Dog days

She was trying to tell me something.

We were on the couch. I was pounding away on my laptop, and she had been curled up by my side. Then she rose and inched closer. Her sweet face pressed down on my shoulder for the briefest of moments as I continued to tap away at the keys. When she retreated, a moist puddle of drool was her parting gift.

“Thanks, for that.” I said aloud as she looked up at me with a start. “No charge,” I answered on her behalf and returned to typing.

My silent partner relaxed. She is not fluent in sarcasm, but she understands that the smile that settles on my face means she's not in the doghouse.

Most of our interactions have had this kind of lost-in-translation sensibility.

She barks at me when I'm on the phone. I tell her we don't have a son named Timmy, nor do we have an uncovered well. She is not convinced. She keeps barking.

I roll my eyes and put her outside. She is quiet.

She sighs and lowers herself to the ground to await my return.

“People!” she probably growls to herself, “What do they know?

Prattle on about nothing from sun-up until sun-down, check the box in their pockets every six seconds and it's not even FOOD.”

In allergy season, as each grain of pollen is explosively expelled from my sinuses, her canine outrage is awakened. She sees nothing to sneeze at. My irritation is her irritation by default.

“Dogs! What do they know?

“Eat, sleep, befoul the backyard, chase squirrels, ignore their toys, chew up something they shouldn't, cover their humans with slobbery substances when that human returns from checking the mailbox, eat, sleep and sleep some more.”

Of course, there are times when I'm sure we understand each other completely.

When I walk into the kitchen, she sits near the fridge.

When she starts using the couch as a trampoline, I get her leash.

And then there are days I wonder how ANYONE got the idea that humans and animals ever live together in harmony.

Take yesterday, for instance:

It started out as any ordinary spring day: The kids woke up; complained about it being a school day; decided they didn't want to wear weather-appropriate clothes; and got on the bus begging me to come and get them in an hour, “when it would be the summertime.”

The dog's day was ordinary, too: Woke the kids up, complained about not being allowed to go to the bus, ate the left-over breakfast and broke a dish in the process.

She needs a job, I think to myself as I sweep up the pieces and drop them into the trash. She thinks she's the dishwasher around here.

She just looks at me, tilts her head and sits. Her tail sweeping back and forth excitedly.

All day long, she follows me from one chore to the next.

Clear dishes. Start the laundry. Sweep floors. More laundry. Errands. Office. Bookkeeping. More laundry. She just watches.

She is maturing, I think, as I load the dish washer.

I glance up at the clock to look at the time, and realize the day has gotten away from me.

“Oh, the bus!” I yell and race out the door.

In no time, I am back, trailing two little humans who are babbling about their day.

And then suddenly … there was silence.

“What happened?” yelled the kids as the dog tries to slink away.

She couldn't move.

I'd guessed from the sight of her that she'd been licking the plates in the dishwasher, which I had left open in the rush to the bus, had gotten her tags caught in the lower rack. She'd panicked and dragged the thing through the house at a high enough rate of speed that its contents had scattered everywhere.

This was not what she expected either.

I patted her head as I unhooked the empty rack from her collar.

“You know … If you really wanted to be a sled dog you should have just told me.”

Mirror, mirror

Sometimes I think my mirror must have magical properties.

When I look into it – past the water spots and toothpaste spatter – I see the same person who greeted me during my high school days and showed up in college. She is the same woman who wore the bridal gown at my wedding … the same woman who got carded for an R-rated movie when I was 30. It matters not that I know this person peering at me from behind the glass isn't as youthful as I used be. Her hair is filled with silver now. She is wider in some places, thinner in others. But if I stand a certain way, hold in my breath and relax my eyes, the mirror still shows me what I want to see.

Stupid mirror.

It should have warned me about honesty ... the unguarded kind.

Instead, it let me stride in to my son's kindergarten class on a beautiful Friday morning – overconfident in my youth and vitality, believing that I was no different from any other mother of a five-year-old, helping classmates color inside the lines -- and be completely demolished by a single question.

A question not even addressed to me:

“Hey, Champ, is that your grandmother?”

I tried to make jokes with the teacher. I tried to laugh it off, but I touched my hair -- my metallic laced, straw-textured hair – and I just wanted to cry.

It wasn't just the way I looked. It was the way I felt. The way I'd defiantly accepted the wiry silver hairs once they'd started coming. The way I'd admired other women who refused to cover their premature grays. The way I'd hoped to be admired as I aged into my hair color.

Yet, one word spoken aloud – grandmother – and all of those good, empowering feelings were gone.

For the next hour, while I helped children wrestle with their shoelaces, backwards Bs and a sticky soap dispenser, I wrestled with my pride.

As soon as the bell rang, I was staring blankly at the hair color aisle in the pharmacy.

“This isn't a big thing, right?” I reasoned, tipping a box of Soft Maple Brown into my shopping basket, which was dangling from the crook of my elbow below the shelf. “It's just a bit of color. A boost of confidence.

“Think nothing of this container of chemistry going against everything you've ever said about accepting aging with grace. … or beauty being more than skin deep.”

Even with the purchase, I couldn't let it go. I paced the floors with the unopened box, ruminating on this thing I was about to do.

“Do I look like a grandmother?” I asked people neither gormless nor honest enough to answer in the affirmative after regaling them with the story of the kindergartners I'd encountered that morning, whose mother, I'd convinced myself, was surely a teenager.

“Are you still going on about that,” asked Ittybit. She had emerged from her dance class to find tap shoes and instead found me droning on about looking into an AARP membership.

She was right. All this time I'd told her looks aren't important and here I was obsessed. How could she ever listen to me again? I wondered.

But it wasn't that. She saw a more practical problem with my predicament.

“I saw that box you bought at the drugstore. ... If I were you, I'd go to a salon. Let a professional handle this. Really, you don't want ME to be the one saying 'I told you so'.”

Only nine and she is already a grownup.

“You don't have a kid in The Champ's kindergarten class you haven't told me about, do you?”

Rude awakenings

A scream dashes down the hallway and into my bedroom. “Get down, Rosie,” shouts a gruff little voice, prematurely awakened by a cold, wet nose pressing into the folds of his warm neck. A soft thud will follow, and then the click-click-clicking of nails will trace into the next bedroom.

Another voice will sound:

“ROSIE! That's my sock! Give it back!”

There will be scurrying and pounding of feet. Something will overturn, but thankfully it won't break. A door will slam. The dog will run into our room and launch herself onto the bed. My daughter trails her, complaining. She says something about dogs not understanding boundaries as she crushes my shins climbing over the mountain of covers.

Within seconds, my son will make the migration from his bedside to mine. There's no snooze alarm to press; no nine-minute respite from day before us. There's just an angry little boy who hates the world at 7 a.m.

“There's no room for me,” he huffs. “Why is there never any room for me?”

The morning alarm clock is as fail-safe as they come.

It's always a rude awakening no matter how many times it happens.

I lift the covers and inch backward. Cold air reaches toward me with prickly fingers. It is a momentary shock as The Champ crawls in and goes back to sleep.

“How does he do it?” my husband will ask as the faint sound of snoring drifts upward.

I wish I knew.

Also wish I knew how to stop the fight that will ensue once he wakes up and realizes everyone else has migrated downstairs to fill themselves with breakfast and morning television. Without him.

For once I'd like to get through the morning without whine.

It's enough to drive a person to drink.

But this is our routine, more or less.

There is much dragging of feet. No decisions about breakfast. Lunch won't make itself. “Where is my favorite shirt? The one I've worn every day since three weeks before school began?”

These shoes don't feel right. Can you drive me to school? How about you just pick me up after math class?

I'm exhausted. I feel like I've run a marathon and the day hasn't even really started.

How many times have I run up (and down) the stairs since the loony alarm went off?

One trip for socks. Another for shoes. A red shirt. A New shirt. The wrong shirt. A blue shirt.

None of it makes sense. Especially the soft, warm depression my hand makes when it makes contact with the wood of the hand rail.

“Why is there oatmeal all over the banister?”

In a million years, I could never imagine those words would ever have reason to come together in question form, but there they were.

Why. Is. Oatmeal. On. The. Banister?

He musters as guilty a looking smirk as a little kid can muster. “I tried to feed it to the dog. She didn't like it either.”

I want to scream:

“What were you thinking? People are starving in Africa! This is why we can't have nice things! Who do you think you are?”

But I just stand there. … blinking.

I am exhausted.

We barely make it out to the curb before the bus passes us by.

Once they are seated, noses pressed against the glass, the doors of the bus fold shut. A smile stretches across my face, and I start to wave maniacally, anticipating the silence of the house upon my return.

I'm going back to sleep.

A little help

We have a project.

A project!

We have a subject, a schedule and a plan.

This is going to be fun.

My mind is whirring with possibilities.

My fingers lace. My nose wrinkles. My eyes crinkle. I am as close to giddy as I get.

We need glue … and scissors … and a ruler ... and that's just for the display. There's research and testing and rehearsing …

“A-hem,” Ittybit interrupts. “What are you doing?”

“I'm helping?”

That sounded wishy-washy; I try again, this time in a more convincing tone: “I'm helping!”

Not quite right. One final time, in case she wasn't paying attention: “Uh, I'm help...”

No sale.

“No! You're NOT helping, you're taking over. This is MY project.”

Ittybit's nine years old, and as any parent of a nine-year-old can tell you, she knows just about everything.

Well .. except how to spell e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g, but she assures me it's not on her spelling list and, therefore, not a priority.

I sigh and launch into the rant she can practically lipsync: “Just because you're not being graded doesn't mean you shouldn't try to spell it correctly.”

Now, she may not know everything, but in this case, she is entirely correct: This is her presentation to give. It is hers to research, compile and present.

My place now is to hold my hand firmly over my mouth and make myself busy elsewhere.

Not that it's easy.

Especially when the first draft of her presentation on Basic Dog Obedience includes nothing but a list of steps that would make a prima ballerina look like a two-left-footed dancer.

“You can't just make stuff up. You have to find out how to train a dog using an actual expert source.”

Her mouth slips to one side of her face, and her eyelids curl around so that only slivers of her green eyes are showing.

“Not. Helping,” she chides.

She's right. I'm not helping.

I go back to pretending to dust the cobwebs from the rafters.

She pounds away on the computer keyboard, banging out lines and lines of poetically resplendent course of action that reads like an army obstacle course.

“We can do this eezee, or we can do this hard: It's all up to you and how much effert your are willing to put foureth wen you trane your dog.”

“You know ...” I say from my dust-bunny-eradicating position over her shoulder. “A dictionary would be extremely helpful right about now to check your spelling ...”

“Mom! Stop!” She snaps the lid shut on the laptop and storms away in a huff.

I know she's right, but I can't help myself. There are so many things I could help her with. Tips. Ideas. Things that would make it better …. easier … better … All she needs to do is listen.

But she's heard it all before, and it doesn't make it easier.

It doesn't make it better.

In fact, the more I think about it, my help can only etch away at her growing confidence.

“I don't want you to make it easier. I just want to do it myself.”

Run out of town

“I've been invited!” The Champ announced as he got off the bus. He descended cautiously, bending halfway at the waist to counterbalance his enormous backpack -- filled, no doubt, with half of the contents of his toy box.

His winter jacket was slung over one arm. It was March, and freezing, and he was in shirtsleeves.

“They're SHORTsleeves,” he corrected when I over-acted my exacerbation as we sprint toward the house.

The afternoon greeting as he returns from school has been our winter ritual.

He pretends the air is boiling and threatens to strip down to his “shortsleeved pants” and go “sunbabing” on the front lawn.

I tell him “Try it, buster, and the neighbors will run us out of town.”

But he doesn't want to banter on this day.

He runs inside the house, tosses his coat, kicks off his boots and extracts items from his backpack hand-over-hand, littering the entryway floor until he finds his prize.

He holds the paper in his closed fist like a bouquet of flowers and waves it at me.

It looks smudged and sticky.

“I've been invited to a very special club. It's super-duper special, and only ALL the kids in my school will be there. Maybe. I don't know if the two Sarahs will come, but they might. Here. Read it. What does it say?”

I un-crumple the sweaty handout (it IS smudged and sticky) and fall silent as I scan the text, weighing the chances that he's testing me.

Does he already know the gist or can I lie and tell him it's an invitation to the newly formed Just Wear Your Coat Club? Not to be confused with the Eat Your Vegetables Club he wouldn't join if it paid him.

“Come on! What does it say,” he begged, jabbing at the running stick figure in the header with a crumb-encrusted pencil grip he fished from the dark recesses of his school bag.

“It's a running club. You've been invited to join a running club!”

His eyes shine like the high beams of a pickup truck. I am the deer frozen in the light.

He knows what I'm holding, he just doesn't know the specifics.

“I'm going to do it. And so are you, and dad and maybe even my sister. Can we bring the dog, too?

Read. It. Pulllleeeeze?”

“Oh, OK: freespingrunningclinicforkidsandadultseverywednesdaynightrainorshineorhailingthunderstormstheend.

“Sounds horrible, doesn't it?”

“Nope. It sounds like the most fun in the whole wide world. We have to do it. …And YOU,” he narrowed his eyes, “have to do it with me.”

How could I say no?

How could I say “No” to setting a good example for my kids?

How could I say “No” to the benefits of going out into the world and getting into shape?

How could I say “No” to eight weeks of couch-to-5K goodness?

“No, really? How?” I asked my husband. “Where will I put my coffee cup as I run? Running clothes don't have built-in cup holders.”

He just grinned his no-good, low-down accomplice -y grin.

The Champ knew he'd won. Probably from the moment he stepped off that bus.

“I suppose there's more than one way to run us out of town. … At least this way, we take the neighbors with us.”

Test and detest

I had been warned.

Every parent I knew who had gone before me had cautioned about third grade.

That was the year their school-loving children started getting belly aches and saying they'd rather sit in the dark and listen to opera music than go to class.

“It's the tests,” they explained. The state's English Language Arts and Math standardized tests got them all nerved up.

The tests, which assess student understanding of state-determined learning standards, are also used by the federal government as part of its accountability system, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.

Every fiber of my don't-worry-about-the-recital-just-enjoy-the-dance being HATES the idea that tests are served up as the main course for months in the bakery that is school.

Yet, here we are, a dozen years later – pressure is mounting, school funds are shrinking and it is test companies that are by and large determining how student understanding is evaluated.

It's enough to make anyone's stomach twist into knots.

As the days draw closer to Ittybit's first foray into the world of No. 2 pencils and perfectly filled-in ovals, she started to complain of stress and worry.

Her homework started to include thick packets of practice questions. Things, she said, her teacher didn't have time to go over in class.

She was worried.

What if she did horribly? Would she be demoted to the second grade? Would her teacher lose her job? Would the principal shut down the school?

Tests nerve everyone up.

Yet, no matter how many times we told her to relax, told her her score would neither affect her grade nor jeopardize her standing as a third-grader heading for the promised land of fourth grade, she was not convinced.

“This is all anyone cares about,” she said. “All they do is talk about how we have to be ready for the test.”

I shrug my shoulders and weigh my options.

Do I tell her not to care about the test?

It's true, I am unconcerned about the results. In my mind, calculating achievement by standardized testing is akin to trying to use a cookie-cutter to form teaspoon-dropped cookies … one shouldn't expect uniform results. But that doesn't mean I don't care.

Do I tell her she can refuse to take the test?

According to grassroots groups and postings showing up in social media networks, students can formally refuse the tests, and schools can assess student abilities using other classroom accomplishments. Her portfolio of work, the chapter tests and periodic projects. But that the consequences to schools and to the students are somewhat unclear.

“You have options,” I tell her. “You don't need to take the tests. It's not the only way.”

She listens as I explain about what happens if we formally refuse.

Ultimately, it's a choice that requires some amount of civil disobedience.

But the idea of disobedience, civil or otherwise, at this tender age horrifies her.

What would she do while her friends sat at their desks, rat-tat-tatting their pencils and biting their nails to the quick?

Nothing?

Totally unacceptable. “Totes” as her prematurely tween self is wont to say.

She's not ready to take up this fight. Not this way, at any rate.

She'll take the test and do her best not to worry. Maybe when it's all over she'll write a strongly worded letter that explains how the same recipe with different ingredients isn't always palatable:

“I see it like trying to bake chocolate chip cookies using a little of everything you have in pantry,” she tells me with a grin. “Sure, you might end up with bacon chip ginger snaps, but it doesn't necessarily mean you've failed. It just means you may have to wait for the right person to eat them ...

“Like dad.”

I smile.

“Has anyone ever told you that you are a smart cookie?”

“Oh, totes … all the time.”

Links

Tests

http://www.nyspirc.org/pdf/NYS%20Standardized%20Tests.pdf

http://www.nyssba.org/clientuploads/nyssba_pdf/OB-41513-NYSASA-Opt-Out.pdf

Detest

http://www.fairtest.org/get-involved/opting-out

http://www.wnyforpubliced.com/faqs.html

http://www.nystoptesting.com/

All the rage

I used to be enraged. All the time. Over everything and nothing.

It was often the little things that set me off. Late starts. Half-finished breakfasts. Dirt on the floor. Dishes left just above the dishwasher. The sound of a word uttered a little too sharply. Tiny chaffs.

I used to wake up like a bear, take an overly-long shower, get dressed, stomp down the stairs, genuflect at the altar of caffeinates and look up toward the morning Enternewsment show, at which, inevitably, I would start screaming my head off.

Rage, physically speaking, differs from anger in a few important ways. There can be the same physical sensations – your heart rate quickens, you might experience a tightness in your throat or a constricting of your chest – but mentally you've jumped the shark.

For example, My reaction to morning television:

“Cheese-Its H. Rice! If they do one more segment detailing every single bit of bacteria lingering around in my pocket or festering on my phone I will send them a metric ton of our pre-recycled kitchen waste, I sweartoghad!”

Not that I would actually ship my $4!# to 30 Rockerfeller Plaza … but a girl can dream.

“They can't hear you, you know,” said my husband in that snarky tone he usually reserved for telemarketers or when his calls found their way into the voicemail on my smartphone: “I'm not sure why you even have a phone, seeing as how you never answer it.”

Delete.

Delete. Delete. Delete.

Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete.

Every time I see something that's going to send spiraling into another orbit I hit “Delete.”

That's what seems to have happened to my rage. I just started deleting it.

As the news reader tries to make jokes. … As the toaster burns the toast. … As the coffee pot revolts … I just shrug. I'll worry about that tomorrow, for now I'll scrape the burned bits and drink tea.

My husband is skeptical. One can't blame him.

Coffee withdrawal not withstanding, the fact that I would just stare silently at a woman on the screen who was talking out of both sides of her face as she recounted the top-three viral videos of the hour on Twitter, is unprecedented.

“Honestly. I don't understand why you're not screaming at the television news right now. This is bad, even for me.”

But I can't even muster a sneer.

“I don't know. It just seems mean. It's an unfair hour on a Sunday morning. Anyone who's anyone has already ditched them for Facebook. Who else could be watching this dreck?”

Rage deleted.

I feel … calm.

Delete. Delete. Delete.

Change channels. Delete.

But I can't believe it's really gone. Neither relief nor calm filled the space rage left, leaving me to think that it's out there somewhere. Seeing the world. Biding it's time. Picking up some new tricks.

It's dull, really. All this dispersed rage.

I keep wondering when it will come back.

And what will happen when it does.

I imagine rage will give me a good rap in the head when it boomerangs. Torrents of the stuff will blast from my ears as soon as the emotional equilibrium shifts to a more precarious incline.

I'll be ready for it when it comes.

Finger on the delete button.

“Did you get my voicemail?”

“Nope. I deleted it.”

“Why?”

“Because only my rage listens to voicemail.”