The Hobbling of Dr. Frank
When I was 26, I had some pretty bad anxiety to contend with. That first sentence I wrote, that won’t make you feel it, and at this point in the evening, I can’t write the words to show you.
I can’t feel it anymore myself, but back then, I’d lost control of several relationships that meant a lot to me. Instead of freaking out about that particular situation to the depth and degree that I felt it, I did a trick where I mirrored it onto other things. Mostly, I worried about the weather.
It sounds crazy to try to explain, but I became so phobic and scared of tornados that I couldn’t sleep, or relax, or focus my attention on anything else if the sky so much as dimmed. I couldn’t breathe through a rainstorm.
Not that I got to choose what I was doing, but I don’t recommend that method of coping; it is not coping. I couldn’t have specified then exactly how I do effectively cope, but these days I know that good coping for me is done by putting myself in quiet proximity to some large natural formations, like a body of water, or a mountain. Or I can do it through exercise. And for me, a lot is done through human connection.
That year, I did spend a lot of time at Barton Springs, which is a clearly sacred space. I also exercised my ass off. No, literally. And I made a sympathetic friend who’d had his own bouts with fear, and he helped.
He hung around me and even seemed to enjoy my company when I wasn’t able to act entirely rational. He (along with some others) sent me to see a therapist. And for times when I wasn’t with my friend, or with the therapist, he gave me a tiny foam lion, large enough to squeeze, hard, in my hand. It also worked on another level because I could gaze at the lion, and remember that someone wanted me to feel better.
I’ve saved Dr. Frank — my lion — through many years. He’s made the cut through eight address changes. He was most recently living in my jewelry case until the other day when my two-year-old opened the case and ransacked it. He loved the sparkly beetle pin he found, the Bengali bangles, a bejeweled hairclip.
And then Henry removed the top tray and discovered Dr. Frank.
I could tell you that we approach lions with great reverence and solemnity in our home at the moment, but that’s not wholly accurate. Because we revere them, we shriek at them to express our joy. We make them fake-roar, and then we tear around in circles with them.
Good thing that all of the lions we have are fake.
Henry clearly felt that he’d hit the jackpot.
One of Dr. Frank’s legs was already half-torn since long ago, like a bite out of a nerf-ball. Henry wobbled it back and forth quite a bit, not realizing the personal significance of his new toy to his mommy. I urged him to be gentle, but then, the inevitable.
Dr. Frank, now an old dingy foam lion with one leg lost in the shuffle, stands sentry on my bookshelf, still somewhat solid.
He’s wondering his fate, and he’s reminding me of how he helped redirect mine.
The “S” Word
Before I put Henry down for a nap today, he wanted to read the book Love You Forever.
Have you read this book? By Robert Munsch, it is one of the most emotionally manipulative pieces of literature in all time. It is the Sophie’s Choice of children’s books.
Here is the basic concept:
A mom has a new baby, and she rocks is very slowly, and this is the refrain:
I’ll love you forever I’ll like you for always As long as I’m living My baby you’ll be.The kid grows up, and becomes a smelly, loud, typical p-i-t-a, and but the mom keeps sneaking in to hold and rock her little boy and sings him the refrain.
I am tearing up while writing this. What is my problem?
And then, the little boy is a grown man, and she sneaks into his room at night to rock him.
And then she gets old and frail, and he rocks her, and tells her that she’ll always be his mommy, and, good lord, it’s even more worse, cryingwise, than the opening sequence of the damn Lion King. Every time Henry picks Love You Forever to read, he ends up smearing tears all over my face like finger paint all over a page.
This highly-charged emotional state is enhanced by the fact that he’s starting “school” next week. It’s an itty bitty fake non-academic cooperative playschool, run by parents and a teacher. For 9 hours a week, his main activities will be eating homemade playdough and gluing googly eyes to pom poms, or more likely, to his own hands. Still, the fact that we’re throwing around the “s” word makes me feel like something weighty is sitting on my chest. It makes me feel like he is going to college. It makes me feel like I’m co-signing a lease for him to get his own apartment.
It’s all a bit too much. I need to rehydrate, and fast.
Dear Counselor Chomp — As a Mom, I’m a Hot Mess!
Dear Counselor Chomp,
Help!
I am the mother of a 21-month old girl. We moved to our current city when she was 13 months old. We didn’t know very many people and we have no family here. Other mothers that we’ve met have been very helpful — watching our little girl when we went looking for houses, watching her again so we didn’t have to take her to the inspection, having us over as a family for dinner, etc.
We’ve been very lucky to meet great people, but I have a hard time reciprocating, because I don’t really like kids! Both of the moms who have helped us out offered to do so, and seemed genuinely not to mind having our little girl over for a playdate. However, they both have two kids of their own (with their younger kids both being under 1-year), and I don’t feel up to returning their favor by watching BOTH of their kids. I’m not sure I could even handle one of them!
Should I just stop accepting their offers to help? Is there any other way I can reciprocate? In theory, I’d love to have their families over for dinner, but I feel like my husband and I are both just barely hanging on to our sanity as it is.
— Hot mess in pennsylvania
Dear Hot Mess,
Well, at least you are a self-aware hot mess.
The learning curve for parenting is steep, isn’t it? It’s the kind of steep where in your dream you are driving a dunebuggy up a dune which is getting steeper and steeper and suddenly the laws of physics kick in and the buggy falls on its head.
In this scenario, you may or may not be crushed. And that is the learning curve of parenting.
The crazy dunebuggy ride probably drains at least as much energy out of you as sleep deprivation does.
I think that having the learning curve conquered is why some parents have second children —aside, of course, from the fact that they are too tired and desperate to remember to use effective methods of birth control. But a second child is the chance to apply that hard-won wisdom to a new baby, one who they have a better chance of not ruining, because it won’t need to absorb all of their ambient freaked-out thoughts like “I am a terrible mother, because I don’t read to my two-week old enough.” With a second child, parents understand that babies are sturdy entities: they don’t have hollow bones, like chinchillas do. Also, they know that they don’t care about reading that much.
Second-time parents know that hard things will change — quickly. If the child isn’t sleeping, the child will start to sleep. If nursing is hard, nursing will get easier. If the child has colic, the child will probably un-have colic at some point.
These helpful second-time mothers who you cite are different that you are. For better or for worse, they have embraced the zombie march of motherhood, while you’re probably still expending some energy fighting it. These women have abandoned all dreams of privacy. Chaos affects them differently than it does you, because it is the main feature of the only habitat they can probably remember living in.
And they are probably lording over you their superior abilities at having multiple children around. Don’t be angry: that may be the only fun they have. But also, they know a secret you don’t know yet, which is that having an extra kid around for the existing kids that it actually makes a morning or an afternoon a bit easier.
You should be genuinely grateful for the actions of these mothers, and it sounds like you are. People rarely decide to help you so that you will have to do something you’d consider excruciating in return. Mostly, they probably help you because it will make them feel good to do so, and maybe, because someone helped them at some point, and it meant a lot to them, and they didn’t manage to reciprocate.
But, I would suggest that you stop accepting their offers. You need a babysitter in your life. It will let you do what you need to do without feeling guilty, and it will let you leave the house with your husband but without your child, on occasion. If you and your husband feel like you are just hanging onto your sanity by a thread, it’s very important to get out an reconnect with one another. A good friend of mine was urged by a therapist to do this, and when she mentioned that they don’t have a lot of money, the therapist said, “fine, go and sit on a park bench with your husband, but be sure to get out and do something by yourselves.” I think that’s true.
And now, let’s address the real problem. How can you reciprocate for what these women have already done for you?
You could do something simple, like invite one over for pizza. That will give her somewhere to go, but you will not have to watch her kids while they are over. And while they are over at your place, you can say something authentic, like “I just want you to know that you’ve really helped me out. You’re so competent: taking care of two kids, and offering to watch a third. I wish I could reciprocate with the kids but right now I feel like I can barely watch my own!”
Try, perhaps, to avoid being so authentic that you confess that you don’t like kids.
Or, if you can stand it, offer to spend time in her house so she can have a date-night. Suggest that she and her husband go to a late movie or dinner after they’ve put the kids to bed. And then you can just watch TV in their house until they get home. How cozy!
If that isn’t going to happen, make them a banana bread: banana bread is universally loved and appreciated by everyone.
If that’s not going to happen, or even if it is, just be on the lookout for small ways you can help others in the future: ways that won’t ruin your life, but that will make the world slightly nicer for someone, even if it isn’t those women in particular.
To get your question answered by Counselor Chomp, email it to churchchomp at gmail dot com.
1. Tweeting Snake
This is “viral” enough that you likely know about it, however, in case you don’t:
A young cobra escaped from the Bronx Zoo. No one can find it. This is clearly a problem.
But on the funny side, someone has set up a Twitter account, speaking for the snake, about wandering around New York. It is hilarious. Read below for another brilliant thing someone else has done.
2. Musical Subway Map
In 1972, a graphic designer called Massimo Vignelli created a map of the subway system. It’s over-simplified — trains only run at 45 or 90 degree angles, and it’s not to scale — but it’s neat-looking. You can see it here.
an exerpt of the Massimo Vignelli map
Now, a composer named Alexander Chen has taken the map and created a musical composition out of it. I think it’s based on actual train schedules. Minutes move very quickly on a clock down in the lower left corner, and when two trains intersect, there is a plucking, stringed-instrument sound. You can also pluck the lines yourself.
a screenshot of Alexander Chen's "composition"
It’s been on ambiently here for a few hours while we make playdough, make my son dinner, and feed him while I get started on our own dinner. The “music” is vaguely Japanesey sounding. Mostly I like the idea of taking something reflective of an actual system — in this case, a map of something familiar —and setting up another system for it to follow to make noise, and then listening and watching the idea. Take a look and a listen! The piece is called www.mta.me, which is also where it is located.
I’d like to note that WNYC news covered both of these things today. I only stole the second piece of news from them; the first piece is something I suggested that they cover, yesterday. So there!
The Orange Bus
I decided to introduce the topic of school.
Because of a virus we shared, the two-year-old and I had been sitting in the living room watching television for what seemed like days on end, because it actually was days on end. We pretty much never watch TV, or rather, we didn’t. But here, I was buying feature-length films and more off of AppleTV. Cars, Toy Story, Lion King, Electric Company, and our guilty pleasure, Glee. (Well, my guilty pleasure, Glee.)
Should the quarantine lift, Henry is going to start preschool in April — a short session from April through June. We hadn’t talked about it yet, though I worry about this transition for many of my waking hours, and a few of my sleeping ones. I thought it was time to bring it up. I had no idea what I was getting into.
“So, do you know what school is?”
Henry’s eyes flash and he and nods fast, though he still has a high fever. This is the most animated I’ve seen him in 72 hours. Through a wide, smiling mouth, he yells “BUS!”
Ah, right. I have talked about school before in that context—the context of transportation.
What makes little boys love anything that will take you anywhere so, so much? No one will ever know. Or maybe they do know; someone recently told me that even baby monkeys who are boys love trucks, whereas baby monkeys who are girls love fake baby girl monkeys. They like to wheel them around.
“Right,” I said. “Some people take a bus to school,” not mentioning that he’d be lucky to take the subway; we’ll probably just take the stroller.
I continued. “Soon, you get to start school. School is a place where Mom-mom or Daddy will bring you, and you can do lots of painting, and projects, and toys. There will be lots of other kids there, and some other grown ups, but Mom-mom or Daddy won’t be there with you.”
I fear the worst, but he’s still listening raptly with a giant grin. Wow, this might be easier than I thought. Perhaps I’ve been worrying for nothing.
So I continue. “And after a little while, Mom-mom will pick you up, in time to have lunch.”
“N0 NOOOO NOOOOO!!!!!” Suddenly he’s shrieking and shaking his head violently back and forth, objecting to . . . lunch?
“You don’t want lunch?” I idiotically ask.
“BUS! ORJ BUS! HENRY! RIDE ORJ BUS!”
I see. He didn’t like the idea of me picking him up; he wants to take an orange bus home. Or not even come home, just ride around forever on the orj bus. Who cares about home? Even within the exciting realm of transportation, the subset of buses holds a special place in his heart.
Every once in a while for the rest of the day, his whole expression would light up and he’d appear to be in some happy reverie and when I questioned it he’d yell:
“BUS!
ORJ BUS!
RIDE ORJ BUS!”
Then for dinner, I gave him some polenta on a blue plate, and he yelled:
“NO! ORJ PLATE!”
in apparent solidarity for the (wrong) color of the school bus.
We still don’t know yellow; what can I say?
Church Avenue Chomp 
