I just don't get it: June 15, 2003

I like boys a lot. I married one, I've produced two, and I'm even friends with a few. But I don't understand boys. I don't understand how they think or why they do the stuff they do or why they say the things they say. Boys are weird. I will probably spend a lot of the rest of my life trying unsuccessfully to understand boys.

That's OK. I didn't really have any other plans.

A crash course in the mysterious world of boys

  

    I’ve never been a little boy, which sometimes makes it hard for me to get inside the mind of my 3-year-old son.

    Jack’s idea of a terrific game is to smack his buddy Norman on the head and then wait for Norman to smack him back. They both shout "Whack," and laugh uproariously at this exchange.

    During a recent drive I had both boys strapped into the back seat of the car, and they spent nearly an hour playfully smacking each other’s heads and shrieking laughter. I watched them in my little auxiliary rearview mirror, which points at the back seat.

    I fought the urge to tell them to stop hitting each other. "Be nice," I wanted to say. "Don’t hit your friend." But I kept biting my tongue, listening to that laughter. They were nearly giddy, and I was silent the whole way.

    I don’t get it, but I guess I know a good time when I see one.

    Jack turned 3 last month, passing into the exotic realm of children who are old enough for toys that contain small parts. He’s not my baby anymore. He’s almost toilet-trained and loves to announce proudly to everyone in earshot that he can go potty. People are remarkably gracious upon receiving this news.

    "Good for you," said the smiling woman at the Wal-Mart.

    I’ve learned the art of the apologetic grin and developed an imperviousness to embarrassment.

    As Jack gets older, the details of his personality are coming into focus.

    He dislikes loud noises — the vacuum is a particular nemesis — and gets intensely upset when he sees another child crying. He thrills at heavy equipment, motorcycles and fire trucks. His favorite word is "contraption."

    He is left-handed, which he got from me. He’s thoughtful and tends to be cautious, which he got from his father.

    Jack has a room stuffed with an appalling supply of toys, but prefers rocks, dirt and puddles to anything you can buy in a toy store. We had our first camping trip recently, and the opportunities for entertainment were endless.

    "Jack, let’s go fishing with Norman and his daddy," I suggested.

    "I want to throw rocks in the water," he replied.

    "How about we go watch the kayaks — you can see Daddy in his kayak," I urged.

    "I want to throw rocks in the water."

    I know when I’m beaten. We found a creek with a nearby supply of rocks, and I took a seat on the bank.

    Jack spent 90 minutes throwing rocks into the water. By the end of the afternoon, he was wading thigh-deep into the little creek to fetch the rocks he’d thrown in, and then wading back out to toss them in again. Soaking wet and muddy up to his hips, he laughed and executed a triumphant little hop every time a rock splashed down.

    When I was little girl, I was not particularly prissy. I rode horses and bikes. I climbed trees and didn’t have any interest in dolls. But I’ve never been a little boy, and I’m just not sure I understand the appeal of rocks and mud, the charm of games that involve violence or the romance of heavy equipment.     

    I’m willing to learn, though, and I hope Jack will bear with me while I try to figure all this out. So far he’s been pretty patient.

    "Jack is a big, tall crane," he says, growling like a motor and lifting piles of rocks in his little hands. "Mommy is a crane, too," he adds, dumping the rocks in my lap.

    OK, Jack, Mommy is a crane. Mommy is a happy crane. 

Guilt is dumb: May 18, 2003

I discovered long ago that energy spent on guilt is energy wasted. (Assuming you're not, you know, just a completely horrible person. Completely horrible people should absolutely feel guilty.) This column records one of the little steps I took toward the realization that there's no point feeling guilty about enjoying stuff that may or may not have redeeming qualities.

Yeah, OK, it's just a column about TV. But I can turn anything into a heavy life lesson. I'm an Olympic-level overthinker. And I do not feel bad about that at all.

I love TV, but I think we should just be friends

  

    We were a Nielsen family last month.

    This little card came in the mail telling us we’d been selected to fill out a diary tracking the television shows we watched for a week. In return for this, we got $5. Getting paid $5 to watch TV and scribble a little sounded all right, so I did it.

    I quickly discovered there’s nothing like a little documentation to make you question your habits.

    According to my Nielsen diary, my 3-year-old son watched almost three hours of television on April 29. The high temperature that day was 83 degrees. There were no clouds, no rain, no reason to stay inside save the fact that it was easier to plunk Jack down in front of "Dora the Explorer" and "Blue’s Clues" than it was to tear myself away from the coffee I was drinking and the newspaper I was reading and the dishwasher I was loading.

    "Mommy wants to play trains with Jack," my son told me as he climbed down from his chair after breakfast.

    "In a minute, honey. I’m still reading the paper, and I need to clean up the kitchen," I replied. "Why don’t you watch Dora and Blue until I’m ready to play?"

    Ack! When did I turn into this person?

    During Jack’s first year, when I worked three 10-hour days a week, I used to threaten to divorce my husband if he let our son watch TV while I was gone.

    "Play with that baby," I instructed Jim. "Talk to him, tell him stories about the ’70s, sing him Beatles songs. DO NOT put him in front of the television."

    I used to touch the top of the set when I got home to make sure it wasn’t warm.

    What a big hypocrite I am now that I’m at home during the day and Jack is old enough to grab my leg, gaze up at me imploringly and ask if he can please, PLEASE watch "Blue’s Clues."

    After a few days of keeping a Nielsen diary, I decided we needed to pick a weekly TV-free day. I ran the idea by husband, who shrugged agreeably.

    "I don’t watch much TV on Thursdays," he said.

    The reason he doesn’t watch much TV on Thursdays is that he tapes the Thursday night shows while I’m at work. Then, on Saturday nights, we curl up on the couch to watch "Friends" and "Scrubs" and "Will & Grace."

    Thursday didn’t count as TV-free, I decided. So which day?

    Well, not Tuesday, that’s "NYPD Blue" night. Certainly not Wednesday, that’s "West Wing" night. Not Thursday, for the abovementioned reasons. Saturday’s out, too. And Sunday is "Malcolm in the Middle," which we love.

    This TV-free day thing was a bad idea, I finally decided. Besides, I hate arbitrary rules — no TV on Monday, no TV on Sunday, no TV whenever, just because we picked that day.

    What are we supposed to do when the Tour de France is on in July? We can’t miss a night of that race. And once you start making exceptions to arbitrary rules, they’re out the window for good. So why have them in the first place?

    By this point my mother was in on the discussion.

    "That’s why you had so much trouble in school," she said. "All those arbitrary rules."

    This dilemma got me to wondering why I feel so guilty about our TV habits. Jack has learned Spanish from "Dora the Explorer" and deductive reasoning from "Blue’s Clues." "Sesame Street" has taught him numbers, colors and letters. Jim and I are suckers for public television documentaries about everything from genetics to jazz. 

    We don’t watch reality shows (OK, we watched "Joe Millionaire," but that was just too funny.) We don’t watch lurid talk shows or silly game shows. We are pretty careful about what we let into our living room.

    I decided it’s not what we watch that I feel guilty about; I feel bad that we’re watching instead of doing other things. When we watch TV we’re not riding our bikes, which Jim and I used to do several times a week. We’re not playing in the yard or taking a walk or reading a book or working a puzzle. We’re not talking to each other. We’re just sitting.

    The solution, I decided, is not to eliminate TV time, which makes us feel like we’re sacrificing something. The solution is to add things to our schedules that don’t involve TV.

    My mother has volunteered to come over every Sunday to play with Jack while Jim and I go biking. Jack and I have a date to go to the park after breakfast at least twice a week, even if I haven’t finished loading the dishwasher. And with Nightfall concerts kicking off this month, Jim and Jack have a Friday night diversion on one of the evenings I’m at work.

    I’m not giving up "Will & Grace," mind you. And I’m done feeling bad about liking TV. I’m just hoping for a little more time spent playing together and less time spent simply sitting.

    Stay tuned. I’ll let you know how it goes. 

I have no idea what will happen next: April 20, 2003

This column is from an era when I was spending most of my time at home with my son -- something I never, ever thought would happen. Absolutely no way. And now I am the breadwinner for a family of four -- something else I never, ever thought would happen. Absolutely no way.

I have no clue what to expect from life; you don't, either. We do what we must when we must, and the rest is just making sure everyone has the most fun possible.

So what if no one vacuums; everybody is happy

  

    I left the grown-up world of full-time work two years ago this month, and my career has been stalled at the roadside so long it’s been stripped for parts.

    The adult in me cares about this, even worries about it, but her voice gets harder to hear all the time.

    She’s the woman who thought fingerpaint was gross. She got annoyed if there were bread crumbs in the butter tub or globs of peanut butter in the jelly jar.

    She washed her hair every single day and carried a pager. Her CDs were stored in alphabetical order.

    The grown-up me would have been scared out of her mind that a stack of envelopes with little plastic windows is piling up in the bill basket, and the check register shows $26.34 in the bank right this minute.

    I’m not knocking her, mind you. The grown-up me has her place, and she surfaces occasionally to keep things from spinning into total chaos. I am her, she is me, we know each other well and will probably not be apart indefinitely.

    But right now I have this precious, finite window into my own past, this opportunity to have a second childhood while I supervise my son’s first.

    I have never had — never will have — a better reason to play. In the last two years I have rediscovered the smell of Play-Doh, taken long walks for the sole purpose of finding pine cones, sat in sand boxes while my feet were methodically buried by busy toddlers, picnicked in my front yard even though the grass was wet, and learned to love peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

    I have realized that it doesn’t matter if my son’s new shoes get utterly filthy on their first outing because he won’t fit into them for long anyway. And it turns out no one cares if I don’t vacuum the house for a month, or if dinner is a frozen pizza because we were in the yard throwing rocks into a puddle when I could have been inside cooking.

    My second childhood has been a lot more fun than my first, mostly because I’m spending it with my little boy, Jack, who will turn 3 next month.

    Jack is excellent company. He has never once suggested he’d be better off if I spent more time cleaning his room and less time throwing balls in the house. He never complains if I decide to take him to the park instead of grocery shopping. He doesn’t even notice if I wear the same clothes two days in a row.

    This is not what I envisioned when I decided to become a mother.

    I honestly thought I was going to do it all: work full time, keep the house clean, cook, play with my son, lose all that baby weight in six months. And I would be ever so happy and fulfilled by it all.     

    It took me about a year to figure out that it just wasn’t going to work that way, that it wasn’t even going to be close. At the end of that exhausting year — after I finished kicking myself for failing to be perfect in every way — I made a list of what really needed attention and what could slide. Jack was at the top, which made the rest of it look pretty trivial.

    Then I drew up a budget of what needed to be bought and what we could do without. Turns out all we really need is a dry place to sleep and food. These days, on 60 percent of our previous income, that’s pretty much all we buy.

    So the house is dusty and disorganized, and the bills are sometimes late. The cars are old, and no one washes them, and my dreams of doing it all and having it all are shot full of holes.     

    I have never had more fun.     

    I could not even begin to do this alone. My husband, to my endless amazement, never comes through the door after work asking what’s for dinner, or if I washed clothes so he’ll have something to wear tomorrow, or if I bought milk and eggs like I said I would. He doesn’t gripe about how broke we are, and he never asks me when I plan to get myself back into the world of paycheck-earning wives.

    He just wants to know one thing, and he asks Jack every evening: "Did you have fun today, buddy?"

    It took me two childhoods to realize that’s what matters most. 

Like, totally: March 23, 2003

I think the unfairest thing (unfairest -- that can be  word, right?) about getting older is that you only do it once so everything you learn about the process is applicable to absolutely nothing. And people who are younger than you aren't interested in hearing about everything you've learned from getting older because, well, you're old. And people who are older than you aren't impressed by all you've learned because, whatever, you're not old enough to take seriously.

In any case, the 1980s: Maybe you remember them, maybe you don't. Either way, I'm pretty sure all they taught me is to avoid skinny jeans, no matter how much the fashion industrial complex wants me to buy them.

How can the 1980s be back? They just left!

    I grew up in the decade of MTV and Reaganomics, wide belts and skinny ties.

    I was 8 years old when the ’80s dawned. By the time I was 10, I was wondering what, exactly, a communist was and whether something called a Cold War was likely to get my dad killed.

    When I was 11, I bought the Michael Jackson album "Thriller" and nearly drove my parents to violence with the incessant playing of "Billie Jean." I had feathered hair and a Rubik’s Cube; my brother had an Atari.     

    When MTV first appeared in my living room, I was in middle school. I idolized the VJs and memorized the videos (not difficult at the time, as there weren’t many). My father once came home from work, switched on the television and announced that the next time he turned on the TV to find MTV on the screen, he’d break the legs of everyone under 18 in the house.     

    In high school, I had big, permed hair made even bigger through the miracle of Aqua Net, and the ankles of my jeans were tapered so tight I had to put plastic bags over my feet to get dressed.

    It doesn’t seem that long ago, but apparently the 1980s are now a distant enough memory to have become kitsch.

    There are Web sites, books, radio shows and Time-Life sets devoted to the music and culture of the ‘80s. The VJs who helped launch MTV have carved out new careers for themselves as purveyors of nostalgia. On a recent Sunday morning I heard the voice of Nina Blackwood on my radio introducing a song by the Stray Cats.

    I think it’s pretty funny that my generation is feeling nostalgic for the decade that brought us parachute pants, the Valley Girl dialect and the solo career of David Lee Roth. But I listened to that Stray Cats song and to the rest of that radio show devoted to 20-year-old music. It got me to thinking.

    The 1980s have long been derided as a hopelessly tacky time of over-the-top materialism, ugly clothes, bad music and silly slang, and it’s largely true. But it wasn’t all bad.

    The 1980s also gave us U2’s "The Joshua Tree," and great music from REM and the Police. I’m pretty sure the end of the Cold War and communism as we knew it was in there somewhere, too. And I still really like "The Cosby Show."     

    At its core, though, I think nostalgia for the 1980s is probably not really fueled by a yearning to hear Pet Shop Boys songs or watch movies starring Molly Ringwald. I suspect it’s based more on a desire to relive a time when no one had heard of Osama Bin Laden, Anthrax was the name of a band, duct tape was for ducts, and the bad guys all lived in one big country really far away from us.

    Things seem harder now, scarier, than they did then.

    I know that’s how nostalgia works — that the past, no matter how tacky, always seems safer and easier than the uncertainties of the future. And of course the world seemed safer and simpler to a 13-year-old wearing big earrings and listening to a Cyndi Lauper song than it does to a 31-year-old wife and mother worried about what kind of world she’ll leave her son.

    I guess we could all use a little escapism right about now, whether it’s brought to us over the airwaves by an aging former VJ or on a Web site devoted to ’80s trivia.

    In fact, in the spirit of nostalgia for a simpler time, I think I’ll drive out to my parents’ place and dig up some of my albums. Somewhere in their house lurks a stack of vinyl that includes the soundtrack to the movie "Footloose," several albums by Duran Duran and one by Culture Club.     

    How totally awesome.