Thanks for the Favor

Having pets can bring pleasure to your life if you concentrate on the good parts. The unconditional love is great, but the cleaning up puke and rushing around to find prescription dog food without a prescription and the never-ending poop scooping tends to take away a little from that enhancement of the quality of your life. It’s almost like taking care of pets is a concrete example of what life is really all about: picking up someone else’s shit.

Sometimes you decide you need a break from it all, the routines and doldrums of everyday life, and so you plan a vacation. But oh crud, what about your pets? Who will care for them, nurture them, and make them feel loved while you enjoy a week on the beach of sidestepping someone else’s dog crap? Boarding is always an option, although not without its own drawbacks, especially the cost and inflexibility of hours. I have several friends who have called a trip a few days short just because the kennel closed early on the weekends. Plus, how stressful is a kennel for your pet, who is accustomed to licking food off your fingers and sharing your pillow? Suddenly, you desert them in a hostile environment with strange dogs barking at all hours. It could make even the bravest of pets have an upset stomach in the backseat of your car on the way home.

Cats are a whole other story. Boarding would really be a last resort kind of option for me, because it takes all my strength, and by that I mean actual physical strength, to force my cats inside the car for a five minute drive to the vet’s office. I cannot imagine the ordeal it would be for me to board them, let alone how they might feel about it. Hiring a pet sitter is the easiest way to keep them at home, but when you tack the expense for that on top of a vacation, even a cheap weekend getaway, it adds up.

So I prefer to have a friend come to my home and feed them when I go out of town. I like to ask a friend who also has pets so that we can help each other out by taking turns caring for our pets while each of us finds something better to do out of town. Plus, it’s free. But like all things in life, friends pet sitting for friends has a dark side.

My friend BD and I have exchanged pet sitting several times over the course of our friendship, but lately, it just doesn’t seem to be working out. She usually boards her dog, who on a good day, with her loving family at home, could still bring western civilization to its knees with her enthusiastic tail wagging and jumping and cushion chewing and shoe snacking and homework eating. When I go over to BD’s house, the dog is so excited to see me she bounds in front of the car and waits there excitedly where I can’t see her, so that I never know if that day is the one I ran over her dog.

The cat, however, stays home and does what he does best, which involves filling the downstairs toilet with unrolled toilet tissue and knocking things off the counter. I’m used to that part, but BD recently expanded her menagerie to include a turtle and a hamster, so they are part of the pet care package. BD gave me a crash course in turtle and rodent care before she left town, and I felt fairly confident I could handle the responsibility. Wrong, as usual.

The first day I went over there, I dropped the hamster’s water bottle behind the dresser on which his cage sits. I tried to move the dresser out from the wall to retrieve the bottle, but it was stuffed with ten tons of business cards and brochures for BD’s job, so it wasn’t budging. I next scooted the end table next to the dresser away from the wall and tried to shimmy myself between the two pieces of furniture, but since I am not two dimensional, it didn't work. I got down on the floor and tried to peer into the dark underneath the dresser so I could at least see where the water bottle went, with no luck. I had no choice but to summon Incredible Hulk strength and walk the dresser away from the wall just enough so I could contort my arm and squeeze it behind, blindly feeling for the water bottle. Which was leaking a little, and very full. Right when I thought my arm was going to rip out of its socket, I felt the bottle with my fingers, grabbed it, and squirted water all over the wall while trying to get my arm loose. I was able to get my arm free, and it took significantly less than 127 hours.

I fed the turtle his dried shrimp and pellets after I finished with the hamster. Turtle food, by the way, smells a lot like a store in Chinatown. The turtle's little plant had come loose from the gravel and was bobbing along in the water, but I had had enough of sticking my hands in places I didn’t want to for one afternoon.

I returned every day for more of the same, but a few days later, the filter on the turtle tank was making a horrible noise. Smoke wasn’t coming out of it, but I had this mental image that I would make the turtle into soup and then burn down the house. I texted BD, who was coming home the next day, and she said to just unplug it, which I did. The water level also seemed low to me, but I don’t know nothing about caring for no turtles, so I tossed him a couple of extra dried shrimp and got the hell out of there. BD came home the next evening. During those twenty-four hours, that damn turtle rearranged all of the props in his tank, stacking everything against one glass wall before making his great escape. Curiously enough, BD found him behind the dresser.

When BD sits my cats, she too gets to experience the same kind of fun. My kitties get quite distraught when I go out of town, and they soothe themselves by chewing up the houseplants and vomiting them all over the place, a little bit at a time. I can be gone for less than two nights and find at least three little puddles of puke. BD has told me that a visit to the cats always involves one such surprise.

One time this summer, the cats took it a step further than the usual chew and spew. I had left their large container of cat food on the counter near where their food bowl is in my laundry room. BD came one evening in a rush, only to discover that one of the cats had knocked the very full container off the counter, causing the lid to pop off and kibble to scatter all over the floor. It wasn’t just a pile of cat food; it was fifteen pounds of dry cat food from the far wall to the doorway, like a rug of food. In fact, you couldn’t even see the rug underneath because of all the cat food. BD spent the next thirty minutes sweeping up as much of the food as she could, from under the washing machine and near the littler box and by the attic and every other square inch of laundry room floor. Teeth marks were visible on the lid to the container.

Maybe it just seems like pet sitting for each other is a favor, but in reality, it is more work and a bigger pain in the ass than just a simple “come over and feed the cat” or “all you have to do is count out twelve turtle pellets.” Our pets, like us, are rife with quirkiness and a tendency for melodrama. Maybe next time BD or I go out of town we should dress up the cats and the hamsters and the turtle as dogs and try for a group rate at the kennel. I am sure they have a contingency plan for animals hiding and frequent hysterical vomiting. And they work for a fee, not a favor.

Cock of the Walk

Tell me, is there anything as peaceful or relaxing as a house on the lake? To look out the window and see the calm water? To sleep in without the interruption of texting or phone calls? To lie in the hammock on the deck and feel the cool breeze? To hear the crowing of the rooster in the forest?

My husband and his brother in law recently purchased an older lakefront house at an absurdly low price, without the blessing of either my sister-in-law or me. While that is certainly an issue for more than one session of marital counseling, the fact remains that we are now part owners of a lake house, which means that occasionally, when we have nothing better to do (and believe me, I always try to find something better to do), we tootle down the interstate and spend a day at the lake. Our house is rundown and dated compared to the rest of the houses on the street, which are occupied full time by their owners. For us, it’s an investment/recreational property, so we are only there on the weekends, if at all.

My husband and his brother in law have spent the better part of six months slowly, and I do mean slowly, renovating the house, mostly without the assistance of professional craftsman. They have installed the hardwood floors, tiled the bathroom shower stall, and even hung light fixtures and window treatments. It is coming together, and in an effort to be civil, I occasionally go out to the house to see what needs doing and provide lunch and make sure our children don’t drown.

The truth is, I don’t like lakes. I grew up a beach person, and I am still a beach person. I like sand and salty water and waves and sitting under an umbrella to read a book and finding shells and spotting dolphins breaching in the distance. I like seagulls begging for crackers and sea oats and long walks with my bare inner thighs rubbing together. When it comes to the beach, I even like the patently unlikable parts.

But the lake? Well, I don’t like any of that business. The way it goes from twelve feet deep to sixty feet deep. How the water smells and feels and if you get any up your nose or down your windpipe, chances are good a brain-eating bacterium has just entered your bloodstream. And don’t get me started on the fish. You can’t even tell them apart; they all look the same and none of them are going to be a shark or a jellyfish or anything even remotely interesting or edible. Everything is slimy, and you have to wear life jackets, and did I mention snakes? Plus it’s boring. Get in the boat, ride around, jump out, tread water, sit on a tube, repeat. You can’t even go crabbing, and I am allergic to crabs!

One thing, however, does make the lake house worthy of the occasional visit, and that is the potential for wildlife. I am always optimistic that I will see deer when there, although it has yet to happen for me. Last time my husband took our daughters, they saw a deer swimming across the lake. A deer, swimming! Who knew they even knew how to swim? It’s not like he was doing the breaststroke, but he was in fact deer paddling his way from one shore to the other. Instead, I have seen woodpeckers, which are ordinary birds with extraordinary names, and hawks, and more than a handful of frogs. And I have seen the rooster.

Our lake house neighbors have a rooster that patrols their yard. He was a gift from some friends of theirs who raise chickens, but a coop only needs so many roosters, and he was a surplus rooster, so the neighbors took him to the lake as a pet. Let me tell you, there is nothing quite as odd as walking down a path to the dock and having a rooster, feathered ass and coxcomb waving in the breeze, cross your path. He has taken it upon himself to patrol not only his owner’s property, but ours as well, so you never know where he will pop up until you hear the tell-tale crowing.

One time, when we took some of our daughters’ friends with us to the lake, the rooster decided to join us on the dock. Well, he did need a little coaxing. The girls were both delighted and terrified to see him strut down the path, and I foolishly enticed him to walk onto the dock by making a trail of pumpernickel pretzels on the ground. It turns out that roosters like pumpernickel pretzels as much as chicken feed and worms and bugs, and before we knew it, he was all the way on the floating dock, high stepping and turning his head sideways in that weird way that chickens do. I thought if we were lucky, we could get him all the way on the boat, then maybe abandon him on the shore of another part of the lake so we didn't have to worry anymore about him attacking anyone near the house.

My husband came down to join us and chastised us for encouraging the rooster to strut on the dock, but I mommed up and admitted I was the one who got him there by feeding him pretzels. Really, pumpernickel pretzels are tasty, so it was a shame when my husband picked up the stray ones and threw them in the water, where they instantly grew waterlogged and sank before the ugly boring fish could even nibble them.

The rooster roaming on the dock and in the woods is the only good part of the rooster. The bad part is four in the morning, when the loud crowing starts. It’s one thing to hear a rooster crow on the Mattel See N Say, but it’s quite another when you are trying to relax at the lake. And this rooster seems to think he is more like a church bell or a grandfather clock; on the hour, every hour, he cock a doodle doos loudly and annoyingly. It’s quaint for one night, but if I lived there full time, that rooster would not.

My brother in law reported that the neighbors recently invested in some hens of their own to give that rooster something better to do than nose his way around the neighborhood, waking everyone up and snacking on pumpernickel pretzels. Maybe next time I go to the lake, I can get some fresh cage-free eggs to go with my four A.M. wake up call. If I’m going to be up that early, I might as well make an omelet.

A Doggone Lie

A few years ago, I wrote an essay about a woman at my gym and her helping dog who is always by her side while she exercises. I have seen that dog for years now, the same yellow Lab in his hunter green vest, alerting any friendly folk that he is working and not to pet him. He would stay close to her, resting on his belly while she used the treadmill or elliptical machine, which made me admire her for staying active and healthy in the face of some disease that required her to need the assistance of that sad eyed canine.

Well, last week, the lady was at the gym with a new dog, a beautiful but serious looking Golden Retriever. This new dog takes the job more seriously than the last one, staying very alert by her side, never making eye contact with humans, not even smiling a subtle dog smile. I didn’t think the other dog looked particularly old, but I suppose at some point even helping dogs need to retire.

I commented on the new dog while walking on the track with my friend DK, who like me, is both a regular at the gym and nosy enough to be aware of things like a new working dog.

I said something along the lines of “Hey, look, she got a new dog.” DK said she hadn’t noticed, so we took a moment to stare at the dog in all its splendor.

“What’s wrong with her, anyway? One of the instructors told me she’s blind, but she doesn’t act blind,” I said.

“There’s nothing wrong with her,” DK told me. “She is perfectly healthy.”

“Are you serious? What do you mean there’s nothing wrong with her?”

DK looked thrilled to be able to share a little gym gossip. “She has a disabled daughter. That dog is her daughter’s, not hers. There’s nothing wrong with her.”

“Pardon my language, but are you fucking kidding me?” I said to her.

“I kid you not,” she answered. “There is nothing wrong with her. Here, I’ll show you.”

Now, this part sounds like it’s going to lead to one of those moments like on The Brady Bunch, when Mrs. Brady was in court for a traffic accident. Remember that one? The guy who was against Mrs. Brady had a neck brace and was claiming whiplash, but he was really fine, and Mr. Brady tricked him into revealing his lie in court by throwing his briefcase loudly on the floor, which caused the man to turn his head to see what made that noise, thus showing a full range of motion in his neck and how could anyone try to set up Mrs. Brady anyway? Well, it was nothing like that. Except for the fraud part, to which Mrs. Brady could relate.

DK walked up to the old lady with the dog, bent down to stroke the dog’s head, and asked her what happened to the other dog. I don’t remember what the woman said since I was still in shock over the part where DK touched a service dog who was working, which on the scale of things you don’t do is somewhere between throwing your gum on the sidewalk and using the N word. The next part I remember well though and it went something like this:

“Oh, this is my daughter’s new dog. She’s on vacation right now, so I have him with me while she is out of town,” the old lady said.

“Well, he’s really beautiful,” DK said, “and so serious.”

“He takes his job very seriously,” she said.

"Enjoy your workout!" DK said cheerfully.

As DK and I walked away, continuing on the track, she turned to me and smugly said, “See?”

“I cannot believe that! I feel so violated.” I was outraged. “Who takes a service dog who isn’t even their service dog to a public place and passes him off as hers? What a fraud!”

“I told you,” DK said. “Nothing wrong with her.”

The next time I see that woman and her service dog who isn’t even servicing her, I am going to walk right up to him and scratch him behind the ears and maybe even give him a treat. Then I am going to follow her out to the parking lot when she leaves and see if she gets into a car in a disabled parking space, because if she does, I am going to report her to the police or something, because that is just wrong.

Okay, I am not going to do any of that. But I am thinking about making a little vest with a badge on it for my cat and taking him with me to the grocery store. If anyone asks me, I will say it’s my daughter’s, because that makes everything okay.

Between the Sheets

I like my high thread count sheets, and I am not going to apologize for them. I began buying nice sheets about eight years ago, sheets that used to be well out of my price range, sheets that come in either white or ivory and had packaging with calligraphy on it. They feel better, softer and more sensual, and even if I don’t get eight hours of sleep, I would like to have the environment be ripe for a good six hours. High thread counts are almost the standard now, though, and those sheets of the lifestyles of the rich and famous are pretty much available on trailer budgets and in a rainbow of colors. So I branched out from the typical boring ivory, and now I have a small collection of European style and Egyptian cotton bedding sets, in hues like taupe and sage green and rich chocolate brown.

My children appreciate the finer bed linens as well, and when they have difficulty falling asleep in their own beds, they like to climb into mine. Something about that combination of the king sized bed, the familiar smells of their parents, and the luxury sheets lull them to sleep faster than a Benadryl. When I am ready to go to bed, my husband will move whichever child nodded off in our bed, carefully walking them back to their own rooms, so that I can get comfy and read before I too slumber. It’s not uncommon for one of my daughters to find her way back to my bed after I have gone to sleep. At least one night a week, I will wake up to pee, only to find one of my kids drooling away on my husband’s pillow. If they are feeling stressed, or if they have a babysitter, or they have any other change in their normal routines, they soothe themselves by resting in my room. In other words, my bed is not an adults-only domain. And sometimes, it really should be.

Recently, my husband and I went to a party, and my friend SF babysat the girls. SF knows our musical bed routine well, as most of the time when she comes over to watch my children, one of them will end up in my room before the night is over. We all accept that as the norm and don’t really do much to change it, because both girls are easy to move back to their own beds. When we get home, SF gives me a full report of how they behaved and ate and slept, including the usual difficulties in falling asleep.

On this particular night, my youngest daughter, S, had that feeling that sleep was going to be difficult to attain, so she thought it would be best to start out in my bed instead of her own. SF knows I am cool with it and got both the girls to go through the bedtime routine of showering and tooth brushing and picture book reading. When it was finally time to say good night, S removed the shams and decorative pillows and turned down the comforter and top sheet. She looked at the bed before she climbed in.

“What is all over these sheets?” she asked SF.

SF looked at the brown sheets, which had evidence of conjugal relations on them. Some hot freaky conjugal relations. Which meant that evidence was kind of all over the place. SF is a friend, and a woman, and familiar with what she saw. Wisely, she didn’t say a word, nor did she laugh.

E, my older daughter, also inspected the sheets. “It’s probably just drool stains. I have them all over my bed too.”

S most likely gave E a skeptical look, so E did what for some reason seemed logical to her. She got on the bed and sniffed the stains. According to SF, she didn’t just gingerly snuffle. She got her nose right up on the stains and inhaled deeply.

“I think it’s just drool, they’re fine,” E declared. SF stifled all remarks or outburst of laughter, and instead tucked my daughter into my filthy nasty semen covered sheets and wished her a good night.

When we got home from our evening out, SF asked to speak to me alone, while my husband was downstairs piddling about with his wallet and loose change and keys and whatever the hell else he digs out of his pockets, which could be rocks and frogs and baseball cards for all I know.

“I have to tell you what happened tonight,” SF said, “but I don’t want your husband to hear.” And she relayed that story to me as delicately as she knew how.

“For the record,” I said, “I just changed the sheets two days ago. They aren’t that dirty.”

Because, really, what else could I say.

My mother used to complain incessantly about how nothing was ever just hers. I thought she was selfish at the time, and in all honesty, she is selfish, but in some ways, I know what she means. I am not going to change my sheets every time I get my freak on to protect my children from a reality they will learn on their own in less than ten years, which disturbs me every time I think it. One day, E will have her own sex stained sheets, and she might sniff it, and that smell might trigger a memory back to one night when she was eleven and her sister could not identify what was all over their parents’ bed, and she will know. Five gray hairs just sprouted on my head typing that sentence.

And that’s why kids should sleep in their own beds. And sheets should only be ivory.

Bah, Humbug

I was an eleven year old girl once. I don’t remember it being as tough as this. Mind you, I am not an eleven year old girl again. I am a forty two year old girl with an eleven year old girl, my daughter E, who manages to bring a level of drama to my life that didn’t exist even a month ago. I have to admit, I am not enjoying it. It’s a bad version of time travel, where you don't actually go back and relive the good ole days, you only get to watch them like Ebenezer Scrooge. E began sixth grade last week, and if that weren’t bad enough, she is creating parenting challenges on an almost daily basis.

Middle school just started, and it is to elementary school what a federal prison is to a halfway house. Every day, I am amazed by the rules and rigidity of all of her teachers and the administration. I admit, I did go to private school for sixth and seventh grade, but that was to avoid the three hour round trip bus commute in my hometown, not to keep me in a cocoon. I have no doubt that tweens are a bunch of troublemakers, as I am learning every day, but they aren’t criminals. Yet. What follows are just a taste of some of my favorite new rules.

• No water bottles. What is this, a public education or the TSA? I don’t my daughter tonguing the same water fountain as eight hundred other mouth breathers. Besides, who knows how much lead is leaking into that drinking water? I can assure you, she is not bringing a Camelbak filled with vodka to get her through the day. Water, it’s the stuff of life. Kids need it, way more than they do the high fructose corn syrup juice and chocolate milk you are selling in that cafeteria.

• No backpacks in the halls. Seriously? What makes backpacks contraband? I remember a few years ago when schools had a see-through backpack policy. It seemed the only people who had access to clear backpacks were New York City club kids, but whatever, suddenly they were a requirement in the suburbs, and the idea of a right to privacy between the ages of eleven and thirteen was heresy. Now, the kids can take a backpack on the bus or in Mommy and Daddy’s car, but it better be locked up the minute you walk through those doors. Next thing you know, they are going to check the lunchboxes for files. As if a pencil could not be used a weapon. You could out an eye out with one of those things.

• Bathroom breaks only during class changes. Okay, here’s a good one. How are tweenage girls supposed to figure out how to use a tampon if they only have three minutes between classes? My eleven year old can’t pee, flush, zip, and wash her hands in three minutes. I know, because I have timed her. I can only imagine the horror of dealing with feminine hygiene for the first time when you only have three minutes to plug up your manhole. And that doesn’t even count the time it takes to walk from one classroom to another, or the part where you have to work up the nerve to actually use the school bathroom.

We haven’t even gotten to the part about going to school in the morning too early or the fun of dismissal in the afternoon or the horrors of the dress code. It isn’t a set of striped pajamas and ankle shackles, but it might as well be. For some reason, my daughter is petrified of wearing shorts, and it has something to do with showing skin. I don’t know if knees have been banned, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

Yes, I do understand that we have adjusting to do, and until that occurs, my daughter is going to find herself feeling more than a little anxious. She is overwhelmed by the amount of homework, the fact that all she wants to do is sleep, that lunch is at ten thirty, that she doesn’t understand how to operate a combination lock, that she finds eighth grade boys cuter than sixth grade boys. Wait, that one overwhelms me. So why would she go out of her way to get into trouble?

Yesterday, I sat next to her on the couch while she read her science homework. I noticed what looked like freckles under her eyes, ones that I didn’t remember. They were very small and almost black, as if she had drawn them on with a fine point pen. I looked at her eyelashes, and I realized what caused those black dots. She had on mascara. If the under-eye spots didn’t give it away, the clumps on her lashes did. They were the clumps of a mascara novice. Did I mention she is not allowed to wear make-up until she is in seventh grade? Here's how it went down:

Me: What’s under your eyes? Are you wearing mascara?
E: No.
Me: Tell me the truth. Do you have on make-up?
E: No.
Me: This is the last chance I am giving you to tell me the truth. Is that mascara on your eyelashes?
E: Yes, ma’am.

She only says ma’am when she is in trouble or mad at me.

Me: Whose mascara is it? Did you put it on at school?
E: It’s yours.

I explained to her the dangers of sharing eye make-up. I reminded her that she is too young to wear it. And then I got mad about the lying. She said she lied because she didn’t want to get in trouble, but the lie is what got her in trouble. I would have told her to not wear make-up, to not use my things, but that lie cost her all computer access for two weeks, except for homework. No iPad, no laptop, no iTunes.

Remember that overwhelmed feeling I had? Well, it got a whole lot worse yesterday. If she will lie about wearing make-up, what else will she lie about? Not only is she breaking my arbitrary rules, but she is also going through my things and using them without permission. What if she finds all her baby teeth I have hidden? What if she finds my collection of sex toys? Hiding them higher in my closet isn’t going to work; she’s taller than me.

Yes, middle school is a series of adjustments. All she has to do is go there, learn, and stay out of trouble. Me? Well, I have to stay one step ahead of her. Which do you think is tougher?

PTA, PTSA, PTSD

“I don’t know why you are so nervous. You aren’t the one going to school tomorrow.” –S, aged 9.

This morning, while I drove to the gym, I listened to a song on my iPod by a band called Starfucker. I normally skip that song in the car because I don’t want my children to see the name of the band, even though they don’t say fuck in the song or anything like that. I was alone, though, so it didn’t matter. It was the first time I have ever driven to the gym alone on a school morning.

This week was the first day of school for both my children. My older daughter, E, began sixth grade, middle school. My younger daughter, S, started her first day of public school, after spending every school year since she was three at a Montessori school. Two kids, two first days, two new schools. I thought I had good reason to be nervous too.

Yesterday, I took each of them to meet their teachers and get a last look around before the fun began on the first day. S went to work with my husband in the morning so E and I could get a good look-see at her middle school without little sister distractions. I know E was nervous; she kept reaching for my hand and then remembering she was eleven and at school and someone might see her holding her mother’s hand. Poor baby. It’s tough when not only do you wanna hold your mama’s hand, but you are taller than her, and oh yeah, just being seen with her is embarrassing.

She had decided early in the day that she didn’t want to go to orientation with her friends, because she might get distracted and miss something she needed to know, like how to get to art class. I walked a few steps behind her like a Saudi wife, letting her set the pace for our progress through the checklist, the yearbook photo, the collecting of textbooks, the introductions to six new teachers. I was there to chime in with her last name when needed, when she couldn’t get out her own name because of nerves. That was one long hour, and we were both overwhelmed when it was through. We got in the car to pick up S and didn’t say a word to each other.

That afternoon was S’s turn at her elementary school, where E had been a student for the past two years. We stood impatiently waiting for them to unlock the front doors, general admission style, as opposed to the stockyard feel of E’s school, where we were herded into the cafeteria until they were ready for us. We jostled for position and when the doors were opened, rushed in along with all the other suburban moms and kids. We found the fourth grade class lists, and to our disappointment, we saw that S got the one class she didn’t want. Which is always the luck, really.

S and I entered her classroom and looked around, waiting for the teacher to finish talking to another family. When it was our turn, I introduced S to her, then convinced my daughter to look around while I explained to the teacher how sensitive S is, how she had been sheltered at her small private school since she outgrew diapers, how she was bullied by some of the other kids. I don’t know how needy we came across, but I am pretty sure my teary eyes gave it away. I stopped my mouth from spewing any more information all over the teacher, grabbed my folder of ten thousand forms that public school requires, and escorted my daughter around the school so she could meet her other teachers and familiarize herself with the building. I didn't want S to have the stigma of a hover mother in addition to the baggage she brought to the table herself.

On the way home, S asked me, “Mom, what is a grade?” She has never understood what a grade was, in either context. She never had a report card, so she doesn’t get the whole A through F thing. She wanted to know what happened to E. And grade levels, well, that too is meaningless to a child whose preschool class was three to six year olds and whose elementary class was six to nine year olds, depending on when their birthdays fell. There is so much she doesn’t know. Like how to check out a library book. Or how to get the bus at the end of the day. Or where to go to get a band-aid. Or how to find her classroom. She grew up sheltered, I admit, but I didn’t realize how sheltered. Just wait until she hears a kid yell shit or throw a cafeteria tray at the teacher.

And that big one, E, at middle school. She is used to nice teachers, to one classroom, to having a number called in the carpool line and a bathroom in the back of the classroom. She will have to use a real girls’ restroom, the kind from countless teenage movies. Yeah, those restrooms. She will have to deal with teachers who don’t give a crap if her pencil needs to be sharpened or if she started her period. She will have to learn how to avoid bullies and eighth graders and drugs. Chances are, by the time she finishes middle school, she will know someone who got pregnant, someone who got expelled, someone who got arrested. Is she ready for that? Am I?

Two new schools, with all the things that go along with them. It’s a lot to think about when driving all by myself to the gym, for the first time on a school morning, listening to my Starfucker song. Maybe I don’t miss diapers as much as I thought I did.

Buzzkill

As a parent, you sometimes know when you have totally screwed up, the kind of screw up that your child might bring up in therapy as an adult. You never intend to do permanent damage to your offspring, and yet, just by happenstance or plain not thinking, you go and say or do something that once out there, you can’t take back. If you are anything like me, and hopefully you aren’t, you beat yourself up over these parenting blunders. I can’t seem to remember that I am allowed to make mistakes as a parent, that just because my children might occasionally think I am an expert on many things and fairly infallible, that doesn’t make it true. I screw up just as much as the next mom, with alarming frequency. If parenting were a paid position, I don’t know how well I would fair at my next performance review.

The other afternoon, I picked up my daughters from day camp and drove them home. On the way, they took turns telling me about their days. My younger daughter, S, gave her usual report of who got in trouble and what she didn’t like, saving the good positive parts of the day to share later with her father at the dinner table. She is only nine and she already knows how to filter her information to avoid conflict and elicit sympathy.

My older daughter, E, was not quite as coherent in her retelling of the day. She had gone on a field trip that day to a nasty little kid spot called GattiTown. It is one of those pizza buffet and arcade houses, a huge box with no windows, neon patterned carpets, and no supervision. It’s like Chuck E. Cheese without the giant mouse and ball pit, catering to the older child with ADHD. Even I get stimulus overload in that place, which is why about three years ago I put a moratorium on going there with my family.

E had every intention of relating several good stories about her field trip to me, but every time, and I mean every time, she began a sentence, she would mumble out two or three words, then sort of toss her head around and laugh. I drove along, patiently waiting for her to make even a bit of sense, but that never happened. She would start talking and stop, laugh some more, mumble, her head lolling loosely on her neck. At one point, she became quiet and rested her head on the window with her eyes closed. I turned the music up to indicate our attempted conversation was over.

I thought I recognized that behavior in my eleven year old child. It was reminiscent of being stoned, a kid version of high as a kite, and it scared the hell out of me.

When we got inside the house, I waited for my younger daughter to slink upstairs and park her ass in front of the television before I confronted E.

“I need to ask you a question,” I said to her. “Can you come here for a second?”

“What?” she said, standing next to me by the kitchen counter.

“I am a little concerned about the way you were acting in the car just now,” I said. “Did you or any of your friends take anything on your field trip?”

“Take anything? Like steal? No, Mom,” she said.

“I don’t mean stealing, I mean drugs. Did anything give you anything to taste or swallow or sniff or anything like that today? Or did you see your friends sniff or swallow anything?”

E immediately sobered up, or, rather, woke up. “Mom, you think I’m on drugs? Why would you think that?”

“You are just acting really weird, not at all like yourself. I’ve never seen you this disoriented or incoherent. And you don’t act that way when you’re tired. So I asked.”

“I can’t believe you would think I would do a thing, like that! Gosh, Mom.”

Yes, she said “Gosh.” E speaks like Napoleon Dynamite on an alarmingly frequent basis, considering she has never seen the movie or that character.

She looked at me, her eyes all watery and on fire. “Don’t you trust me? I can’t believe this.”

“I do trust you,” I said to her. “But you’ve been at a field trip all day in a dark, unsupervised building with a bunch of teenagers. Then you get in the car and you can’t string two words together. I’ve never seen you act like this, but I have seen plenty of adults act like this, and they were either drunk or on something. I don’t smell alcohol on your breath, so I asked.”

She glared at me and stormed upstairs, and I stood alone in the kitchen, wondering how I could have handled that better. Was I overreacting? Was it fair for me to ask her? Was she being honest with me? Did I have any reason to doubt her?

I thought about our exchange for the rest of the afternoon, trying to get over the guilt I felt for confronting her about something for which I had no proof. She is, after all, eleven. She is a good kid, and just a kid. She doesn’t like to talk about love or sex, she doesn’t make or receive phone calls from boys, she doesn’t hang out with a rough crowd. She still likes stuffed animals. How could I make such a big leap? I apologized to her before dinner, and by dessert, the entire episode seemed forgotten.

I discussed it with my husband later that evening, trying to assuage my guilt. He sort of agreed with me, that if she acted so oddly, it was worth questioning, but he did seem to think I dramatized the whole situation. I might have; I honestly don’t know. My mommy instinct told me to ask, so I did. Maybe I didn’t handle it that great, maybe I could have been less accusatory and more understanding, maybe I was wrong. At least I cared enough to ask and was paying enough attention to notice, so that can’t be all bad.

I believe she wasn't on anything. I didn't get a blood test, but I do trust her. Maybe she was tired, and after a full day of tween talk, with all its "likes" and "ums," coherent conversation was beyond her. And perhaps next time, I won't jump to conclusions. For all I know, she might have been crashing from too much soda, which in my house we do treat like an illegal drug. I wonder if she will be as scarred as she claimed to be. She can just add it to the list of grievances about my parenting, and I, in turn, will drop another dollar into her therapy fund.