Sugar and spice

Polly heads down the sidewalk with a little one on either side, their hands slipped confidently into hers. Shoulders a little rounded: all the reading, the computer games, the growth spurt. Old plaid skirt an inch or two above the knee now, about the length she’d wear it if she went to Catholic school. Yesterday a stranger asked her if she liked being homeschooled and she lit up, answered Oh yes with shining eyes. He works with students her age, this man does, and I could see him comparing—favorably; it was lovely, the way she grinned at her daddy’s jokes and nodded so vigorously when I talked about how much fun we have. Mary did some mild eye-rolling; she finds plenty to complain about, but I know that would be the case if she went to school too. Some temperaments have to wrestle and push, I think. It took me a long time to understand that what she needs is for me to be an angel for her to wrestle with. I wish I were better at it. She is so very strong.

Polly would rather lose an arm than wrestle with me. What she wants is not a sturdy angel but a song of praise, a warm glance, a shared joke.

When she brought the little ones back from their walk this evening, Jack had lost his band-aid. She put him on the counter and hunted for a new one. He took a pinch of air from her cheek and pretended to eat her. That laugh rippled out, and she threw her arms around him and said, “I just love you!” He grinned and bobbed and took another bite.

“Sometimes he just melts me, Mom,” she said.

Oh honey, don’t I know the feeling.

Why he deserves me

“Who’s the love of my life?” he whispers, snuggling closer, nuzzling my neck.

I arch my eyebrows and glance pointedly at the sleeping toddler on the other side of the bed, her hair tousled and sweaty, her mouth pursed in a little o. He adores her almost past sanity, and we both know it.

“No, she’s the joy of my life,” he says. There’s a pause, while we fill in the words so deeply understood there’s no need to speak them aloud. She’s his joy, I’m his love.

“And she’ll leave me someday,” he says. “For some jackass who doesn’t deserve her.”

I smile, stroke his hair. I hadn’t noticed how much gray there was in it.

“I hate him,” he mutters. He looks like he might bite me, but it wouldn’t be me he was biting. It would be the future.

His face is buried in my hair. “But I love you,” he says. “You are the love of my life.”

I’m not sure if he said it out loud. But I heard it.

It’s about time

A thread over at BlogHer got me thinking about how fortunate I am to be able to be home with my kids, and have them home with me. My sister doesn’t have that luxury. I know a lot of women choose to juggle out-of-the-house jobs and kids, and I know that lifestyle has its challenges, but they are challenges that come about by choice which must make them easier to deal with, right?

My sister, a single mom, has no choice; she has to work, and she therefore doesn’t get to spend much time with her daughter.

This makes me think about that BBC show Berkeley Square that aired on PBS several years ago. It was all about nannies in Edwardian London. I think it was Edwardian. Or was it Victorian? I’m trying to remember if there were any motorcars. Now it’s getting muddled up in my head with Upstairs/Downstairs. It doesn’t matter. The point it, there was one nanny who had a child of her own (secretly, or she would have lost her job). She was an Irish girl who got pregnant by the son of the lord of the manor, oh the scandal, and she left home and went to London with her baby and found lodgings with a nice Russian woman who took care of the baby for her all day. And that just killed me, thinking about this girl having to leave her own baby to go take care of other people’s children.

But that’s been going on forever, and it happens all the time today.

I am so lucky. Well, my religion says you shouldn’t say “lucky,” you should say “blessed.” Except I have a hard time with that, because why should I be more blessed than my sister? God loves us both the same. I guess I do think there is an element of luck at play in our lives—not a superstitious concept of luck but something for which there is no better name than the luck of the draw. I drew a pretty fine hand of cards. Did God stack the deck in my favor? Did I just make better decisions with the hand I was dealt?

Hmm, better than my sister, yes probably. But still.

Okay, yes, I did work hard to put myself in the position of getting to stay home with my children. And I have made sacrifices, choices, that make this work. Small house, frugal living, career on the back burner.

But still, but still.

One of my kids just bounced over and asked me to scratch a terrible awful itch in the middle of her back. I got to stop writing this and scratch her. And I knew it was a luxury, a great blessing, a high card for my royal flush.

Ain’t no bigger gift than time to just be together.