Kids

Since becoming a mother (with a teaching degree in my background) I am thinking constantly about kids. Their unique viewpoints, their education, their quirks, their questions fascinate me.

Look, a Peep!

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ Leave a comment

I love artists!

This might be a sort of obvious statement for me, along the lines of, “Oxygen is really wonderful stuff,” or “Since I have to eat every day, I’m really happy someone invented food” But, I do feel like it needs saying every once in a while.

I love all sorts of artists for the color and life they bring to the world, the unexpected juxtapositions of imagery and meaning, the metaphors and the details. The melancholy mood of Billie Holiday’s “Foolish Things”, or the violent wind that seems to shake Van Gogh’s White Roses, or William Butler Yeat’s “rough beast” that brings in a nightmare in “The Second Coming”: all are wonderful and terribly beautiful and full of imaginative life. I am transported by a vision or a feeling that I would have never arrived at without the compulsive need of an artist to create. It is amazing.

But, I also love artists for entirely selfish and narcissistic reasons. I love when I can see myself, my life, or what is important to me in the art around me. I love that this unknown photographer abandoned stuffy parlor portraits to capture this mother.

Mother and Child

I think that one of my friends finally softened into trusting me after see the same look on my face as the mother in this photograph has. For the first few weeks I knew my friend, she saw only my furrowed brow and heard only my scolding towards my children. Eventually I let my face soften into the same face in the picture, and I could feel her soften, too. Across a century I see myself.

I love that these animators chose to draw George and the Man with the Yellow Hat this way.

George

This comes from a longer episode of Curious George about Halloween. In this still, George has just been told that a frightening legend may have some truth to it. He grabs the Man’s face and stares hard into his eyes.

My oldest child’s birthday is towards the end of October, and whenever we go to the party store to find decorations for his celebrations we are bombarded by macabre costumes and props: knives and skeletons and blood and gore. My youngest could not bring himself to walk through this store, so I always carried him. When a motion detector would trip ghoulish noises, he would grab the sides of my face in his chubby tiny hands and straighten my head so that I could only stare into his eyes. I could not determine if he was trying to protect me from the scary things all around us, or if he needed steady, unwavering reassurance from me. How amazing that that gesture is universal enough that it made its way into this animation.

My youngest son recently got a book for his birthday, a book he loves and which contains a page that describes the protagonist child’s favorite dessert. On a plate, next to an elaborate and beautiful cake, is a small Peep chick. As soon as he caught it he yelped out loud and pointed at it and laughed and laughed. A Peep! Look right there! I love Peeps!

peep

He recognized himself in the pages of this book, and it made him fill with delight. Someone else who loves Peeps as much as he does, this character. I’m not sure if I should tell him that this particular book was inspired by him in the first place. My brother wrote it and my future sister-in-law illustrated it with him and his love of squirrels in mind. So the Peep was intended as a nod to him from the beginning, and when they saw him see it for the first time, they both lit up.

SquirrelSquirrel 2

Seeing yourself in art never gets old. To see a piece of what you know and have lived reflected back to you, to see something that felt important to you lovingly captured in photos or drawings or poems or songs, it is a kind of magic. The kind of magic that makes you feel less alone and less apart from the rest of the world.

The End of Kindergarten

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ Leave a comment

Giraffe

I’ve been noticing more about my youngest child lately. I’ve been paying more attention to him, taking mental pictures more often, remembering cute things he does more often.

He just turned six. A few weeks ago he held my hand in the parking lot as he clacked along to soccer in his cleats. He held onto his water bottle and kicked his size 4 soccer ball down the path. My purse was slipping off my shoulder and under my other arm I tried to press sunscreen and another water bottle and bug spray to my body so that they wouldn’t clatter all over the pavement. At the edge of the blacktop he kept holding onto my hand. A bolt of lightening hit me saying, “He might never do this again, he is so close to not needing or not wanting this anymore.” I struggled to keep holding onto him as long as he would let me, even though everything else I had kept falling.

We only have a few weeks of school left, a few weeks where it is just him and me all morning long, just a few weeks before the time I get with him is always and forever shared with his older brother. Next year is first grade, and I have to share him with a whole series of teachers. In the afternoons I’ll have to share him with soccer and chess and whatever else interests him: new friends, books, computer games.

These are the last few times I will take him to the library on a weekday morning, just the two of us. These will be the last weeks of eating lunch together while watching Blue’s Clues or Phineas and Ferb or Curious George.

Today he asked me to dance around the kitchen with him.

Today we put some of his summer clothes on a stuffed giraffe while he got dressed.

Today he rode around the block on a too-small Dusty Crophopper bicycle with training wheels while I followed behind.

Today he asked if I could come into his classroom to see the baby chicks that had hatched.

Today he let me give him a goodbye kiss as I dropped him off at school, even as he asked if he could take the bus next year.

I am going to miss this so much. It won’t be the same again. I know it’ll be okay, but while I had been telling myself over and over how much it was going to be okay, I didn’t realize just how deep my sadness really was.

I have been so lucky to have had this time that I have.

So lucky. Thank you, everyone and everything that has let me have this.

But, Only Hipsters Have Triangle Tattoos

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ Leave a comment

Maslow's

I am certainly not a hipster.

I also do not have any tattoos.

Yet.

But, lately, the tattoo I have been planning out in my head is a simple striped triangle. A representation of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

My teacher friends might remember this concept from back in developmental psychology courses. The basic idea is that we are all motivated by irreducible needs, and that once we meet our basic needs we are able to climb higher to try to achieve more lofty ones. The concept is framed as a pyramid.

The base layer of the pyramid contains our basic biological and physiological needs – our need for air, water, food, shelter, sleep. These needs have to be met for us to move on to the next level.

The next level up contains our need for safety – protection from danger (whether that danger is a poisonous snake, a tornado, or a criminal), law and order, stability.

The level after that contains our need for love and belonging – friendship, affection, intimacy, romantic love, family.

The level after that contains our need for esteem – self-esteem, mastery, achievement, independence.

The level after that contains our cognitive needs – stretching our brains, learning, finding meaning.

The level after that contains our aesthetic needs – appreciation for, the search for and the creation of beauty.

The level after that is our need for self-actualization – becoming the highest version of yourself you are capable of becoming.

The last level is the need for transcendence – overcoming the limitations of human needs and human forms. It is complete spiritual fulfillment.

This seems like an orderly way to explain the motivation of human beings, that once the bottom rung of needs are met then we can seamlessly turn our attention to the next level and so on and so forth. When I turn back to this model in times of chaos, it provides me with a way to get my life back under control. When the pain or fatigue or depression that can be associated with fibromyalgia begin to severely limit my ability to function, I go back to the pyramid. I go back to the basics and make sure I take care of each level I can in order. It helps.

It also gives me an organizing principle for deciding what is most important for my children, for my family. Food, water, sleep, shelter first. We are very lucky that the first needs are securely taken care of. Safety is always next. This is such a part of our life that I can yell out to them at any given point, “What is my number one job as your mommy?” and they will yell back, “To keep us safe!” If there is a question of priorities, those win.

It helps stave off bad behavior, usually. Most tantrums come about when basic necessities are off – the boys haven’t eaten in a while, they stayed up too late, they feel sick and need rest and medicine. My youngest had a tantrum this morning because his need for safety was not being met to his liking. He thought he would have to get a shot at his doctor’s appointment when he did not. Once he felt safe (all of his vaccinations are up to date and he needed no boosters) the rest of the day fell into place.

This helps me prioritize what charities we support with the little extra we have. Charities that feed and clothe and shelter people get our attention first. Charities that keep people feeling safe and loved next. Charities that teach after that.  If you can do all of those at once, even better.

I taught in a public school and can tell you first hand how difficult it is for a child to learn if his basic needs, his need for safety or his need for belonging are not being met. Any programs that provide breakfast and a safe environment should be protected. Any wonderful people who can make a student feel like he or she is meant to be right there with them, who can make a student feel safe and accepted, should be truly appreciated. Then mastery and learning can happen. Not before. The pyramid as an organizing principle makes sense again.

But, and this is very, very important, we as humans are not always orderly. A shock, I know. We sacrifice having basic needs met to hit those higher levels. There are examples everywhere. We lose sleep night after night after night going for a promotion. We eat a plate of fries when the problem is not that we are hungry, but that we are lonely. We let obsessions with mastering a level on a video game run over our loved ones. We skip meals to fit into a gorgeous dress because we want above all else to be beautiful. We often choose to meet needs out of order.

And, if under extreme circumstances there is little to no possibility of having our basic needs met, we strive to fulfill any of the needs we have any chance of meeting. Gang members may find their need for belonging is stronger than their need for safety. During unspeakable horrors like the Holocaust, people have turned to learning and appreciation of beauty as the only needs they could fulfill or help others fulfill. Countless people have had to look at transcendence as the only need they could hope to meet in the midst of war or starvation or natural disaster. Our needs are irreducible.

I want a visual reminder that every person alive on earth has real needs.   A reminder that my needs are real, that the needs of other people are real, that meeting those needs is imperative. I want a reminder that this organization of those needs has often helped me and others, and I feel anchored by it.

I want a simple, striped, triangle tattoo.

I also would really, really like it if this tattoo didn’t also scream to the world, “I wish I were a twenty-something hipster who loves the clean lines of geometric shapes” when I am really a thirty-something conventional mom and former educator who actually prefers photo-realistic tattoos of things like flowers and insects and birds.

But,

That isn’t a real need.

Inspiration and Execution

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ Leave a comment

Sunday Morning

A conversation with children at 7:00 AM. It is a chilly winter morning, and two young boys ages 8 and 5 beginning interrogating their harried mother.

Youngest: Don’t we have any dreidels?

Mother: Well, no. We don’t.

Youngest (cries as if heart is broken)

Mother: What on earth???

Youngest: I want to collect dreidels.

Mother: I…uh…huh?

Oldest: So I just made up this drum set. How long did Fleetwood Mac practice before they were rock stars?

Mother: I…huh…what? Do you mean Mick Fleetwood? I don’t know, what did they say on the show?

Youngest: (still crying)

Mother: (switching attention rapidly between one child and the next) Ok, kiddo, we just don’t have dreidels. It’s not the end of the world, sweetie, really it’s not.

Oldest: Wanna hear my new song I made up? Can I take drumming lessons? How long do you need to take drumming lessons?

Mother: I…uh…huh…what?

I have to be careful what sorts of TV shows I watch with my kids. It is not about violence, or sex, or even foul language. The above transcript comes from a morning where my boys watched a recorded episode of CBS Sunday Morning with me. This episode featured interviews with Mick Fleetwood and an older gentleman who owns the world’s largest collection of dreidels. Other episodes convinced the boys that they wanted to sculpt huge sandstone caves, create street art, start a bakery, and become comic book authors. Some days I am not up for how excited the boys are.

Mother: (just too tired to think straight) That is IT! We cannot do everything! These people, the people on these shows spend their whole lifetimes doing what they do-we CANNOT replicate what they do in the space of a morning. We are not going to pout about it either. Just, everybody CHILL OUT!

But, most days, I am able to appreciate the way a segment on a show can ignite their imaginations. And I am a little jealous. I have found them designing huge pumpkin sculptures (with trick-or-treat buckets and stuffed animals) after watching Halloween Wars. They’ve made River Monsters out of Legos and blocks and boats out of kitchen chairs. We made a turkey-shaped sugar cookie at Christmas because a contestant had on Holiday Baking Championship. Every room of the first floor was commandeered recently for a live-action game of Boom Beach that went on for two hours.

Come to think of it, it really isn’t just TV shows. Sometimes it’s video games, apps, zoos, restaurants, songs, books. Everything can become a game, or a new dream to pursue, or a book they need to write.

One of my favorite days was right after we had been to The Museum of Science and Industry. We had seen the recovered submarine U-505 there. The next day they decided to play Battleship, which seemed reasonable as we’ve had that board game forever. When I came into the playroom, they had set up a fortress wall that divided the whole room in half. Homemade boats studded the sea of carpet. They threw stuffed animals at each other to sink the other person’s makeshift navy. And once a boat was sunk (they assured me no one on board was hurt) the boats were hauled away to be “museumed”.

I miss childhood and the way you can run off with an idea as soon as it pops into your brain. I get tired of having to postpone a project for dirty dishes, e-mails to the boys’ teachers and calls to refill prescriptions. I’m tired of waiting weeks and weeks between inspiration and execution. I’m frustrated with rainy days and budgets and tax appointments and laundry, but I suppose most adults are. I try not to let my jealousy peek out too often, because I am absolutely glad that this is something the boys can have, that I can give them now. As adults, as far as I can tell from myself and most other adults I know, they’ll still get a million ideas but they will have less time to actually do anything with them.

This post, alone, has been a nebulous idea that has floated around in my brain for at least a year and a half. And I have had a stolen hour Monday and a half hour this morning to get anything that made any sense written down. And that was only available because the boys saw a YouTube clip of a Hot Wheels track in a bathtub that they wanted, on Monday night, to try for themselves.

Pokemon Cards and Competition

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ Leave a comment

Pokemon

The games and toys that my two boys play with most often all have one thing in common. They all involve a huge cast of characters who must do battle in one form or another. Whether in video games like Skylanders or Super Smash Brothers, or as tangible action figures from Lego’s Hero Factory, or as spinning tops called Bey Blades or in their huge binders full of Pokémon cards, my children know each and every one of these competitors and how they perform in competition.

Do you by any chance know who Pop Fizz, Ninjini and Eye-Brawl are? How about Preston Stormer, Ogrum or Von Nebula? Charizard, Pidgeot or Gangar? I kind of know who they are, but my eight-year-old and my five-year-old could tell you exactly how they attack, who they attack, how much health and stamina they have and what are their main weaknesses. And there are hundreds more that they can describe in such detail. When they give me lists for Christmas or their birthdays, it becomes a long string of gibberish to my ears as they rattle off the characters they still need. I nod as if I understand. A lot. The once-in-a-blue-moon occasion that I remember some of these details leads them to believe I really am paying attention. Sometimes, sort of.

I didn’t play these games as a girl. I tried to decide if that was because I was a girl. I had traditionally feminine, gendered toys I loved: baby dolls, dress up clothes and a pretend kitchen. But I also had many that were not specifically “just” for girls: balls, bats, musical instruments, puppets, paints, roller skates, bikes, a microscope and even Pipeworks (a set of PVC pipes you joined together to make forts). I look at the playtime choices I made among the choices that were given, and I see that I practically never, ever chose something competitive. There was almost never a winner or a loser, no one was ever glorious in victory or saddened by defeat. That wasn’t a part of my play, or of my imaginative world. I anticipated my baby doll’s needs, I squished play-doh, I made up dance recitals in the living room and pretended to be trapped on a desert island in a version of Survivorman meets playing house. I looked at leaves pressed between slides. I made up restaurant menus. Fighting, battling and competition weren’t there.

Why weren’t they?

Competition, and the desire to win at all costs, was considered a scourge as I grew up. Perhaps it was reactionary to the 80’s corporate culture, and a byproduct of the 90’s focus on diversity and inclusiveness. Maybe I had the message reinforced for me in church and school and home that caretaking, cooperation and empathy were far more valuable traits to cultivate. And maybe those traits were emphasized more strongly because I was a girl. And maybe, because I definitely wanted to be seen as a girl, I took to it. Or maybe those qualities were what I was naturally good at, anyways.

I look with curiosity at my children’s obsession with competition games. I am trying to parse out whether there is a problem with this play, because it looks so different with my own. The bottom line: I don’t think there is.

There are gendered expectations put on boys that they will have to engage in competitive activities. There are biologists who are fairly certain that competitive activities go hand in hand with testosterone. There are plenty of men and women I know who (gasp!) actually enjoy competition through sports and games and career-building. While I’m sure I could cite many examples of competitive spirit that went far, far over the line, I believe that the problem arises when it is taken to an extreme.

So, my boys are gearing up to be competitive creatures and to enjoy it. What lessons about competition are my kids taking away from Pokémon cards, specifically?

They are exposed to the idea that every competitor has unique skill sets. No one character is identical or has identical attacks. The diversity of successful competitors, from the cute and cuddly Pikachu to the enormous Mammalswine, gives credence to the idea that there is not just one successful archetype. Success, even in a narrowly defined arena, can look very different.

They are also familiar with the concept that every player has specific weaknesses. These weaknesses may cause them to take on more damage in a fight, if they are attacked in their vulnerabilities. However, everyone has a weakness. There is incentive to carefully choose whether to exploit that weakness for personal gain or not. The boys know that they could be exploited themselves. They know, too, that their weakness is normal and not necessarily of harbinger of defeat.

They watch DVDs of Pokémon exploits where battles are ethically constrained. The Pokémon practice their skills to improve. The trainers must acknowledge the feelings, health and well-being of their fighting Pokémon. The Pokémon themselves enjoy pushing themselves to learn a new move, but know when to rest. Wins and losses are accepted with grace.

And this is similar in all these competitive games they play: the diversity of skills and weaknesses, the need to rest and recover between matches, the impulse to improve, the good sportsmanship of winning or losing with integrity. In a world where (hopefully) healthy competition will strongly shape the lives of my two boys, I am happy they have found fun ways to learn how to navigate that world

What Are You Afraid Of?

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ Leave a comment

Alien

“There was this incredible crashing noise, like a huge stack of heavy boxes falling over. I went running around the house making sure no one was crushed and never found what it was. Then it happened again that same night. Again, nothing had actually fallen over.” My brother is one of the first people I tell strange phenomena to, because he is the likeliest of all my family and friends to explore all the possibilities with me.

“Whoa. Ghost?” He seems concerned, but practical.

“Maybe a poltergeist?” I actually sound a bit hopeful.

“That doesn’t seem like it would be comforting.”

“But it is!” I can sense my brother raising an eyebrow over the phone, “Poltergeists, well according to Wikipedia, tend to be manifestations of one person’s stress. So, I just need to relax. If it’s a ghost or something then I have no control over bumps in the night. This way, I do!”

“Yeah, still not a comforting thought.”

I would rather have a poltergeist in my house than a ghost. My brother would rather a ghost than a poltergeist. My oldest son, when asked if he was afraid of ghosts one Halloween, furrowed his brow in confusion. “Ghosts are just dead people,” he said. Seeing as he is generally not afraid of live people, this makes sense. But it doesn’t.

Fears are so idiosyncratic. I used to believe that every fear someone had made sense, or had a contextual backstory that explained it away. I am scared of crossing train tracks. I live in the suburbs of Chicago and there are a whole bunch of Metra stations and tracks everywhere. I had heard stories of people dying at crossings. When I was a child in the backseat of a mini-van, I had no control over the speed of our car or when I could cross to safety. When I have had to walk over tracks, I am painfully aware of how slow and clumsy I am.

I am scared of large dogs because for a few summers I worked as a mail carrier. A huge German Shepard that roamed an otherwise empty house day in and day out lunged for me and ripped through a screen next to my head.

I still have nightmares about velociraptors because of Jurassic Park.

These fears make sense.

But I am scared of heights with no clear reason. Arriving late for almost anything starts a low-level anxiety pit in my stomach that can grow quickly to fill my chest cavity. I can swim, but drowning fills my nightmares.

I’ve come to realize that some fears have no clear context, that maybe the quirks of what we fear are largely inborn. Just like our favorite and least favorite foods are decided by a mysterious combination of the chemicals in our brains and the way we’ve been exposed to snacks, maybe our fears work the same way. Some make sense and others don’t.

Take my two sons. They are only two and a half years apart. Almost all of their formative life experiences they have had so far in this world have been together. Raised by the same people, taken on the same vacations, enrolled in the same school, exposed to the same movies and TV shows and video games, they probably have more similarities than differences. But…

The oldest hates rollercoasters, but loves huge water slides.

My youngest loves rollercoasters and HATES water slides.

My oldest is afraid of spiders and heights.

My youngest will be going to a camp this summer mostly to see spiders, and climbs to the top of every playground.

My oldest went water tubing at the age of six and stayed out behind the pontoon boat as long as we would let him.

My youngest, sitting on the boat, absolutely refused. But when he saw teenagers jumping off cliffs into the lake he asked if he could, too. At four.

At the very least it fascinates me to know that for almost every fear we have, rational or not, there is probably a counterpoint. For every fear that has us paralyzed, there is someone who is just amazed or thrilled by it. And the things we take for granted as manageable (I am not afraid of dentists or doctors or public speaking, for example) could be terribly daunting for someone else.

I have always been terrified of the idea that aliens may exist. I want to watch shows about it, but find myself chickening out at the last moment. At any given time there is probably an episode of Ancient Aliens waiting for me in the DVR, biding its time until I am brave enough to conquer it.

My oldest, at eight, has commented on that particular fear of mine.

“I am much more worried that there are no aliens. That will really are alone in the universe. That scares me. We’re the only ones alive in the whole universe? Totally by ourselves?”

I consider this for just a second. “But, what if they are dangerous or evil aliens?” I ask because that is the only possibility I can imagine. “If those are the only creatures who are out there, that doesn’t seem very comforting.”

“But,” he looks at me with that furrowed brow again, “it means someone else is out there. It is.”

Not What I’m Supposed To Be Doing

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ Leave a comment

Sometimes I feel overwhelmed. I know I am not the only one who is balancing on that fine line between “okay” and “not okay”. This week brought one kid’s winter cold, another kid’s blood drawn, six nights of bad sleep for everyone in the house, a holiday, too much fast food, a day off of school for another holiday and most likely a day off of school for freezing cold. And my crown popped off in a Valentine’s Day caramel. All of these are small things, taken individually, but they’ve pushed me into “I am going to sit and stare into space until I figure out what to do or until elves come and solve every problem for me” mode. I have to say, I am always hoping the elves show up soon, because I am not the best at prioritizing what needs to happen next when everything needs to happen at once.

When overwhelmed, I tend to pick the most absurd chore I can find. I tackle it for one to two hours. I feel immensely better and more in control of my life, though in reality I’ve squandered a lot of precious time and energy.

Last week I cleaned every baseboard on the first floor of our house. Some spots were immensely dusty and grimy, but not anymore! Never mind that you can’t even tell now because so much clutter is obscuring it.

The week before I tackled personal grooming-I scrubbed and buffed and shaved and moisturized. I used every beauty product in my arsenal. The next night I forgot to take off my makeup so I had raccoon eyes and the clogged pore beginnings of pimples by morning.

This week I had been reading a book on decluttering which, among other things, suggested that socks have a very hard life, living as they do between foot and shoe all day. My socks need to rest, and should not be balled up so uncomfortably. Also, my t-shirts would be so much happier folded in a kind of a roll, not piled up on each other. So this week, I tried to make my clothes more comfortable.

folded

The winner, though, in the “This is the most unnecessary task I can think of at this point in time, and I will do it thoroughly and with gusto” award goes to…sorting through every single one of the eighty-two episodes of Wild Kratts that live in our DVR. About two weeks before Christmas, with almost every hour planned out to make sure we didn’t miss a present, an event, or a holiday memory, I started going through them. It had irritated me that some episodes were mislabeled, some were repeated, and it took extra time to find the one we wanted. So, I wrote down the name of every episode, I fast-forwarded to see if the title was correct, I deleted duplicates. I don’t want to tell you how long I spent doing this. It was longer than any other random project I’ve decided to tackle on a weekday while feeling overwhelmed. It feels silly to admit, but it felt good that something was in order.

wild kratts

Next week, I’m hoping things go a lot more smoothly. If not, I am wondering if I’ll feel like the most important thing in the world is to sort through my eight-year-old teaching materials, or research 101 dairy-free crockpot recipes, or maybe comb the DVR for errant Peg + Cat episodes.

At least we only have 30 of those.

Poultry

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ Leave a comment

poultry

My youngest child has always had a fondness for birds, though as I try to trace it back I can’t quite describe when it began.

When I was pregnant with his older brother, I dreamt that my little baby was a songbird. I don’t know that I ever shared that story with the boys.

His older brother’s favorite stuffed animal since birth was a large penguin named Narnie.

I sing the song “Little Bird” from The Man of La Mancha every night as I tuck them in. It begins, “Little bird, little bird, in the cinnamon tree…little bird, little bird, please take pity on me…”

When my youngest turned four I began calling him my duckling. His soft light hair reminded me so much of a baby bird’s pin feathers.

We have a bird feeder, though quite often we forget to fill it. Near our house we have seen red-winged blackbirds and Canadian geese, robins and cardinals, finches and seagulls, herons and red-tailed hawks.

My youngest has a collection, now, of stuffed animals that are birds. There are a mama and baby owl set named Snowy and Syrup. There are huge ducklings, smallish penguins, a chick and even a wild turkey. The birds nearly always keep the coveted stuffed animal spot on the bed, and rarely see the inside of the toy chest.

I suppose it was just a natural progression of his fondness that two weeks before Thanksgiving he suddenly found it unbearable to think of chickens and turkeys being eaten. I admit that all the billboards and television cooking shows made his sadness thicker. Everywhere there were raw birds, golden birds, chefs advising ways to tuck back wings and tie up legs. The carcass of a bird was identifiable as the body of something missing a head and stripped nude. He cried, quite often.

For those two weeks, and a few weeks after, he would not touch chicken or turkey, though both had made up half of his dinners before. We shielded him from seeing our Thanksgiving turkey as much as we could, and at the long dinner table that night he got to sit next to his uncle who is vegan, and revel in being with a like-minded soul.

In the midst of it all I wondered aloud with him if one thing that troubled him was the language we use. When we eat beef we don’t say were having “cow”. When we eat pork or bacon or ham we don’t automatically call it “pig”. I asked him if it would help him at least feel less sad if we called chicken and turkey “poultry”. He agreed that it would, that he would not have pictures in his head of a live chicken and a dead chicken at the same time.

As a whole family we’ve had more vegetarian meals lately, and also more beef and pork overall when we do eat meat. When we go to fast food restaurants I ask the boys if they want “Poultry Fingers” or hamburgers or mac and cheese. At home for dinner we still sometimes have “Poultry Vesuvio” or “Poultry Cacciatore” or “Barbeque Poultry Baked Potatoes.”

The word “poultry” seems to soften his stance on not eating “poultry” – since we started using that word he will sometimes choose the fingers or have a bit shredded in a soup. And while it buys me some time to get him acclimated to healthy vegetarian food and makes life a little easier from meal to meal, I feel dirty. I have marketed chicken differently, and so hidden the parts that are so objectionable to my five-year-old, and made it okay for him again. I am wondering how much longer I will hold out using the word “poultry” before I decide to say “chicken” or “turkey” again. When I switch back I have to be prepared that might be the end of my child eating meat and some radical changes are going to be happening around here.

He is developing empathy for other living creatures, and I cannot be mad at that.

The day before Thanksgiving he and his brother made posters about saving endangered species, protecting the food chain, discouraging hunters.

One says, at the top, “Do not hurt animals”.

Another of the posters asked, “Do you promise?”

I promise to try, my duckling.

I promise to remember that birds are your friends.

I promise to be respectful on that day when you finally do tell me you won’t be eating poultry ever again.

Ghost Town

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ Leave a comment

defalted santa

I drive my youngest to afternoon kindergarten every weekday around noon. If it is cold outside, or if we are very early, we will wait in the car until we see the first of two yellow school buses pull up to the front doors. Sometimes my five-year-old will get bug-eyed and giggly and give me a scene to imagine. “Mommy, what if…” giggle, giggle “What if all of our clocks were wrong? And what if we didn’t know what time it was ever? And we are waiting for the bus, but it never comes because it already came?” His eyes are shining with possibilities. Would we wait forever until we turned old and grey? Would we try to find out if the bus had arrived only to be turned away because we should have known school started hours ago? Would we shrug and say, “Well, we gave it our best shot. Instead of going to school, should we go to Disney World?”

I tell him that would be pretty strange, but pretty cool. I give him two hugs and a kiss and tell him what time I’ll be coming to pick him up (more to remind myself than to reassure him). Afterwards, I decided to go take a walk. I was feeling decidedly blah. It was only ten days before Christmas, and Chicagoland was abnormally warm at fifty degrees. It felt like spring, which meant mentally I’d checked out of Christmas festivities and moved on to fretting about swimsuit weather, soccer schedules and Easter. We had fog, rain, confused lawns trying to turn green again and confused Canadian geese going North instead of South. I started my short walk out by our pond.

The first part of my walk took me past a garbage can that really needed emptying. Sticking out of the top was a grocery store shopping basket filled with vitamins and supplements. I am trying to figure out what it all means. What if…what if someone managed to shoplift the whole basket of stuff? He ditched it here because…the cops were on his tail and he had two strikes already? What if an unfaithful husband had taken on an affair with a much older woman, one who needed joint pain supplements specifically? What if his wife is one step away from finding out the truth about them, so he ditched the evidence?

The path I take winds away from a small parking lot with the garbage can that contains a mystery, past cattail-filled wetlands and ponds. Then it runs alongside an elementary school.

No one is outside, not the kids who would be out for recess, not the joggers. I suspect that the drizzle coming down kept the kids inside, and that Christmas shopping has kept the adults I might normally see in the mall. It is eerily quiet and still.

I pad along hearing only a faint thud of my boots on the sidewalk. I keep tossing and turning my head looking for evidence of other human lives around me. I try to remember what human activity there might normally be: construction workers cleaning out storm sewers, SUVs passing me on the street, older neighbors wrapping up garden hoses or raking leaves, a mom slamming the trunk of her car in the driveway and grappling with grocery bags. None of it is here. All I can see is evidence of human beings having once lived here. All that remains are their houses and the sad, deflated reindeer strewn across their lawns.

Trees are budding and birds are singing. I start to imagine it really is spring, then become alarmed at how many houses are still covered in Christmas decorations. From my understanding of this community, the people are good upstanding citizens who (for the most part) take down the lights and inflatables and signs in a socially prescribed, timely manner. Responsible. What has happened here? It is as if something mysterious called them all away at once.

I suspect that if I looked in windows I would see that the inhabitants left so fast that there are still dishes in the sink, laundry in the washer. Everyone has simply vanished! Like Roanoke, like a ghost town, like a zombie apocalypse. Was everyone killed? No, no bodies. Were they somehow abducted? Possibly, but if so by whom? Aliens? A government agency who decided the whole town knew too much? Did they leave of their own accord? Was there a disaster of such magnitude that no one could still live here? Is the air poisoned? Is the presence of geese and ducks and new grass evidence that we are the weakest of all species on earth, that humans pretend to be so tough but we can be wiped out in the blink of an eye and the rest of the world will still move on? Will this ghost town become a time capsule and mystery to future generations, a costumed tour guide exclaiming how, “No one really knows what happened here,”?

I pause to take a picture of a squirrel trampling all over a flattened Santa, a reminder that one day nature will triumph over all of human culture, and that maybe that day is upon us. In the stillness I ask myself, am I the last person left on earth?

“Excuse me.”

I startle out of my story and realize that I am squatting in the middle of a sidewalk and blocking the way of a very nice and polite woman. She had to have been no more than a few feet behind me, and I never realized she was there.

I have a feeling that in front of her she saw a discombobulated woman, a woman a little wild-eyed, a woman who was possibly muttering to herself and oblivious to the world around her, who inexplicably squatted down right in front of her to photograph someone’s unremarkable front yard.

I get up quickly and mutter a shy apology while blushing and let her get twenty feet in front of me before I begin my walk again.

And I wonder what story she is having to come up with to explain me.

Punishment

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ Leave a comment

workout

I would like to add an author’s note here.  This post was written before the controversy around 19 Kids and Counting, before we knew that Josh Duggar had victimized his sisters and other young girls, before his hypocrisy in condemning homosexual couples paired with him soliciting extramarital affairs.  I could take this post down, but I still feel a connection to the idea that we sometimes punish ourselves with TV shows and Instagram accounts and celebrity reality shows, taunting ourselves with what we can’t have.  For the record, I did seem to think they were doing a good job raising children and am currently shaking my head realizing that all I knew was an highly edited version of their lives-not what really went on. 

I used to watch 19 Kids and Counting each afternoon when I exercised at our local rec center. And by “used to” I mean I watched it daily up until a week ago.

The Duggars kind of fascinate me.

Obviously, their life is very different from mine. Rural Arkansas and its lack of diversity is a different world from the suburbs of Chicago, and as a one-time public school teacher I don’t really agree that homeschooling is the way to go, and I generally wear pants and low-cut tops whenever I feel like it, modesty be damned. Their Christianity doesn’t resemble mine, especially when I mix it with Buddhism or scientific inquiry. Oh, and I have seventeen less children than the Duggars do.

They seem to be good parents. I understand how reality shows can be edited, but from what I can see they instruct their children with patience and love. They seem to be thoughtful about how to foster good relationships and how they instill values like kindness and respect and purpose into their offspring. I quietly cheer them on when I hear more kids or grandkids are on the way. These are people who want children, see them as a blessing and seem to know how to raise them to be decent human beings. I got to see babies and cuddle them vicariously as my own got older and older. I got to see how excited these women were to find themselves pregnant again.

I had to stop watching this show.

Watching it was a way of punishing myself, flooding myself with images of a chapter of my life that is closing. It is unlikely, very unlikely, that I will be having any more babies. Having fibromyalgia is difficult with two fairly independent children; I cannot imagine how much pain I would be in going back to newborn days when sleep deprivation goes on for months and months. And, according to some blood tests, the chance of me even becoming pregnant again is very low- as low as it would be for a woman ten or fifteen years older.

I have been intensely angry at my body, though I hadn’t realized it.

I have quietly and persistently been furious with my body for all of the things it cannot do. I am angry when I can’t play at the playground with my kids or take them to the pool, when at a fun run I am even slower than a three-year-old and a woman who is recovering from surgery, when I can’t stay up late without major consequences. I am furious at what I can’t have: the shoes I can’t wear because they jar my spine, the food I can’t eat because it makes pain run up and down my arms, the plans I have to cancel because I cannot do one more thing.

The babies I can’t have.

Not that I was planning on having more anyways.

Watching the off-the-charts fertility of the Duggars was a super subtle way of admonishing my body, reminding it of its shortcomings. That I watched it while exercising, which I don’t want to do but I have to do every day so I don’t feel even sicker, was the sneakiest way ever to be mean to myself.

So, I stopped.

It’s a small turning point, one that would be invisible to the people who see me on the elliptical machine every afternoon, but I think it’s an important one. And so far my body seems relieved that the activity I put it through every day isn’t rooted in so much anger and disappointment. It feels happier.