I remember the heat wave now like a lost lover, blurred with nostalgia and regret. Why didn’t I savor it while it was here?  Why did I wish it away as I lay naked with the fan on, unable to sleep under that heavy summer blanket?

Now it is gone, gone for the year, and Autumn is upon us once more. I’m staring down the long tunnel of Fall and Winter, the light of next spring barely a pinprick in the distance.

Every year I think I will survive this change with some semblance of grace. And every year it floors me, knocks the wind out till I’m gasping like a kid fallen off a high swing, flat on her back in the dirt.  All summer I was giddy with constant sunshine and ice cream and spontaneous swimming adventures in ponds and rivers.  Suddenly we’re trading bikinis for fleece.  Soon it will be time to get out the wool hats.

If I could go back to the scarlet poppies in May, those showgirls tossing their crinkled silks, I would.  I’d go back to peonies, lilacs, back further to planting peas in the 8 o’ clock spring twilight.

But it’s late August.  We still have two weeks till school, and my children won’t stop fighting. Summer has turned them into feral animals, eating with their hands, running around naked, scratching and biting and pulling hair. Our doctor gave me a little lecture about enforcing mealtimes rather than letting the girls snack all day on demand.  She also told me to get firm at bedtime. It’s true, the best parents set clear limits with their children, but I’m just too tired to do it myself. I wish someone else could handle the discipline and let me lie back in bed, snuggling my girls and reading books.

I’m too tired to do much these days.  Cooking dinner, for example.  A real dinner, not just frozen pizza and some carrot sticks.  Too tired to write the scintillating Vermont version of Eat, Pray, Love and send it off to potential agents.  Too tired to build up my private teaching business, designing the perfect logo on the couch while the girls watch Angelina Ballerina.  And too tired, way too tired, to slip into something silky and try to seduce my husband at 10 o’clock at night.

Most nights, I am praying to be a better mother.  I’m running down a mental checklist of the good and bad I’ve done today.

GOOD: made fairy princess crowns out of cardboard and tinfoil.

BAD: screamed “STOP THE FIGHTING!” and slammed car door for emphasis.

GOOD: baked banana muffins with flaxseed meal.

BAD:  bribed girls with ice cream if they cooperated while shopping at Price Chopper.

I pray for more patience, more kindness, more parenting skills.  Several of my mom friends say they recite similar prayers at night.  Are the dads staying up late worrying about being better fathers? Maybe some of them are, but it’s the mothers I know who feel a profound sense of inadequacy.

There’s no torment quite like the mental anguish of depression, the relentless voice of self-laceration. If allowed to go unchecked, it drowns out all other sound. Sometimes I can’t even hear my children play, so deafened am I by the noise in my head.

When the rain came, the girls got out the wooden blocks and built a giant 4-story apartment building for their princess dolls. Then they added bridges, barns, and walkways for their kitties. It was an architectural feat, absorbing them for hours. Ava, already elated at the approach of her fifth birthday, had never been more proud of her handiwork.  When the inevitable happened and Carmen smashed the masterpiece, Ava handled herself with aplomb.  After an initial cry of devastation, she picked up the pieces and started rebuilding.

Sometimes the clichés are true: we can learn from our children.  Fully present in every moment, they aren’t victims of their negative minds. They don’t write scripts about the future. Their play is their work and they always “trust the process” (my mother’s favorite Sixties mantra). If I had my five-year-old’s big, innocent confidence, what couldn’t I accomplish?

The first yellow leaves swirl from the pear tree.  “It’s Fall!” yells Ava, running to catch them in mid-air.  The light is ochre now, the whole green world going to seed.  Purple morning glories climb the bean tower, cascading like jewels in the tangle of neglected garden.  They are my favorite bloom, small and vulnerable, not the brassy sunflowers– too cheerful.

The Sunflower House I planted in June sits moldering and stunted like a shrine to failure.  Ravaged by Japanese beetles, its leaves are wilted brown.  For hours, I dug sod out of a patch of field to make the structure, envisioning a magical, secret playhouse.   I dug and heaved while my children sprayed the hose and frolicked naked in mud at my feet.  Later I wrote about the ill-fated project, an article that was rejected by The Boston Globe.

Everything I do seems to be jinxed, and then I rediscover a book by Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice For Difficult Times.  I receive her words in gratitude:

“Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing.  We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart.  Then they come together again and fall apart again.  It’s just like that.  The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen…”

Yoga Shala shrine- NOT Jewish

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don't worry, it's not a real tattoo

It’s late August and A. is about to turn 5.

We’ve been on a countdown all month, and now the big day is TOMORROW. A. morphed into a nasty little monster in time for C’s birthday, but has now, thankfully, returned to her sunny personality. Despite some sister-hair-pulling and scratching, her behavior has been lovely– helpful, curious, sweet.

Is it possible that I’ve been a mother for 5 years?  Some days that number feels accurate, other days it seems outrageous.  Five years of 24-7 experience means that you should have a good handle on your job.  You should be quite accomplished at your job. But the truth is, this job is constantly changing, and I’m figuring it out as I go along.  Most days I’m crippled by doubts, questions and perennial guilt.

More so now than when A. was a baby.  Back then all I had to do was nurse and worry about how to get her to sleep.  I was privileged– I didn’t have to work and earn an income, I didn’t have to balance mothering with some semblance of career. Of course I also suffered from depression, insomnia, and the intense grief following my dad’s death (7 weeks before A was born).

I have to be careful not to romanticize those early months of motherhood.  It may seem like things were simpler then, but I was overwhelmed with change.  Now I try to accept that change is a constant with children.  No, with everything in life.

Just when I think I’m in a groove and the girls are sleeping through the night or behaving like angels, and I have some breathing space, some confidence about the future, something shifts again, from equilibrium to chaos.  C. stops nursing and starts pooping in her pants.  A. goes through a flurry of developmental insecurity and begins walloping her sister.  And we’re all thrown into upheaval, and the poor parents don’t know what to do.

Acceptance is the wisest path, though the hardest.  Can I accept my girls in their darkest, meanest, difficult hour?  Can I accept myself? (rarely).  Can I live in the midst of family strife, admitting I’m way over my head, that I don’t know how to parent? RESISTANCE to what is causes pain and suffering.  Or so says spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle.  Today, I vow not to resist, but to embrace.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

the courage to change the things I can,

and the wisdom to know the difference.

Happy Birthday, my beautiful 5-year-old!

Why am I not celebrating this milestone– the final 12 months of The Baby Cave, which, I’ve been told, lasts till the youngest is 4?  Why am I not running full-tilt to the mouth of the Cave, eager to frolic outside in high heels?

Because the Cave, in hindsight, is a snuggly place– a safe, uncomplicated nest of love.  Suddenly I’m overwhelmed with Baby Nostalgia.  I indulge in a fantasy about a third child: a mellow, sound-sleeping baby boy.  How my girls would love their little brother!  How boys (I’ve heard) adore their mothers!  This time I would be wiser. I wouldn’t get trapped in the Cave and half-crazed with sleep-deprivation. Maybe it’s not too late to remove the IUD, chart my ovulation, and get pregnant ASAP.

Then I remember the letter I wrote myself on a particularly dark night with a newborn and a toddler.  “Dear Diana, Don’t ever, ever, ever do this again.” I shake off my daydreams and examine the crux of the matter: my youngest is turning 3, and we’re finally going to stop nursing.

I thought about weaning her at Two. I tried to do it at Two and a Half. One by one, my friends weaned their toddlers– in private, without fuss. When C. demanded Snackies at a playdate, I blushed and looked around for support. Surely there must be some die-hard attachment-parenting moms in this neo-hippie Vermont town?

“Oh, we’re all done,” said one friend.  “It was easy, once I made up my mind.”

“Don’t you feel like a doormat?” asked another, who had briskly weaned her babies at 12 months.

Call me a pushover, but I’ve taken the path of least resistance. My daughter loved nursing, and I had no pressing reason to stop.  In truth, I loved breastfeeding as much as she did.  Nestled in the warm quiet, her whirling dervish body finally still, she’d stroke my waist with one hand and rub her Ducky’s beak with the other. I’d nuzzle her head– my tawny lion cub– breathing in the baby musk of her hair. Nursing was a primal intimacy, one I won’t experience again.

When I weaned my first baby (at 19 months), I was already 5 months pregnant with the second and desperate for space. I cringed every time she latched on to my sore nipples. She was a hungry little monster causing me pain, and my wolf instinct reared up and cut her off.

This time around, there’s a spontaneous upwelling of grief, even though I have no desire to keep nursing a 3-year-old.  C. is a fidgety rascal, often kicking me in the groin or stubbornly refusing to stop after I give her a Count-to-Ten warning. In most ways, I am ready to end the relationship. Still, the grief is vast– the end of an era, a shift into the next phase of mothering, whatever it may be.

The last nursing, like the first menstruation, goes largely unacknowledged in our culture.  But the two moments book-end a woman’s childbearing years.  If only there were some way to mark this transition, rather than muddling my way through it alone.  In ancient writings, the word “wean” meant “to ripen,” like fruit on the vine, and weaning was a festive occasion.  A weaned child was a fulfilled child, ready for more independence. In the Bible, Abraham says he will “make a great feast” for the event of Isaac’s weaning.  In Hawaii, I’ve heard that weaning is celebrated with a “Milk Party,” where young children sit together at tables drinking ceremonious cups of milk.

The common age of weaning for ancient Hebrews was three. “The median age of complete weaning worldwide has been estimated at three to five years,” states The Nursing Mother’s Guide to Weaning. I may be an anomaly in America, where some women have been accused of child abuse for nursing older children, but on an international scale, I’m average. The La Leche League says that most children will self-wean between age 4 and 6.  I’m afraid C. would nurse till she was 10, if left to her own devices.  So for the months leading up to her third birthday, I ask her, “When will you ready to be done with Snackies?”

“When I’m THREE!”

The birthday becomes a source of joyful anticipation– vanilla cupcakes with pink icing, a princess doll, a piñata.  Surely breastfeeding can be relinquished amidst all this excitement.

C’s last nursing came on a Tuesday, her final day of being Two.  I lured her upstairs for Quiet Time with the promise of Snackies and then puttered about folding laundry, delaying the occasion. Many times that day I’d found myself on the verge of tears– overwhelmed by late summer, the melancholy of August, cricket-song and goldenrod, sunflowers and tomatoes, everything ripening too fast, going down the long slide to the first hard frost, the season turning, the daylight fading, another reminder of death.

I drew the shade and lay down with C., pulled the sheet up over us.  She had her Ducky and Blanky and she smiled at me, ordering “First the little bubbie, then the big one.” I realized I wouldn’t miss those commands.

I burrowed my face in her hair and tried to absorb the moment. How rarely we know that something is ending even as it happens– the last time in bed with a lover, the last time talking with your father.  Usually, the knowledge comes in hindsight. But this nursing was a privilege, and had a ritual gravity.

I cried briefly as I drew her squirming, sturdy body to mine. She drank milk from both sides, I counted to ten, and she stopped. She offered some milk to her Ducky and grinned.  Then she hopped out of bed and went off to make mischief with her sister. We were done.

If you’ve ever picked up a magazine at the pediatrician’s office, you know that the glossies are full of parenting tips and advice.

Five Simple Steps to Get Your Baby to Sleep Through the Night!

Top Ten Ways to Raise a Happy Child!

Magazine editors love bullet points, solutions, and sound-bytes.  They know how to play on parental anxieties, consulting “experts” with the latest research, promising to help us with the overwhelming task of parenthood.

But here’s the rub: advice articles may move magazines, but they don’t usually make us feel good. For me, they inevitably inspire feelings of guilt and inadequacy.  My favorite parenting columnist, Joanna Weiss of The Boston Globe, recently observed in her Op-Ed, “Parental Bliss, or Lack Thereof“:

“The Internet and bookstores are loaded with parenting advice, as if childrearing is a set of problems to be solved, instead of a set of experiences, good and bad.”

Summer days with my kids encompass a range of experiences, from the sublime (snuggling in the hammock) to the grotesque (stepping on a huge turd in the kiddie pool).  I’ve never wanted to write an advice column.  Who am I to tell others how to raise their children, when I’m just figuring it out as I go along?  But on a journalistic whim, I decided to poll my friends and neighbors, eschewing parenting experts for real, live, imperfect moms and dads.  It turns out their insights may help us all relax.

“What Tricks of the Trade do you have up your sleeve?”  I asked.

“Movies, candy, bribery…” replied one friend, a Brattleboro father of two.

“Bribery, Benadryl, letting my children sleep in my bed,” laughed Sarah, a Washington D.C. mother of two (ages 2 and 5).  Then she added, “Watch your kids sleeping.  Even after the worst day, it’s impossible not to love them when they’re asleep.”

“Never battle over clothing,” said Leah, maternity nurse and mother of two boys (ages 7 months and 4 years).  “Let them wear what they want to wear, as long as they’re warm enough.  Once Sammy wore his Spiderman tights for two weeks straight.”

“Let your kids get dirty and wet.  You can always clean them up later,” recommended Orly, third-grade teacher and mom of two (ages 2 and 5).

“Read Confessions of a Slacker Mom.  It’s the one book that, philosophically speaking, helped me the most,” advised Andrea, a video producer for The Washington Post and tireless mother of three boys, ages 4, 6, and 8.

“Never read advice books,” countered my friend Amy, a physician in California and mom of two girls, ages 5 and 7.  Amy also told me she’d recently made a parenting resolution:  she’s not going to yell at her kids anymore.  When I expressed dismay at my own loud tactics and admiration for her lofty goal, she said, “Yelling has become the new hitting.  In the moment it feels like life or death.  But what would it mean to actually stop?  I decided I’m not going to let myself get that mad.”  So far, she’s made it three weeks.

“I’m not afraid to tell my kids that I need a break,” said Eileen Parks, librarian and mother of two (ages 7 and 9).  “My kids understand the word FRIED.  I have no guilt about telling them to get lost, so I can lie down and slip into a Mom-Coma for 10 or 15 minutes.  Just enough to dip into some REM and renew.”

I rely on the Mom-Coma myself most afternoons.  I also give myself Time-Outs whenever I feel my temper building.  And instead of pajamas, I dress the girls in clean clothes before bed.  (Sometimes it saves a step in the morning, though my two-year-old usually goes through several clothing changes before breakfast regardless).

Maybe some of these tips will work for you.  Or maybe not.  As one grandmother of nine put it, even after four decades of childrearing,  “How can I give advice?  It’s all so individual.  It depends on the child, the parent, the family.”

I like getting a long-term perspective on parenting, receiving the wisdom of the older generation.  These days, I try to remember one grandfather’s bittersweet words: “Relax and have fun with it.  If I could do it all over, I would have played more and worried less.”

Of all the trials and tribulations in my nearly five years of motherhood, I’d never suffered public humiliation until last week.   I have a thick skin– I can handle my toddler unloading in her swim diaper every single time we go to the pool.  I can survive a screaming tantrum on the Co-op floor because I won’t buy a chocolate-chip cookie.  But I’d never known parenting shame before The Children’s Room at the Library.

“You can’t check out these books.  You have a $15 charge on your card,” the librarian said stonily.

Shock must have crossed my face, because she continued.  “The ripped book you returned– The Jungle Book?  That will cost $15.”

“Oh dear.  I’m so, so sorry about the ripping,” I said, deeply embarrassed and regretful that my child had destroyed yet more library property.  “But do I really have to pay $15?  The book was pretty beat-up when we checked it out.”

The librarian appraised me with a cool stare.  “I can lower the fine slightly, but there have been many other ripped books you’ve brought back that we haven’t charged you for.”

At this, I flushed red and tried to sink through the floor.  Instead, I got out the cash, took my guilty, unrepentant toddler by the hand, and slunk away like a criminal.

The librarian’s voice admonished me like a slap on the wrist:  BAD MOTHER!  I felt like I’d been caught shoplifting or smoking pot.  The woman acted like I’d deliberately encouraged my progeny to rip books.  Or maybe I’d just lain on the couch drinking chardonnay while my two-year-old tore out page by page.

In truth, I was probably checking my email.  And Carmen manages to destroy most things very quickly, in the privacy of her own room.  If I were less of a slacker mom, I would monitor her every activity and catch her before she inflicted damage.  Or I would keep all library books in a locked cabinet and ration them, one per day, to be viewed under parental guidance only.

The real stinger is that I am a book-lover myself.  Our house is filled with all genres of literature, and I’ve been reading to my children since they were infants.  I adore the Library and am supremely grateful for its services.  I like to think I’ve instilled in my girls a healthy love and respect for books, although I don’t always supervise their reading.

“Books are our friends.  We have to treat them with kindness,” I told my two-year-old after the first ripping incident.  After the second one, I resorted to threats:  “We won’t be able to check any more books or movies out of the Library unless you stop ripping!”

The latest time, I turned to my daughter in fury.  “Why?  Why did you do it?  Why did you rip The Jungle Book!?”

“Because of the scary tiger,” she replied.

Aha– there was method to her madness!  She’d been frightened of the evil Shere Khan and decided to take matters, literally, into her own hands by excising him from the story.

I felt relief that Carmen’s ripping hadn’t been blind destruction.  The child loves to do damage.  While her big sister enjoys building sandcastles, she likes to raze them.  If there’s a block tower or Lego castle in sight, she’ll knock it down.  She delights in clearing bookshelves and dumping out baskets of tiny toys–tea party dishes and plastic food scattered over the rug for her mother to tidy.  Ever since she could walk, she’s gone outside and thrown the family shoes off the porch, one by one.

Is this normal toddler behavior?  Is she looking for attention? If I were less distracted and better at organizing activities, rather than letting my kids run wild like banshees through the house, maybe I wouldn’t need to hide my face at the Library.

My husband has another theory.  “She’s curious.  She wants to see how things work,” he observes.  He’s often her ally when I discover her latest mess– new seeds for the garden scattered in the grass, for example. Perhaps he envisions her as a future scientist, whereas I can’t help rage at the prospect of yet more clean-up.  Nothing is sacred anymore, not even my laptop, which Carmen once drew all over in permanent marker.  Not my journal, which itself has fallen victim to a ripping spree.  A friend refers me to the website www.shitmykidsruined.com , where parents post pictures of their damaged possessions.

One parenting handbook, Magic Tools for Raising Kids, believes that adults get infuriated at kid misbehavior because the results waste either their time or money.  Since children can’t understand these abstractions, the book urges us to change our expectations.

I wish I had a tidy toddler who didn’t leave a swathe of destruction in her wake.  I’ve met kids like this, and they are lovely.  Yet Carmen, for all her naughtiness, is so full of life and spark that just seeing her little naked body race across the front yard infuses me with joy.  Her mischief is an expression of joie de vivre.   She is a big personality– as am I– and my karma is to make room for her as she grows.  We’ll have to make room for each other, if we are to survive.

Guess whose hair is natural?

But it’s all worth it.  For $7.99, I can cover my grays, those insidious little markers of aging.

Some women are content to go au naturel, transforming with grace into silver foxes.  I admire their Earth Goddess poise, but my vanity won’t let me abandon my youthful mane just yet.  When it comes to my hair, I’m going to “rage, rage against the dying of the light.”  If this means bimonthly henna treatments, so be it.

Does having kids make you go gray earlier, or is it purely genetic?  “It’s the sleep deprivation,” says one friend, a working mother of three, “It turns your hair white.”

Another friend protests that while parenting may make your body age faster, having kids keeps your mind younger– more playful, imaginative, sharp.  I’m not sure if I believe this theory, because I already lose my glasses and confuse my kids’ names.  But I do know that my child-free friends are, without a doubt, more youthful looking.  They also have better clothes and social lives.

Some science supports the claim that stress (whether child-induced or otherwise) speeds up the hair-graying process.  In a study published in the June, 2009 issue of Cell, researchers found that “genotoxic stress” damages DNA, depleting the specialized “melanocyte stem cells” in the hair follicles that are responsible for producing pigment.  When pigment cells in the follicle gradually die off, the hair strand doesn’t contain as much color, and hence, we get grays.

“It’s all about the hair,” says one dear friend, a 60-year-old knock-out with a yoga body, well-cut clothes, and glossy chestnut mane.  She exudes a confident intelligence that makes heads turn.   I can only hope my hair looks as good as hers in two decades.My girls have yet to watch my home hair-coloring performance, since for sheer convenience, I do it after bedtime.  But they observe my other beauty rituals, from make-up application to leg-shaving.  Back in college, I owned a single cobalt-blue eyeliner and stopped shaving my legs as a feminist statement.  Eighteen years and two kids later, I understand the power of good mascara.  I often hit up my savvy little sister for the latest under-eye concealer.  I enjoy sporting smooth gams, but find it hard to keep up with all the grooming.

“Who wants to play Beauty Shop!?” I shout to my girls on a Friday night.

We get out the Mermaid-Princess bath toys and Mommy’s good shampoo, then all pile into the tub.  They’re so busy lathering up their dolls that I’m free to loofah and shave.  They seem not to notice I’m there until I nick my calf and the soapy water turns pink with blood.

“Mommy, WHY did you do that!?” asks A, age 4 and 3/4.

“It was an accident, honey,” I say.  “Sometimes it happens when people shave.  It doesn’t hurt and it’ll stop bleeding soon.”

“But WHY do people shave?”

This is a question I’ve heard before, for which I have no good answer.  I fall back on:  “Because they like it.”

For now, A is satisfied, but I wonder if I’m modeling for her the tyranny of the female beauty industry.  I want her to know she is free to make her own choices about her appearance.  But are any of us truly free?

My daughters already torment each other by saying “YOU don’t look beautiful!”  In our house, the word “beautiful” now means wearing a fancy party dress.  My earnest attempts to correct the definition go unheeded:   “You girls are always beautiful, no matter what you wear-dresses, pants, mud, naked.”  But I’m not sure my words sink in.

I remember playing “Charlie’s Angels” with my best friend in 4^th grade, Abby Greenberg.  We were sitting at her mother’s lighted vanity table, brushing our hair and studying ourselves in the mirror.  “You’re pretty, but I’m beautiful,” Abby told me.  With that quote, she seemed to sum up our entire identities.

Before I try to de-tangle the snare of feminine self-esteem, I remember my daughters’ favorite Max and Ruby book, “Ruby’s Beauty Shop.” Ruby’s pal Louise shows up with her Deluxe Beauty Kit, complete with wigs, makeup and stick-on nails.  The girls give Max a blonde wig and lots of mousse, then Max dyes his fur Lizard Green.  Author Rosemary Wells knows that playing with beauty stuff is FUN–  a messy mix of art and fantasy.  “Hello, Beauty Shop Hotline!” Ruby answers the phone.

So I wont get too huffy and feminist about my rituals.  I often think of Nora Ephron’s witty memoir about aging, “I Feel Bad About My Neck,” in which she chronicles her life over sixty and the “maintenance” required to look youthful.  With a keen sense of humor, she laments the inevitable downward pull of gravity.  “If I’d known what was going to happen, I would have walked around in a bikini ALL DAY when I was 35,” she writes.  Well, it’s summertime– let’s us moms lighten up and break out the bathing suits!

Country Girls in the City

But taking the girls to New York City for the weekend was an ambitious plan.  “Only people who aren’t New Yorkers call it New York City,” said one Manhattan friend drily.

We made no pretense of being New Yorkers.  We were country mice, and we were pushing the envelope, traveling beyond our Vermont comfort zone.

For weeks, I’d told the girls about the trip– how we’d drive in and see the bridges and skyscrapers, how we’d visit relatives, play in Central Park, and go to the Bronx Zoo.  I sang “Mama’s Taking Us to the Zoo Tomorrow” as we fantasized about our favorite animals.  To ramp up anticipation, we got online and browsed the Zoo website, watching little movies of baby lion cubs tussling and squirrel monkeys racing vine-to-vine.  Ava wanted to see a zebra, Carmen couldn’t wait for the lions, and I preferred the Big Bears.

I printed out the Zoo map.  I was in my element.  I am, by nature, a planner-tending towards “continuous, compulsive projection into the future,” as spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle puts it.  My monkey mind leaps one month, one week, one day ahead, rather than staying absorbed in the here and now.

My children, on the other hand, have no need for plans.  They would’ve been content to stay home on my lap and watch the baby lions on the webcam.  Instead, we packed our bags and car snacks and left behind our green world for 48 hours.

I wasn’t expecting much sleep, and I was right.  Friday night the 2-year-old stayed up till 10:30, wired on the constant hum of the city.  We were crashing at a friend’s apartment on 110^th street, a 12^th floor sky-box towering above horns and sirens, buzzing with the pulse of people packed together, so much energy I woke at 5 am as if something had shocked my eyelids open.

subway to da Bronx

By noon, when we got to the Zoo, I’d already been up for seven hours.  No need for coffee, just jacked up on New York.  We’d braved the subway to the Bronx, dragging the enormous double stroller up and down the stairwells, each holding a terrified girl in our arms.

The Zoo was packed on a sunny spring weekend.  It was hot, and the Big Bears had retreated into their dens, hulking shapes in the shadows.  We did spy a shaggy Polar Bear lumbering along a fake ice floe.  He was majestic, and it seemed mean to subject him to 85-degree weather and gaping crowds.

At this point, the girls were more excited about ice cream than they were about the animals.  We scarfed down vanilla cones, then, fueled by sugar, pushed on to the sea lions.  “See it?!”  I cried, pointing to the baby sea lion sunning himself like a big sleek slug.  We watched for a few minutes, but all he did was stretch his neck up.  Ava was keeping a tally of animals and wanted MORE, so we sped through the Monkey House into the Madagascar exhibit.

Here’s my advice about Zoo trips with kids.  Go first thing in the morning, because the exciting animals snooze at midday.  The three baby lion cubs (so playful on the internet!) were distant tawny spots, sleeping on a faraway rock in the “African Plains.”

WHERE are the lions?

“SEE, there are the LIONS!” I shouted to the girls, but they couldn’t really see.  Yes, some real zebras grazed amidst wandering peacocks, but my children were nonplussed.  They were hot and tired, running on fumes, and the nap-less toddler was cranky as a crocodile.  We’d gone to New York City, we were at the Zoo, but my feet hurt and I wanted someplace to lie down.

Sometimes anticipation is more potent than reality.  I’m not saying I was disappointed, but I wonder what lessons I’m teaching my children by the build-up to trips, birthdays, and holidays.  Can’t we just live life day-to-day, rather than waiting for some fabulous future?  Why don’t we just stay put?

But something fabulous did happen at the Zoo.  I was hauling my flailing two-year-old through the Congo Gorilla Encounter when we actually encountered some gorillas.  The keepers had just brought food, and the females sat by the window in their jungle habitat, munching on celery.  A baby gorilla crouched by his mother, content and absorbed in his snack.  The mothers were black, hairy and naked, unfazed by the throngs of faces peering in, snapping photos with their phones, holding up their children and shouting “DO YOU SEE!?”  With nipples bare and bellies hanging down, the apes exuded a Buddha-like calm amidst the human spectacle.

How I wished I were a gorilla then, happy to eat celery, free of mental torment!  How did we evolve from these peaceful animals into stroller-pushing, texting 21^st century Homo Sapiens?  Then the huge Silverback gorilla, sire of this particular group, loped slowly down to the window.  He gathered up all the other gorillas’ celery stalks and took them away to a tiny pond behind the bamboo forest.  There he sat, while we watched, dipping each piece into the brackish water before he ate it.

Today is supposedly a holiday, a day for schmoozing and sleeping in.  But after a weekend of swimming, hot dogs, and kid time, I was ready to work.  I was up with the sun at 5:15 and snuck downstairs into the blissful quiet of a sleeping house.  I anticipated writing at my desk over a steaming cup of Chai, then going for a short run before everyone woke up.  What a fantasy…

First I had to feed the dog, give her her medication and take her on a short walk so she didn’t turd in the neighbors’ yard. By the time I let out the chickens and made my Chai, it was already close to 6 am.  I checked my email, opened my notebook, and thought about Sylvia Plath, her poem that starts “Love set you going like a fat gold watch.”  What poem was that?  Maybe it was “Morning Song,” the first poem in Ariel?

I could Google it or be old-school and search for my actual copy of the book, a First Edition from England, my mother’s from 1965.  The pages smell old and sweet and slightly musty, like a dusty bookshop.  They make me want to write.  I went into the dim front hall to my big poetry bookcase, which is full of literature from my days at Oxford and my MFA program.  I found everything in shambles, half the books stuffed in upside down and sideways.  C. had obviously been there and cleared the shelves, then someone else had cleaned up after her.

Of course I needed to re-organize things then and there.  I never found Ariel, because the pitter-patter of little feet interrupted my quest.  6 am and C. was awake, even though she’d refused to go to bed before 9 pm.  Bleary-eyed and clutching her Ducky, she was overtired and supremely grumpy.  What happened to my private writing time? What happened to toddlers needing at least 11 hours of sleep per night?  I tried to wrap her in blankets on the couch so I could write for a few minutes.  No luck.

So i loaded her in the stroller, laced up my shoes, grabbed a yogurt container, and jogged up the hill to pick black raspberries and feed carrots to the horses. A fun outing, and some exercise too.  Forget projects.  It’s glorious to live in Vermont in July!