Category: Kids

Parenting is weird. I’m not even really a parent, I’m more like a kid who’s been handed a hall-monitor’s bandolier and stop sign. Do I know what to do with these tools? (Spoiler: I do not.)

… But He Was Still Hungry

Pavowski3 Comments

My kid is super-hot on Eric Carle’s timeless and much-adored The Very Hungry Caterpillar.  He loves the book so much that I can recite it word for word from memory without so much as a hiccup, and he can fill in the blanks when I leave words out.  (“On Monday, he ate through one…” “APPLE!”)  Fantastic bonding experience, reading with the sprout, even if it exhausts me reading the same book night after night after night (it does, but you know, welcome to parenthood).

We’re reading the book tonight before bedtime and I have one of those HOLY SHARKNADO moments.  If you’re not familiar with the book, basically there’s a caterpillar, he’s hungry, he eats through all this food at a picnic and every night he’s still hungry.  Sort of existential in a way, actually (damn, there’s ANOTHER of those moments, okay focus).  But I’m reading through the story for the sixtieth time and it’s right about the time where he eats through four strawberries (but he was still hungry) when I realize that I AM THE CATERPILLAR.

I mean, I guess we’re all the caterpillar, aren’t we?  Chewing our way through the swollen fruits of life, gorging ourselves on the sweet meats of the vine, but at the end of the day, it’s not enough: we’re all still hungry.  But it hit me today, like an unregistered immigrant flying through a red light when I’ve got a green (not that THAT ever happened to me), that the caterpillar is ME as a writer.  I popped from my egg one day and started looking for food (writing).  I chewed through apples, pears, plums (my novel, short stories, the blarg), eating so much at times that I made myself sick on it (yep I’ve definitely been sick of writing a few times on this little excursion).  I’ve not yet turned into a beautiful butterfly: more likely I’m one of those guys that turns into a dusty, nasty moth that spirals into your porch light and fries himself before he can get a taste of the night.  But man, if this realization didn’t resonate with me.  I guess great literature does that, dunnit?  No matter what age group it’s aimed at (you YA haters can suck it, Twilight is TIMELESS [no it isn’t, please kill me]) if the writing is sound it will appeal to virtually anybody in some way.

So I’m the caterpillar.  I achieved the goal I set for myself four months ago: achieved it in less time than I budgeted for.  And achieving it has tasted sweet, sweeter than I imagined it would, though not without its bitter aftertaste.  But it’s now a week and a half later and my stomach is rumbling something fierce.  The novel was fantastic.  Delicious.  Satisfying.  But I’m still hungry.

I’ve got to find my next project.

Sure, I’m still writing daily — the blarg is keeping me honest on that front, and that’s not going to change — but the blarg is a completely different animal than churning out 900 words a day on ONE singular topic, one idea, one band of characters.  The blarg requires the attention span of a coked-up yap dog: one moment I’m peeing on the carpet, next moment I’m chasing the neighbor’s cat through the azalea bushes, next I’m snoozing on the pair of shoes you left in the corner, and then I’m running under your feet trying to trip you down the stairs.  There’s no focus, no throughline, no gravity.  Last couple of days especially, the fact that I’m not writing anything of substance is irking me, burning in the back of my brain like I’ve left the stove on before leaving on a five-day cruise.

I guess that means that the break is over.  I’d promised myself a bit of time off to decompress after finishing the first draft of the Project, figuring that if I tried any serious writing too soon I’d feel burnt-out and frustrated and stretched too thin.  At the moment I’m torn between telling myself that I need a bit more time to really spin down — a lot has happened in these last few weeks — and embracing that sucking wound in my gut that’s gasping for more words, more ideas, telling me I need to write write WRITE.  The urge to write is winning out at this point, I fear.  The question is, what will it be?

Do I jump into the draft of another novel?  I’ve got a few ideas on the burner for that and I’ve felt a couple of nibbles along the way writing the first one.  Do I try my hand at writing an extended short story, a little novella perhaps of maybe ten thousand words?  Go back to the stable where I first started this crazy gig and try my hand at another stage play or screenplay?

New resolution: By no later than Monday of next week I’ll choose a new project to work on, and set an acceptable deadline for its completion.  I’ve got two weeks left in the summer and then it’s back to the teaching grind, and I’ll want something to anchor me creatively.

Toddler Life, Chapter 128: Staying with the Grandparents

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Let me preface by saying that I love my son dearly. He is a searing beacon of joyfulness and hope and all things good, and it is my greatest aspiration that I could become half the man he seems to think I am.

But, I am probably going to kill him.

I’m not gonna lie, the kid has it rough right now (as rough as a kid who has everything he could hope for and doesn’t even have to clean up his own room yet can have it, I guess). He’s adjusting to having a baby sister in the house, which has got to be confusing for his tiny lizard brain. He’s also in that “terrible twos” stage where every snack he’s not allowed to have means he’s going to starve to death, every fun thing he’s not allowed to do means he will never have fun again ever in his life, and every moment he’s not surgically attached to my leg or my wife’s is a moment in which there is no happiness in the world (more importantly, the room) for ANYBODY. He is needy, he is demanding, he is a phenomenon of auditory wave production: he can, on demand, produce sounds that are either so loud they have no business emanating from a human who stands knee-high, or sounds that … god, how can it be described? Imagine a mosquito buzzing right next to year, and that mosquito is also scratching its nails down a chalkboard while playing a kazoo off-key and droning in some discordant minor key, “DADDY, WANT POPSICLE”. It’s a sound and a tone that makes me wish I did not have ears. How he learned to produce this tone I have no idea, but HE MUST BE STOPPED. I am sure that if the government could somehow weaponize a toddler’s whine, no military in the world would stand against us for fear of the psychological trauma that the sound can cause.

Luckily, my parents are magnanimous old souls, and they lie to me and tell me that he always behaves fantastically for them, so they agreed that he could stay with them for a night or two.

Let me be clear: I’m not trying to foist my child off on his hapless grandparents. They asked for him.

But I’m not here today to write about the kid. No, I’m here to talk about a night without the kid.

Toddlers are like tiny black holes. They drift around, sucking up your energy and time, occasionally throwing toothbrushes into the toilet and sticking lollipops on the backs of the cats. (Black holes do that stuff, right? I may have gotten distracted.) But you can get used to living with just about anything. We can tune out most of his whining. We eat fast and without tasting so that we can finish our meals in less than the time it takes for him to fidget with a few pieces of broccoli and start demanding popsicles so that we can field his tantrum. We step over and around and through the messes he’s left all over the house, somehow having blinded ourselves to them, as if the entire area of the house that is less than six inches above the ground is an enormous SEP (Somebody Else’s Problem) field (thanks Douglas Adams!). That’s just our life. Every couple of days (…or every couple of weeks) we’ll clean house from all the insanity that he causes, and we live with it.

But tonight, he’s gone. And the house is so wonderfully, terribly peaceful.

There are no tantrums. No screams to go outside. No tugging and yelling to get up and play (“DON’T SIT, DADDY”). No haphazard and wanton destruction of the room: no toys strewn about, no magazines knocked in the floor, no tiny puddles of milk and juice and unidentified sticky substances underfoot.

Have our lives ever been this quiet before?

We went to dinner, my wife and I, taking sprout the second with us in her carrier. I can remember (vaguely) taking sprout the first with us to restaurants, shortly after he was born (in other words, shortly after our Life Before Children — a time so darkly lost in history it can scarcely be remembered), and thinking how stressful it was to eat out with a child. Then he grew to be a toddler and it got even worse. Now? A newborn in a carrier? We’re on vacation! We sat across from one another at dinner, enjoyed a little bit of quiet conversation, and then stopped trying to fill the void and just enjoyed the motherfargoing SILENCE.

Silence. It’s such a simple thing. You never think about it when you have it in spades. Living alone? Early married life? You can have all the silence you like, you can go crazy on it. When you have a kid — a toddler, no less — you begin to forget what silence even means. Silence might as well be Narnia. Mythical. Impossible. Imaginary. You get snippets of it — an hour while the kid naps, a blissful moment while the kid plays in quiet with a new toy, a handful of seconds after you close the door and walk around to the other side of the car — but you don’t get to enjoy it. There is no stretching of the legs, no draining of the tension in the neck, no softening and unclenching of blood vessels or anuses. You live in fear and dread of the next tantrum, the next shout, the next dropped cheerio that turns out to be the next great calamity.

We eat dinner in silence. We drive home in silence. We do the dishes, pick up some toys around the house, get ready for bed, in perfect, blissful silence. It’s glorious. Wondrous. And we miss the kid.

For all the noise and all the messes and all the noise and all the tantrums and all the noise and all the disagreeing and did I mention the noise, the house feels empty without him in it. Were our lives ever this quiet? How did we ever deal with this much quiet?

I am fighting against my basic urges. I am trying to enjoy the time without having to worry about him, without saving him from pitching himself down the stairs or from impaling his eyeball with a fork or from cracking his skull on the coffee table, without listening to his fits and his whining, but I can’t. Something in your DNA wants to have the child near even when having him near makes you want to kill him.

Thanks, mom and dad, for taking the sprout (the terror, the speaker of demands, the destroyer of rooms, the scatterer of toys) for a couple of days. Keep him as long as you want. But not too long. We miss him over here.

Some Unsolicited Advice for Anybody Making a Life Change (a reflection on 100 posts)

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About a month ago I saw a video on YouTube from Numberphile (okay, the secret is out, I’m a nerd and I sometimes watch videos about math on YouTube when I have nothing better to do).  It’s a fascinating little examinaton of the methods we use for counting and it explores what our everyday interactions would be like if we had twelve fingers instead of ten.  (Spoiler alert — counterintuitively, numbers and computations and especially measurements and conversions get simpler by factors of oh-my-god-numbers-hurt-my-brain.)  You can check it out below if you’re so inclined.  They make some fascinating videos if, like me, you’re fascinated withthe way math impacts us even if we’d like to pretend it doesn’t.

But this isn’t a post about math, not really.  It’s just a little reflection.   Now, in the scheme of things, even though one hundred seems like a big deal, it’s an arbitrary number, which becomes incredibly obvious after watching a video like the one I linked above.  Nevertheless, it’s a significant number because we’ve all agreed that it is; we measure years in decades and centuries, we have the metric system (which nobody uses, PFF, SILLY REST OF THE WORLD), and our currency is nothing without hundreds.  Ultimately, however, it’s just one way out of many to count stuff, and as we all know, everything is relative and there is no best anything.

I’m hung up on one hundred today, though, because I recently passed the 100 post mark here at Pavorisms.  I’m pointing it out, not to toot my own horn or to massage my ego, but honestly just so that I can have another landmark to look back at.  Landmarks matter because they show us where we’ve been, but perhaps more importantly, so that we can tell other people where they’re going.  This particular landmark is a pretty monstrous one for me.

I started the blarg here the very week I decided I was going to finally get around to writing a novel.  It wasn’t meant to be a major undertaking; just a spot for me to reflect on the writing I was doing on the novel and to stretch my legs on writing some non-level fiction vis-a-vis my short pieces.  It wasn’t a big deal, but I committed to it just like I committed to writing the novel.  Now it’s four months later, and I’ve nearly finished the novel and I have made over a hundred posts here at the blarg.

That’s one hundred times I’ve sat down to write outside of working on the novel.  That’s one hundred times I’ve found something to say even on those days when I started out thinking I didn’t really have anything to say.  (Spoiler alert: I still don’t have much to say, but I do have fun saying it.)  The point is, I found ways to write even when I didn’t think I could.  I kept writing even when I was exhausted from writing.  I kept writing even when I was sick to death from the thought of writing.

My dad told me many, many years ago — and it’s a piece of wisdom that I’ve repeated many times throughout the years to myself and others — that you can do just about anything for a few weeks.  And I’ve found that to be pretty much true.  Anything you end up doing — however unpleasant, taxing, difficult or challenging it might be — you can muscle through it for a few weeks.  You can force yourself to get up at three in the morning for a terrible job and not crash for a few weeks.  You can try out a new diet and not hate it for a few weeks.  You can give up beer, chocolate, sex, or whatever other guilty pleasure you might have for a few weeks.  But there comes a point beyond which muscling through it cannot carry you.  A point that, for better or worse, you have to find a deeper drive to get past.  You can keep working the job that gets you up at three AM, but you’ll have to give up staying up to watch late night TV.  You can stay on your diet, but you’ll have to find replacements for the food you’re giving up, and make lifestyle adjustments so that you don’t keep craving the old stuff.  You can stay off your vices but you have to really know why you’re staying off — giving them up for Lent isn’t going to keep you clean.

My point is, muscling through can get you to the brink.  It can get you through the salty first days of something and show you what life is like with this new change you’re trying out.  But muscling through won’t get you through the days when you’re so exhausted you can’t bear to think about your three AM job, your diet, or your sudden lack of cigarettes.  What gets you through then?  For me, it’s an eye on the prize.

I tried running three different times in my life.  Twice I did it for a few months and then gave it up — it was too hard.  Two years ago I started it up again (for the last time) because my son had just been born and I wanted to work to stay healthy for him, and I am still going strong two years later, despite some serious setbacks of late.

Now, I’m writing because I have always felt that I could tell a decent story but never tested myself.  Well, I may still be in the muscling through stage, but I have a hundred blarg posts and almost ninety thousand words banked on the novel that say this is a habit I just might be able to stick with.

Jeez.  I start off talking about math and then I get all preachy.  Could I meander any more?  The point is this (and I write this, both for anybody thinking of trying out writing or trying out anything new as well as for myself when I lose gumption somewhere down the line, as I know I will): Making a change is about two major turning points.  The first is when you decide to do the thing.  People think that’s the hard part, but I don’t think so.  Look at the numbers for gym membership sales in January for your evidence: making the commitment is — I don’t want to say easy — not the hard part.  The hard part comes when you’re no longer riding the high of just having started, you no longer have the accolades of people clapping you on the back and saying “good for you.” When you find yourself in the trenches, covered in mud and blood and tears and sweat, clinging to your rifle like it’s the only good thing left in the world and you’re faced with deciding whether to press on through even more mud and blood and heartache and pain or to cash in your chips and go back to the easier life you were leading before.

So pick a milestone.  Shoot for it.  “900 words today.”  And write it.  “Run three miles today.”  And run them.  And then go for a bigger milestone.  “6000 words this week.”  And write it.  “Run twenty miles this week.”  And run them. And grow and evolve and improve and keep changing and don’t get comfortable and keep setting new milestones and enjoy the landmarks as you sail past them and leave them in the rearview.

If I can do it, you can do it.

I’m talking to you, Future Me.

 

Chasing Toddlers

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I write a lot about how parenting is a pretty raw fargoing deal.  That’s because it is.  You never work so hard for so little appreciation in your life as when you’re parenting a toddler.

I’ve written about how kids are basically black holes, about how I no longer have the freedom even to move around my own house anymore, about how they made me ruin forever my cool by buying a minivan… it goes on.  It was pointed out to me by a loyal reader (*cough*totallynotmywife*cough*) that all this ragging on the parenting life makes it seem like I don’t enjoy it.  And while, sure, okay, there are certainly moments when I long for that simple childless existence again — a time when I didn’t have to live in fear of some sharp-ended plastic doohickey left by the toddler sticking up into my tender underfoot, when I could rest my hand on the coffee table and not have it come away sticky, a time when I could close the door and enjoy a nice deuce in peace — on the whole I really love it.  Being a parent just has a way of filling me with this sense of accomplishment, happiness, and… I dunno… rightness.

That being said, some moments just have a way of refining all that general goodness to a razor-sharp, crystal-clear, shot-to-the-gut point that I could almost forget the week we spent in February washing baby bedsheets EVERY DAY because he was pooping huge quantities of what looked like, but did not smell like, chicken salad.  I could almost forget the screaming fit he has every night when I leave him in bed for the night, his betrayed little toddler eyes welling with tears as I close the door on him and leave him with his nightmares (of course, he passes out two minutes later, but those two minutes really hurt the heart).

I had one of those redeeming moments yesterday.  Read More »

What Day Is It, Even? (Or, a teacher’s ode to Summertime)

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I mentioned several posts ago how babies are basically localized black-holes that wander through your house and crash into your coffee table, sucking up space-time and stuffing stale Cheerios in their mouths, those slobbery, germy little event horizons.  So time has no meaning in my house at all right now.  Basically, if it’s daylight out, we try to remember to eat and wash the stale sweat off ourselves.  If it’s dark out, we try to put the kids in their beds so that we can put ourselves in our beds.

But that’s life as a new (repeat) parent.  (As soon as I typed “repeat” before parent, just there, it immediately struck me that the phrase was not so very different from “repeat offender.”  Which is horribly apt.  Parents of multiple children should be referred to as repeat offenders: obviously they didn’t learn their lesson the first time around and they need to go into the penalty box again.  The penalty box filled with poop, urine, vomit and tears.)  I’m down with that.  Trouble is, I’m also a teacher, and for teachers, a similar phenomenon takes place annually.Read More »