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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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Thunderstorms

Posted September 05, 2008
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The kids - passing the time

In Praise of Boredom the column I'd been planning to write today - now makes about as much sense to me as In Praise of Heat Rash. In Praise of the Mysterious Pee Smell That Cannot Be Scrubbed from the Bathroom. In Praise of PMS.

But earlier, making my various happy notes about my kids and their heroic ability to entertain themselves all summer long, I'd been thinking of Birdy hunched for doting hours on end over her homemade flower fairies, or Ben's week-long claymation project that resulted in a 45-second-long film of a rabbit and two aliens who disappear jerkily into a puff of smoke while being slithered after by a long Fimo rattlesnake. Michael and I have both worked a great deal in the past couple of months, and the kids have been amazing - inspired by the depths of tedium to scale new heights of creativity.

It helps, I know, that we've taken some lovely vacations: to Virginia and Cape Cod, to Maine and New York. Someone recently asked Ben what his favorite part of the summer had been so far, and he said, "Low pressure rear cleansing!" - referring to a friend's toilet in Maine, where we programmed and reprogrammed their high-tech personal cleanser (Think: Waterpik, but the Crack-B-Kleen version), loitering in their bathroom for hysterical hours on end. These kids - they are easy to please.

Kind of. Because come the end of August, boredom morphs from something like a sunny seaweed-draped castle on the beach into a sucking swamp of quicksand. The children run through the house with their arms around each other's necks - that classic manifestation of friendly aggression - until somebody trips and falls and cries. They argue about whether it matters whether you set up the Mouse Trap pieces the right way, even if you're just playing with it, not playing the game. In fact, even as I was writing this, just this very second, I was called away by a weeping argument about whether the pretend silverware does or doesn't fit in the basket with the pretend dishes. The kind of argument that ends with both kids tear-streaked in my lap with the tragically shuddering breath.

Plus, everyone's in the habit of hurting their own feelings. This is a specific style of self-injury that is usually motivated by restlessness and involves talking about something that makes you feel sad. It helps too if you're sitting on the itchy wool rug in the heat of the late afternoon. For example, the kids will remind me that I once described my childhood cat, Zazie, as "mean," and then they will fall into fits of made-up despair - "That's so mean to call a cat mean!" - that evolve incrementally into fits of true misery - "She was really nice, right? It's so awful to call a pussycat mean! Oh, Mama, that's terrible!" "Please," I say, "we've got enough to worry about without trying to get into a pretend argument!" But it's too late. The kids are huffy and upset, and it's like a joke, but nobody's kidding.

I think it all boils down to this: when we can all laugh at ourselves - which is most of the time - everything goes great; but when someone's mood grows dark, and they cannot be cajoled into lightness, everything feels hard. And sometimes it's my mood that casts it shadow over the house. If I could just lie in bed and read magazines, I would hardly know how grumpy I was. But brushing everyone's teeth around clenching jaws? There's no missing it, this temper that gathers like a black cloud, like the black clouds that are even now gathering over our skylight as I'm brushing all these endless tiny teeth. Birdy doesn't like the way her clothespin doll's pink hair came out. She cries, furious, when Michael accidentally cracks the plastic gumball-machine case that her tiny cow came in. Ben is offended by the idea of going to bed at all. And I feel a strange coldness even in the heat. I feel a coiled-up energy, a desire to run - not to jog, but to sprint down the street into the rain which is falling now, dropping heavy onto the skylight like silver pebbles. The thunder cracks overhead, like a metaphor for my mood, but one that changes the thing it represents. Now the sky has grown dark and loud and wet and stormy, as if my pent-up frustration has become, simply, the weather. And so it has. A summer storm that clears the very night it rages through. Thank goodness.

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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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