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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Tea Party on Acid

Posted September 07, 2007
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It's a long spring evening: daffodils blooming, the bleeding hearts just emerging, the world an ache of blue and green. Could there be a better moment to spill an entire pitcher of iced peppermint tea from the coffee table? Of course not! Because we're eating our pizza in the living room near the open windows, like the lazy picnickers we are, and Birdy insists on refilling her own glass. First there's just a single errant drip, only then this feisty little person, distracted by the drip, loses her grip and drops the pitcher and also knocks over her own glass in the process, sending a wave of tea over the side of the table and onto the white rug. Also into the inside of the table where the baskets of books, games, and magazines become immediately, mintily flooded.

In someone else's normal life -- I am imagining here -- people laugh, scramble after sponges, tacitly agree to resume their conversations in a minute or two, once all the Your Big Backyards have been mopped off, the puzzles set out to dry, plates rinsed and refilled. But in my odd life, I leap up to get a dishtowel while my children proceed with dinner like pediatric robots who have been programmed to stay on task. Must keep eating. Must keep talking. "I need a new piece of pizza," Birdy says, poking at her crust that is now soaking under the half inch of tea in her plate. "Another artichoke piece. Cut it with scissors again that exact same way in the exact same number of pieces so I can eat it littlest to biggest." It's like two reels of film superimposed over each other: the frantic sodden crisis blurred onto the mellow, chatty meal.

Tea is still pouring off the table's edge, and I'm trying to catch it in a cup, blotting at the sodden rug with a useless paper towel. "Honey, can you please get me a dish towel?" I say to Ben, only he doesn't hear me because he's still talking. "Clara in chorus? She was the only alto singing the high part? And all the other altos were like, 'I am so not singing the high part.' And I was like, to myself, 'I'd sing the high part!' But then I remembered that I already do sing the high part!" I love his new valley-girl teenager way of talking, and there may be no greater understatement in the world than describing Ben as a soprano. But still. Now is not the time. "Honey," I say, and he says, "Oh right! Dish towel!" and leaps up obligingly, still talking. "It was Smarties day? For having all your right music and a pencil? But I so totally had the wrong pencil! I mean, I had, like, a Halloween stub of a pencil, and KC didn't even care!"

"Honey?" I say, and Ben says, consolingly, "No te preocupes, Mama," and returns with the dishtowel. "Well Ben?" This is Birdy again, with her classic combative opener. "Ben, it's oy estoy moy ucapata." "Okay, Birdy," he says and she says, "It is." "Okay, Birdy, fine," he says again and she scowls at him. Ben is helping me with the tea now, dabbing with the dish towel, but all I can picture for some reason is me with my head lopped off, blood spurting geyserously from my neck stump, while the children bicker and talk and chew their food.

And actually what I'm remembering is how Ben used to fall asleep in the car when Birdy cried. On spring nights just like this one. She'd be screaming her small red face off, with that terry horseshoe pillow wedged around her furious head, her mouth a wild, toothless hollow of misery, and Ben would keep talking in a normal conversational pitch -- "I just... because the oranges... the horse pooping... didn't think it would!" -- and I couldn't even hear him for the screaming (Birdy's) and the panic (mine). And then suddenly, as if the baby were crooning him a delicate lullaby, his eyes would flutter and close, and the two of them would be behind me, yelling and sleeping, like some bizarre yin-yang introduction to parenthood. Four years ago. And I will say, if you're still in it, that it's just as surreal as it ever was. But now? It's a mess, yes, and it's weird, but it's really just tea and arguing. There's no need to panic.

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Tea Party on Acid

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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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