Part 1

We have to decide whether to make Dash do something he really doesn’t want to do. In the scope of life, a tiny decision, one that doesn’t even merit a word with three syllables…. Let’s call it a “choice,”  less significant than so many of the choices we lucky middle-class parents get to make (soccer or hip-hop on Wednesdays?)  Not life or death, not a safety issue…

If I make him go to Coney Island with his class (24 subway stops as he’s counted) and then return (24 stops again) will he feel triumphant, and therein is it worth the anguish it will take to a) get him to school, b) burden his amazing teachers with his anxiety on the train ride there and back? And what does it mean that I’m taking this singular person and bending him to my will because I think it’s “good for him”? Is this what it means to be a parent?

Those of us who are married make some sort of promise to each other whether it’s to be there in sickness and health or not to tattoo someone else’s name on your hip. But what do we promise as parents?

Most of us force them go to the doctor, eat the occasional vegetable, get a good amount of sleep, take a bath, not play with fire. Generally, no-brainers….

But then there are these decisions in which we have to play both parent and kid (and psychotherapist)….What will he think I’ll make him do next if I force him? What will he try to escape doing next if I don’t? Or more important, how will he feel if he doesn’t go? Relieved, disappointed, can I go so far as to say self-loathing?  Does he expect me to do this for him? Is this one of those moments that I’m supposed to step up and be the grown-up? I—who feel more comfortable before making a decision than relieved after—am now consistently put in a position of deciding for someone else.

 My goodness, if my grandfather could hear my vacillations… I can hear his LES immigrant voice, “force him? Of course, you force him. It’s a school trip, he goes!” But we are neither parents of that time— evidenced by our taking the word “parent” and using it as a verb—nor can we pretend to be.

Stay tuned for fallout… same alien time, same alien station.

Three “I”s

(Impatience)

So Dash is getting better… but not fast enough for me. Once the “breakthrough” is made, isn’t it time for the montage sequence accompanied by the three-minute inspirational song and then everything returns to “normal” (or even better than normal since a difficult journey was made)?

(Irritation)

Despite his now being in school for six hours, I still resent the house arrest his fear puts me under from 3 pm until Dennis returns from work. I try to remember the self that used to plead with Dash—long after all other kids were gone from the playground and the rats of Tompkins encroached, dusk signaling their time to play—“Honey, can’t we please go home?” There were times that that kid drove me mad (as I watched compliant children leave with their parents at dinnertime, but now I miss him. The boundless energy and rambunctiousness is there, but he’s imprisoned and mercilessly hurls the cushions from our couch against walls and the floor as he twirls and somersaults to “Billie Jean” or “Thriller.”

And my outlet is the irritation that makes him repeatedly ask, “Are you mad at me?” And I say no enough times that guilt seeps into the irritation, which makes me sad, and of course, I’m lying because I am angry… I’m mad and frustrated. And I’m terribly sad.

(Image)

He’s suffering. That kills me, but there’s an embarrassingly narcissistic side to my sadness. Prior to this mess we’re in, Dash was the mayor of the street, the boy who commented on a friend’s mom’s new haircut, or high-fived the regular motorcycle dudes who frequented the corner restaurant.  Dennis and I basked in the warmth that he exuded and that came back at him.  We long for that kid, but we also miss being the parents of that kid. And that is not an enviable trait…. While most of us say, “We just want our child to be happy!” I confess I am far from free of projecting aspirations onto him of the qualities I wish I had had as a child or even as an adult.

September 12, 2017

The same gods I cursed as a child, the gods of autumn (aka the going-back-to-school gods) are on the top of my list of who to thank, bless, and make a sacrifice to. I’ve been saved and therein, I think, our family has been saved, by the return of routine and the sharing of responsibility and love (and fury) by the saints of the world, teachers.  

Nevertheless, I hope to keep my promise to children everywhere, no matter how old, cranky and out of touch I may grow never to ask (as the last days of summer get sucked through a Slurpee straw) “Are you excited to go back to school?” Dash goes to one of the best schools in the whole wide world and when asked that question by some unsuspecting grownup, looks to me ruefully for a clue as to how to say politely, “Hell, no!”

And I understand and I remember. I wouldn’t trade freedom (even with the boredom/loneliness of it) for structure, sharing, listening, washing my hands, co-operating, walking and not running, no matter how much fun.  

So really, this is our time to celebrate since it affords us the opportunity to share our Dash difficulties (renamed “challenges”) with some of my favorite people around:  Dash’s head of school and his teachers.

Since having Dash, I’ve refined my fantasy of having a weekly (Daily? Hourly?) award ceremony in which I get to stand at a podium with my hair in an updo,  and speak far too long—prompting the music to swell  to signal STOP!  In this daydream, I tearfully thank the people in my life who have helped with Dash, in words that are generally only attributed to doctors in movies about (nearly) incurable diseases, and the fairy in Sleeping Beauty, who is able to exchange the princess’s death sentence for a hundred-year snooze.   

No updo here, nor anyone really listening but still thank you... you know who you are. 

September 8, 2017

Writing from our East Village bunker where I am trapped by a 43-pound six-year-old’s thousand-pound fear of what scariness may lie on the sidewalks of Manhattan. 

After having lived here for well over twenty years, I associate “the dangers of the streets of New York” with young Al Pacino’s straight cop in a skanky 70s Manhattan (Serpico), or the subway riders’ lack of surprise that their train has been hijacked (Taking of Pelham 1, 2, 3). When Dennis’s parents visited from Las Vegas they stayed in a Chinatown motel and were afraid to leave the building after 7pm, (Year of the Dragon?) I scoffed, rolled my eyes and became indignant, personally insulted for my city. 

The yearning to walk among others, to feel life, commerce, conversation, romance, stories unfolding or ending, only expanded when I came to New York and multiplied tenfold when I became a mother. The freedom of the streets, the casual contact, the energy that sometimes is too much to take, but usually a necessity to my equilibrium… My social life barely exists on the phone except for faraway friends. It’s in chance meetings or semi arranged gatherings at Tompkins Square Park or the bagel shop or the restaurant on the corner.

In Dash’s daily mantra of wanting to live in the country, he’s too young to understand the tradeoff we would be making: his neurosis for my inevitable psychosis. 

Life is not fair and being a child subject to parents’ choices is really unfair, but as I’ve heard one father say to his son, “In this movie, I have a better part than yours.” Perhaps there’s something missing in my makeup as a parent, for I can’t imagine sacrificing my love of New York for a quiet house with a yard in the suburbs in order to quell is worries.

So we work on his fear, and repeat again and again that this is much harder for him than it is for us. 

September 6, 2017

This first blog entry was meant to be a confession, introducing myself and my less than socially acceptable thoughts about motherhood. It was meant to be irreverent and just blasphemous enough that you might allow yourself to silently nod your head yes and maybe even smile.

But, as is so often the case, the plan is interrupted by the now, and while my feelings about the now are decidedly un-wry and un-funny, and deliver none of the liberating pleasure that I envisioned in writing this thing, if you and I are to embark on this relationship, you as reader and I as flawed mother providing an espresso shot of catharsis with my less than Carol Brady thoughts, then honesty is the only policy and I must write about the present.

But first a brief and bleak backstory of early days with my husband Dennis’s and my little boy, Dash.

Dash was born a tiny baby.  He came home weighing only four pounds after a mundanely harrowing birth in St. Luke’s Roosevelt hospital. Despite his size, he was term and amazingly strong though he had no eyebrows, eyelashes or hair atop his head.  He was the size of a free range, hormone and antibiotic free organic chicken. He looked much like the figure at the end of the first Encounters Close movie— unfinished… a crustacean without its shell. As my mom would say, “He was no beauty.”

He was healthy, alert, and one hundred percent committed to embarking on his new adventure.  I was serotonin–deprived, deeply depressed, and ambivalent (on a good day) about my new identity as a mother.  I dreamt of being admitted to a mental ward where I could just sleep for days, or had the more outrageous fantasy of taking a Greyhound bus somewhere and assuming a new identity and life.

How we all muddled through those first 8 months is a story for another time. But today that long dormant wish to flee the scene, fueled by those thoughts from close to seven years ago of “I’m not good for him; he’d be better without me,” and “Dennis knows what to do; I’m making everything worse,” reawakened in my coward’s heart.

My vision of removing myself in mind, spirit and body from our current situation resembles my former fantasy of renaming myself Juanita and working in a diner in New Mexico in that it is: a) an absurd idea that my feelings of being burdened by my kid’s suffering would ever melt away and, b) far from what I’d wish for were I to conjure an alternative life (I’d much rather be Ira Glass).

If only someone could just “fix it,” the way Martin Sheen used to say to Toby or CJ on West Wing when a nuclear bomb was soaring toward North Korea.

But I neither want suggestions on how to “fix it” nor someone to step in and take over. And I’m going to take a leap of faith and assume that you’re reading this because you too have signed up for making motherhood even harder— by realizing there are no easy fixes for helping our children through filthy rotten miserable chapters in their lives.

Our filthy rotten miserable phase is based in the reality of living on the Lower East Side in New York City.

Since early July, after seeing a brutal fight on a basketball court and then being frightened by wacked-out street people expressing their craziness in a variety of ways, Dash doesn’t want to go outside ….doesn’t want to play soccer (until recently an obsession of his), doesn’t want to see his friends at the playground, panics when he’s outside having to wait for a subway, bus, or even to cross the street.  He’s terrified of what he may see and doesn’t want to frequent the restaurant where he once, to celebrate its third-year anniversary, danced and sang on the bar. Out and about he’s a changed child from the effusive gregarious curious person he was months ago. Inside he vacillates between being his old self and being furious with the world and us. He wishes he were a baby again.

Formerly our life was in the neighborhood, on the street, bumping into people, joining pickup games, and having spontaneous encounters out and about. Our social life and community lie on the streets of the East Village, and only more so in summer.

After a week of conceiving of every strategy to both get Dash outside and then to cope with whatever came up once we were out, my sadness, frustration, and irritation reached a pinnacle Friday. When Dennis took over and I finally got out alone, unencumbered by Dash’s fears and my reaction to them, it was only then when the old feelings of flight flooded in.