The Po Show

Chivalry

Today was Matthew's Medieval Open House at school. They've been studying castles and fairy tales and other assorted knights and stuff. Today was the day to show off the projects they'd made, the costumes they'd created for themselves (Matthew was designated a knight), and to put on a tournament for the parents in the gym.

I wasn't able to go. I had a study scheduled from 9:00, so Ross had to drop me and Tessa off and quickly head back to school. I was so pissed that I missed it, because the subject ended up smoking on the way here (they are supposed to remain abstinent from midnight till the study starts), so we had to cancel anyway. By that time, it was too late for Ross to come back to get me and I had no way of getting over there.

I called Ross later to see how it had gone. It did not go well. Ross got caught in traffic on the way back to school, and had trouble finding a place to park, so by the time he got there, there was little time for Matthew to show him his project (a castle made out of blocks) and adequately explain to him all the facets of castles he had planned to share. The teacher told everyone it was time to stop and go out for the tournament, and Matthew totally melted down.

Ross tried to get him to go out with the other children, but he was past the point of return. Finally Ross and Matthew went back to the classroom themselves and spent an hour there. Matthew calmed down and was able to continue his explanation of his project, so he was happy in the end. Ross was pretty frazzled, but it ended up okay.

In the afternoon, I went home with them so that I could drop them off and have the car to bring Tessa and myself home (we do this so Matthew won't have to be coaxed out of the house again at 5:00). I asked Matthew how his day had been. He said it was fine, and nothing about the open house. He did tell me he had a present for me.

It was a bracelet, made out of beads he had found in the aftercare room. He wanted me to have it because I was the best mom in the world. In doing so, he lifted me out of my sadness over not being at his school function, absolved me of the guilt that maybe if I'd been there, he wouldn't have had such a bad episode.

A true knight indeed.

Gating

There's a term called sensory gating. It's the brain's way of dealing with repetitive stimuli, so that you don't have to attend so closely to repeated input. For example, if there's a noise that repeats, like the ticking of a clock, your brain takes note of the first tick, then sorts of gets used to it and tunes out the following ticks. It's nice, because otherwise you'd spend your whole life having to pay attention to ticking clocks.

Certain psychological disorders mess with sensory gating. Schizophrenics in particular often lack the ability to filter out repetitive stimuli, so they hear each tick of the clock as clearly as the first. It's enough to drive anyone crazy, if they weren't already crazy to begin with (actually schizophrenics aren't crazy to begin with. They generally don't develop their symptoms till their late teens/early 20s, which always struck me as incredibly tragic. But anyway).

I've come to conclusion that I have a serious sensory gating problem when it comes to my children, and it IS driving me crazy. Not that that's a long trip. (As Ross said, "Driving you crazy? That would imply you're not already there.")

I just can't tune them out. The constant, steady stream of input from them overwhelms me, particularly in the car. Two little voices coming from the backseat in a never-ending barrage. Stream of consciousness musings by Matthew on what the largest things in the world might be, queries from Tessa as to where Daddy is (which she asks over and over and over again).

Requests (demands) for this and that and the other; in Tessa's case, over and over and over. She'll ask me to pick up the thing she dropped from her carseat. I'll explain that I'm driving and can't get it now, but that I'll get it when we stop.

A nanosecond passes. "NOW you can get it, Mom?"

"No, I'm still driving. I'll get it when we stop, sweetheart."

We stop at a red light a second later. "NOW you can get me the brown puppy, Mom?"

Matthew exhorts me, in excruciating detail, about how to get through the level he's working on in the current video game he's been playing. Tessa wants me to sing with her, then yells for me to stop singing.

They've reached the "MOM, he/she's touching me; took my [whatever]; that's MINE!!!!!!!!" stage with each other. I know this is all perfectly developmentally appropriate, but it's driving me bonkers.

I just can't tune them out. I just can't ignore them. I feel obligated to respond to every single myriad comment, request, accusation. I try to do so in measured tones of voice. I try not to yell.

I wish Home Depot sold sensory gating. I need to give my brain a little rest.

Split Personality

What is it with kids saving all their worst behavior for Mom (and Dad)? Yeah, I know, we get the lovey dovey stuff that no one else gets too, and it is more than enough compensation, but it still cracks me up how kids know that the ones who love them best will tolerate their worst.

Yesterday I picked up Tessa at daycare and was putting her into the car. I noticed a bunch of dried blood behind her ear, with a bit smeared onto her neck. We went back to the playard so that I could ask if they knew what had happened to her. There had been no accident report, and since it was not cleaned up I was assuming that they actually didn't know anything had happened.

I was right, and Tessa's head teacher was mortified that she hadn't noticed. She was terribly apologetic and said that Tessa was the most uncomplaining child she'd ever seen. That Tessa will fall down hard, and they'll rush up to her and ask if she's okay, and Tessa just says "Yeah" and shuffles off to play again.

"Are we talking about the same child?," I asked. Surely they had her mistaken for someone else. MY Tessa whines incessantly about being hurt, about being sad, and constantly wants me to attend to ouchies. She wants me to pick her up following an infinite number of tragedies every single day. Drama queen, in a house full of drama queens (sometimes I think Ross is going to get himself committed just for the vacation).

The day before yesterday we got home in the evening (bright daylight still at 5:30!!! I LOVE it!!! Except that we play outside for so long every evening that by the time we come in and eat it's really late) and our neighbor was outside on their front lawn, with the two babies she was watching for a friend. The babies were twin boys, 9 months old, with that wonderful chicken-y flyaway hair standing straight up from their heads. *SO* cute! Their two older brothers were running around with my neighbor's four kids. Add in my two and that was a lot of kids running around the yard. Anyway, I hung out holding the babies, just drowning in baby lust. Despite the fact that it was their dinner time, the babies cooed and smiled big toothless smiles and tried to put their slobbery fingers in my mouth. *SO* cute!!

Then their mom showed up. Almost immediately both babies, who had been happy as clams before, started wailing. She picked up one, who quieted a bit, but then the other one really turned up the volume. She said it was their dinner time and hurriedly packed up all the kids into her car. The babies never stopped crying the whole time. It was an amazing contrast to their good-natured behavior just five minutes before.

Lucky moms (and dads), who are so trusted and loved by their children that they bestow upon us the behavior that would make strangers leave them on the side of the road :).

Bodies

Everybody's got one, right? I'm not too stoked on mine these days. I changed my eating habits, stopped snacking so much, am a lot more active than the slug I was during the winter when we couldn't leave the house, and I'm still exactly the same weight (30 pounds more than I was two years ago when I went on Paxil). This is unchartered territory for me, as I've spent my whole life being able to eat whatever the hell I wanted, never exercise a smidge, and actually worry about being too thin. It's kind of like when I started taking fertility drugs and suddenly started getting PMS, which I'd never had before. I suddenly thought, "So THIS is what everyone's been complaining about all this time! Yeah, it SUCKS!"

I look way too much like I did when I was pregnant, as the weight is almost all in my belly. My summer clothes don't fit. I literally did not have a single pair of shorts that fit me, which was a problem when the weather suddenly jumped into the 80s. I had to go out to Old Navy and pay FULL PRICE for a pair of shorts!

I am reluctant to complain about this to people, for fear of getting bopped on the head by people who have struggled with their weight all their lives and who would give up an appendage to be the weight I am now. I know that in relative terms I really don't have anything to complain about. But I look in the mirror, or just down at myself as I sit here and my belly splooges over my waistband, and I don't like it. It doesn't look like ME. I don't feel like ME.

And I don't even get the compensation of having bigger breasts finally! A funny about that: last night as I was pulling on a tshirt after my shower, Tessa commented on my having nipples, as she always does.

"You have nipples, Mommy?"

"Yes, so do you. So does everyone." (An homage to the Seinfeld "everybody's got 'em" episode.)

"Yay!," she said, "Nipple power!!"

A rather empowering attitude, seeing power in your body, no matter what it looks like.

Accomplishments

So it's not everyday that you see the word "Blog" in a headline in the Boston Globe, so my eye was caught to the front of the Business section the other day (Attention!! Attention!!! Freudian slip alert!!! As I was just typing section right now, I accidentally typed "sextion." AND, when I just tried to type section in the previous sentence, I did it again! AND, when I just typed the last sentence, I did it AGAIN! This is bordering on pathological! Okay, not so much bordering...)

ANYWAY, I was attracted by the word blog in a headline, which headed an article about how some blog writers are being awarded press passes for the Democratic National Convention here in Boston this summer. All an example of how blogs are becoming so mainstream, I guess. The part that struck me was a description of one of the guys who's been given a press pass. He's one of the writers on pandagon.com, which is a poliblog that Ross reads fairly regularly (I find it telling that all the blogs he reads are political and economic, whereas all the ones I read are personal blogs by moms). This guy, whose blog gets like 15,000 hits a day and is highly regarded, is 22 years old. His partner is still a junior at UC Santa Cruz (go, Banana Slugs!!!).

I am always startled when people radically younger than I am show themselves to be highly accomplished (okay, so having a popular blog isn't the hardest thing for a 22 year old to accomplish, but it's just one example of many). It all comes back to my extreme ambivalence about what I've "accomplished" in my life so far.

I always say that if you had told me when I was 17 that when I was 37 I wouldn't have a "real" career, I would have thought you were nuts. I was destined for great things. People had always told me so. I was going to be fabulously successful. In exactly what, I wasn't sure, but boy was it going to be fabulous. I was going to be fabulous.

So here I am, and I have a job that I hate, and previously I worked for seven years in a job that I was good at, but never felt like a career, never felt right for me. What the hell happened? What happened to my fabulous accomplishments?

Their names are Matthew and Tessa, and I don't discount for a second the magnitude of the accomplishment I have achieved, and still achieve, by being a good mother. I tell myself that there could never be a fricking *job* that was as important as my kids.

But there is still something missing, and I'd be lying if I said there wasn't. Something still to be accomplished.

Oh, and I hate the changes that seem to have been made to Blogger while I was on weekend hiatus. Though your new look is divine TC ;-)!!

Change

So I walked into my office this morning and my computer was replaced with another. It's the G4 that the woman who used to inhabit this office had. My bee-yoo-tee-full kickass G5 was given to the woman who just started working here yesterday (on my day off). I knew this might happen, and I can see how it makes a bit of sense considering I'm leaving in a month and a half, but I found it annoying that the puters were switched out on me on my day off. All my files were transferred for me, but that felt a little icky, not getting to do it myself. And this old keyboard sucks ass.

Oh well. I hate change, that's just all there is to it. I hated being made to change offices a couple of weeks ago. I hate new situations. I always have. I think it's just another example of how Matthew comes by his ASD honestly.

And after frantically running around from the moment I walked in at 8:45, trying to set up for my study, we couldn't run the subject because he ended up testing positive for cocaine. Some things never change...

Mother's Day Prep

Matthew surprised me this morning by complimenting me: "I like your dress." Of course he didn't take his eyes off the TV as he said this, but I still thought it was sweet. He really touched my heartstrings the other day. Tessa and I had stopped for Mother's Day cards for all the grandmas (my mom, Ross' mom, and Ross' two grandmothers) on the way home and Matthew made off with one. He was doing something at the diningroom table and kept telling me to go away when I walked by the room. After a bit, I realized that he was writing in the card and I said to Ross, "He does realize that card's for Grandma, doesn't he?" No, actually, he had thought it was for me (despite the fact that it said "Grandma" on the front by the kitty cat) and he had painstakingly written

"Happy
Mother's
Day
Mom
L"

Oh, we said, that's for Grandma. He instantly got upset. We told him over and over that it was wonderful, that Grandma would love that he wrote so nicely in the card, that we could change it to "Grandma," but he was inconsolable. It took awhile to calm him down, and he was fine, but I was so sad for him. Writing is still very difficult for him, and he had tried so hard to print neatly and had done it all on his own. He later did accept it when we erased "Mom" and "L" on the card, and he signed his name on all the cards. Tessa made beautiful little cards for all the grandmas with drawings on the front (all of Matthew :)) and "writing" on the inside (she carefully drew lines while intoning "Once upon a time, there was a beautiful princess... Once upon a time, there was a bunny..." etc.).

I provided Ross with all the pictures of the kids he needed to include in the cards to his mother and grandmothers and once again wondered why this was all my responsibility, him getting cards and pix out to his own family. Well, at least I don't have to buy my own card and present (he admitted to Matthew that there was no card for me yet, though there were two presents :)). At least I don't have to hear from him that I'm not his mother ;-).

I'm reminded, though, of the first Mother's Day after Matthew was born. Ross had been sick the week before and got a wee bit defensive when I commented on not having a card on Mother's Day to go with the picture frame he had bought me months before.

"I was sick," he protested.

"Yes," I answered, "and you know they only recently announced when Mother's Day was going to be."

The other thing Matthew said recently that blew me away was during an attempt to write something else to my sister, thanking her for some gifts, which was not coming out perfectly. I told him repeatedly that it was all right to try again, that it didn't have to be perfect.

"NO!," he cried. "I want it to be perfect!"

I told him that it was okay, that nothing in the world was perfect, that Auntie would love it even if it wasn't perfect. In what I thought was a stirring example, I said, "*I'm* not perfect, and you still love me."

Without missing a beat, he replied, "Yes, you are."

Wow. My heart jumped into my throat. "Oh, Matthew, I am *so* not perfect," I told him.

"Yes, you are," he repeated, with total conviction. I knew that he really meant it. It was startling to me, that this little person with whom I've made SO many mistakes, thinks I'm perfect. Me, the most flawed human being I know...

Okay, so there are good reasons for having children. Who else is ever going to think you're perfect??? Happy Mother's Day to me, and to all of us, perfect in the eyes of our children.

What's Important

So we spent the weekend in Westchester County, NY, hypothetically looking for a place to live. Ross had to go into the office in the city on Friday, so we all went and stayed with our friends Jill and Preston in Ossining, who have two kids right between Matthew and Tessa in age. The plan was that I would go to AAA and get maps on Friday, contact a real estate office in White Plains that had been recommended to us, and talk to a friend of Jill's who lives in White Plains and knows the special ed scene inside out, as her son has Asperger's. Then on Saturday we'd roam around White Plains and look at neighborhoods, then on Sunday we'd drive out to Montclair, New Jersey to check it out (having had a wonderful recommendation of the place made by Natalie).

I found out that White Plains has absolutely incredible special ed services, and they suggest additional services to you without you even asking (as opposed to most places, where you have to fight tooth and nail for every service, even badly needed ones). We found that White Plains has two very nice malls (hey, I'm an L.A. girl, damn it, I need my malls!). I found out that Century 21 in White Plains has one house rental listing for under $3,000 (everything else was like $3,500 a month). We found out that rental brokers charge a fortune to help you find rentals (like, more than a month's rent).

What mostly happened that weekend was that the kids all played and played and played together, having an absolute blast, Jill and I talked and talked, Ross and Preston talked and talked, the four of us adults talked and talked. We stayed up till 1:30 in the morning on Friday night all talking. So right before I went to bed that night (morning), I told Ross, "I don't want to go to New Jersey. I want to live here." He said that would could at least go check it out, since it seemed to be cheaper out there. "No," I told him, "I want to live here." He readily agreed.

Because what's really important is being around friends whom we love, especially coming into a whole new place. The kids need to be with friends, right from the start. I do too.