Toothless Wonder

When I was a little girl, it was a big deal to get a loose tooth. 

The blood!  The tears!  The angst!  The worry! 

My dad would pull our teeth out, if we asked him. 

But he meant business, so you had to make sure you were sure--really, really sure--before you ventured.  Once he got hold of you, you might get away with your life, but not with your tooth.

First, you had to hold discussion groups with other siblings.  Was the tooth really loose enough yet?  My sister was of the opinion that some teeth had hooks on them.  And she definitely taught us that the two big top teeth in the middle of your mouth would be the worst trial ever.  You didn't want to ask Dad to pull a tooth that had a hook on it, and you didn't want him to try when your teeth weren't loose enough, because it could take up to an hour of terror.  So, we let our sister and brothers wiggle our teeth and gathered their opinions. 

I would really have rather not have involved Dad, actually, and I tried sometimes other methods I'd heard of, like tying a thread around the tooth and a doorknob and slamming the door.  Those things never worked.  I would wiggle and wiggle and wiggle the tooth, trying to make it looser.  I would reach up and grasp it and try to pull it out myself so that I wouldn't have to go through Dad's vise grip on it, but that never worked either, although I would have preferred it.

Getting a tooth pulled was not something to be taken lightly.

Sure, you wanted the dime from the tooth fairy, but the quest had to be weighed.  You wanted to wait until the trial that lay ahead of you had shrunk down to be worth the reward.

Well, times have changed, it seems.

I have a child who looked up at me one morning when I went in to say goodbye and very casually informed me that he had lost a tooth.

Really?!  How did that happen? I wondered.  And, since he'd already lost his two bottom teeth, it occurred to me that it could be one of the big top teeth.  "Which one?" I asked, wanting to know and not wanting to know all at the same time.

He looked up and opened his mouth.  One of his top teeth was missing.  "It just came out in the night," he said.  He had never mentioned it was loose.  No one had ever wiggled it.

"Where is it?" I asked.

"I lost it," he shrugged.

Wow. 

We looked in his bed and found the tooth.  The tooth fairy came that night.  He was very casual about the two pieces of money he was given, even when he immediately lost one of them.  None of it seemed to be a big deal.

A few days later, it occurred to me to ask him if the other top tooth was loose yet.

"No," he said, and went on with his playing.

The next day, so I heard, he was in class in church and just reached up and pulled it out.  He showed it to me in the hall.

I looked at my toothless wonder, and he smiled.

Cuter, older, and more self-sufficient than ever.

If I wanted a baby, I'd have to have another one.

Talking to Myself. . .on the Phone

We all know people who end phone calls quickly.  Maybe too quickly.  And we all know people that trying to hang up with is like trying to extract arms and legs from quicksand.

Some people don't like to talk on the phone, or have mastered a business-only approach.  Some people love to talk, on and on and on.

For these people, we learn to develop strategies.

There are people who only need one "Well, okay, then, I'll see you later," and relationships where it takes four or five of those to make it stick.

These days, we have options.  We can avoid calling people by emailing or texting them instead.  It's hard to be really long-winded on a text.

But, how many of us have good end-the-conversation skills when talking to ourselves?

Several years ago, I had a lead worker who taught me a lot about how to do my job.  She also taught me a lot about being gracious, warm toward people, and at my best.

One thing she taught me was how to leave messages for myself at work to remind me of  things I needed to take care of. 

Let's face it: when you are a working mom, you spend most of your alert hours at work.  It was easier to schedule doctor appointments or run errands on my breaks or lunch hours than it was to try to remember to do these things after getting home and immersing myself in my children's needs again.  

And, while we're at it, let's face another fact: we think of things at the wrong moments--the middle of the night, while in the shower, or while driving from one place to another.  

Technology has given us myriad ways to tend to these issues, and it has advanced exponentially since the time I started working with this lead, but what she would do is call her work phone and leave herself a voice mail message.  She knew that she would absolutely without fail be answering her voice mail messages several times a day at work, and that she would be alert during business hours then, so this worked for her.

I tried it myself, and still do it sometimes.

I remember her describing how, when she thought of something in the middle of the night, she would grab her home phone and dial her work number, then whisper her message to herself quietly so as not to wake her husband.  Then, she said, when she would get to work, she would not be able to hear her message, and she would wonder, "Who on earth called me at 2:12 this morning!?"  

My issue when I started doing this was that I did not know how to say goodbye to myself.  Now, I've got down how to say, "Call Dr. Anderson" and then hang up.  But, at first, I was not used to calling myself on the phone.  I would say hello, then leave my message, then stumble over how to say goodbye to myself.  "So, okay, well, I'll see you later!" I might tell myself.  Then redden as I listened to that the next day.  Or, "Take care!  Bye-bye!"  

 

It is, of course, totally unnecessary to say all these pleasantries to yourself, but I was in the habit of saying them to others.  I don't think I ever went so far as to say, "Love you!  Bye!"  But I may have come close.

Interpret This

The other night, I dreamed that we went to a public building to hear someone speak. 

We sat in the kind of chairs with desks attached that are in high schools.  In fact, one of my friends from high school was there.  We waited a long, long time for something to happen.  After a while, I noticed that people were trying to sleep in those chairs, contorting their bodies this way and that, trying to get comfortable.  I noticed my high school friend had taken her dress off in order to increase her comfort as we waited.  It got darker.  We grew colder. 

About the time it seemed dawn should be breaking, nothing had happened still.  I gave up and ventured into another room, a big kitchen or cafeteria.  The yellow walls and light were bright and cheery in there, and food was being dished up.  What an improvement!  I grabbed a plate and went around the room filling it.  The food was beautiful, intricate!  Salads had foods shaped like dragonflies and butterflies.  Everything smelled and looked great.  The variety was amazing.  I filled my plate up to the edges.

But, then I noticed that some of the utensils available to take were dirty.  And then that food was actually being cheerfully dished up onto dirty plates.  I marveled that I seemed to be the only one noticing this.  Why do the people here settle for this, I wondered?  As I looked at my own plate, I realized that in the time I had taken to go around the room, my food had disintegrated, as if the cell walls of the food had melted away.  The lovely food I had taken looked hardly palatable--just a big mass of gray blobs the consistency of instant potatoes. 

I looked around at all the many other people walking around filling their plates.  The food being dished up still looked amazing, but it rapidly deteriorated once on the plates.  Yet, people were still walking around, waiting in lines, filling their plates, not noticing that it was pointless unless they wanted to eat gray slop. 

My attention was caught by the light and movements and clearly defined objects in another room.  I went in there, and there were brightly-colored and interesting objects.  My interest was caught over and over and over again by all the varied things to look at and investigate. 

Other rooms held books, puzzles, statues, toys, instruments, gems, art, tools--as if we were in some sort of museum with a room for every type of thing in the world. 

Again, everything was clear, crisp, bright, beautiful, intricate, and interesting in the beginning, but rapidly deteriorated into piles of soggy paper mache.  And still, hoards of people circled, being taken in by what seemed offered, but soon sifting through nothing but garbage.

I started to realize that, no matter what I found, this place was going to be like that, and that I needed to find my way out of it.  Never mind the puzzles I could try to solve or the books I could try to read--none of that was lasting.  I needed to read the situation and solve the true puzzle--how to overcome the entire place.

While it had taken hours for things to deteriorate enough for me to leave the first room, the rate of deterioration was increasing.  Things slipped out of my hands within moments.

I saw my husband and started sharing my insights with him.

Instead of looking for objects of interest, we started immediately looking, upon entering new rooms, for stairs, ladders, signs of natural light--anything that would help us rise out of the mulch the multitudes were slogging through and escape.

Our children were with us now, and the pace was fast.  We hurried our way through room after room, ignoring all distractions and just heading for whatever seemed to be the way out.

I was in a library where books turned to stapled packets of papers and then worse as soon as I touched them.  I climbed the bookcases, clutching at the upward-pointing arrows on the top of each book, which fell out of my hands as soon as I could grab them. 

I called out my husband's name.  "I found the way up!" I shouted to him as I climbed as fast as I could, hoping I could save myself, without really going anywhere.  Looking over my shoulder, I called out again.  But I'd lost him.  Like everyone else, he was distractedly thumbing through something, as it crumbled to dust..

What Fantasy Women Think

I've been sick again, so that's probably it.

Despite everything fabulous about me, sometimes I just have a downer kind of a mood.  Yesterday was like that.  It takes energy to keep being fabulous.  I was feeling a little picked on, picked at, picked over, and peculiar.

Even my baby saying, "We belong here," as he happily folded himself up on my lap after several days of quarantine did not completely dispel my mood, although it went a long way toward it.

Then, I had a dream.

In my dream, my daughter had been invited to a wedding of someone obviously older than her that I didn't know.  I went to drive the wedding gift my daughter had picked out to the bride's parents' home, which took me straight east, up a steep hill into a very rich area of town.  The hill was so steep, in fact, that my used car started to slow down and flounder.  If I could only make it to the next intersection at the top of the hill!  I decided to turn off the road and look at the wedding invitation again for the address, or a map.  

This family was obviously way richer than our family.

I don't remember if I got the present delivered before the dream switched on me.

I was back at home, only it was really my parents' home--the one I had grown up in.  The mother of the bride and the bride had come to my home instead of the other way around.  

I wasn't prepared for this to happen.  I looked around me, and the house was a mess and I wasn't dressed. Given the state of things, I tried not to receive these women.  I even went so far as to hurry into my mother's bedroom and hold the door shut.  

The other women went so far as to knock and push on the door, demanding to be allowed to expose me in all my "glory."

They won.

They were in my old bedroom then that I had as a girl, watching me flounder to try to get dressed in front of them.  I looked in my closet and my chest of drawers, but things were not in the order that I keep them.  I couldn't find anything to wear.  I found myself making excuse after excuse. "I've been sick.  I usually plan my wardrobe ahead of time and have things all lined up.  I don't know how I got so behind.  I am usually tidier than this--I don't know what happened.  These clothes fit better before Christmas."  Et cetera.

The other, glamorous (of course), women were patient, but still there, looking in on my disaster.  I felt like, given the evidence around them, they couldn't possibly believe my statements that I usually do better than that.  

In the closet, I found a yellow dress (that I don't own) and tried clumsily to pair it with a black skirt.  I asked their opinion.  I kept talking, hoping to convince them that I am not such a personal catastrophe in real life.

I suppose one could call this a nightmare.

I woke from it feeling like my spirit had holes.

I wondered if I would be able to go back to sleep.

No, of course my true circumstances are not as bad as they were in the dream, but being sick does always put me behind in my personal goals.  Things fall apart a little bit, which I hate but cannot avoid.  I don't like feeling like I'm living in the fairy tale where every time the suitor axes one chip out of a tree that he's trying to cut down, two more grow in its place.  I try to be patient and forgiving of myself during weeks like this.  I try to listen to the voice of the kind me over the one that drives me.

Turning over, I crumpled into a ball, wrapping my arms around that hole in my spirit, so it wouldn't ache.

A "tender mercy" came.  I remembered something I had done last night, right before going to sleep.  I had extended a kindness to my husband by offering to take on one of his jobs to mitigate the extra load he has taken on at work.  I had assured him that I would be able to handle it just fine.  He had seemed so tired that I just couldn't stand the thought of him staying up late to work on something between two extra-long days at work.

The kind voice in my head asserted itself.  "That's the real me," it said.

I smiled and told myself to go ahead and believe that.  Never mind what the rich, glamorous fantasy women I'd made up thought of me.  If I could extend kindness to my husband so he could sleep, I could do the same for myself.

So, I did.

A Small Lump of Massachusetts

So, I'm sitting in church, minding my own business.

Well, I'm mostly minding my own business and trying to listen to the speaker.

Suddenly, a red-and-yellow object is thrust in front of my face.  "Afghanistan!" is whispered loudly at me.

I pull my baby's etch-a-sketch down to where I can see it.  On a tiny, two-inch by three-inch screen, he has drawn the outline of Afghanistan.  I nod.

Strangely enough, this is not exactly strange.  He's been drawing states for months.  He can get through all fifty in the time it takes four speakers and a musical number to wind down in the front of the chapel.  And I have come upon the volume A encyclopedia lying open on the floor--in front of the living room bookcase, or on his bed, or on the floor in his bedroom--several times.

But.  I do realize that not everyone's kindergartener is drawing Afghanistan in church, so I turn to my husband and whisper, "He drew Afghanistan."  I do this for the shared smile we give each other whenever one of our kids does something amusing.  

I turn my attention back (mostly) to the current speaker.  The speakers today are all high school kids who read their talks too fast for the concepts to seep in very deeply.  They are doing their best, but I am restless today.  And annoyed by something that happened right before church.  

I stare ahead blankly until I am nudged again.

"This is one quadrant of the earth," my brainy baby says, "from the prime meridian west and north of the equator."  He's missing his two top teeth now, so he's cuter than ever.

Again, I look down at the tiny screen.  North America is plainly drawn there, along with other partial continents and islands.  He points out this and that on the map. I want to squeeze his head, where all this smartness is, in a burst of affection, but I don't.  Like I said, I'm a little feisty today.  

 "Where are you?" I ask.  

He looks at me in surprise.

"Where's the church?"  

The North America he has drawn is about a one-and-a-quarter-inches squared area. I take his wand and calculate about where our city would be on the map and make a dot.

"That's on the border of Nevada and California!" he hisses at me.

I make another dot slightly up and over from that.

"The exact same spot," he says, his voice dripping with disgust.  

I laugh and hand the toy back to him. "Draw the southeast quadrant," I suggest.

A few minutes later, I am nudged again.  I look at the screen, expecting to see Australia looming large on it. But I don't.  "Where's Australia?" I ask him.  He points to a small object, accurate in shape, floating up in the middle of the screen.

A few minutes later, he shows me another picture.  Antarctica is sprawled all across the bottom of the screen, like it is on the placemat map he carries all over the house, and South America is clearly coming down toward it, joining it for a quarter of an inch. "That's good, but they don't touch," I remind him.

He looks stunned.  Wounded!  "What do you mean?"

"They don't touch," I repeat.

He recoils again.  "Touch what?"

"Each other."  

He erases his board.  

I am not prepared for what happens next.  He holds up a picture of a blob with mini rectangles and squares attached all around the outside of it.  "That's Atlanta!" he says.  

A city!

Okay, to me, it's one thing to have a picture in your head of how the earth looks or a country or a state.  But I couldn't draw a semi-accurate outline of my own city for a million dollars.  I nudge my husband again. "Now he's drawing cities," I tell him.  We share a look of wonderment.

But, wait!  There's more.

In the children's group, the song leader puts a sign with three Chinese characters up on the board.  "Can anyone read that?" she asks, kind of smart-alecky.

"Happy New Year!" my baby calls out.  "In Chinese."  

I whip around to look.  She confirms that he is right, and everyone laughs.

This kid can state all of the United States in alphabetical order and their capitals in alphabetical order.  He can list them by size and by date of entrance into the Union.  The.  Whole.  Lists.  I could guess the three biggest and the three smallest, the two oldest and the two newest, but that's about it.  And I've read the encyclopedia, too.

It's not just memorization.  He understands this stuff.  

I had tested his understanding of a new concept the day before.  "Suppose we compare the list of order and the list of size to find out which state would come out on top as far as newest and smallest," I suggested.  

My husband threw me a look like, "What are you trying to do?  Explode his head?"

But I thought he could do it.

"Hawaii!" he called out.  

"Very good," I said.  Then we discussed which state would be the oldest and biggest.  We discussed Alaska, Pennsylvania, New York, and Georgia as possible candidates.  I pointed out to him that, yes, Alaska is first in size, but 49th in age, so it would end up in the middle of the combined list.  We finally decided Georgia, 24th in size but fourth in entry to the union, would be the winner, then discussed that Virginia was much larger when it was made a state than it is now.  I thought maybe California, third in size, would be a candidate, but my baby knew that it is thirty-first in entry, so it would fall behind Georgia. 

And I haven't even mentioned that the week before, after I'd frosted a cake, my brainy baby had pointed out that the spatula had (accidentally) left a pretty good facsimile of the United States on one side of the cake. Nor that he said last night at dinner, "My meatloaf looks like a small lump of Massachusetts."

I just hope this kid keeps pouring what's in his head out for all of us to see and hear for the rest of my hilarious life.

Where's the Dummy?

My son and my daughter both tried out to be in the school play.  They got small parts.  I was happy for them.  My daughter told me she was one of the dancers.

"What part did you get?" I asked my son.

"The ventriloquist."

"Ventriloquist!" I said in surprise.  "I don't remember one of those in this play."

"They added it," he told me.

So, I shuffled them home from play practice over and over, quite happily, because, hey, one of the funnest things in life is watching your own children perform on a stage.  I was very proud of my oldest son at his graduation when he got his master's degree, but, to be honest, the time when I really thought my heart was going to burst wide open with pride and drench everyone in the audience around me was when he pulled off, with no hesitation or bashfulness at all, a song and dance in a coconut bra.  Why?  Because he did such a good job, and everyone was laughing to the point of rolling in the aisles.  That was MY SON up there!  

After one of these play practices, my younger son told me I was supposed to come up with the dummy for his act.

"Ho no!" I breathed.  "I don't think so."  It's not like we have a dummy in the closet.

I thought about it.  If I had a dummy, of course I would hand it right over.  But I don't even know where one would go to purchase something like that.  I couldn't recall ever seeing one in any kind of store.  And it's not like we can make one, or send little sister's doll.  Dummies have a very specific look about them, and their jaws have to move.

After all, I hadn't had to buy the coconut bra.  It was a prop.  And, as far as I know, I haven't volunteered to be the props mistress for this play.  I am happy to supply two of the actors and the treat every now and then--and I absolutely intend to come and watch it--but that pretty much maxes out my ability to support this school play.

"You'll have to tell your director that we aren't going to be able to come up with the dummy," I told my son one evening.  He didn't argue.

But, the next thing I heard, the expectation for the dummy was still on us.

"Didn't you tell her?" I asked.

"She said, 'Try harder.'"

My heart sank and fizzed.  Try harder to what?  To say that we can't take on that responsibility?  Why did she add a ventriloquist to the play if she didn't know how to get a dummy? 

"What did you say exactly?"

"I said, 'We can't come up with the dummy.'"

"Can't is pretty clear," I agreed.

I didn't know what to do.  Is it really my responsibility to provide a dummy?  And how would I do that?  It's one thing to say, "Wear black flats" or "Wear a white shirt."  Coming up with a prop that unusual and specific just seems too much to expect.

"Your uncle used to have a dummy," I told him my son.  I didn't hold out much hope that he would still have it.  A pack rat he is not, and he has risen to higher and higher levels of responsibility since he was twelve.  But I gave my son his phone number and helped him figure out what to say to him.

He took the phone into the other room and came back about a minute later.  "He said if he still had it, he would be glad to give it to me," my son said.  I smiled.  My brother always was a good diplomat.  But, no, he probably gave up the dummy decades ago.

Try harder.

Am I a dummy if I don't bust my buttons finding a dummy for my son's play?  Or am I a dummy if I do bust my buttons just because someone with no authority over me said I should?

I posted a request to borrow a dummy on Facebook.  Apparently, I am not alone in my dummylessness.  At least, none of my friends will admit to having one, or is willing to let us borrow it if he does.

The play isn't being performed until next month.  Perhaps a dummy will find us somehow.  In the meantime, I may have to craft a well-worded email. 

How are these, for starters?

I am no dummy, and I have no dummy.

or

I've tried saying dum-dum-dum-DUM! without success.

or

Will the real dummy please stand up?

or

Sorry.  We C-A-N-'-T come up with the dummy.