Everything Happened | vol. 213
Solo parenting and the legend of SMOG
Nick wakes me up at 9:30 on Sunday to tell me that he and Desi are leaving. Nick’s dad, hundreds of miles away in Ohio, is in that last room of life: sick with an illness that can’t be cured and for which treatment has stopped. Our deal is that he can visit Ohio as frequently as he needs as long as he takes at least one child with him. Nick let me sleep in as they loaded up the van but now they needed to start the journey. “Shit,” is what I say to this info.
Jane, my three-year-old, is outraged that they are leaving her behind. She sits on the threshold, holding the glass storm door open with her knees, wailing. I envision the outdoor air whooshing in through the opening and choking out all the expensive, chilled air inside. I tell her she can sit inside or outside but she needs to close the a door. She snaps her head to look at me, a vengeful ghost, and stares like I’ve pissed on the graves of her ancestors. Her legendary frown gives way to an unintelligible scream rant. I ask her if she would like some blueberries. The killswitch. All darkness is instantly snuffed out and she floats behind me to the kitchen where she swoons. “I love blueberries, mama. Thank you so much!”
Being solo with two kids is annoying for obvious reasons but there is something clean about having one adult in charge. There is no waiting around to see if the other person is going to start making lunch; you will make the lunch or there will be no lunch.
My mom used to talk of SMOGs, “smug mothers of girls.” Neighborhood parents of only girls who gawked at the antics of my high-energy, mischievous brother while their kids peaceably played mermaids with all of their important bones intact. There was an incident where a particularly irritating neighbor girl, his same age, taunted him on our walk home from school to the point that my brother shoved her to get her out of his face. The girl’s dad phoned my parents and implied my brother, without serious correction, would become a wife beater and a low life. He demanded an apology in writing.
Jane has her moods but overall her care tends to demand less of me than her brother’s even though he’s three years older. I suspect birth order is somewhat involved but so much is just how they both just were out of the box. Desi came out of the womb like a grenade with a pulled pin, daring you to find out what could happen if you removed your focus from him for one instant. Jane showed up pleased to have been included on the invite. A recent Evil Witches newsletter about supporting ADHD children referred to people who have “compliant girls who color all day and don’t require 72 checklists and constant boundary setting.” I laughed out loud at this line. There but for Desi go I!
Obviously, there are little girls who would spit in your face if you crossed them and little boys who want only to read in their beds in their softest clothes. For all I know Desi is a girl anyway! I’m just saying that the binary is false and yet a stopped clock is right twice a day.
With Desi gone, and Polly still more house pet than person, I am living a SMOG life. Jane is less aggrieved by the betrayal of their leaving once she realizes she is free to select shows her brother rebukes as babyish.
“Could I put on….Pinkfong?” she asks, while I am in the kitchen trying to make the Alison Roman potato salad. I am doing it all out of order and at the store my phone went dead so I bought ingredients from memory, failing to get enough potatoes.
"Definitely, babe.” I say to her. She looks thrilled, like she’s getting away with something. The potato salad comes together, though imperfectly, and at the neighbor’s cookout a man tells me it is the best potato salad he has ever had. “Alison Roman,” I offer, lest I misappropriate credit. He looks back at me, blank as a sheet, and I envy him his offlineness.
Jane and I play Dino Escape! before bed, a board game enclosed in the library parcel Nick brought home last week called “Dinosaur STEAM kit.” Within the clear plastic tote, there is additionally a set of “mother and baby” plastic dinosaur figures and a set of dinosaur removable decals that can be moved around a laminated prehistoric scene.
Jane, 3, illiterate, is showing me how to play the game and after a while I realize that she is taking an off-label approach. She just wants to roll the dice, collect cards of unknown purpose, and move the dinosaur figures around a loop that has no clear start or end point. We are locked in an infinite march around the island. There can be no dinosaur escape. To me, this is perfect. We roll and move our dinosaurs in a pointless, sacred dance, Jane narrating each turn like it’s ESPN. For a moment, I accidentally think about how life is just moving pieces around, collecting meaningless tokens, but then I turn my writer brain off before it gets too stupid. I feel like I am watching a jellyfish tank at the aquarium or watching waves land and slide back into the surf. She breaks my reverie, my exquisite boredom, by asking me if she can have some cheese. She can.
Bedtime is trash. My attempts to gaslight her into an early bedtime by drawing the shades and hurrying her through the routine fall flat. She lifts the roman shade and the sun’s hateful rays slice horizontally through the house. You can only Truman Show your kids for so long. She resists bed, says she will have too many nightmares, describes to me a series of hellish beasts that will visit her dreams. A wolf with a cobra for a head. A shark with a polar bear for a head. “That sounds cute,” I lie. “It’s not cute!” she shouts, so loud that I laugh.
“IT’S NOT FUNNY.”
Finally, I slip away with a bullshit claim that I need to check on Polly. Really I lock the bathroom door, sit on the toilet, and scroll the phone I’ve had to neglect for the past few hours. When I emerge, the front door is open, and Jane is wandering the yard in her pink dinosaur pajamas. I ask her what she’s doing and she does a big “umm” before settling on “I needed to show people my hair. How is Polly?” She knows I’m full of shit and I know she is. I guide her back inside claiming that the mosquitoes are out, which they are.
On Tuesday morning, I have to drive our manual transmission car to the girls’ daycare and my heart is racing like I have a date or a job interview. We accidentally bought a stick shift car last fall, and while I once learned to drive stick for a vacation, my brain is wiped of the knowledge as soon as I step out of the car. While neither of us were confident stick shift drivers, the little 2006 Toyota quickly became Nick’s daily driver. I continued to drive the van because I was too tired to develop a skill, like, are you serious. But the van is the car for road trips, and so there I was with the hatchback and a home daycare six miles down the road.
I stall out once in the driveway and I can’t decide if I want our neighbor, who is out gardening, to save me or not. I call Nick and ask him to remind me what to do, which I am humiliated to have to do. I resent the leftist bumper sticker on the car because I feel that every time I stall out at a light, I am representing leftists as effete, impractical, in the way. Jane interrogates me the whole way about why we’re going so slow, why the car is making that noise, can she have one of the DumDums that her dad keeps in the glove box.
We get to daycare and I can’t help but trawl for a little recognition.
“Did I do a good job driving Daddy’s car” I ask Jane.
“Yes!”
She has unbuckled herself and gotten into the glove box while I’m fussing with the baby and is eating a lollipop at 8 am.
“Yeah, I did pretty good,” I decide.
yr mate,
Evie
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"Being solo with two kids is annoying for obvious reasons but there is something clean about having one adult in charge. There is no waiting around to see if the other person is going to start making lunch; you will make the lunch or there will be no lunch." THIS. I only have one but I've been doing a lot of solo-ing lately and even with the annoying parts I always feel like an Executive Function hero when I get through the day.