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 Dalai Mama Weekly BlogCatherine Newman chronicles life parenting Ben, 8, and Birdy, 5
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April 14, 2008
Birdy Longstocking
 Ever wonder what Catherine sounds like? Listen to her read this blog entry. It's easy for me to forget that the children don't always have all the information they need. Information so as not to make choices that send me Thelma and Louiseing myself into a canyon. Tonight, for instance. Michael's working, so the kids and I have upholstered ourselves to the big bed, all of us bundled down together for the duration, to write in our journals and read our stories and love each other up and drive each other crazy. Michael's the one who's been reading Pippi Longstocking to Birdy, and so when the bookmark falls out — Birdy tugs it loose and then says, "Wait — where does this go?" — I'm not sure where to start. Birdy remembers something about a circus, so I find the chapter, try to determine if they got all the way through it. "'Oh what a jolly horse,' cried Pippi," I read, and Birdy taps her chin and nods slowly: "Yup. Read that already. "Oops," Ben says on my other side, and I see that his pen has slipped and he's drawn a black line across our white comforter cover; he smears it around with his licked thumb, while simultaneously drawing on it some more with the pen that's now capped on its back end. "Oops," he says again, and shoots me his patented comical worried expression, eyes stretched wide as dinner plates. I pat Ben's knee, ask Birdy, "Did she fight Mighty Adolf yet?" and she says, "She did." I show her the first page of the next chapter, "Pippi Entertains Two Burglars." "That," she says. "Definitely. Start there." An awful distraction is buzzing in my head because I've left myself tons of work tonight, and I just want the children to be asleep already so I can stay awake long enough to do it. Lists form and reform even as I'm reading aloud about the madcap goings on at Villa Villekulla. I have a rich and beautiful life and I enjoy it so much — but times like this, I need a bumper sticker that says, "Life Is Not a Squeaky Hamster Wheel Atop Pee-Soaked Cedar Shavings." And so, when I look at Birdy three pages into the chapter and she's got her hands clamped down tight over her ears, I am not a happy hamster. "Honey," I say, only I have to press my face up against hers so she can see that I'm talking to her. "WHAT'S UP?" "Well," she says, and her eyebrows lift apologetically, "Daddy actually did read that already? And I didn't want to hear it again." Hm. "So you thought you'd just plug up your ears and let me go ahead and read it anyways?" I say, and even Birdy can hear that this is something of a rhetorical question. "That wasn't a very good idea," she says with nervous, curtsying obedience, like I'm Miss Hannigan and Birdy splits her time between singing "Maybe," and dreaming of the nice family who might one day adopt her. "Honey," I say to Birdy, but I don't know what to say next. I poke Ben, who's writing in his journal about the salmon hatching in his second-grade classroom. "Ben!" I say, loudly now. "Ben! Help me! I've run out of patience! It's all drained away!" Ben snaps into action, flinging his journal aside to turn his finger into a syringe that he jabs into my biceps. "Patience!" he cries. "Coming right up! Hang on!" He pantomimes refilling and jabs me again, then my eyes roll up into my head and I fall back onto the pillows in a blessed-out stupor of patience and say, "Phew!" How I managed before this crazy, funny, big-hearted kid came into my life is totally beyond me. "Honey," I say again to Birdy, whose face is pink and soft again from laughing, "it's frustrating to read to someone who isn't listening." "I understand," she says simply. "I'm sorry. I think it's after her feet are sticking up out of the covers like this?" She dives under the comforter, and sticks her stripy socks up into the air in such an excellent imitation of Miss Longstocking herself that Ben and I crack up when we find the picture in the book: "Here?" I say, and she says, "Definitely." "Tommy's and Annika's mother had invited a few ladies to a coffee party," I read, and Birdy's face creases with worry. "Actually?" she says, "I think we already read that part." Ben jabs me again with his finger of patience — and it's not a moment too soon. Editor's Note:   
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. Post a comment
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