any problems accommodating her. Sometimes she brings a friend too. Everyone gets along.

This unexpectedly ideal situation only compounds my usual sense of time passing by too quickly, though. Their perfect harmony will likely be disrupted by the fall; Tim will be off to high school and Holly still in middle school for three more years. They’ll be on different schedules and attending schools in different towns. Moreover, Tim will probably make new friends who might not find it quite so natural to have a very small and much younger girl and her friends hanging out with them. Or Holly might not find it quite such a novelty to be part of Tim’s group.

So it’s yet another thing that I’ll just have to appreciate as long as it lasts while also being aware it won’t last long. Today is a monthly early dismissal day; the two of them will go out to lunch with a couple of Tim’s friends and maybe one or two of Holly’s friends. It might not happen many more times; it might even not ever happen again. And of course, they have no sense of the rapid passing of time at all; they’ll find this particular ritual noteworthy only when they look back on it after these excursions are no longer happening. So it’s up to me to appreciate it right now, and be happy the two of them and Tim’s friends and Holly’s friends all enjoy each other’s company. They might appreciate it only in retrospect, but I appreciate it right now, in real time.

Taller than Mom (or pretending to be, anyway)

Holly has become fascinated as of late with trying to imagine what it might be like to be taller than me.

Whenever she finds me standing next to a chair, she scrambles up to stand on the chair so that she can tower over me. If we’re outside, she angles to get me near a stone wall or bench upon which she can stand to look down on me. Her favorite opportunity is when we’re both in her bedroom, from which she can not only stand on her bed to gain a couple of feet on me but can also see both of us in the large mirror over her bureau while she does it.

I’m enjoying her fascination even though I’m not really sure of its source. I think it began earlier this fall when Tim, now fourteen years old, reached a height that unmistakably topped my five-foot stature. At first he and I were eye to eye, but it seemed within days he was discernibly an inch taller than me, and then two inches. Initially hard to believe, it’s now a fact of our domestic life that he can see the top of my head – and that I routinely ask him to reach for serving plates and glasses stored higher than I can reach.

Holly, just ten years old and small for her age, is still a very long way from reaching my height, and yet the fact that Tim has done so seems to have opened up a door in her imagination. It’s as if she realizes for the first time that this is probably going to happen to her someday. She’s correct in seeing that the odds are in her favor – at exactly five feet, I am one of the shortest adults I know. It’s very unlikely that she – or, in fact, anyone else we know – will be shorter than I am when full-grown. Pretty much everyone can look forward to the prospect of peering down on me at some point in the future.

I’m not sure why she gets such a kick out of climbing to higher elevations simply for the experience of standing next to me and looking down, but it amuses me nonetheless. It seems like such a simple pleasure, and yet there must be more to it, in her imagination. She has never been interested in dressing up or trying on high heels or applying lipstick; this may be her first inkling that occupying an adult body is a novelty yet to be experienced.

And I’m glad if the thought pleases her. Of course, by the time she really does surpass me in height, it will no longer seem like the thrill it does now. By then, there will be more important markers to the growing-up process, milestones that may please her or may dismay her but either way will surely seem more significant than achieving a height greater than her mother’s.

But in a way, it’s like pulling back the curtain and watching her mind at work. As she “practices” being taller than me by standing on chairs or park benches, she’s starting to think about what it will mean to grow up: to be a full-grown woman, an adult, maybe even a mother herself someday. Clearly she’s having fun with the idea, and because of that, so am I.

Holly, halfway through the cross-country season

I didn’t take it too seriously the few times over the summer that Holly mentioned she might want to join her school’s cross-country team. I knew some of her friends were interested and figured that hearing them talk about it was fueling her interest, but it wasn’t clear to me that she even knew exactly what a cross-country team was – or, more importantly, that it involved running, something Holly has almost never been known to do.

But when the date of the first meeting arose, she attended it, and when it was time for the first practice, she asked me to sign a permission slip and write a check. It turned out she really did plan to go through with it after all.

Now we’re four weeks into the season – about halfway through it – and  to my surprise, Holly’s commitment hasn’t wavered yet. She puts in four afternoons a week at practices or meets. She generally doesn’t talk much about training regimens or race times; occasionally I wonder if to her, cross-country is essentially an extension of recess, a chance to wander through the woods while talking with her friends. At least that was the impression I got from her early descriptions of team practices.

But then recently, something changed. Though not a star runner, she discovered at the past few meets that she gets a better time when she tries hard, focuses on the course, and runs by herself rather than with her friends – and her times are actually not bad for a small fifth grade girl.

It’s been a lesson to me in taking her seriously when she says she wants to try something new. And much as I hope she develops a passion for running and an allegiance to this team, I was perhaps proudest of her a few days ago when she said offhandedly in answer to a question Tim asked that she very well might not sign up for the team again next year – four sessions per week just seems too time-consuming, she said. What made me proud was that this was the first I’d heard of her not being crazy about the strenuous schedule. Even though she’d been feeling that way all along, she took her commitment seriously, never voicing her misgivings to me or hinting that she might not last the season.

No, she’s planning to see it through. And even as I nurse a secret hope that with another few weeks to go, she’ll come to like it so much that she will in fact sign up again next season, it’s fine even if she doesn’t. She has discovered the very best part of running: a chance to de-stress while loping through the woods, by yourself or with a friend, caught up in silent reflection or in conversation. It might not be the best basis for a team sport, but it has carried her happily through half the season, and to my mind, that’s a fine start no matter what happens next time around.

Sibling horseplay

On Sunday evening, I sat down at my laptop planning to write about something cerebral, but it wasn’t meant to be. I was too distracted by the shrieks and giggles ten feet away from where I was writing.

Every now and then, and particularly, it seems, on Sunday evenings, my two children need to let off steam with a long, noisy wrestling session on our bed.

This can be difficult for me to witness. Tim is a head taller than Holly, which doesn’t matter all that much in wrestling, but also thirty pounds heavier, which presumably does. I’m always afraid that calamity will result from these ultra-physical moments between the two of them as Tim slings Holly over his shoulder before tossing her down on the mattress. Of course, there’s always the possibility of his being the injured one as well, the way Holly pounces on his back. They assure me that the big soft cushioning of our double mattress makes it an entirely safe game, but if that’s true, it’s still hard for a mother to watch.

It’s important to their sibling relationship, I realize. They like to let off energy and they like to do so with physical contact. I need to get used to this, despite the fact that it is alien to my background. I grew up with two sisters, and we never got more physical than maybe an occasional piggy-back ride.

My mother was also one of three sisters, so she didn’t notice anything remarkable about our interactions – or lack thereof -- but my father once informed us that the correct way for one sibling in a household to pass by another was with nothing less than a punch to the ribs. Tripping was another acceptable option, he said, and there was always the classic noogie. This was how he and his sister spent their childhoods, he told us, and he didn’t realize that it wasn’t like that in every household. To him, we must have seemed semi-glacial in our physical reserve.

Well, my children will never have that problem; I’ll just be relieved if neither of them breaks an arm or punctures a lung with all this horseplay. But despite my mild anxieties about the orthopedic risks at which they put themselves, I acknowledge that in some ways, this is probably good for them. Not only do they vent some pent-up physical energy; they also develop a sense of their own strength and muscle control. Holly is not fond of organized sports, so this may be the closest she comes most days to testing her gross motor skills.

Still, by 9 p.m. I break it up and tell them they both have to read for ten minutes to calm down before bed. They complain, but they follow my instructions, and within minutes they’re lying side by side, engrosssed in their books.

That’s good for them too. Horseplay, reading – either way, they seem to end a lot of evenings side by side. It’s how life with a sibling should be. That I know, even if I never punched, tripped or noogied my sisters during our own childhood years.

Skateboarding (Day One)

The first time Holly brought it up, I suspected it might also be the only time she’d bring it up. “Mommy, you know how you always want me to try more outdoor activities and sports. Well, I want to try skateboarding.”

I assumed it was something she’d seen on TV or heard a friend talking about. It was mid-February and we were in the midst of the very small window every year when I’m actually not looking for more ways to spend time outdoors with the kids. So I pretty much brushed it off.

But she brought it up again – every week or two, it seemed, throughout the winter. She wasn’t pestering or whining or pleading; she was just confirming that this was something she wanted to try.

No one in our family skateboards and I couldn’t think of any of her peers whom I’d ever seen skateboard. I didn’t know where to begin as far as equipment and instruction. Is it something you just pick up instinctively, like riding a bike? Or is it more like skiing, where a few lessons to teach you the basics can really make the difference between ongoing success and a dead end?

This past Tuesday, a warm sunny day in the midst of what felt like a March heat wave, I ran into my friend Patricia up at school. As we chatted, I remembered that her sons have done a little skateboarding in the past. “How did you get them started?” I asked her. “How did you know where to begin?”

Patricia solved it easily. “Anthony is home right now and doesn’t have any homework,” she said. “Bring Holly over and he can show her a few things.”

Anthony, my friend’s 12-year-old, was waiting on the front porch for us when we arrived, after a brief detour home to get socks, sneakers and Holly’s bike helmet. He offered Holly one of his many outgrown skateboards to use and started immediately with rudimentary steps. “To get started, you just do a double push-off and then glide,” he showed her as we stood in their driveway.

On the drive to their house, I’d wondered what would happen at this point. When I was her age, I went through a phrase of fascination with motorcycles. I insisted I loved motorcycles and wanted nothing so much as to ride a motorcycle. Then one day my father brought me over to his mechanic's house. The mechanic was waiting on his bike. His wife brought out a helmet for me. I was speechless. I never meant to be taken seriously. But the wheels were in motion, both literally and figuratively, so I hopped on the motorcycle, reached around the man’s waist as best I could, and off we went for a spin around the block. It was a thrill, but scary also, doing something I’d never really intended to make a reality.

I wondered if Holly might be equally flummoxed when faced with the reality of a skateboard, but she wasn’t. She copied Anthony’s form, and the skateboard glided in a short, neat line as she balanced atop it. She turned to him for the next instruction.

Patricia and I did the most sensible thing we could at that point: we told the kids we’d be on the porch and we moved out of their line of vision. Curious as I was about what would transpire, I knew that standing there watching Holly’s skateboarding lesson would be helpful to absolutely no one.

Sitting on the porch sipping seltzer, we heard no shouts or tears or anything much at all until Anthony trotted around the side of the house after 45 minutes and said “Holly is ready to show you the three things she learned today.”

Holly double-pushed, glided….and toppled off the skateboard onto the pavement. Immediately she stood up and didn’t even dignify her new scrape with a glance. Back onto the skateboard for another double-push and glide, this one successfully defying gravity. Then a tiny turn, then a stop.

We told Anthony we’d come back next week if he’d do another lesson. He instructed Holly to wear pants instead of shorts next time for better skin protection and then said she could borrow the skateboard for practicing. As soon as we got home, she found the flattest part of our driveway and went out to work on her newfound skills.

It may be the beginning of a new passion, the very first sport she’s taken an interest in doing. It may be a passing phase, or it may be a curiosity satisfied in just one lesson, like me with motorcycling. But today she was back out on the driveway practicing again. Push, push, and glide. She’s on her way.

Surprised by empathy

I think most parents are like me in that as soon as we send our daughters off to school, we know on some level that the day will come when we’re drying her tears and trying to come up with answers about why kids sometimes don’t always treat each other too nicely. No matter how closely we read Reviving Ophelia or Queen Bees and Wannabes, or attend anti-bullying sessions sponsored by the PTA or listen to the counsel of friends with older kids, we wonder how we’ll help her navigate this particular age-old maze.

I don’t mean to sound sexist; boys have friendship issues too, but in my household, that part has been easy. Tim is something of an introvert; he gets along with lots of kids (being a good athlete always helps, as you’re always in demand for a pick-up game at recess) but sticks with a small number of good friends with whom he’s been close for years.

For Holly, it’s more typically complicated, and I consider myself lucky that it’s no more than every few weeks that she comes home on the verge of tears with a friendship issue to vent. I’m definitely no expert, but I do my best at those times: I listen to her account of what happened (which usually boils down to who was excluded from what by whom), offer perspective, reassure her that this too shall pass, and sometimes try to subtly clue her in as to which friends tend to get mixed up in these problems more often than others.

So earlier this week when she said she wanted to tell me about a problem, I automatically pictured the fairly large circle of girls she normally socializes with at school. I wondered which girl had snubbed Holly or said something that was open to misinterpretation this time around. But what I heard instead surprised me. With tears rolling down her cheeks, Holly told me a story about being excluded in the cafeteria – except it didn’t involve her at all. It was a boy in the class who was having trouble fitting in with the other boys whose attention he apparently coveted.

Accustomed to discussing girl problems with Holly, I was a little bit perplexed. I suggested that she could invite the boy to eat lunch with her and her friends if the other boys were excluding him, but she retorted that my solution was not what he wanted. “I understand that he wants to be with the boys and not the girls, but wouldn’t being with the girls be better than nothing?” I asked. But this is fourth grade, the height of the boy-girl voluntary segregation phase. It was unthinkable to her that eating lunch with the girls might be a reasonable second choice for this boy, and my attempt to suggest that having the girls desire his company might in fact make this boy more impressive to the other boys in the long run made even less sense to her.

I wasn’t much help, but what struck me was the depth of her empathy. She almost never cries when she confides to me about her own friendship problems, but she was crying over the fate of a boy being left out. “They’re just so wrong to think they’re better than him!” she wailed in describing the other boys’ behavior.

Her frustration and anguish made me sad, but her empathy surprised me and gave me a twinge of pride. Holly is almost always cheerful and pleasant, but I don’t necessarily think of her as empathetic. I felt sorry that she was experiencing so much sadness over the schoolroom situation, and I felt concerned for the boy whom she perceived as being victimized. My hope is that this situation will pass. But underneath that feeling is a fundamental belief that her empathy for those in difficult situations will last a lifetime, and that almost makes the tears worth it, this time around.

Where the wind comes sweeping down the -- whoa!

Arson. Knife fights. Attempted assault. Vivid nightmares. Relentless jokes about promiscuity.

And I thought a film from the Golden Age of Broadway would guarantee some wholesome mother-daughter bonding time for Holly and me.

Quick, what are the images that come to mind when I say “Rogers and Hammerstein’s ‘Oklahoma!’?” The surrey with the fringe on top, right? A box social? A square dance scene full of swinging skirts and prancing feet? A cowboy singing to the blue sky amidst waving stalks of corn?

It turned out there was a lot I’d forgotten. I lost track of how many times during the two-and-a-half hours that Holly and I spent huddled under a comfy afghan on the couch watching the DVD together I said “Is this too scary for you?” She just shook her head; the truth is she’s seen worse, thanks primarily to Tim’s affection for the entire Star Wars sequence and a few slightly graphic video games.

But still, this wasn’t the Oklahoma! I remembered at all, which makes me think maybe I’d never actually watched the film from beginning to end. In fact, it’s quite likely that my familiarity with this musical, as with many others of its ilk, may have come primarily from attending a high school performance of it when I was about twelve years old. And that would have been the stage version, of course; it might be that this was my first screening of the film.

I thought I knew the story fairly well, but what Holly and I viewed last night bore so little resemblance to my memory that it made me think twice about just how I knew the details. When I was growing up, my grandparents had an extensive collection of Broadway musical soundtracks on vinyl; when we visited them in the summer, my sisters and I would spend a fair amount of time playing the records. I think I probably read the liner notes to Oklahoma at some point and confused that with seeing the film.

So just in case any other parents of nine-year-old girls get the same urge I did to spend a cozy evening taking in an old-fashioned flick together, let me remind you of a few forgotten highlights of Oklahoma: there’s an attempted date rape in a carriage (which is thwarted when the horses bolt and take the carriage on a terrifying ride that ends in a near-collision with a train), a villain who tries to trick the hero into stabbing himself in the chest with a switchblade, a couple who nearly burn to death when the haystack they’re standing atop is intentionally set on fire, a predatory Peeping Tom, a scene where a man encourages his nemesis to seriously consider suicide, and a female character whose love of physical attention from men is the source of constant joking but who by today’s standards would likely be labeled both mentally challenged and co-dependent.

The film also includes the heroine's nightmare, which appears to be induced by hallucinogenic bath salts, about being taken prisoner in a bordello while a twister forms in the background. It occurred to me my daughter might be the first kid her teacher had ever heard complain that she had slept poorly because her mother made her sit through a Rogers and Hammerstein production.

Introducing our kids to timeless classics of stage and screen is one of the pleasures of parenthood, but next time I think I’ll pre-screen the production before we cozy up for a mother-daughter movie night. Either that or we’ll just watch Star Wars, where Holly already knows all the scary parts even if I don’t. This time she can tell me when to close my eyes or block my ears.

More to "Hot Cross Buns" than meets the ear

Back in September when my 9-year-old announced she wanted to start instrument lessons, I didn’t dare to look ahead to the holiday band concert.

Too much stood in the way of any expectation that she would reach that point: the idea that she’d follow through from saying she wanted to take lessons to actually attending the weekly instruction; the practicing; having to get up an hour early once a week in order to be at band rehearsals before school. Too much of it just didn’t seem to play to Holly’s strengths. Since preschool days, she’s avoided team sports – even the ubiquitous suburban soccer leagues – and quit Girl Scouts without ever proceeding beyond Brownie level. She won’t attend Sunday school anymore, and she admitted she’d much rather have free time for playing after school than be part of the kids’ book discussion group at the library.

So I didn’t really expect her announcement in September about trying percussion to turn out much differently from soccer or Scouts. And I certainly didn’t expect we’d get through the first three and a half months and find ourselves seated in the school auditorium waiting for the curtain to go up on a chilly Tuesday evening in December.

But Holly attended her lessons. She practiced between lessons. She learned to lug her bell set on and off the bus and up the steps to the music building at school. She even managed to wake up a half-hour early each Wednesday morning for band rehearsal.

And once we were a couple of months into the routine, I began to look forward to the December concert.

It’s not that I expected to hear fine musicianship or a compelling range of musical selections. The first band concert of the first year of music instruction, which at our school is fourth grade, is instead a showcase of abilities that it would have been hard to imagine some of these kids possessing a few months earlier. Holly, and the other 79 fourth graders, demonstrated throughout the course of the 45-minute-long program that they were able to sit quietly in their seats. They kept their eyes on the conductor. They stood when he motioned them to stand, and they took their places on stage. They bowed on cue.

They played music, too, but in the end, that was the least of what impressed me. Hot Cross Buns and Jingle Bells aren’t difficult compositions, especially for the percussion section, where Holly has indeed made her musical home. What impressed me was the life skills they’ve developed in just these first few months of band: their focus, their respect, their ability to function as a group.

Naturally, Holly still had a few hallmarks of her usual maverick self. While the other girls donned velvet sashes and taffeta skirts; Holly insisted on black ankle pants, a long shirt, a scarf and black boots. Her wardrobe vividly reflected that she’s still not what you’d call a conformist. And she doesn’t need to be. I understand why she’s never found her way with soccer or Scouts or afterschool clubs. She likes to do things her own way and plan her own time.

But apparently not always. By being part of the band and part of this week’s performance, she showed another side: a side that recognizes the value, sometimes, of getting with the program. And as I watched her move with confidence and agility from her bell set to the snare drum to the bass from song to song, I realized that she had found a group she felt vested in.

It’s a start. And maybe by the June concert, I’ll even succeed with the velvet and taffeta dress.

Blanket praise

Last month, according to the Boston Globe, USA Today and numerous other news sources, the Toy Hall of Fame in Rochester, New York, inducted three new items: Hot Wheels, the dollhouse and the blanket.

According to the article I read, “Curators said the blanket was a special addition in the spirit of two earlier inductees, the cardboard box and the stick. They praised its ability to serve either as recreational raw material or an accessory transformed in myriad ways by a child’s daydreams.

‘Blankets have been keeping people warm for centuries, but they have also been heating up kids’ imaginations,’’ serving as superhero capes and tents, said Christopher Bensch, the Rochester museum’s chief curator.”

If it were up to my 9-year-old daughter, blankets wouldn’t just be in the Toy Hall of Fame; they’d be in the Hall of Fame of Life, if there is one. Yes, she uses it as recreational raw material and for the traditional purpose of staying warm. She also uses it as clothing, napkin, apron, shroud, umbrella, puppet, carpet, slide and imaginary friend. Sometimes she even spreads it over puddles before she walks across, as if she’s a gallant knight offering the height of chivalry to herself.

Each of my children has one comfort object from which they have been inseparable since toddlerhood, but the two objects are very different. Tim’s is a pale green stuffed frog named Ba; Holly’s is a faded fleece baby blanket that once had a print of light brown puppies with red bows, though the pattern is all but indistinguishable now. At the ages of 9 and 13, the kids still need their objects close at hand; when we leave on overnights of any length, the first question I ask once they’re in the car is “Do you have Ba and Blankie?”

As Tim has pointed out, though, I don’t hide my biases well. He occasionally quotes me on a regrettable outburst in which I said “Ba is a member of the family; Blankie is just a blanket.” The kids were shocked that I could compare the two and announce which I preferred, almost as if I had just baldly announced which of them I liked better. But I maintain there’s no contest. To my mind, Ba just has a lot more character. He’s a creature, not a blanket. He has a name that isn’t the same as the name given every other copy of his kind. You can love a frog, whether it is alive or inanimate. But a blanket? Ba has eyes, a mouth, an expression. (These days, he doesn’t have much else; he’s so ragged after 13 years of affection that his limbs and torso have shredded into strings. But he still has a face.) Blankie has just….a lot of square inches of dirty gray fleece.

But Holly loves Blankie, and for that reason alone, I do too. She drapes Blankie over her face while she sleeps at night; when I go to wake her in the morning, I like peeling Blankie back slowly as if I’m opening a present, with Holly’s sleepy face under the wrapping. She totes Blankie down to breakfast with her and holds onto it (“Him!”, she insists on correcting me. Him? No comment.) until it’s time to leave for the bus; then she drapes Blankie as close to the door as she can in anticipation of a reunion in the afternoon.

A few days ago, I saw Blankie lying on the staircase in the middle of the school day as I was throwing a load of laundry into the washer, so I scooped it up and tossed it in along with the other dirty items. By the time Holly got home, Blankie was already in the dryer, but she was horrified by my temerity nonetheless. “You have to ask me!” she chastised. “What if I had needed him sooner?’

It didn’t help for me to protest that she was at school. To her, there’s always that chance that some kind of emergency will necessitate immediate contact with Blankie.

So I suppose the Toy Hall of Fame designation serves as something of a gentle rebuke to me. Blankie is more than just a scrap of material. Holly has insisted that for years, and now toy curators are backing her up, calling it recreation, comfort, an accessory to imaginary play and an agent of warmth. I should really try to appreciate Blankie a little bit more. And for the moment, freshly washed, fluffy and smelling of clean laundry, Blankie has my affection. Blankie, you’re no frog. You’ll never have a stitched-on smile or shiny glass eyes. But to Holly, you’re perfect, and that’s good enough for me.

Clean-up time

Holly is invited to a sleepover that starts at dinnertime tonight, and I’ll celebrate her absence the best way I know how: by cleaning up her room.

I realize how many principles of good parenting this comes into direct conflict with. Holly should clean up her own room. In fact, cleaning up her room should be a prerequisite for going to a sleepover. In fact, her room shouldn’t even need clean-up; tidying should be part of her everyday routine.

In the best of all worlds, yes. In my world, not hardly.

Holly’s room is a mess. Holly’s room is always a mess, with the rare exceptions of the times that I absolutely insist we spend some quality time together cleaning it up – which is less fun than a dentist appointment followed by a trip to the transfer station – or the times like tonight when I wait until she’s out of the house and then do a kamikaze cleaning job on it.

And it’s not good for any of us. The stress of seeing so much stuff all over the floor and furniture gives me a headache. Both Rick and I have stepped painfully on small, hard, occasionally sharp objects in the dark while up in her room saying goodnight. Things she needs get lost in the strata of materials. Small containers of colored water left over from painting projects have splashed on the rug. Beads have become embedded in the carpet strands. Library books have gone missing.

But she seems unable to improve in this area. She loves her mess, and as I wrote about last month, our trip to an Open Studios event didn’t help at all: Holly considers herself a practicing studio artist, and when she discovered that almost all of the professional artists whose workspaces we visited that day also favored a colorful but chaotic mess of art supplies and works-in-progress, it only served to fortify her argument that this is how artists need to work. “I like to see what I have, Mommy,” she says by way of explaining the necessity of keeping cloth swatches, sets of scissors, containers of beads, paint sets, books, paper, markers and more piled all over the floor in her room. “It helps me figure out what I want to do.”

Perhaps this is true and perhaps she’s just being devious, because the fact is that the way to put something over on me is to pledge creativity. Holly must know on some level that claiming her mess inspires her is the best way to ensure that I’ll never really truly insist that she keep neater. As a writer, I’m all about the creative process, and not a bit willing to stifle it in someone else.

Still, on that rare opportunity when Holly is out of the house while I’m home and it’s not what I consider work hours, I make my move. Tonight, I’ll pick up, and until she gets back home, I’ll enjoy the absolute sense of serenity that comes from a tidy, well-ordered room. She won’t be happy with my efforts. She will immediately start asking for items that she’ll insist she needs but that we won’t be able to find: the stub of a blue-green Crayola, a tiny booklet that she made for a tiny doll, three beads strung on a segment of floss. Inevitably, I’ll end up going through the same garbage bag I just filled in search of some obscure project.

But at least I’ll have until Saturday morning to know her room is neat. I’ll sleep soundly, happy with the order I’ve imposed on her chaos. And if once she’s home she starts creating that chaos once again, I’ll suppress my frustration. It’s all part of the creative process, I suppose. And who knows, maybe someday that same process with inspire her to create a new way to keep her things in order.

Art in the making

All those weekends we didn’t make it to all kinds of cultural events that landed on my calendar in theory only – well, last Sunday seemed to make up for every museum, concert and performance I tried to get my family to, only to end up going for a bike ride or watching a football game instead.

Holly and my mother and I attended the Open Studios event at Art Space-Maynard. Art Space, we discovered, is an artists’ enclave located in a former elementary school – the 1940s kind, a wide red brick building with a steep concrete staircase leading to the center entrance and echo-ey linoleum hallways. Now, over 40 working artists have carved studio space out of former classrooms, offices and meeting areas.

I had never thought of taking Holly to an open studios event before, but it turned out to be a match made in heaven. Holly loves to make art, but I’ve often been disappointed that she doesn’t take more of an interest in viewing art – she frequently shrugs off my suggestion that we visit a museum or a gallery, even if there’s a particular exhibit that I think would engage her. But seeing how immediately she immersed herself in the studio-touring experience on Sunday, I could start to see why this appealed to her so much more. Rather than viewing finished art hanging on a wall or secured inside a display case – art so complete and professional it probably would look nothing like anything she had ever worked on – this was the down-and-dirty creation phase that we were witnessing. As we strolled amidst the work spaces of painters, sketchers, sculptors, metal workers, wood carvers, jewelry makers, textile crafters, and more, Holly stared: not only at the work itself, some finished and some just barely under way, but also at the clutter of materials and supplies that filled each work space. Paints and clay and canvases, yes, but also scraps of paper torn from magazines, snapshots pinned to bulletin boards, feathers, flowers, seashells. Here she could see something that reminded her of the kind of work she likes to do herself: using clutter and mess to create something.

Although it wasn’t an event geared toward children, the artists were uniformly welcoming to all three of us. Not only did they talk to my mother and me about their work; they drew Holly into the discussion as well. One artist who works in the plastic-coated thread known to campers everywhere as gimp gave Holly four different strands to work with and showed her how to weave a pattern of her own. Another invited her to sketch her own self-portrait and tack it to the studio wall. A sculptor listened to Holly describe the pottery class she attended last year, and all the artists offered snacks and beverages.

All in all, Holly was transfixed by the opportunity to see artists at work. When I asked her if she was ready to leave, she said “No, I want to stay a little longer: this is way more fun than I imagined it would be.” And the next morning, expecting to have to spend the usual five minutes or more trying to get her to emerge from sleep and head down to breakfast, I was surprised to find her sitting up in bed working her gimp pattern already.

Of course, there was a minor down side as well. I am forever asking Holly to keep her room neater, but every clean-up is followed within hours by the start of a new project that requires her once again to scatter crayons, markers, fabric, beads, thread, paper and tubes of glue all over the floor of her room. Now she had a reason. “Mom, did you see how messy their studios were?” she asked me the day after the open studios event. “Artists need to be surrounded by art supplies. That’s why I keep my room so messy.”

Well, I still have the authority to overrule that excuse. For now, it’s a bedroom, not a studio, and she’ll still be required to put everything away at the end of the day. But I think I understand a little bit better why it’s so hard for me to convince her to visit a museum. Never mind the classic masterpieces of the art world. Show Holly some crusty tubes of paint and a scattering of colored pencils, and she’s in her element.