now fortified with impotent fury!risperdal

Every so often, I catch myself wishing you were small again. That I could curl you up inside me, feel your every move again. That I could nestle you against my shoulder, all drunk on formula and sweet downy smell. But you are not to be so contained any more, my little man. You are long skinny legs thrown akimbo over my lap. You are sharp elbows to the side as you scrabble out of our gentle snuggles, hell-bent on going off on your next adventure. You are demanding, and imperious, and vocal, and verbal. You are a disbelieving look, you are a rippling shriek of laughter, you are a moody toss of too-long hair badly in need of a trim. You are sensitive and worried about the mess in your stuffed rhino’s fur, you are chirruping a sweet ‘thank you daddy’ at dinner, you are hyper scrabbling up into your chair at the mere hint of watermelon.

Your father and I agonized long and hard over your gift this year, rejecting every idea as too old, as big kid, you’re just little. Until we realized we were saying no not because the ideas weren’t right, but because we refused to admit you were no longer a baby, a toddler.

You are 3. But in 15 minutes time, I can say that no longer. To be precise and accurate, in exactly 3 hours and 12 minutes I can say that no longer. Either way, you are slipping out of my protective embrace. You were 1 times 1, then 1 times 2, then 1 times 3, but now you are getting so old that the geek in me sobs your age can be defined as something other than 1 times. Eventually, you will get to my age, where the dizzying array of options to get to that number would make even the proudest of math team members roll their eyes and dig out an extra blue book.

But for these precious few last minutes, you are only 3, in all of its beautiful simplicity.

Boss, turning to me as we leave the shiny coffeeshop built into the ground floor of the metra station near the old stomping grounds/place of employment.

“Oh, to be young, and reading deep books and thinking your thinking is so very important, and drinking coffee.”
“Drinking a $4 coffee. While nodding your head as you read about the proletariat and the nobility of poverty.”
“Viva!”

So I have just finished wrapping the birthday present for one of Sean’s dearest pals at school. A young woman who has informed me, without a whit or iota of irony, that “Pink goes with everything!“. She in fact recoiled in horror and cried out, as if a million beauty pageant contestants suddenly went silent and couldn’t answer the interview question, when I told her the reason my nailpolish was blue, not pink as she felt was right and proper, was because I really like dark sparkly blue polish and I’m not much for pink.

We bought her a doll.
A doll with blonde and pink hair.
It is now wrapped in pink paper, with pink and white and tangerine and lime print, and pink ribbon, and a pink bow, and pink tissue paper.

In a desperate, probably pointless effort to salvage what little feminist cred I may have left, the ‘accessories’ set we got to go with her is called the “Born to SHRED” set, complete with snowboard, and the doll herself is sporting a GIRLS ROCK shirt. It’s sort of like when I dork during Passover and eat something leavened and look up and apologize. I know it is wrong! No blood no foul, right? Right? I fully expect Karma to bite me on the ass in the form of Toys of Weaponry And Loud Noises for Sean’s birthday next weekend.

If you’ll excuse me, I need to go look up the directions to the Barbie Princess Party now. Sean’s going to have a rollicking time.

Please to note the sarcasm dripping off the title, thank you and drive through.

You know, she said in a vaguely whiny tone, I thought I’d get the hang of this, at some point. I thought that eventually that crushing oh holy shit, you mean I really take the baby home and we’re responsible for another human life? terror would ebb. In my biz, we talk about ‘empowering’ the guest, and how it’s important, from a psychological viewpoint, to give them mastery and control of a subject- to be the expert, in essence.

I am so fucking not the expert it is not funny. I’m not just flying by the seat of my pants, people, the prodigious ass of my old navy low rise stretch boot cuts (take THAT, skinny jeans! and take your goddamn little capri friends with you!) have sprouted wings and possibly a jetpack, given how loosely I am maintaining command over my mad parenting skillz, yo.

You know. We don’t know what the fuck we’re doing. We’re kind of making it up as we go along. And trying to phrase things politely. The foibles and non-linear thinking of the 4 year old mind make it something of a challenge, though (“Have you decided what you want for your birthday party?” “Yes! Pirates….and knights, because they need someone to fight….and cars, so they can chase each other real fast! and lemurs! cause every pirate needs a lemur!”) I read the stories of record numbers of kids! turned away from good schools! And I have three thoughts in rapid fire succession:

1. Jesus ghey, there is no way I’d have gotten into my alma mater these days.
2. If it takes 3 varsity sports, community service, 15 ap exams, and a stated career goal plus 3 years of independent research- at least 1 summer of it in the Remote Needy Region Du Jour- and a science research project the approximate size of my master’s thesis to get INTO college, we have already fucked over Sean by not starting him in 3 different sports plus French prior to Kindergarten. Hope you like state school, kid.
3. How insane is it to be thinking about college already?

We just want a happy kid. And this- along with our house rule, which seems to be Parenting by Benign Neglect- equates to Sean not (unlike certain friends of his at school) having for his summer docket: camp at school, summer soccer league, t-ball, swimming, karate, spanish, drama camp, and art camp. Sean has 1 swimming lesson a week. He will have 6 Saturdays of t-ball. He will have one half-week of morning sports camp. And possibly one week of morning soccer camp. And his half day camp at school (aka, omg, mom has a job kthnxbye)

And that’s it. Every other friggen morning this summer he’ll be unprogrammed and hanging out with mom. Maybe we’ll go to the gym. Maybe to the farm. Maybe the zoo, first thing. Maybe we’ll hang out in the yard and he’ll play in his sandbox and mommy’ll have a drink (coffee, mimosa…) In the evenings there will be fireflies, outside time, swimming at the gym, and more drinks for the parental types. This is a plan which is being met with shock and outright consternation by some. Why aren’t we doing more for him.

Because he’s 4, people. He has plenty of time the rest of his damn life to be overscheduled and multitasking.

You know, there comes a point where I’m so far behind on here I don’t know where to start. Let’s see.

-Work is killing me. Good god. So much of it is fast burn, short duration projects- or bids- instead of the nice big long contracts that allow one to breathe. That said, most of the work is at least interesting, which is a bonus.

-Lad is resubmitting some grants. Go go gadget hamster wheel of tenure! Sigh.

-Sean has his downs and his ups. School is a major issue (more on that in another post), things with Wyoming have simmered down but they have brought other issues to the fore- we’re not the only family who had Wyoming treating a child badly; at least 3 families approached the teacher about it. And we’re all dealing with the ‘I hate school!’ upheaval because of it. In our case, it’s exacerbated the ‘I miss N and J! When will I be 4? When can I be in their class?!’ issue.

But then there is the sun bursting through the clouds. The thing which makes everything else a mere trifle.

Sean has graduated from speech therapy. From that horrible day in early 06 when they told us he had a ’severe apraxia’ and would possibly be in therapy until sometime between 4th and 7th grade, we’ve come to here. He will always have some apraxia. He will always have that fundamental gap between brain and mouth, and words will come to him with more difficulty when he is excited or scared. But now he knows how to find them, and say them, and furthermore say them without the ‘phonological and articulation disorders’ he was saying them with. We had a glimmer the end was coming a few weeks ago, but we were told not to get toooo excited, it could be temporary, they’d keep him in to make sure he didn’t backslide, they’d test him. Yesterday, one of his two therapists at the elementary school program turned to me and said, “He’s done. He aced his sound inventory. If we keep him in, he’ll pick up bad habits.”

Our son has a voice. It is not perfect. But it is his, and he is proud of it, and the words he can use and the stories he can tell. And once again, in this particular voyage of ours, I find myself to be the one without words, as I cannot possibly express the overwhelming gratitude and humility I feel in the face of such grace and the amazing thing which is the mind of a child.