Almost-8-year-old Jovie is having a sleepover with one of her best friends at our house tonight.
This is the most awesome thing ever for Jovie because:
1. Her older sister is not here to tell her what to do. Lily is at her friend’s house for a sleepover, so there’s no one here to have opinions about everything from their choice in pajamas to how many pieces of candy she eats to the proper way to bark like a specific breed of dog (which was an actual argument I had to listen to the other night. For real.)
2. Jovie’s best friend is also escaping the clutches of a bossy older sister.
3. They got to drink Coke and eat popcorn and Pez while watching their favorite movie, “Trolls.”
4. Tomorrow morning there will be pancakes. (Note to self, There Will be Pancakes is a great name for a band.)
But tonight it’s for giggling and, after the movie, according to Jovie’s friend, “boy talk.”
A few minutes ago, they ran downstairs screaming that Jovie’s beanbag chair had exploded. As they were clomping back upstairs to show me the evidence I noticed a trail of styrofoam beans rolling across the carpet in the front hall and stuck to the back of their pajamas. The trail continued on the stairs and in the upstairs hallway. Jovie’s bedroom floor was a hailstorm of beanbag beans. Her friend sprawled on the carpet making snow angels (beanbag bean angels?).
I’m not sure if you’ve ever tried to stuff styrofoam beanbag beans back into a burst beanbag chair, it’s both comical and infuriating. Why? Static cling. Say you have a handful of beanbag beans you’ve gathered from the floor and you locate the hole from where-st they spewed and you attempt to drop them back in the hole- what happens is that instead of the beanbag beans dropping into the hole to commingle with their fellow beanbag bean breathren, your hand somehow attracts more beanbag beans. And you can’t shake them off inside the hole, because they’ve been magnetized for even more beanbag beans. So you have to shake them off outside the beanbag, which means you’re only adding to the external beanbag disaster.
And that, my friends, is the perfect metaphor for life right now. Except instead of beanbag beans, my life is an eruption of large and small menial tasks (which sounds like a redundant oxymoron, if there were such a thing, but is not!)
Allow me to explain.
The day before I’d been chatting with one of the teachers I help out. We had just finished wrapping up our boisterous sixth period English class.
I love the class, but it and the science class before it are mentally exhausting- I bounce from desk to desk answering questions, coaching them on topics ranging from thesis statements to types of energy and prodding students to stay on task (like, stopping playing that game where the snake eats the apple on the computer and maybe do your science test, please!).
As I tidied up the classroom and gathered my things, I felt my mind barreling ahead into the day- picking up Annie from daycare, grabbing the girls from school, making dinner, cleaning up, getting everyone to bed. Brad was out of town, so I’d be managing all the things on my own. I’d been running since 5:30 that morning and didn’t see the opportunity to sit down until after 8. And by then I knew I’d be wiped out. Too tired to do much more than read a few pages of a book.
I was feeling kind of dazed and overwhelmed and was explaining myself to my teacher friend.
She observed that the level of noise and activity in my life currently must be tough. “You’re kind of an introvert,” she said, “At least, I assume you are a little bit introverted because you’re a writer… you need quiet time to do your thinking.”
She’s right. I spend so many days racing, racing, racing. Being ON at school supporting my students, making small talk with teachers and power walking around the building. And then being ON at home. Mom-ing and adulting.
Quiet time is a rarity.
Just her pointing that out- that I probably needed quiet time for writing which is really my way of thinking- was validating. Saying out loud something that has been churning in my subconscious, but that has been squelched by the taskmaster portion of my brain (we’ll call her Karen) with its checklist of the most pressing needs for each day. The part of my brain that always bumps down the less practical, but always more fulfilling and satisfying things. Writing. Creating. Listening to music. Dancing with the girls. Standing outside and watching birds whirl about the sky.
Karen’s all like, “Those dishes aren’t going to wash themselves. And shouldn’t you follow up with VDOT about the growing sinkhole in your front yard? And weren’t you supposed to schedule a consultation with the orthodontist for Lily? And is the dog up to date on his shots? Did you clean up the cat puke in the playroom? The bathroom mirror is looking kind of smudgy. You should probably do something about that. And while you’re at it maybe tackle that weird crust around the faucet. What are you planning to do with the three boxes of baby clothes out in the garage? They’re kind of taking up space.”
You get the point. Karen’s pretty relentless. She’s a beanbag chair Vesuvius, spewing staticky beanbag beans everywhere. And she has no time or tolerance for that other part of my brain (whose name is probably something dreamy and poetic like Ophelia and she smells like gardenias and always wears gauzy dresses in muted colors and hums to herself while picking bouquets of wildflowers).
Sometimes, when you are in the throes of living your life, you’re not aware of, or at least not able to describe the thing that’s frustrating you with any specficity. It’s just this little black rain cloud over your head- an amorphous, mercurial thing. You’re too busy crossing off the stuff on Karen’s never-ending list to tell Karen to shut the hell up and just leave you alone already (I’d add in ragier expletives here, but I know my mom reads my posts and she’s done me two huge solids this week, so, in gratitude, I’m laying off the “F” bombs. You know where they should go though).
If it’s not Karen yelling at me, it’s the constant stream of requests from the small people. A braid for Jovie and help slicing a bagel for Lily and the dog wants to be let out and back in and the little cat wants water from the faucet and the big cat wants dinner and the baby wants to be held constantly in the 5 o’clock hour, which is also when I make dinner and will stand underfoot crying “Mama, Mama! MAMA!! MAMA!!!” at increasing volumes almost attempting to re-insert herself into the womb until I pick her up.
It’s clarifying for a human outside yourself to point out that the closeted introvert (is this a thing? It should be a thing) that you are might not be getting the things that she needs. Namely quiet space to have a thought or two or three.
But as I’ve noticed happens sometimes when things get to be a little too much, grace intervenes, as if by magic.
The day after I had this conversation with my teacher friend, my phone pinged at 4 a.m..
Alerts at 4 a.m. are never good. It was the woman who watches Annie while I’m at school. She’d been up all night throwing up. It sounded awful. She had to close daycare. Which meant I had to take the day off school. Since I’d already burned through my sick leave, it meant going without pay. All this running through my brain at 4 a.m.
Lying in my bed, I tried spinning different scenarios in my head. Maybe my mom could come watch Annie. Maybe a neighbor. But it didn’t feel fair to spring babysitting on Mom at 4 a.m.- she’s an hour away and had already helped me out once this week. And it didn’t seem fair to Annie to foist her on a neighbor last minute. I have the best of neighbors. I’m sure any one of them would’ve loved to hang out with Annie for the day. But she’s a bit clingy these days and dropping her off in a less than familiar place seemed unkind to her and to the hypothetical pinch-hitting neighbor.
You didn’t see her frown Wednesday when I dropped her off at her regular daycare. The way her lip quivered as I kissed her goodbye.
Drop off is usually Brad’s job, but he had to be out of town so it fell to me for the first time since I went back to work.
There’s good reasons I don’t do it. One because daycare opens at 8 a.m. and I have to be at work at 7. Cafeteria duty is 7:10 sharp and who else can greet surly seventh graders and remind them to take their hoods off and throw their apple juice containers away?
Also, if I had to drop Annie off every day, I’d be terrible at greeting seventh graders. They’d wonder why I was always sniffling and teary eyed. It’d be real awkward. (Actually, let’s be honest, they probably wouldn’t even notice. The same person has been saying good morning to them every day since August and I’m still not sure they realize I’m an actual adult human who works at their school.)
Until drop off yesterday, I didn’t realize how much Annie might have to swallow down in a day. I watched her pull herself together. She didn’t cry, even though I could see she wanted to. At least that’s the story I tell myself. Because after the door closed, I had no idea what happened. What her face did. What sounds she emitted.
I pick her up every day and she looks happy. She’s excited to see her daycare friends when I show her videos or pictures of them on Facebook. Brad says when it’s time to head out the door in the morning, she grabs her coat and sits for her shoes. When he drops her off in the morning, she runs down the hall without a looking back. I know that both the woman who watches her and her husband dote on Annie. They cuddle with her and fuss over all the adorable things she says (or maybe they just do that for my benefit). Though, for the record, Annie is especially adorable.
But all that aside. It’s still hard for her, I think. And I hadn’t appreciated that until I dropped her off. At least… I hadn’t allowed myself to think too much about it. For self preservation sake. For sanity. For selfishness.
But then the two of us had this unexpected windfall of a quiet day together. Not that I would’ve wished a bad stomach bug on anyone. Not that my daycare person was feeling much grace.
But man. I needed it.
A chance to catch my breath and giggle and snuggle with Annie who is growing and changing by the minute. We ran to the grocery store for milk and “bah-NA-NAs.” We flopped on the floor of her bedroom together, read stories and listened to “Elmo’s Song” and “Baby Shark” many, many times.
She can say so many things. She has so many ideas about the world unfurling in that head of hers. She loves staring out the window and waiting for dogs to walk by. Dropping food on the floor and saying, “where is it?” like it was an accident. Letting Snacks lick food residue off her fingers. One minute cuddling her baby doll, BeBe and the next throwing her across the room.
“Oh no!” she says, all wide-eyed and innocent as I retrieve BeBe yet one more time.
Annie knows what she wants. She knows when she wants a banana and when she wants to take a bath. She knows when she wants to put on her, “doke” (coat) and go outside. She knows when she’s tired and wants to go to sleep. She’s declarative and unrelenting.
Kind of like Karen. But much cuter and cuddlier.
After putting her down for her nap on our day off together, I relished the quiet. It’s the first time I’d been home by myself with no kids to actively manage in months.
I just sat on the couch and it was my space and my time and it was quiet.
I found this song that I’d heard the tail end of the other day and listened to it on repeat.
I thought about how much I missed writing and I wrote a little. I thought about my job and how I’m not sure what I want to do about my career but how I love spending my days with the ridiculous, insightful humans middle schoolers are. Like, it’s silly how much I appreciate the kid in fourth period who contorts his face into new, odd expressions every time I glance over in his direction. And the kids in second period who call me “Jenkins” and critique my hair. And the kids in third who like to hear stories about Jovie’s ongoing obsession with farts and poop.
What does it say about me that I feel at home with them?
What does it say about them that they ground me?
I’m never going to be able to get all the beanbag beans back in the bag. I know that. I know I need to spend less time listening to Karen and more time dreaming with Ophelia.
While it’s exhausting, really exhausting, to be working outside of the home and to have both a toddler and girls that have sleepovers with “boy talk” on the agenda, I’m grateful, too. Because this is the life I wanted and the life I chose.
And it’s still alright.