Citrus olive oil cake and how are you?
Over the last three months, I’ve become incapable of answering the question, “How are you?”
Not because I don’t have words to describe my experiences with and opinions about the pandemic, police murder, the dismantling and defunding of police departments, unemployment, and a lunatic president. Not because I don’t have words to describe my ongoing education about and awakening to White privilege and all the ways I can choose to hurt or harm other humans.
It’s because I don’t know how I am.
We’re in the middle of something, so I don’t trust how I feel from day to day. Also, the things that seemed to define me are gone. Who am I if I don’t have casual interactions with people? Who am I if I don’t get dressed to leave the house? Who am I if I don’t make plans for the future?
I’ve had issues in the past with feeling removed from myself — at one time, during the two years after my divorce, pathologically uncentered. When I was pregnant, I felt it again, to a lesser degree, of not having a sense of who I was.
Nothing is normal. When it comes to Black lives, this is a good thing. Please let’s not go back to any semblance of normal.
There are other parts to this experience I’m having a harder time getting my head around. How will this affect my kids? What are the long-term effects of them not being able to embrace their friends and family members, to not even see them? What about other people’s kids, especially the kids whose communities are being decimated even more than normal and who among the sickness, dying, anxiety, and want are falling even farther behind because of lack of access to BROADBAND FOR GOD’S SAKE INTERNET ACCESS, which they need for distance learning? What will become of us?
I have taped the word “coexist” next to my work space at home. It’s the only thing that gets me through some days. I need to remember that with the bad comes the good, that things coexist within and without us. That this is what real change looks like, and I need to settle into the discomfort.
And sometimes, I need to look to my kids.
In the middle of the dumpster fire that is our country and our world, my 10-year-old stepdaughter regularly puts on her bathing suit and climbs into the tub to give her 2-year-old brother a bath.
Gargantubaby will be three next month. He can spell his first name because he is brilliant and I am a drill sergeant. Out of context he can identify the letters C, O, P, and S.
If we ever get the chance to talk a walk around the neighborhood, he plays I spy by pointing to the corner of one eye. He doesn’t completely get how adjectives work, so one time he said, “I spy with my little eye (points to eye) something ludge.”
Keeping up with my Mother’s Day tradition, this year I spent the entire day avoiding everyone. I stayed in bed all day and watched ten episodes of Too Hot to Handle on Netflix and it is STILL THE BEST DAY I’VE HAD IN THREE MONTHS. I was amazed by these people who can’t go a day without kissing, even when $100,000 is at stake. I want those producers to send me and SJ to a tropical location and give us $100,000 to not have sex for four weeks. Done!
GB has calmly been saying he "hates" things and people lately (in addition to telling me he’s “dead,” a hilarious game I will never forgive his sister for). SJ said he heard GB stomping around in his little circus tent from IKEA singing happily to himself, "I hate, I hate, I hate my family! Holy fucking shit. I hate, I hate, I hate my family!"
He poos and pees by himself now. He’s tall enough that he can pee “like a big boy” and it’s so fucking cute I constantly invade his privacy to watch him. Sometimes SJ and I will discover that he has taken himself to the bathroom to poo without even telling us (hand-washing is not 100% yet, but we’re working on it).
We’re in the backyard one day when GB tells me he has to pee. Then he climbs up on the retaining wall into the grass, pulls his undies and pants down to his ankles, and pees with great concentration, watching the cherubic arc of his pee, all without dribbling on himself and then pulling everything back up.
“A nature pee!” he says happily.
We take a delicious nap together. After two hours I wake up and try to extract myself. He reaches out and begs me to come back to him. I crawl back in. I say, “I love this nap.” He says, “Me, too.” Then he drifts in and out of a dream and tells me repeatedly to stop splashing him.
“Hugging makes me sleepy,” he says. “I love you, Mommy. I love you so so so so much, in the whole wide woy-yald. I like you. I really, really like you. Sleep wif me. You sleep wif me.” I rub his back as he holds my breast and snuggles and murmurs, “Thank you for touching me.”
His last-ditch effort to get me to stay in bed is “I go top on you,” in which he’ll roll on top of me and try to hold both of my boobs at the same time.
The living room floor is alternately covered in bees or sharks. He wants me to watch him jump from cushion to cushion in the living room. I say I'm eating.
"You can watch me as you're eating," he says. AS YOU'RE EATING. TWO YEARS OLD.
GB: I want to cut a book!
SJ: You can't cut a book.
GB: I want a fucking book.
GB summoning his superhero friends (“talks on phone"): Catboy! Robin! To come! Superheroes to come!
When we come back from a walk, he lays his head on my knee as we sit on the front steps.
“I had fun with you,” he says. Then he tells me everything we did: “We walked to the bottom of the street, we played, and then we came home. That was fun. That was weally fun.”
Later, he takes a swing at me and says, “I’m angry at you.”
I say, “What can you do to express your feelings other than hitting me?’
No answer.
“You can say, I’m angry at you,” I say.
“I’m angry at you.”
“I’m sorry you’re angry at me. Is there anything I can do to make you feel better?”
“You can touch me.”
“OK.” I give him a cuddle.
“Thank you for touching me,” he says.
He really wants to “play a game,” meaning dumping out the pieces of one of his sister’s board games. I get out backgammon, thinking maybe I can explain it well enough we can move the pieces around. I get it set up and make up a simple move; I show him how to roll the die and how to count on them. I actually think we’re getting somewhere, and then he picks up one of his pieces (black).
“This is chocolate?” he asks.
“No.”
“It’s not for eating?”
“No.”
He considers, then decides: “Let’s break it.”
He pretends the pieces are people. He puts them wherever he wants on the board, makes them fly around and talk to each other, crash into each other. He narrates their dramas.
GB: “Can we play Sorry? Can we play the game called Sorry?”
When he can’t find something, he roams the house calling for it, as if it could answer:
“Sorry! Sorry! Sorry Sorry Sorry!”
”Scissors! Where are you, scissors?”
Sometimes all four of us “play” Sorry. He wants to draw his own cards and read the directions. I tried to help him once, and he said, “No! I wanna tell a story!” So he thinks we’re telling stories when we read the directions out loud. He picks up a card and instead of saying, “Move forward 4” (which he can’t read), he says, “You hafta make a robot after dinner.” For the next card he says, “You don’t have to tell your dad.”
GB playing Sorry: “Ah! That dinosaur’s swirling around! Boom me around. That’s mine. Ha! That’s not gonna be yours, it’s gonna be mine. Boom! You’re on my blue. Awww.”
He takes a break to eat pineapple out of a bowl. He eats for a while and then says, “I love McQueen (main character in Cars). Do you love McQueen, mama?”
He tells jokes that go like this:
“What did the fox?”
“I don’t know, GB. What did the fox do?”
“It did!”
When I tell him to do something he doesn’t want to do, he cries, “No! You’re making a joke!” For example, I pick him up off the couch to take a bath, and he wails, “No! You’re making a joke! You’re joking!”
Overheard:
GB: “Go away! Nooo!”
Jenny: “Who are you talking to?”
GB: “My feet.”
I say, “The lion says rawr,” and GB says, “It doesn’t say rawr. It says hi.”
Life with a toddler: What’s that doing there?
He’s starting to understand the concept of time. He understands that numbers are associated with the clock, so he’s constantly telling me what time it is, which is usually forty.
He also has a basic understanding of time words: The other morning he put his toast in the toaster and asked, “Is that gonna beep in two weeks and ago?”
We have a rule in our house that if you fart you have to say, “Toot sweet.” Guess what I hear all day every day from everyone in my house: “Toot sweet!”
GB: “Your life is berry berry good.”
He says “goy-al” for “girl” and “woy-ald” for “world” like some old-timey New York detective.
His favorite game is “family” and he has a stilted baby voice wherein he says, “Feed me wike a baby,” and then pretends to nurse.
He starts a lot of sentences with instructions: “First thing you gotta do is … ”
When I chase him around to go to bed, he runs away from me naked, screaming, “No! No! You made a bad choice!”
He has a new habit of being adamant that I eat something. He offers me half a cracker or a piece of apple, something I generally have no interest in, and I’ll politely decline, and then he gets more and more upset, demanding, “EAT IT.” Sometimes I eat it to avoid a meltdown.
Beloved stepdaughter: “When is his birthday?”
Jenny: “July 25th.”
SJ: “Or, as I like to say, July 25th or 26th.”
GB loves to snuggle. Morning time remains my favorite time of day, because he will happily lie in bed with me. He says, “Snuggling is my favorite idea.”
He has a habit of running around outside, stopping, and checking, “So, we are on Earth?”
He recognizes and can name orange poppies.
He walks around Heron’s Head Park telling himself, “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” because his stupid dad told him not to walk barefoot in the mud because his toes might get pinched by crabs. But then his wonderful sister told him to repeat this to himself to not be afraid.
GB (6:37 a.m., runs into the room where SJ is sleeping): Did somebody say Jif?
SJ (sleepily): Jif?
GB: Jif.
SJ: Jeff?
GB: Was it you?
SJ: I didn’t say Jeff.
GB: Was it Mommy?
SJ: Maybe.
GB: Was it somebody else?
SJ: I don’t think anybody else is around. Who’s Jeff?
In our ongoing quest to raise an antiracist child, I recently asked him, “Did you know that you are White?”
GB: “I didn’t know that. But I DID notice YOU.”
Finally, a few days ago, SJ threw his back out opening a can of tuna, which I’m just sharing because it’s the funniest thing that’s happened in three months.
Also, he recently shared his retirement dream:
SJ: I'd have a bait and tackle shop ... that I didn't have to run.
Jenny: What, like sit on a milk crate outside the door?
SJ: Yeah. And say, These worms look a little cold!
Back in April, SJ and I had our third wedding anniversary. I baked this olive oil cake, because I’ve been meaning to make one forever, and it turned out amazing.
I can’t believe I finally wrote a blog post, so just go to Smitten Kitchen and give her the traffic to find directions on how to make this amazing cake.
