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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Resolute

Posted September 07, 2007
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Have you ever tried to fish a chip of shell out of a bowl of cracked eggs? You can't. There it is, clear as day beneath the perfect transparency of whites -- just stick a finger in and pluck it out! But you end up grasping after it while it slides out from under your fingers, elusive as a sea creature. You end up cursing, with your two sodden, eggy fists, your three eggy rings, your ten eggy fingernails, and still you'll never be sure you really got it -- even though you could see right where it was.

This is how I feel about my own impatience: There it is! I see it so clearly! But my efforts to evict it from my personality are frustrating and ineffective. Also, I am perpetually covered in some kind of metaphysical equivalent of egg.

What I'm trying to say here is that I am a terrible mother. I am also a great mother: warm, creative, funny, doting. But today the great-mother part feels like a drop of pink dye in a cup of water, and the bad mother part is a big squirt of black, and once it's all black, the pink just seems kind of irrelevant. Every New Year's Eve, I resolve to be more patient. And then I blow it on the first day of the new year. Usually by noon. And it's so hard to describe, the effects of this impatience. It's subtle: I feel my face pull into criticism, my eyebrows sucked together into ruts of irritation; I hear my voice, the way I can speak mild words but in the harsh dialect of What's wrong with you?; I see, flitting across the children's eyes, the way I can make them feel ill at ease, here in their very own home, here in their very own skin. This is one of the worst feelings I know.

It starts, as it often does for me, with houseguests. On the one hand, we love having people stay with us -- love, among other things, the way we are all compelled to our best behavior. On the other hand, though, I can become excessively self-conscious, especially with friends who don't or don't yet have children, about how irritating my kids can be. Or might be. This time it's Ben, who becomes overanxoius, waiting for late-sleeping guests to wake up. He has taken a Chinese Restaurant calendar -- it's printed on a kind of woven mat, with a menu on the back -- and rolled it up like a scroll, and he is waiting, waiting, waiting to show it to them. He is a child, and so doesn't understand yet that uncaffeinated adults are as interested in your Chinese-Restaurant-Menu-Calendar-Scroll as they are in your textbook from insurance-adjustment school or the lint between your floorboards. As each friend appears, still bleary and muss-headed on the bottom step, Ben -- Floop! -- unrolls the scroll about a quarter inch from their face. "Honey, give her a minute to wake up, okay?" I say. And then, the next time, not especially gently, I say, "That's enough with the scroll. Everybody's just trying to have their coffee."

I say something similar about the giant art pad, the pages of which Ben is turning ceremoniously at the table while we're all trying to catch up, in the ten minutes we have together, about work, family, life. I say it again when he points at the origami chains he's made, interrupts another conversation to announce, in a button-pushing baby voice, "Decowations!" By the time our friends leave, I find myself inexplicably furious. What I should do is take a moment to myself, weigh in with the circumstances of this situation: Ben, like us, is eager to make the most of his time with our friends; catching up means, for him, showing them what he's been doing; he does not know all the social conventions of "When you're done talking, I'd like to show you something."; he's not trying to annoy me; he had a need for attention that, unmet, grew into something unattractive. But I don't. I speak sharply to him; I speak mockingly of his "show and tell"; I speak as if he's a stranger we have caught in an act of vandalism. If you spoke to me this way, I would flee the room in tears and our friendship would never be mended. If my children spoke to each other this way, I would be outraged. If you spoke to my children this way, I would kill you.

Do unto others, right? I wrap my arms around Ben and apologize for my unkindness. I resolve, again, to do better. I lie in bed at night, wide-awake and filled with regret.

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Resolute

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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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