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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Off the Charts

Posted October 09, 2007
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Ever wonder what Catherine sounds like? Listen to her read this blog entry.

I truly don't understand the children and what their problem is. Is there a chemical irritant they emit? A sibling hormone that's like pheromones but, you know, the kind that de-tracts other people from you? I mean, how else can you explain the arguments they have? Their primal irritation with each other? Tonight, for instance, they're fighting about who brushes their teeth first. Note that, in opposition to such coveted operations as opening the front door or lying on top of me in the morning, tooth-brushing is a situation for which the desired position is not first. "Who went first last night?" is the question every night, and to be fair here, the children usually do a fine job of honest reckoning. Usually I roll my eyes and wait, or I encourage one or another of them to go first and get it over with -- but tonight I am impatient. I intervene impatiently, not by helping them work it out, but by deciding. "Ben, you've still got your journal to write in," I say. "You first."

Who cares, right? It's tooth brushing, for cripes' sake. The ice caps are melting, the polar bears are drowning, wars ravage the planet, and here, under the microscope -- what is that? It's an amoeba bickering about toothpaste and turns! A paramecium studying its foamy frown in the medicine cabinet mirror. But it matters to them. I understand this. It matters to Ben, who consents to the brushing, but has gone uncharacteristically silent with anger. It matters to Birdy who -- despite her coveted secondness -- bursts into tears because, unwittingly, I call her in while she's in the middle of undressing. "Now you're going to see my yoni!" she sobs, naked and with a mouth full of toothpaste. "And it's my private part!" Private parts are serious business, so I say, "Go finish getting into your pajamas then, sweetie," instead of, "Um, excuse me, but aren't you the inventor of Naked Pilates?"

Oh, nobody will ever again be happy tonight. It's the Wailing Sink. If these children were characters in one of Ovid's myths, their tears would spill over onto the tile floor until they drowned and became toothpaste-covered statues of themselves wailing. Instead they're just plain old tired flesh-and-blood children.

Why don't you make them a chart? is what you're thinking -- which is a funny coincidence because that's exactly what I'm thinking! "Hey," I say, and gather up the miserable lovies. "Should we make a chart about who goes first?" You can tell that I'm in real problem-solving mode here; I'm not normally a chart kind of parent because a) In the Despot School of Parenting I appear to have attended, charts were rarely if ever mentioned, and b) I like to work things out organically -- to figure out the best possible solution any given moment, rather than determining everything in advance. I want the children to learn negotiation and compromise, and not rely on a set of arbitrary rules that were created to simplify -- rather than, necessarily, to better -- a situation. Oy vey, you are thinking now. Quit overthinking everything and just make the chart already. So okay, okay. I make the chart.

And the children love it. What is it about a chart? Maybe it's that it's so formal, like a reply card in a wedding invitation: Tom's Silly Strawberry or Colgate Too-Spicy Mint: Please check one. Or maybe it's that someone cared enough about you to make it. Or that it somehow constitutes visual evidence of your place in the world: There's my name! I brush my teeth second, therefore I am! Or maybe it's that I'm so tired that in the first chart I make I somehow switch the names every day but I also switch the positions, so that I have Ben going first every single time. The children have never witnessed such hilarious buffoonery in their lives! Who but them has a mother so constitutionally incapable of making a simple chart? "Um, yeah, that seems fair," Ben teases. "Great then." So tickled are they by the wrong chart that the right chart can only elevate their moods further: Who knew I could produce such a marvel of efficiency and delight? They are thrilled.

Until morning. When the children argue about who needs to get out of bed first. Well, Birdy still needs to pick her sharing? Yeah, well, Ben still eats breakfast more slower than me. The problem-solving spirit of the night has evaporated into the mist outside. What, am I supposed to make a chart about every single thing in our lives? First piece of grape chiffon pie. Second serving of kale. First goodnight kiss. Second tick check. First inhalation of air. Second getting the barfing flu. We can wallpaper our house with them. "Everybody up," I say, and pull my unwilling self out of their cozy tangle of arms and legs. "Get up. I am not going to make a chart about every single thing in our lives." And so the children, like the good little soldiers they are, get quietly out of bed.

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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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