Remembrances from the other earthquake zone

Published in The Fauquier Times-Democrat Weekend, Aug. 26, 2011

I have recently met more readers than I dared to suspect I had. Thank you for stopping me. I love meeting you, because our dialogue is so often one-sided. When you stop me at the post office, pool, grocery store, school, or even at the polling station, it leaves me ebullient. The only time I ask that you don’t stop me is if you are an officer of the law - in the line of duty.

Who can forget our earthquake last week? We lived in Northern California for nine years, and I don’t recall one. But when I was sent on a weeklong business trip from Long Island, New York, to Los Angeles, we experienced one then.


My husband, being a creature of higher intelligence, always accompanied me on business trips. We had a single toddler in tow. When he had business trips to exquisite destinations, I was always the idiot who felt compelled to stay at work. Then, I would suffer pangs of jealousy and regret as he described sunken tubs of black marble in posh hotels. I know. You didn’t think they let scientists out of the lab, right? He was serving as an expert DNA witness in court.


When I started my life of stay-at-home-dom (which equates to martyrdom for some), I longed for another such opportunity to escape, but it never seemed to appear. Or perhaps, my husband, being the creature of higher intelligence, never let on to such opportunities.


There was the one trip to Santa Barbara when the three kids and I tagged along. It was a gorgeous holiday, despite my being newly pregnant, and the youngest, a two-year-old boy, insisting on wearing a girl’s bathing suit to the beach. He was having none of this trunk exposure stuff. We acquiesced, realizing we couldn’t get to the beach otherwise. We coached our girls, then five and seven, not to hint as to gender of their sibling. We didn’t know anyone there. What would it matter?


It is the same liberating anonymity as when you go camping, know no one, and feel fine walking around with Einstein’s hairdo. Who will know? Who will care? Perhaps this is also the danger with out interactions online. It is easy to become too friendly with people we have never met – “e-quaintances,” I believe they are called. Who will know? Who will care? Trust me, someone or Someone knows and cares.


We had barely set foot on the beach, when our second daughter squealed, “Hey! Why is he wearing a girl’s bathing suit? He’s a boy!” She then dashed about, delightedly repeating this to random, arbitrary strangers. It was the nineties’ version of sending out a public tweet. She’s in college now, and surprisingly, she isn’t pursuing journalism.


When we went to rent the quadricycle, the girls were thrilled. Each child had to be helmeted, which seemed a simple enough business. The two girls donned their headgear. The man went through his entire inventory of children’s helmets, but our little XY shrieked the moment any helmet approached his head. We couldn’t get that thing near him. It was like an invisible force field around his body that inflicted pain or an electric shock every time the helmet approached him. So, he retaliated by inflicting pain on us, in the form of piercing screams and embarrassing public tantrums.


This is why I avoid any joining in of eye rolling at stores when someone’s child is having a fit. I realize that we all think we are smarter and more astute than the inept parent who doesn’t understand proper parenting techniques the way we do or did, whether we have children or not. But some kids are just different. Way different, and we need to be as thankful for them as we are for the ones who help us believe we are sane and competent.


The shrieking and body writhing never stopped until I walked, defeated, back to the hotel room with the creature still struggling, and got out his sister’s bright pink bike helmet (odd, why HAD we packed that for the trip?), and put it on him. Putting that helmet on him was like the tranquilizer dart hitting home on a charging rogue elephant. Ah, peace. All was well with the world. I trudged back to the quadricycle, fatigued and annoyed. If this was peace, it was a disgusted sort of peace.


If I recall, my husband had to do all the pedaling for the whole family. He fixed me with accusatory glares. Me, the mother of the contented boy who could finally be calmed by that glaring pink helmet. The girls were oblivious to our tension. (It’s so nice when they are young.) They gleefully enjoyed the fruits of their father’s labor and delighted in everything the beach had to offer.

Maybe that’s why this was the only business trip I was invited on as a stay-at-home mom. And maybe that’s why we never experienced earthquakes as Californians. We always seemed to have our own built-in version, right at home.

V-A-C-A-T-I-O-N at the end of summertime

Published in the Fauquier Times-Democrat Weekend on August 19, 2011

Who said summer could be over? I’ve barely nicked our list of summer projects. True, we can walk through the garage now, and there have been sightings of our basement floor, but where did the time go?

Sunday night we returned from a quick, three-day getaway into the mountains. We’ve barely begun our summer fun. How can it be time for school?


We had relatives visit for eleven days, made a single day trip to New Jersey for my nephew’s graduation and my cousin’s 50th birthday, took the kids to the swimming pool at the WARF several times, drove into DC to the Natural History Museum, and saw Luray Caverns again, but did I ever play a game of chess with my sons? Did I get around to a simple sewing project with my youngest daughter? Have I read a book?

This year, I did things backwards. Since I normally do things so slowly or late that it may as well be backwards, this should have approached the domain of the double negative and set me straight, but it hasn’t. I took the children school supply shopping early. (Of course, you read that column.) With that out of the way, I could start thinking about planning a vacation.

With the threat of summer ebbing and school washing in, we had only one weekend available. Unfortunately, our eldest daughter had signed up for the GRE on that one magical weekend, so it was going to be a lonely trip: just the seven of us and our shelter dog.

I realized then that planning a vacation actually takes a little time, effort, and of course, planning. I’ve even heard about businesses that do this for you! You’d have to wonder about our sense of family vacations. We have a few preferences: It needs to be within driving distance. Please don’t make it too physically taxing. I’m in no shape to be hiking up some mountain, and I’m a little nervous of water, so don’t expect me to be snorkeling around somewhere. It should have some educational value beyond learning that I’m in no shape to be hiking or snorkeling. It should include museum and/or zoo visits. If I get to be the driver to our lovely, life-long learning vacation resort, we will also intensify the experience by listening to an audio book in the car.

Think of normal life as the ant that is outdoors enjoying the sunshine, and vacation as being the ant enjoying the sunshine under a magnifying glass. Perhaps there is a reason we keep our vacations short. Maybe standardized testing is less painful than a vacation with the Ribeiro Family.

I’m thinking that our vacations worked better when the children were closer to one age group, instead of being sprawled across the decades from entering elementary school to legal adults. Isn’t it irritating how children insist upon growing up? The true beauty of childhood is that it takes so very little to please a child. A young child can be happy with the smallest things: kicking pebbles together, rolling around and laughing on the carpet, or trying to catch toads and butterflies. These things can delight the heart of a small child.

We traveled with three teenagers.

These teens had wanted to go to the beach. Or was it everyone that was in a rebellious mood? They had already seen and remembered, in excruciating detail, our visit several years ago to the Frontier Culture Museum in Staunton, Virginia. I tried to remind them about our compressed, 40-hour vacation to Virginia Beach last year, which, incidentally, is perhaps the best vacation we’ve taken. If we applied the same logic, they had already “been there, done that” with the sand and the waves. Why should they want to go again (and again)? Apparently, the flavor of the beach does not wear out the way the flavor of a museum does. The older, more sophisticated, and more jaded hearts are a little harder to delight.

Some of the more mutinous of our group awoke late on the morning of departure, and hadn’t packed a single thing for themselves. By contrast, the two youngest had been packed up for a week. (We will not hold it against the six-year-old that he forgot to pack any shirts. After all, he had packed everything else that mattered: a toothbrush, underwear, shorts, pajamas, and his stuffed dinosaur and a pocket-sized fighter jet.)

The older children approached my amazing vacation plans with the enthusiasm of criminals heading to the gallows. Come to think of it, they were acting like criminals that should have been heading to the gallows. One thoughtful soul helpfully offered, an hour before departure, to stay at home and finish summer assignments. This new plan could lighten the load on the car, open up more space for baggage, alleviate concerns about pet care, and reduce our carbon footprint.

I offered my carbon footprint.

Remind me on our next vacation to the mountains to bring along a bucket of sand and a pail of water for those who are missing the beach.

Doing the dirty deed

Published in The Fauquier Times-Democrat Weekend, August 12th, 2011

Someone once said, “You haven’t really lived until you’ve had to collect your child’s stool sample.” Okay, no one said that, but this thought occurred to me once when I was amidst this unsavory act. Rest assured, it was for medical purposes. I don’t have the time, energy, space, or desire to be a hobby collector. Besides, saving up potential coprolite (literally, “dung stone”) would not be on my list.


Indeed, the sordid act is stomach turning. While engaged in the deed, this single-sentence complaint wafted through my mind. It could be the kernel of a column, because writing a weekly column is like being a professional complainer, except you don’t derive a living off of this exceptional ability. That’s not a complaint, just an observation.


Do you know what happens whenever I complain about things, even mentally? The things I complain about get worse. I know I sound like a superstitious scaredy-cat. Perhaps it is a weakness in my faith, but it happens often enough to be uncanny. I feel like that Skinnerian rat (or cat) that has developed the habit of turning around thrice before pressing the food lever because that’s how it worked the first twelve times.


I once had to take a child’s specimen. It’s one thing to keep your child’s medals and trophies – maybe the refrigerator artwork, or even those obnoxious yarn and Popsicle stick crafts they produce. But collecting stool samples is something else entirely. Poised with one of those scientific, tubular containers with the tiny spoon conveniently attached in the lid, you try desperately to disassociate this astute little medical device to its kin, the tiny ice cream sample spoon. Ew. This was not what you wanted to collect from your darling. The thought of samples has been forever tainted.


The moment I thought what a disgusting endeavor it was, how relieved I was (stop hunting for puns) that it was over, and how happy I should be if I never had to do this again, I found myself conscripted for the task of collecting, not a single specimen, but an entire supply for a general, 72-hour study.


Mathematical translation: “Baa, baa, black sheep, have you any stools? Yes, Mom, yes, Mom: Three days’ full.”


Notice how this task once again falls into the maternal domain? The maternal domain continues to expand like an unwilling oil slick: traditionally confined to the home to cook, clean, and train the children, we are now bringing in incomes, chauffeuring, managing finances, networking, arranging (or doing) car maintenance, and, yes, collecting medical samples.


So it was that events conspired against me. I would need to keep the child’s dietary log for three days, and then continue logging for another three days, during which time I was collecting that child’s…well, logs.


Excuse my crudeness. Since I debased myself and wrote about finding boogers on the walls of my home like an archaeologist discovering cave paintings, I find stooping to the topic of stools fairly tolerable. Next week, I might describe myself in a bathing suit.


Hence, I have collected everything for three days. EVERYTHING. I’m not going to name the child involved, because a little embarrassment, my children can tolerate. After all, they live with me. But this would be asking too much. It would also be telling too much.


Those with children in diapers might be rolling their eyes. They might be thinking they have already collected many months’ worth. True, you might be exposed to this on a daily basis. You might be disposing of it, but you aren’t collecting it. No one has told you to keep those nasty diapers refrigerated. As repulsive as I find the term “ew” to be, I will have to use it again. Ew. My refrigerator has been violated. I could complain, but I’m not going there. Instead, I’ll be glad we live in the era of modern medicine, refrigerators, and plastic. Especially plastic.


I used to think my husband’s refrigerating worms left over from a fishing trip was a little nasty and disturbing. I would dodge that shelf with the bagged, Styrofoam container of dirt and its nearly dormant wriggling contents. Now, finding worms in the fridge would be, comparatively, very desirable.


This morning, as soon as I click “SEND” to my editor, I am headed down to the UVA Hospital with this cargo, because their lab is one of the few that sends samples to the Mayo Clinic.


Should I keep the samples on ice for the 70-mile drive to Charlottesville? I could compensate for all the shopping trips when I’ve reused canvas bags: I’d go with a disposable cooler.

If I skip the cooler, I might have to speed. What would I say if I got pulled over? “Officer, I’m on an urgent medical mission, and with all due respect, I can’t take this crap from you.” Because, despite my exasperated pleas to my children that I can’t take any more crap from them, apparently, I can. And I do.

School supply shopping: DONE!

Published in The Fauquier Times-Democrat Weekend on Aug. 5, 2011

I don’t want to shock you, but we are finished with the infamous, annual August ritual: school supply shopping. I know, I know. Had I waited until this weekend, it would all have been tax-free, but there is downsizing and desperation in the bureaucratic atmosphere. Should I deprive our government of a few tax dollars? I’m not ruffled by giving them ten dollars. At least I’m done shopping.


If I had needed to pinch pennies, I would have waited. But I can justify my extravagance. I am neither flying around the world nor running off on cruises nor buying expensive designer clothing. On the other hand, neither am I standing with a tin cup in hand along with the woeful dangling placard on my chest, so I feel it’s okay to have “indulged” in shopping earlier than usual. Waiting, for a procrastinator like me, can have its pitfalls.

I might have put off the trip indefinitely. Then, I would be dashing through the aisles at the same time as every other school year: The night before school starts. Going shopping the night before school is pretty much a bad idea. You are left to wander the aisles that look like they’ve been mobbed. They are strewn with spilled book covers. College-ruled papers are found in inappropriate relationships with the much younger wide-ruled set, tossed about in mislabeled boxes. This forces you to read each label as opposed to grabbing reams or composition books and tossing them, carefree, into the cart.

Shopping late leaves you to discover that those big, huge, bins of supplies aren’t actually filled from the ground up. They have a false cardboard bottom that is about thigh-high. You are going to be seeing way too many of these bare white cardboard bottoms than should legally be allowed. Last-second shopping leaves you squinting in the artificial night-shopper’s brightness well past the children’s bedtime. Invariably, there is some other procrastinator in the store who is carting around an unhappy and overtired toddler who cannot stop howling. This intensifies your painful experience. You want to howl too.

So this year, I have decided to forgo the pain that has tainted my perspective on shopping. I loathe shopping. I dread shopping. But shopping is a necessary evil, especially when you do not possess the skills and patience of a prairie settler.

I took the children shopping early because I had an idea of such sheer brilliance that I am now filled with fear and self-doubt. I turned over the lists as well as the chore of buying school supplies to each respective child. (Even the not-so-respective ones, for that matter.) I gave each child a cash allotment of thirty dollars. They were free to spend all of it or none of it, but their backpacks needed to be loaded with all the necessities. The thrifty could keep the surplus funds. The spendthrifts who require decorator binders would need to dig into their own savings.

The moment I called out this plan, the most miserly children (or the most ingenious, depending on your perspective), darted off. They checked the over-the-door, clear-pocket, shoe organizers where I had stuffed all those clearance, ten-cent book covers, as well as last year’s nickel-a-box crayons. They dashed down to the basement where I keep our overstock of school supplies for the school year. Then, they tackled the bins stacked with lined and graph paper as well as binders and portfolios. These rascals figured the quicker they pilfered our home for freebies, the smaller their cash outlay would be later on.


Watching my most eager children grab the last of the glue sticks, ferret out red pens, and strike gold with a pristine pencil pouch, I felt a mixture of shame (at hording supplies) and pride (at devising a plan that encourages them, instead of me, to do the hunting.)

Last year, I was reading a book on organizing and de-junking the home. Unfortunately, midway through the book, I misplaced it. I’m not trying to be funny; that’s the sad truth. In it, the author (whom I cannot acknowledge, since she has chosen to go AWOL amongst our other books) said we shouldn’t succumb to the myth of saving money by buying things on sale and then trying to make our homes into a place to store all these great finds. She said that’s why they have places called “stores.” Instead, we choose to live in junk-piles where we lack shelving and the full-time employees to keep them organized.


My children’s school shopping is DONE. We even finished shopping for the child we “adopted” through our church’s outreach. I’m glad my children have divested me of my hoard. Now all I need to do is find that book.

The Prong and the Stone, and the Boy who Found it

Published in The Fauquier Times-Democrat Weekend July 29, 2011

To continue last week’s tale: My engagement ring had to be cut off because my ring had refused to cooperate and expand along with the rest of my being. The ring, although snuggly packed onto my finger, had to be removed because the diamond had fallen out, and the exposed prongs which made my every gesticulation dangerous to clothing, furniture, and small children.

My 16-year-old son Sergio found the dearly departed diamond. With a boy like mine around, I should have known not to worry. He’s been training for this task all his life. When he was two, every time we went to a park, he would dart off and immediately begin picking up shards of glass. It was a disturbing and distressing behavior; I did not see him as a future park ranger.


Other moms would look at me suspiciously. It was going to be a hard sell to say he was community conscious, and just doing this out of respect for nature, even in California. After all, he was two years old and looked entirely too excited. Also, I had to coax and cajole him to gently deposit his treasures into the trashcan, much as you might do when convincing someone to back away from a window ledge. He never failed to look back at me before releasing the shard. When you are that young, you are ever hopeful that, this time, Mom might let you keep your treasure.


Before he was born, I had produced two relatively civilized daughters. They liked shiny things, undoubtedly, but they never acted like this. Whether he was attracted to the glinting of glass in the light, or to the glass’ power to cut, I do not know. Nothing I could do would hinder his dangerous delight until the day he finally sliced his finger. I suppose even experts are fallible. He had been picking up glass for about six months then.


We have established the boy’s attraction to shiny things that can cut. In fact, Sergio’s first words (after the standard “dada” and “mama”) were “sharp knife.” His first sentence was “poke eye.” Most parents might have feared these early indicators of criminal behavior, but being of Indian origin, we knew better. Clearly, these actions pointed to a future in medicine. Laser eye surgery, perhaps.


Sergio spent practically the first ten months of his life glued to my hip. Any photos I took of him tended to show him screaming, because of course, it involved two seconds of separation from his mom. It’s good to remember these things when your son is sixteen and too manly to have much to do with you. It might be embarrassing for him to hear this now, so I’ll only tell you.


The first time that I could disconnect the child from my body was when my mother-in-law traveled all the way to America to come see him. Frail, diabetic, and 72 years old, she traveled by herself. I believe it was her first trip abroad. But she came to see her first, and at that time, her only, grandson. He was her tenth grandchild, but the first grandson from any of her six children. It’s not that she didn’t adore the nine granddaughters: It gave her inordinate pleasure to know that the family name would be carried on.


My mother-in-law, Lyra Maria Artemisia Ribeiro was a tall and elegant lady. She died in Mumbai, India on December 28th, 2008. I miss her. Throughout her 23 years of widowhood, she remained devoted to her husband and her home, rarely allowing herself to leave it or her memories of him. So for her to say, “I am coming to America to see my grandson” was extraordinary. When she began her four-month visit, the nine-month-old baby was practically an appendage of mine. She would peel him away from me, and would totter about with the protesting “Baba.” She sat and fed him bites of food, and played games with him. He learned to tolerate the separation. At ten months, we finally got him to crawl. I set down the little rice-cooker power cord as a lure. For that, and that alone, he was willing to crawl.


I may have been an accomplice, but I don’t think I programmed these bizarre behaviors into him. Our pediatrician said that Sergio was the only patient who had ever asked about the fire sprinklers in the ceiling above the medical examination table. Most of the other three-year-olds concentrated on the cartoon characters plastered overhead. But then again, not many other three-year-olds had a light bulb collection: dead and alive, curly and colored. Normally uncommunicative, he became quite chatty with any stranger if he happened to see a fused bulb. He would give them his winning grin and ask for the bulb.


So, when you see your child engaged in odd behaviors, don’t despair. Everyone is made in God’s image. I think He knows what He is doing – not that He needed my approval. Besides, you never know when your child’s bizarre interests will come in really, really, handy.