Lasterday seems so very far away

Lately, I’ll get into these conversations with Molly in which both of us get stuck in an endless loop that neither of us can get out of. It goes something like this:

“Mama, when are we going to the zoo?”

“Tomorrow sweetie.”

“Is it tomorrow right now?”

“No, it’s today. When today is over, then it will be tomorrow.”

Then next day (a.k.a. tomorrow) Molly will wake up to find she’s the star in her own little Groundhog’s Day movie, and say, “Mama, is it tomorrow?”

“No, love, when today is over it will be tomorrow.”

I can see her sitting there thinking: But big head, you said it would be tomorrow today. Because none of it makes sense, she starts crying. “But I wanted to go to the zoo tomorrow!”

“We are going to the zoo,” I say, as if to reassure her. “Tomorrow is today.” Thanks for clarifying, Mom!

Time, for children, time is such a slippery concept. As we grow older, we learn to conform to this artificial construct — time — even though it trips us up for years. We have to figure out what “Just a second” and “In a minute” really means (what we figure out is time is relative, depending on who is saying it), and how eternal a Sunday morning is when it’s just as long as any other morning. Then, as we enter our twenties, we learn that time is no longer this vast, sprawling thing, but as the older we get, the more it speeds by.

When Sam was just about Molly’s age, he very cleverly came up with his own word that perfectly sums up anything in the past: Lasterday.  Lasterday could be a few hours ago, yesterday, a week ago, a year . . . anywhere in that murky territory of time that is particularly vague when you are three and — unlike grown-ups who resort to meditating so we can, usually futilely, try to being in the moment — every thing is in the moment. Unless it’s tomorrow. Today.

Ask Mr.(or is that Miss?)Wizard

“Mom, can you get a wizard to turn me into a boy?” Molly asks me at breakfast yesterday.

“No, love, a wizard can’t turn you into a boy,” I say. “You are a girl. That’s what you are. That’s all you can be.”  It’s one of those things a parent says that has no logic, and that has an edge of cruelty to it.

True, a wizard can’t turn her into a boy. But in her three-year-old world, why not? Why can’t a wizard turn her into a boy? Of course he could. Every day, a wizard turns my daughter into a rabbit, a frog, a dog. Wouldn’t a boy be half as easy? Tears are puddling and about to spill over the edges of her lovely blue eyes.

It’s the same look she had, that on the brink of despair look, when last week I finished singing, “On Top Of Spaghetti” and I had to spend fifteen minutes reassuring her that that original meatball that had rolled out the door was okay, it wasn’t dead. “Wh-wh-what happened to the meatball?” she asks, her voice shaky. Well, sweetie, yes, it turned into mush, but then it turned back into a meatball, so everything is okay. Her lip is quivering, eyes still watering. Wait, wait, there’s more! It gets better. That meatball that landed in the garden grew into a meatball tree and grew hundreds of wonderful little meatballs just like it. So everything is okay. The meatball is better than okay!

Why can’t I be so generous in my lies with this new question?

“But I want to be a boy,” she says, her voice shaky, and I know we’re heading towards a meltdown, a meltdown over the impossibility of getting a gender change at age three. It’s all become very important this past month: Who has a vagina, who has a penis. Of course, because she is three and so has pretty much no boundary issues, she feels compelled to review who has which equipment no matter who, what, or when: at the Whole Foods check-out line, to our neighborhood librarian, or to her wonderful godmother, to which she says as part announcement, part query: “You have a vagina.” And just as further proof of how wonderful she is, Molly’s godmother didn’t blink or laugh in that icky way adults do when a child says something inappropriate. She just said, with the enthusiasm of a new campaign slogan, “Yes, Molly,  I do have a vagina!” (I imagine a chorus of newly empowered, unembarrassed vaginas chanting, “Yes. We. Can!”)

I start reading too much into her question: What if my little girl feels like a boy trapped in a girl’s body? This will be her burden to bear throughout life. But why do I care? I live in San Francisco, a half mile from Castro and Market, where Sean Penn playing Harvey Milk made his famous “I am angry” speech. There’s an enormous, multi-million center for Lesbian, Gay, and Transgender individuals not far away from where we live. I know a couple transgender people, and here I am, getting uptight about a comment that may, or may not, mean anything for my tiny little girl. You’d think I’d be down with whatever, or whoever, she wants to be, thinks she is.

Steve is completely unfazed and, I think , surprised that I was bothered by Molly’s question. “It’s a normal thing to say at this age,” he says. Oh really? And how many parenting books have you read in the last ten years, I want to say? But what’s most infuriating is that even though the answer is “zero,” Steve’s right. It is normal at her age to be sorting out girl from boy, vagina from penis, pink from blue.

And even if for some reason she does grow up wanting to be a boy and finally becomes one, adds Steve, who has morphed before my eyes into Dr. Sears, then we’ll love her and hope she is happy.

Now…what was it that I was worried about?

Screaming meanies

Or rather, screaming mommies. It’s a terrible, terrible moment when it first happens to you — the usually benevolent and loving mother transforms into a tyrant — and terrible every time after that.

My friend Gail send me this funny and honest piece by Lisa Belkin at nytimes.com on why, sometimes, a harshly spoken word may not be that bad. Belkin makes a good case.  Kids need to know that anger is an acceptable emotion, as long as its not abusive.

But I still contend (and as perfect a mother as I vowed to be, woe is me, I’ve had my tantrums) that children shouldn’t be yelled at and this doesn’t make kids behave. It makes them cower. Or retreat. Or rebel.

Feeling up trees

I am a journalist. I should know better than to tip-toe across the journalist-subject divide. Because I know what journalists do.

They get other people to do and say things they later regret. (Or as Joan Didion said: “That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.”)

Not only did I voluntarily become the sacrificial New Age lamb, tiptoeing and tromping in front of the camera for French TV, I felt up a tree…blindfolded. I asked a flower’s permission if I could connect with it before rubbing it’s felty leaves. I stood alongside a woman named Hyacinthe and a man named Sunbeam and consented to renaming myself Sparrow.

Hello France! Watch the daffy Californian engage in a nefarious New Age ritual. How did I — a journalist, who, I repeat, should know better — fall so far so fast?

I’ll tell you why.

About a year and a half ago I wrote a feature for San Francisco Magazine on eco-anxiety. Yes, it seems crazy that I — Madame Neuroticmama  —  would be anxious about anything! (Ha ha ha.) But thanks be to Gore, who went all eco-Cassandra on us, ruining the pleasure of all these balmy San Francisco February days we’ve now accepted as normal, I found myself frequently waking up in terror about this inconvenient end of the world (and somehow, a man-made apocalypse is inconvenient…’cause if we had just been more conscious and less consumeristic and piggish and thoughtless, our children’s children would still know what it is to have snow in winter). It would be an ending that — I wonder if this is worse than nuclear devastation, which is as brutal as it is quick — wouldn’t end quickly.

It would be more of an excruciating, heart-breaking, fast-melting, slow-burning, environmental apocalypse.

One thing led to another.

A French reporter who wanted to do a story on eco-psychology couldn’t find many  eco-neurotics in California who were willing to go on film. So, why not. I volunteered myself to be France’s poster girl for American eco-neurosis. After all, I’m happy to be open about my anxieties since the very reason I wrote the article is because I have been so freaked out about the planet and wanted to know a) Were others as freaked out as I was? b) I they weren’t, why the hell not? How they couldn’t possibly be besides themselves with the terribleness of it all and how can they live with themselves as they idle in their Land Rover in the carpool lane?

That’s why I write most articles. I want to know: it just me, or is there something going on that wasn’t before? Or again, to conjure up the great Didion: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

Is everyone else as afraid for the world as I am?

So there I am last Saturday, having consented to Monsieur French Journalist to be filmed attending a workshop in Golden Gate Park on how to reconnect with nature.

The idea is that so many of us urban dwellers, who live most the sunny hours of our days cubicle-bound and fluorescent-lit, are so disconnected from the natural world that we can’t feel part of it. If you separate yourself from anything — a tree, a person — then you don’t care so much. And if you don’t care as much, then it’s not so sad a thing if that weeping willow is later milled as paper for your derriere.

This seminar, a group of about eight middle-aged white people, was to help us bridge that rift. To once again go back to the garden — yes, that garden — before there were cell phones and  Cinnabun (TM) franchises. To be alive and aware as one who is part of nature rather than another of some 6-billion hapless onlookers who are either helplessly (gotta drive to work, gotta feed the kids) participating in its devastation or a  heartless butcher of its bounty. (Stay with me here. This gets cheerier in the next paragraph.)

Sure, I make fun of the New Agey-ness of it because I felt self-conscious being so predictably Californian, so touchy-feely with the lawn. But here’s the thing. After 2.5 hours of consciously communing with the natural world, I came away feeling connected and softer and less in free-fall despair out about our planet. Maybe somewhere in the Amazon they’re burning down a football field’s worth of rain forests an hour. But I realized in that afternoon, in a moment while I looked without distraction at this one noble, big-barked tree, that the world might be burning up and melting and falling into the sea.

At least, though, there is this one tree in front of me. And I loved it and touched it and felt, for that moment, at peace with the world. It’s been so long that I’ve felt anything but very, very nervous. I mean, come on, the Boy Scouts sold thousands of acres of preserved wilderness to developers. Next thing you know, the Sierra Club will be clubbing seals.

The reporter asked me something to the effect of, “Will this solve the world’s environmental woes if we all hugged trees?”

“Of course not,” I sort of laughed, embarrassed. We need legislation. We need bold steps. But it doesn’t hurt, the hug, that is.

I know it’s so retro. So earnest. So seventies to be hugging a tree. It’s the environmental equivalent of the original and  icky and all-too-hirsute Joy of Sex. So the hell what.

Come on, just try it. Hug him. Or go ahead and stroke him in a very suggestive way. (So much better to feel up a tree then to fell it.) Because after that, you’ll never look at your new wooden deck in quite the same way.

Little plastic pig

Sometimes, no often, well usually, when Sam leaves at 8:00 for elementary school, and then at 8:45 when I walk Molly to her preschool and hug her goodbye and head for home, I am relieved.

Finally, I think, I am unburdened. I have time to myself. I can get to the articles I have to write. I can wash the dirty breakfast dishes (let’s just say standards for fun change after children) and sweep the kitchen floor. I take a shower and talk on the phone uninterrupted and eat the fancy chocolate I’ve hidden in the freezer.

This morning, I found a little plastic pig Molly had left on the bathroom sink. That pig made me so sad, made me miss her so much, because suddenly I could picture her being so busy with that pig, washing it and talking to it and then getting distracted by something else she needs to do right now! (Put a clump of Silly Putty in a glass of water, cook a pile of snakes on her toy oven. . .)

I walked around the house, doing my morning post-child clean-up, and after the pig had caught me off-guard, I noticed other physical echoes of my children. The arm from a pirate pinata Sam had brought home after a party this week-end. The deflated Trader Joe’s balloon Molly had me tie on the tricycle she rides around the house, faster and faster these days.  Sam’s pajamas that he left, as usual, on his bedroom floor, and the pile of BB gun pellets he’d emptied out the night before, excitedly telling me how he’d found them on the AstroTurf at soccer practice.

Usually, I’m so obsessed with getting the house clean before I get to my work. But today, I left the things where Sam and Molly had left them. The house became the Historical Museum of Sam and Molly. This is just how the house looked on February 4, 2009, when Sam was 11 and Molly was 3.

All these still-lifes are so loaded with my children, and seeing these things now inert, lifeless without the life Sam and Molly breath into them, well, today it hit me: There’s life with my children, and sometimes, no often, it’s more than I want — too many demands, too many tears and conflicts and needs and talking, talking, talking, and just too much life.

But how can you have too much life?

Tomorrow, I’m sure, I’ll forget that you can’t. But at least for today, I got it.