Jack and Liam had a pirates and princesses themed birthday party a couple of weeks ago at a a very magical play space in Taos called Twirl. Maybe its the novelty of it all after growing up in a household full of girls, but something about watching a bunch of boys ranging in age from three to eight, decked out in pirate regalia, commanding each other to “Man the ship!” and “Hoist the sails!” while dashing across a little wooden bridge fills me with a specific kind of joy.
Oban co-coaches Jack and Liam’s U-6 (six years old and under, in soccer speak) soccer team. I put on their cleats, shin guards, and socks. I’m not quite sure which one of us has it worse.
Every Saturday morning, our house is full of nervous, testosterone driven soccer anticipation. Liam and Jack get jacked up on pancakes drowned in maple syrup. Oban drinks an extra cup or two of coffee. Uniforms are donned. Soccer balls are gathered. And then we wait approximately five hours until our 2:30 game time.
When we first saw this year’s soccer schedule, we thought 2:30 seemed like an ideal game time for our family. All four of us are night owls, and if you happened to stumble into our house anytime before eight A.M. you’d think we were all passed out and hungover from a wild party the night before, splayed out on a strange arrangement of beds and futons. The way I see it, we’re all still making up for years of sleep deprivation. Our friends don’t bother calling our house before nine. And if our team had been given the 8:30 A.M. slots, well, I think we would have signed up for a different sport altogether. But waiting until 2:30 in the afternoon every Saturday now feels like some kind of karmic punishment for our indolence and sloth.
After we have somehow managed to kill the first few hours of the day, generally by breaking up the arguments and fights that erupt between Jack and Liam after their blood sugar drops, I try to force lunch into my sons who would both much prefer to subsist on chocolate milk between the hours of nine and five. Of course the butterflies in their stomachs only serve to further suppress their appetites and make all food more appear more “ixgusting” (Jack and Liam speak for “disgusting.”) I then allot an entire twenty minutes to put on Jack’s cleats, shin guards and socks. I am not sure that Mother Theresa herself could accomplish this objective without occasionally wanting to strangle Jack with his own shoelaces. Not only must Jack’s bunchy soccer socks remain perfectly smooth without a single ripple or bump, but they must also be folded down at the exact angle that Jack believes all real soccer players wear their socks while the shin guards stay poised at the specific height that will allow them cling to his calves without squeezing too tightly. Complicating this issue is that the widest part of Jack’s concave legs are his knees. His cleats must then be laced to precisely the same tightness on both feet.
Jack is generally absolutely beside himself by the end of this process, frustrated by my complete incompetence as a mother, and I need to step outside for a few deep breaths of fresh air in order to calm down. I then remember that it’s my turn to bring snack again and desperately forage for appropriate food in our our pantry and frig while Oban switches the boys’ booster seats from my car to his, since all three of them have an unspoken agreement that we should drive in the more manly vehicle to the soccer fields while listening to loud, hard rock music on an XM radio station.
When we finally get there Jack and Liam race like gladiators to the grassy field. While Oban tries to accomplish a variety of coaching missions, including luring Isabella, who hates playing soccer, onto the field without appearing like a pedophile and stopping the other Isabella, who loves playing soccer, from pushing kids on the opposing team without offending her parents, and reminding Marlin of which side our goal is on, and corralling our star players Milo and Ricky so we don’t entirely slaughter the other team, Jack and Liam’s only objective is to outscore each other.
In their matching uniforms, no one can tell them apart on the field. All the other parents on the sideline look at me or Oban’s mom to figure out who to cheer for when one of them makes a break for the goal. In U-6, no score is kept. And although I couldn’t care less who wins or loses after a season of straight losses last year when our team was by far the youngest and tiniest, I sit on the sidelines holding my breath, hoping beyond hope that some sort of divine providence will grant Jack and Liam the same number of goals, so that neither will leave the field despondent.
Oban and I have tried everything to quell their competition. Our protestations of “But you defended the goal!” and “You passed so well!” or “ It’s about having fun!” have been met with either blank stares or exasperated grunts. Feigning total ignorance of the number of goals scored by each of them hasn’t worked either, because of course they both keep perfect track of that themselves. We’ve even considered putting them on separate teams, but figure they would still compete over goals scored in their separate games and even worse, they would have to play against each other.
So, when Jack tries to hide the tears falling down his cheeks at halftime during the third consecutive game of Liam scoring more goals than him, I pull him aside and hear myself say, in a shamefully conspiratorial tone and contradicting just about everything his coaches have taught him, “Stop passing. If you want to get as many goals as Liam, just get to the ball, take it down the field. and kick it in.”
He listens. And it works. Jack scores. And anytime Liam scores again during that game, and in fact only after Liam scores, Jack runs to the ball, dribbles it down the field and kick its in.
And we all go home happy. Oban drinks a beer.
We can work on passing next year.
long before bedtime
Last night, while I was reading one of their bedtime books, City Mouse and Country Mouse, Jack and Liam got in an argument. I sit between their beds when I read and since I was red-eyed tired, the quarrel barely registered in my consciousness. It was not a wildly passionate argument, more of a run of the mill difference of opinion. I was not really listening to the content or details of their disagreement, which had something to do with the workings of a mousetrap, but instead just sort of mentally spacing out waiting for the break and calm that would signal I could keep reading, finish the book and finally get them to bed. I heard my voice make a few auto-piloted efforts to smooth things over and move things along. And then I heard Liam cry out, “Just like Baby Jesus!”
Well that caught my attention. Just for the record, Jesus is referred to only as “Baby Jesus” by Jack and Liam. While I was raised Catholic, religion has not exactly become a formal institution in our household, much to my parents’ dismay. Oban was raised Hippie and I have become, more or less, the kind of person I recall being so frowned upon in mass as a child; the holiday Catholic. When we took Jack and Liam to mass on Mother’s Day this year, it was the first time they had been in a church since my grandfather’s funeral mass in January. Jesus, in my boys’ experience, was the very special baby born on Christmas, the one in the nativity scenes and the one so many Christmas carols are about. However, in the church on Mother’s Day, my five year old boys were suddenly and totally transfixed by the violent images of the Stations of the Cross.
“Who’s that bloody guy, Mama?” Liam shouted out in the middle of the Mass.
“That’s Jesus,” I said, uncomfortably. Liam looked at me like I was either kidding or crazy.
“Not the baby Jesus. the grown up Jesus,” I whispered.
“What are they doing to him, Mama?” Liam asked pointing to an image of Jesus being nailed to the cross, to which I stuttered and stammered for a while until Jack asked, “How old to we have to be to watch Jesus the Movie, Mama?”
And despite that conversation in a crowded pew, which really only grew messier and trickier as it went on, they apparently still refer to Jesus, the good guy who got nailed to a cross by the mean guys, as Baby Jesus. I looked down at the book in my lap. There was a picture of a mousetrap. City Mouse was showing Country Mouse how to steal a piece of cheese from it, much to Country Mouse’s shock and horror. Jack and Liam were arguing over the workings of the mousetrap, trying to figure how the trap would actually kill the mouse. Liam felt he had won the argument by surmising that the mouse would be pinned down by the metal bars, in a crucifixion fashion, and left to die, “just like Baby Jesus.”
“Right, Mama?” Liam asked.
Trying to take Baby Jesus out of it, I explained how a mouse trap is triggered and agreed that yes, the mouse would likely either be squished and killed by the metal bar or at least trapped by it until it died, which proved to be an adequately gruesome explanation and sent them spinning into a few seconds of thankfully quiet, enraptured contemplation.
“And that’s why Country Mouse doesn’t want to live in the city, even if he has to eat yucky roots,” Jack said after a while.
“ Yes, I suppose that’s right,” I said, and then I finished reading the story.
Barack waves to us in Espanola. Photo by Dorie Hagler.
Last week I went to Espanola, New Mexico to hear Barack Obama speak. After dropping my boys off at kindergarten, I climbed into a minivan along with seven other Obama Mama friends from Taos. We have eighteen young children between us, the youngest of whom joined us for our adventure. We drove through the winding canyon, shimmering in autumn yellow, down to Espanola, the self proclaimed lowrider capital of the world and the town with the highest per capita heroine addiction in the nation, looking for inspiration and the best chicken tacos with guacamole in all of America.
I began volunteering at the Obama office in Taos just last week. It’s a funny little scene, complete with the requisite Taos crowd of middle aged hippies, artists, Hispanic grandmothers, pueblo kids, and ski bums already waiting for snow, with an adorable sophomore from Stanford running the joint. I doubt he had ever heard of Taos before being shipped here. And when it was announced that Obama would come to speak in Espanola, my heart welled up with the kind of ironic contentment that I have experienced only in my most New Mexican of moments. For lack of a better analogy, this event would be like seeing the pope in Fort Lauderdale – during spring break. And it would be happening only one hour’s drive away. Obamanos!
Shedding my basic black top for a ridiculously tight, cap sleeved, pink and brown Mama for Obama tee provided by my friend Dorie, I found myself looking like the thirty seven year old, wrinkled version of a pre teen Courtney Cox in Bruce Springsteen’s Dancing in the Dark video. I mention this only to show how much I love Obama. And I’m not sure if it was the dry, relentless ninety degree heat that day or the aforementioned tee but I was shocked to find myself reeking of body odor within the first hour of waiting on line near the Lotaburger parking lot in Espanola. And still I wore the shirt, which again goes to show how much I love Obama.
We waited for two hours before the gates even opened, and another two inside. If someone had only mentioned that Obama was scheduled to meet with tribal leaders early that morning in Albuquerque, we would have known to sleep in and gone out for coffee. Then again, it may never occurred to me that someone as powerful as the democratic nominee for president would fall into the same time warp that everyone else does the minute they step foot in New Mexico and especially when they happen to step foot in a meeting with tribal elders. And in classic New Mexico form, following that meeting, Obama’s bus driver chose to take him up north “the scenic way.” By the time he finally arrived, my physician friend Erin had treated several people who had passed out from heat exhaustion in the crowd that had swelled to 10,000, although no one complained, because nothing ever happens on time in Espanola. And besides, the music they kept pumping through the loudspeakers was really funky and good.
The sharpshooters on the roof of the adobe church even seemed relatively relaxed. As a safety precaution, the plaza was entirely ringed by empty school buses. A single helicopter circled as black suited secret service agents dripped in the heat. As he walked out on stage, smiling widely and glowing with an electric calm, my eyes literally welled up with tears and I said a silent prayer that this man should remain safe. While clapping and clamoring for a view, the entire crowd seemed to exhale a collective sigh of relief that he had, at last, arrived.
After fumbling the name of Espanola’s mayor, prouncing it something like “Mayest” instead of Maestas, which reminded me of my original “anglo” mispronunciation of the name of the principal of the Taos Middle School where I used to teach, Reynaldo Quintana as “Mr. Quinn/tan/a” instead of “Mr. Keen/tah/nah,” Obama recovered skilfully. Bill Richardson, who had delivered a rousing introduction, seemed to be willing him through it as he sat nearby, arms folded across is chest, wearing a black shirt with a traditional bolo tie. Obama spoke primarily about the economy, following the stock market’s dramatic plunge the day before. And while it felt to me that Wall Street’s cavernous towers were entire light years and galaxies away from the Espanola plaza that day, the real message that was delivered was an unspoken one, that of calm, thoughtful, honest and gifted leadership. Here was a genuinely warm and extraordinarily intelligent human being, speaking not in condescending sound bites to a rural community but in forthright, respectful, sensible, and graceful language. Bottom line; I trusted him. In fact, the dorky middle schooler in me who played the bells in the marching band wearing a green and yellow polyester suit on equally hot and sweltering days decades ago trusted him. And even more importantly, though I would not wish the laundry list of profound problems the next president will inherit on my worst enemy, I would entrust the futures of our collective eighteen children to him.
We left the rally sun burned and dehydrated, stopping at Dairy Queen for cokes and at a roadside shack called Sugars in the riverside town of Embudo for chile cheese fries that never materialized because they ran out of food. As governor of territorial New Mexico Lew Wallace said back in the 1880′s, “Every calculation based on experience elsewhere fails in New Mexico.” I arrived home hours late, tired, hungry and undeniably grateful for my day’s filling slice of American pie. Si se puede! Viva Obama!
As fall approaches, I find myself flooded with memories of Jack’s illness and hospital stay last autumn. I wrote this before I had a blog in December of 2007…
Jack looked like a hostage while being wheeled on a stretcher into the back doors of the ambulance. “Look,” I said lamely to my precious, barely five years old and utterly terrified son as the driver shut the windowed doors, “we’ll be able to see out the window and watch where we’re going.” Quietly, I corrected myself. “I mean I guess we’ll be able to see where we’ve been…”
I sat down beside him on the bench seat next to the stretcher, buckled my seat belt and began waiting for this two and a half hour journey to Albuquerque, through snaking mountain canyons and across high desert mesas to be over. Propped on pillows, Jack stared angrily out the window. His was not a childlike, tantrum kind of anger but more like that of a trapped animal; still and primal. I searched his eyes for evidence of my playful and curious son and recognized only his will and his courage.
My head and heart were throbbing. I was certain I could feel the weight of every mother who had ever watched her child suffer and who had ever worried bodily, with her skin, her jaw, her teeth… Here we were again. The last time he and I had gone through this together, Jack was still inside my uterus. That time we drove in a car. A routine ultrasound had revealed a cyst on his umbilical cord, blocking his blood and nutrient supply, putting him and his identical twin brother at risk. I never knew until this time that riding in the back of an ambulance is like sitting in the back of a pick-up truck.
“I’m here with you. It’s going to be alright,” I said, laying my hand on him, every time he grimaced or cried out in pain, as he did over every bump in the road across 150 miles, increasingly more so as the morphine and sedative he had received earlier before his third cat scan continued to wear off. I whispered these words to him countless times, and every time I felt like I was lying. Yes, I was with him and I would be with him through whatever was to come but I didn’t know that it was going to be alright. Enough had already happened, seemingly in an instant, that I could peer into the crack between everything being alright and nothing ever being alright again. I thought of my son Liam, Jack’s twin brother, being driven in our car by my husband Oban somewhere behind us in the vastness of New Mexico, as the October sun dipped behind the mountains. That very day, Liam had watched me sob so uncontrollably on the phone with my sister (shortly after a nasogastric tube had been incorrectly inserted in Jack) while driving him to get his lunch that my sister had to force me to pull over in a church parking lot, as Liam sat helplessly strapped in his car seat.
I thought about how, just a couple of days before, my pregnant friend Erin had sent out a group e-mail, requesting a recommendation for a book that she could enjoy in her “fragile, emotional state.” She had attempted reading Interpreter of Maladies, a story about the disintegration of a marriage following the birth of a stillborn son, and couldn’t stop crying for hours. I e-mailed her back and explained that when my twins were two I had made the similar mistake of reading Angela’s Ashes, and couldn’t get past the point when a toddler boy dies and his twin brother spends months looking out the window, waiting for his return. “ I mean, come on!” is what I wrote in my e-mail.
And here I found I myself standing ironically on the precipice, trying to avoid staring into that crack, that fissure in the ground that had seemed so impenetrable, that could remain a tiny fracture or could open more and swallow us all whole.
It had all begun so commonly. I had a brief and insignificant stomach virus. Liam seemed to experience it even more mildly, and then a couple of days later, Jack came down with it. After a few minor bouts of diarrhea in twenty-four hours, it was over. A day later he went back to preschool. That afternoon, he began to complain of stomach cramps and acting strangely listless. The next day, I watched crippling pain rise up in him from his abdomen to this chest. It came in waves that reminded me of labor but it looked like he was having a heart attack. My typically stoic son, worried that any admission of illness might mean medicine or a trip to the doctor, looked up at me and said, “Mama, I think I’m going to die.”
They had ruled out the appendix. Fluid continued to build in his abdomen. He could not eat or drink. His CRP, a non-specific measure of infection in the body determined by a blood test, was extraordinarily high. Intravenous morphine didn’t seem to take the edge off his pain. After a night and day of invasive tests at our local hospital, the doctors were sending us to a university children’s hospital because they couldn’t figure out what was happening to Jack.
Just as when we had been sent from our small town of Taos to an Albuquerque hospital with a neonatal intensive care unit five years earlier, Liam was again along for the journey and though they no longer shared a placenta, I knew his future was still inextricably tied to his brother’s. The night and day Jack had already spent in the hospital was the longest they had ever been apart since their month spent as preemie infants in the neonatal intensive care unit.
By the time we reached Albuquerque, I was kneeling on the floor of the ambulance holding Jack. When the driver lifted Jack’s skinny body from the stretcher into a hospital bed, he wiped tears from his bloodshot eyes. “You and your brother come visit us when you’re all better and we’ll take you for a ride, OK?” he said.
We spent six sleepless days and nights in the hospital. Liam slept at a nearby hotel with Oban and my mother, who had flown in from New York. I slept on a chair or curled around Jack in his bed, trying not to tangle his IV line. Between his pain and the constant waking by the nurses to draw blood from his impossibly tiny veins, nights became a slow kind of torture. By the third day, Jack had the strength to walk a few steps. We pulled him in a red wagon to the toy room. Liam, frustrated by Jack’s exhaustion, persistently tried to engage him with whoopee cushions and ice pops. On the fourth day Jack was isolated for contact precautions while his blood was tested for viral hepatitis. Little by little, his blood work began to normalize and his team of doctors cautiously surmised that he had fallen prey to an enterovirus that had impacted his gallbladder, pancreas, and liver, causing those organs to leak the fluid that had collected in his abdomen. He had a low grade fever for three days as the virus made its exit. I waited fearfully to see if the same symptoms would appear in Liam next. They never did.
We carried Jack, still too weak to walk, around the Albuquerque plaza in a pirate costume we bought at the nearest K-Mart for Halloween trick-or-treating on his first afternoon out of the hospital. At the doctors’ request, we stayed in a motel near the hospital for two more days – and then drove back home for a couple more weeks of recovery. At first embarrassed by his illness, Jack eventually came to embrace his heroic status at school and seemed to exude a newfound quiet confidence. He was eager to laugh and play. Liam, who had thrived during Jack’s hospital stay, fell apart. He was volatile, clingy, and plagued by nightmares. After watching Ratatouille, he cried,“I don’t like that movie! That mouse lost his family!”
In the span of the next month, our family endured an onslaught of medical annoyances; Liam had a severe case of croup, I sliced my thumb open with a kitchen knife and needed six stitches, my elderly grandfather was hospitalized for dehydration. Through talking about each of these more manageable experiences, and with the help of an art therapist, Liam seemed to begin to work through the emotions he felt surrounding Jack’s hospitalization.
Then, the three-and-a-half year old brother of one of Jack’s and Liam’s classmate, who had begun stumbling, feeling dizzy and exhibiting unusual behavior, was taken for a cat scan. He was ultimately, dreadfully, diagnosed with an inoperable tumor that had invaded his brain stem, at the same children’s hospital we had so recently left. Liam came home from school and told me, “Luna says Pablo’s dying because his brain is growing too fast. Luna says he’ll be in the hospital for infinity days.”
I had to catch my breath. I could no more guard Liam from this reality than I could have shielded Jack from the virus as it twisted through his body, or Pablo from his cancer. As much as I yearned to protect what I saw as the sacred bond between my young twin sons, life was already teaching Liam that not everyone is made better at the hospital and that his worst fears for our our family had been, in fact, possible. Yet somehow that sober confirmation seemed to validate Liam’s experience, and in the end, reminded me that deep love cannot exist without deep courage, twin qualities that together create something akin to grace.
I thought she had hit bottom. There, in the semi-circled driveway in front of the retirement community’s pool and recreation center sat my mother’s red 1985 Volkswagen Jetta, the windows defiantly buzzing up and down, up and down, accompanied by the cacophony of the blaring car alarm. My mother, wearing a dripping wet bathing suit, flip flops and cover-up, frantically unlocked and locked the car with her keys, then sat down in the passenger seat and attempted to start the ignition, then got out and unlocked and locked the car again, in a seemingly endless cycle. My ninety-five year old grandmother sat, dumbfounded, in her portable wheelchair on the sidewalk next to the Jetta holding a tall pile of damp pool towels on her lap.
I watched from a safe distance of about half a football field. My sons and I sat at the far edge of the parking lot, near our car, in the shade of a sheltering maple tree as I showed them how to split open the seed pods to reveal the gooey centers and stick them to their noses. I could tell it might be a while and I wanted to distract them, but the noise and the commotion coming from my mother’s car barely caught their attention. At four years old, they were already seasoned veterans when it came to grandma’s chaotic car alarm incidents.
I knew better than to get involved. My mom prized her unique personal relationship with the Jetta, and experience had taught me not to interfere. “She just thinks someone’s trying to steal her!” she would insist whenever I attempted to convince my mom that this was not the way car alarms were designed to operate, usually after having experienced a nerve wracking and embarrassing incident with the alarm myself.
“Why does she think someone’s tying to steal her?” would be my inevitable follow up question.
“Because you buzzed the windows down,” she would explain impatiently, as if it were obvious that one should never open the windows of a car. “Or did you unlock the trunk?”
Generally, things miraculously resolved by the time we had attracted a small crowd of onlookers, and although various theories arose after each incident, no one in the family was ever was quite certain what would have ultimately caused the alarm to stop. This time, however, was different. When it seemed the typical alarm duration had passed without sign of resolution, I reluctantly began walking over to the scene to see if I could somehow help. I was halfway there when the alarm suddenly ceased and my mom, now pushing my grandmother in her wheelchair at a relatively high rate of speed in my direction, started waving me off. My grandmother shouted, “Stay with the boys!” with a tinge of desperation in her voice.
“We can’t get back in the car because the little red light is blinking,” my mom yelled.
This meant trouble. With the Jetta we had learned that if ever the tiny light in the driver’s side door were lit, which seemed to happen haphazardly, it meant there was virtually no chance of entering the automobile. The alarm would certainly go off, and the car would go into some sort of impenetrable lock down mode, unable to start. In the meantime, the Jetta was parked in a drop off and loading zone.
“Do you have your triple A card?” I shouted.
“No, it’s in my purse.”
“Where’s your purse?”
“In the trunk.”
We were in for it.
Unable to shove the wheelchair into the trunk of my car or to squeeze it between my boys’ car seats, we abandoned it on the lawn, much to my grandmother’s chagrin, while my mother drove my grandmother back to her condominium, helped her inside, then circled back to retrieve it and deliver it. On our way back to attempt to retrieve the Jetta, I said to my mom, “Well, what I would suggest is trying to unlock the car, then unlock it again quickly…”
My husband swore that this double unlock technique was the secret to de-alarming the car when I had called him two weeks earlier from the beach, while my mother, my boys and I were last trapped outside of the alarmed Jetta. Before trying it, we went swimming again and licked drippy Superman ice-pops from the ice- cream truck and by the time we returned to the car,with stained lips and sandy towels, the little red light had disappeared.
“I did that already,” my mom said, shooting me a look that made me realize that she too was going into lock down mode. When we returned to the Jetta this time, the little red light was still blinking and my mother was forced to charm her way through a tricky conversation with the elderly director of the retirement community, promising to have a mechanic come and repair it so that the car could me moved.
“Well at least it will be fixed once and for all,” I said hopefully to my mom. My sisters and I had tried countless times before to convince my mom to allow us to have the car’s alarm permanently disconnected, but she had resisted.
My mother called Triple A from home, explained in a business like tone that her card was in the trunk and went back to meet the mechanic who unplugged the car battery to turn off the alarm, then plugged the battery back in again. The car was technically fine, and my mother was able to get in it and to drive it back home and promised all of us that she would bring it to the dealership the following day to have the alarm disabled.
“Either that or please drop it off in Central Islip and we’ll just hope it gets stolen,” my sister added.
Of course, no one could possibly steal this car. To be fair, my mother had replaced the Jetta a couple of years ago. She kept it only to drive while my sons, my husband and I visited from New Mexico. She generously loaned us her Volvo sedan because it was newer and had airbags and she felt it was safer to drive with the boys. And yet, it was beginning to dawn on me that the Jetta remained a kindred spirit to my mother. She never personified the Volvo in the same way she did the Jetta by calling it “she” or by attributing powers of thought to it. Loyal, economical, bright, cute, comfortable and stubbornly protective, the Jetta has at different times driven her, her husband, her elderly parents, adult daughters, son-in-law and young grandsons, a dog and two cats safely through rain, sleet and snow – to airports, doctors offices and train stations. And with kayak racks on the top of it, and air conditioning that comes on strong and fast, it has always been a great beach car in the summer, despite the fact that we’re not allowed to open the windows.
It has been a few weeks now since our latest incident and my mother has not taken the Jetta to have the alarm repaired or removed. Perhaps my mom simply cannot bare to strip her comrade Jetta of its only, albeit dysfunctional, defense mechanism. I must admit that an overactive alarm may really be a small price to pay for the distance she has carried us.