Catherine Newman Weekly Blog: 3.19.07

Dalai Mama Weekly Blog

Catherine Newman chronicles life parenting Ben, 8, and Birdy, 5

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March 19, 2007

Good for Nothing

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Listen to Catherine

If your kids have been in the bath for over two hours — every digit shriveling away to wrinkled white stubs while they take turns turning your hospital-issue postpartum spray bottle into a watery volcano — it seems safe to assume they'll stay in there, oh, another fifteen minutes or so. Ten or five minutes, even. Though this may not even be a conscious assumption. This may be more like something your body decides on a pheromonal level while it pushes the door shut with one foot, snuggles down with its partner in a way that is not precisely snuggly. But you've forgotten the inaudible call and response between adult desire and child sex-radar. Because not a minute into your unsnuggly snuggling you hear the bathroom door fly open, you hear the slip-slapping of wet feet in the hallway, like it's an entire colony of penguins flapping in from their bath and not just these two maniac children who burst into the room and fling their drenched selves into bed between you, screaming with laughter. "Did you guys even towel yourselves off?" you will cry, and they will scream with laughter some more: "We didn't! We're drenched! We're soaking wet!"

I am reminded of a wonderful poem a reader once sent me when I wrote on a similar theme: Galway Kinnell's "After Making Love We Hear Footsteps." But maybe Kinnell could have appended to the poem a few bulleted tips on how it is they make it to the "after" part, since my poem title would need to start with the word While. The first bulleted tip could be "Pick a time of day other than mid-morning." Or "Consider door locks."

But I can't even complain. Not really. And not just because nookius interuptus is, as everyone knows, better than no nookie at all. But also because we're finally having the kind of lazy weekend I've been craving for weeks. Months? I don't know. We have no plans today: no social outgoing or incoming, no work that can't wait, no errands beckoning. I want to be the mom who is dying to zip the kids into snowsuits so that we can snowshoe up Mount Tom and enjoy a celebratory summit picnic of sleet — but what I am is this mom, the one who likes to lie around in bed, snacking on pita chips and tzatziki, while her kids play happily with Lincoln logs and smother her with occasional blankets of affection. I especially like this when I can sweet talk Michael into keeping lazy company with me. Like now.

It's noon and we've wrangled ourselves surreptitiously back into T-shirts and pajama bottoms, but the kids can't be bothered to clothe themselves, and their nudity offers a constant, silent commentary on the day's absurd lack of accomplishment. Michael strums a guitar. I floss my teeth and look at a catalogue. Birdy feeds her dolls, builds a Tinker-Toy elevator. Ben runs in suddenly with only a crown and a cape on. When we laugh, he laughs too and says, "It's funny, right? Because I'm almost naked? But what I am wearing is so fancy!" (Who knew a seven-year-old could grasp the logic of the strip club?) We play Chinese checkers.

It's two, and everyone is suddenly starving, so we eat leftover chickpeas in a smoky tomato sauce; we eat slivers of asiago fresco sandwiched between tortilla chips; we eat toasted, buttered bagels and sliced pears and jelly beans. Ben and I go online to enter the Jelly Belly Recipe Sweepstakes with "Campfire S'mores" (1 cinnamon toast jelly bean, 1 toasted marshmallow jelly bean, 1 chocolate pudding jelly bean). Now it's four o'clock, and the sky is still blue, dotted with tiny flurries of snow, and we really should get outside on such a gorgeous day. Only somehow it's six and getting dark and there's dinner to be made, even though nobody's hungry any more. Wait — it's bedtime. When Ben goes to write in his journal he literally scratches his head like a cartoon wonderer: "Did we even do anything today?" And I don't say it, because it's too weird and he's just a kid, but what I think is: our hearts were beating.

Catherine Newman is the author of the memoir,
Waiting for Birdy: A Year of Frantic Tedium, Neurotic
Angst, and the Wild Magic of Growing a Family,
available online and in bookstores nationwide.

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