Dalai Mama Dishes

by Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Dalai Mama Dishes

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

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Movement

Posted January 02, 2008
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Ever wonder what Catherine sounds like? Listen to her read this blog entry.

"It's Bennie's joke," Birdy is explaining, but I'm only half listening. "It's, well, I think what it is is Who porks your pine? Get it, Mama?" "What?" I say. I'm only half listening because what I'm doing is packing dinner plates because what we're doing is moving. As in: changing houses. As in: upheaval so profound it takes your breath away.

"I think it's What do you call the animal that takes all your trees? And it's pork your pine. Like porcupine. Get it?" It's like the punch line of one of those dirty jokes I never got as a child. That's not my belly button either. "Pork your pine?" I say absently, just as Ben comes into the room to rescue us. "That's close, Birdy!" he says. "But it's hedgehog. It's What do you call a pig that uses up all the shrubbery?"

And this is what life is like with kids in it: we're stressed, we're packing, we're still waiting on our mortgage to close, we're leaving our condo-in-the-woods that we've loved for more than five years now -- the very house that we brought the newborn Birdy home to -- and yet it's business as usual. The kids turn out to need breakfast still, and lunch. The kids need to be fed and read to and put to bed, regardless of our level of anxiety. It reminds me -- as so many things have in the past eight years -- of how fine a line separates coping and not coping. It would be so easy to stop, to lie down in the snow, to tell the kids that there's no dinner, no clean underpants, to let them fend for themselves. I never don't understand when people succumb to the chaos. Even when it's the kind of succumbing that makes it tragically onto the front page of the local paper.

But we don't succumb -- or not yet. I even stop taping up boxes for the four hours it takes to drive with the children and our friends to the local production of The Nutcracker. And even as I'm packing up their snacks -- breadsticks and string cheeses and clementines -- I'm shaking my head at what a parent I've become. In our 20s, as graduate students in California, Michael and I moved approximately every six and a half minutes, and it was always the full catastrophe: all-nighters and forgetting meals, stuff everywhere and Drano open on the counter next to wine bottles empty on the counter. And now it cannot be like that. It has to be daily life, with a side of moving.

At least more or less. At the new house, we're trying to clean before we move in, and we bring over a little rug and some toys, and the kids play in the empty, echoing living room while we work. I bend a coat hanger to dig into the (not working) drain in the bathroom sink, and what I pull out, on and on like a magic trick, is a wad of hair and soap that's the size and shape of a raccoon. Michael takes apart the (not working) dryer and what he pulls out is a mountain of lint that's the size and shape of an armadillo. Michael breaks a glass lampshade and curses. I open the medicine cabinet and a bottle of Kanka tumbles out and shatters on the floor into a sticky puddle of glass and medicinal syrup. I try not to see these fractures as a bad omen. I try to remind myself, like a mantra, that we have chosen to move, that we're excited about our new little old house, that we will have our own yard, the kids their own bedrooms, even if you can turn in a circle inside each one and touch all four walls without moving your feet. We vacuum mouse turds and assess cracked windowpanes. We sweep and mop and sponge and push our hair out of our eyes with wet rubber gloves, and when I finally return to the kids, the drafty old living room has grown completely dark in the winter afternoon, and they're building a Lego farm on their little rug, silently, in the gloom. These poor children. I flip a switch on the wall, and they look up at me, blinking in the light. Then the bulb pings, the room grows dark again, and when I hear the kids laughing, I think: home.

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About Catherine Newman

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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