Tell It To COACHIE

When we arrived at preschool, 10 minutes late as always, it was immediately apparent that we should have been on time. I knew that the Child Development Center was having a parade today as a grand finale to the celebration of the Month of the Military Child (that is, kids whose parents are in the military, not kids that are obsessed with wearing camouflage and shooting guns). What I didn’t know was that the parade was starting right at 9:00. I was told that Lauren should wear a yellow shirt today, but no one told me that the parade was starting so early, that parents were marching too, or that it involved leaving the center grounds and parading with an actual marching band.

As I pulled into the parking lot, the members of the Army Band were unloading from their bus and all of the kids from the center were lined up and ready to march. There was nowhere to park, and as I tried to pull through the parking lot to park on the street, the day care center head walked toward me shaking her head saying “Please stop your car,” in a measured quiet voice that one normally reserves for the very young or the mentally challenged. I put the brakes on the car and my spontaneously combusting rage and said “I’m just trying to get out of the way. Where can I put the car? Can I leave it here?” Here being along the yellow fire zone curb. I could see she was dying to tell me no, but she gave a long look and then a long sigh, and then said “I guess you can leave it here for now.”

I was tempted to give a look of my own, but ever mindful of the impressionable young souls around me, I parked and got the kids out of the car. I figured I would be stuck for about 5 minutes until the parade got underway and then be released to my zealously guarded 4.5 hours of freedom that I get every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Unfortunately, I was wrong. As I started to lead Lauren over to stand with her preschool class, she began to cry and wriggle and inform me that “No, NO, NOOO! I don’t want to be in the parade!” I tried to be understanding for a minute, since she was probably as surprised as I was to find the parade about to begin the moment she arrived at school. But then she said something that reignited my fuse: “I’m afraid of the band!”

My children love music more than any other children I have ever encountered They will sing songs that they learn at school, songs that they learn on the radio or CDs in the car, songs from TV and TV commercials, songs they’ve heard at church, and songs that they make up themselves. They were absolutely obsessed with the Sound of Music for almost a year, until we brought home Mary Poppins, which has held on as a favorite for more than a year already. I think Marty learned to speak for the sole purpose of requesting repeated viewings of the Sesame Street “Peter and the Wolf” DVD. The kiddies insisted on hearing the Irish Tenors every time we rode in the car until Christmas time, when they learned every song on the Muppets Christmas CD, and only agreed to remove it from the car in February when I bought the Curious George CD (which they have also learned completely). Sometimes for fun I’ll introduce them to one of my old CDs, and then listen with amusement as they sing along to Erasure or REM using their own lyrics. Marty drags his wooden xylophone around with him everywhere, sometimes to play nicely and sometimes to just bang on and yell like a budding young Dave Grohl. Aislinn has a guitar that she carries around and sings with, and sometimes just strums absentmindedly while she’s watching TV. I’m not claiming them to be musical prodigies; they are just absolute music nuts.

But most of the time the kids don’t sing songs, they sing stuff that normal people would speak. My life is not a soap opera, it is a regular opera, everything is sung at all times. Unless they are exhausted or crying, if I ask them what they would like for lunch, what they would like to read, what they would like to do, they answer me in song. The styles that inspire their tunes range from Gregorian Chant, to Broadway musicals, to atonal new age music. I was always embarrassed to sing when I was a kid, so to make sure that they don’t become self-conscious, I never comment on the fact that everything they do is set to music. Sometimes they sound great and sometimes they sound like a cartoon, but they always sing everything with great enthusiasm. The girls have a certain high pitched, Mary Poppins-inspired style that they use when they are doing what they call “beautiful singing.” They have a down-home, Kentucky raised, hillbilly style that they use for country singing. But generally they just sing in their regular voices and they can all carry a tune, so to a mom, they sound quite nice indeed.

And it’s not just the singing, they are nonstop dancers too. Right after Marty turned two he invented the Slow/Rock-It game where he directs us to sing a “slow” song so he can do ballet until he screams “Rock It” indicating we are to sing a fast song so he can rock out. Lauren has an outfit (that she wears inside the house about four days a week) consisting of pink ankle socks, pink shorts, and a pink t-shirt which is her gymnastics/ballet girl outfit. Whenever she’s got the outfit on, she prances around on tiptoe, acting very graceful and performing her version of ballet while she plays, eats, watches TV, whatever. When Aislinn receives a new pair of shoes with hard soles, she can hardly keep from trotting out her version of tap dancing on the parquet floor. If I had any aspirations to be a stage mom, I probably could have enrolled them in some sort of Broadway boot camp for children, like the sports camps that the kids from the Soviet Union were sent to at age 3 to become great gymnasts. Only rather than pine away for their childhoods, my kids would probably love it.

So there I was at the day care center this morning, absolutely flabbergasted with my little soloist who claimed to be afraid of the band. We have seen the Army band perform on many occasions and they have never provoked a fight or flight response in Lauren. In my annoyance I concluded that she was just being difficult, but I didn’t make her march. I went into the center to sign the kids in, and discovered that Marty’s class was off marching too, so we went outside to sit on the curb and wait for the parade to return. It was a beautiful day, and I knew that a parade composed of children 5 and under was unlikely to be gone for long, so I decided to just enjoy the weather and the time with the kids who, of course by this point, were dancing around on the grass. I wasn’t annoyed anymore, but I had to know, so I kept pestering Lauren with questions (in a persistent manner that I learned from her actually):

“Why are you afraid of the band?”

“Don’t you remember how much we liked the band at the Christmas tree lighting?”

“Didn’t you see how much fun the kids were having marching behind the band?”

“Don’t you remember that parade on Clifford where Jetta marched with the band?”

“Do you think it is too loud?”

“Did you think they would walk too fast?”

She was evasive, and finally admitted that she wasn’t afraid of the band. I knew it! So I asked, “What was the problem then, why wouldn’t you march with your class?”

“I don’t like the clown.”

The clown! Now there is a childhood phobia I can get behind. I certainly would not have forced Lauren to march off after a clown, even a harmless clown at a Month of the Military Child parade. We sat in the sun, safely out of clown range, and listened to the drums as the parade circled the block. When the band came back into view they began to play again, and Marty got up to dance. The band eventually assembled in front of the center to give a little concert, and I took the kids over to sit with their classes. The clown wandered off with some of the teachers and left the kids in peace to enjoy the show. I gave them each a little hug and kiss and headed off, 45 minutes later than normal, but happy that we would not have to avoid the Army band for the rest of our time here.

I have had close friends, casual friends, work friends, childhood friends, boyfriends, and army friends, and in every case I was able to negotiate the ups and downs of the relationships because friendship is easy to figure out. The relationship that I find rather tricky is the one between me and my neighbors. I suppose there are neighborhoods like the ones you see on TV, where everybody is always running in the kitchen door of everybody else, but in my reality, the neighborhood always includes a rather large contingent of crazy people. You can pick your nose, you can pick your neighborhood, but rarely can you pick your neighbors – they just come with the house.

In every apartment building I have ever lived in (and I have never truly lived in a sketchy neighborhood), I have been awakened at night by odd wailing or screaming, banging and bumping. Every house I have ever occupied has come with some weird guy down the street who mows the lawn wearing a purple satin robe and a miner’s helmet or a reclusive woman who leaves letters for the mailman addressed to various news anchors with the notation “More Chapters” on the envelope. The crazy people are easy to identify and avoid (or interact with if you like crazy), but the other “regular” people take a while to figure out. And when you figure out that there are some you don’t like or can’t get along with or don’t understand, what can you do? They are going to be right next door or down the street or around the corner until one of you moves away. However, when you are lucky, you find someone who is neighborly, willing to help you out, to lend eggs and sugar, or to just spend some time chatting.

I learned a valuable lesson in my apartment in Ardmore, which was in a building of single units – everyone lived alone. I befriended a seemingly normal girl who lived on the top floor of my stairwell, and occasionally we would go out and have a beer or sometimes she would knock on my door after work and just come in for a while to tell me about her day. She was not exactly a friend I would have sought out, but she seemed harmless enough. Unfortunately, I was wrong. She began to stalk me, knocking on my door every time she went by it, and on the occasions when I would answer it, she would come in looking to be fed and regale me yet again with the tales of her terrible job. Eventually I would come home from work, change and head out for a walk so that I would not be home when she got home. When my walk was over, I would check the area near the building for her car, and if I saw it, I would scoot along the side of the building so that she couldn’t see me out the window. I would creep as quietly as I could up the stairs and into my apartment, where immediately I would turn on the TV and the water so that I could claim that I had not heard any knocks. If she did manage to spot me, I would immediately pick up the phone and explain that it was a long, lost relative, so I really needed to be alone. She was holding me hostage in my apartment because we had stepped past neighborly in an attempt at friendship, and when it didn’t work out, I had nowhere to run. All I wanted in the world was for her to move away because I loved my apartment, but in the end she outlasted me and I got married and moved away.

When the HP and I first moved into a house, I found myself completely unprepared for the etiquette of dealing with neighbors because my parents rarely dealt with theirs (probably because before I was aware of what was going on, they had met them and found them to be crazy). Fate forced us to meet our first next door neighbors however, when the water line from the main to our house broke when we were away for the weekend. We came home late on a Sunday, two month old baby in tow, to a house with no water. Fortunately the water line break was a well-known problem in the neighborhood (apparently built by a shady contractor using substandard pipes). Everybody knew that you could run a hose from a neighbor’s house into the outlet for your own hose, and pressurize your house with their water until the pipes were repaired. We didn’t know our neighbors, but they seemed friendly enough, so we knocked on their door and they immediately agreed to help us out. From that encounter we would occasionally chat about how long the landlady was taking to fix the problem, and sometimes we’d stay and the kids would play. Eventually, the wife became our daughter’s part time day care provider, and we became friendly, inviting each other to parties, sharing stories about the kids, and watching each other’s houses during vacations. However, two years later when it was time for us to move, none of us really knew what to do. They were very close to our daughter and had helped us out a lot, so we all went out for a farewell dinner and promised to keep in touch. During my first few trips home from Kentucky I would stop by and see them and the kids would play, but eventually it seemed strange to keep going there. We didn’t have a friendship in place, we were neighborly, and neighborly just doesn’t seem to last “across the miles and over the years.”

When we got to Kentucky, I did not find anyone particularly neighborly, and our next door neighbor actually turned and ran inside one afternoon when she saw me coming back from the playground with my daughter. On one side were an older couple with no kids (and no interest in kids) and next to them was a crazy who invited me in one day to see how she had covered all of her linoleum tile with shelf paper. I spent a lot of time alone there, eventually making a few friends from other parts of post. But over time the neighbors began to change, and for the most part each addition to the block was an improvement over the people who had left. The crazy moved out and a couple with a daughter moved in. I saw them outside having a beer the night before I left for a trip back east and as I was leaving I begged my husband “Please go befriend them before the crazies get them.” More nice people moved in, more crazy people moved out, and by the time we were set to move again, we lived on a great friendly block. All the moms could hang out together outside while the kids played, and after dark everyone went about their own business. We would lend things back and forth, watch each others kids on occasion, and attend each other’s parties, but we never started walking in each other’s kitchen doors. I really miss them, enough to make a real effort to keep in touch, because the Army may bring us back together again, and if we don’t live right in each other’s backyards, we might indeed have a chance to become good friends.

Companionship and favors are not the only advantages I have received from being neighborly. Often neighbors have stuff for their kids that you don’t plan to get for your kids. For example, I have no plans to ever purchase a trampoline, partly for all of the nagging parental worries that someone could get horribly injured, but mainly because I don’t like to buy things that are that big. I really don’t want to buy something like a trampoline or swingset, because once the kids tire of them (and they will probably sooner than later) you just have a big thing in the backyard, gathering pollen and leaves, killing the grass underneath, and generally obstructing the vista of the yard. Fortunately for us, we have always had neighbors with outdoor play equipment. Our current neighbors bought the trampoline for their daughter on her seventh birthday. I was hoping for 40 days of rain, so that I would not have to go outside and hear the nonstop pleas of the kids to jump on the trampoline. But the very first day that she invited our kids over to bounce with her, her mom stuck her head out the door and said the magic words “Billy and I wouldn’t mind if you put the little ones up on the trampoline when we’re at work and the other kids are at school.” Now I have all of the advantages of a trampoline without the dead grass, and I scored it with the goodwill I had amassed by being neighborly and occasionally getting their daughter from the school bus.

Here in Virginia, typically the first thing every neighbor tells me is how soon she will be moving away, as if to ward of any advances of friendship I might make. Many of the houses around me are empty, and so I find myself alone a lot of the time, missing the convivial days back in Kentucky. At least I have the memories of Kentucky and the hope that one by one the houses around me may fill up with people who aren’t afraid to be neighborly.

The following post includes stuff that relates to previous posts. I imagine some day I could rework the essays and add this stuff, remove other stuff, and then what? I suppose I could print all of them off and carry them around in a big binder like those guys who handicap horse races at the track. I can spend my AARP days harassing people and saying “Lookee here, I did something other than watch TV while my husband was deployed.”

Bad Mommy and Knock Knock

Tonight I went out for a fundraising dinner to the closest all-you-can-eat pizza buffet. Accompanying me were three absolutely angelic, perfectly behaved, wonders to behold named Aislinn, Lauren, and Marty. When I left them at the table repeatedly to collect pizza, drinks, napkins, straws, they sat quietly in their chairs, talking to each other and eating their dinners. No one got up from their chair. No one cried. No one spoke loudly. No one stared at the people at the next table. The three of them displayed table manners of well-heeled society people, with “pleases”, “thank yous” and smiles to everyone around them. I just sat in my seat and marveled at them, wondering what alignment of the planets had brought this situation before me. When we were ready to leave, they all got up and headed for the door. No one whined for more dessert. No one asked for quarters for the gumball machines. All of them waved to the people that we knew and said quiet good-byes. As I buckled them into their car seats I could no longer contain myself. I told them, “That was, by far, the best behavior I have ever seen by any kids in any restaurant in my whole life. You all made me so happy and so proud of you. I can’t wait to tell Daddy what a great job you did. You guys were awesome.” Both girls blushed and smiled and then Aislinn, having just consumed a large brownie but nevertheless ever the opportunist, asked “Does that mean we can have two treats tonight?” Oblivious, Marty sat in his seat and barked along to the Curious George soundtrack during my little speech of appreciation, but hopefully the sight of happy mommy registered in his little brain.

Flockin’ Robins

While in Cape May to visit my in-laws over Spring Break, an odd little robin kept flying from the birdfeeder outside to the kitchen windowsill. The kids enjoyed the chance to see the bird up close, but eventually it appeared that he was looking for a way in, and his repeated trips to the windowsill were a campaign to find some sort of weakness in the window that was keeping him outside. Later in the week the New York Times had a whole article about how Cape May was hallowed ground for serious bird watchers, where all sorts of people flocked to witness the great variety of birds that migrated through that area. In the 10 years I have been visiting Cape May, I had no inkling of its reputation as a birder’s paradise. The only remarkable birds that I remember in Cape May (other than the would-be robin intruder) were a little wren of some sort that got trapped in my in-laws’ fireplace and a pack of overly aggressive ducks that chased my husband, his dad, and our poor little daughter back to shelter of the car moments before they were tackled and quacked to death for a few bits of stale bread. I’m sure the main reason I never noticed the birds is that my in-laws, whose back yard is decorated with several bird feeders, never put birdseed out because they don’t want bird poop all around the yard. In these days of bird flu uncertainty, that is probably a very wise decision.

Life on the Homefront

I managed to get the week wacker going and attempted to trim some weeds around the curbs and trees and flower beds and lampposts in the yard. While I will give myself an A- for my use of the mower and a C+ for my use of the leaf blower, I am afraid I must give myself a D for the weed wacker, and that is only because I am giving myself credit for assembling it and getting it started without injuring myself. I had sunglasses on for eye protection, and it was a good thing to because there was all sorts of crap flying around, which I don’t remember noticing at the times when I have been sipping margaritas and watching the neighbors tend their yards. My results with the weed wacker fell into two categories: the parts of the yard with weeds that just wouldn’t be wacked, and the parts of the yard that I scalped to the bare soil. When I got inside I discovered my pants were covered with pulverized bits of rock, soil, and weeds and that entering the house I had made a huge mess of the kitchen floor reminiscent of the days when my husband came in from a bout of yard work. Following my description of my weed wacking experience, the HP urged me to hire a yard service with the separation pay we are receiving. I plan to hire one for the summer, but I hate to do it while I’m here because the service we had in Kentucky never came when we needed them, and I hate looking at a job that I could do but shouldn’t because we are paying somebody else to do it.

What’s In Your Closet?

The closet project has been completed, and anyone who would like to make an offer on 14 pairs of men’s pleated khakis and corduroys, sized 34 x 30, 8 large wool sweaters, 5 dress shirts, or 2 pairs of used boat shoes please let me know. I now have two beautiful closets, one neatly organized for the HP and Marty, and one neatly organized for me. All of our out of date, out of size, or out of luck clothes are piled up in a mountain waiting for removal to Goodwill or eBay, depending on my level of motivation when I next feel I have the energy to move those clothes around again. I have not conquered the HP’s dresser yet, and must confess that some things from the closet got shoved into the dresser when I couldn’t decide whether it should stay or go. The whole project was quite grueling, but not an emotional roller coaster as I had feared.

The kids have moved a framed photograph from my dresser to the computer desk. The frame has the word “FAMILY” etched at the bottom of it and the photo depicts the five of us sitting on the couch when Marty was a newborn. We are all smiling except Marty who is in the slumped in the classic “I can’t hold my big dome up one more minute” baby pose, but his eyes are open and he doesn’t look unhappy. Lauren explained that now when we miss daddy we can just look right here next to the computer and I have to agree that a picture of a happy family is preferable to the image of a messy closet when it comes to thinking about the ones you love.

Bad Mommy and Wanted: Baby Groomers

On the Saturday of “bad mommy” weekend, I managed to get the kids in and out of the bathtub and dressed in their jammies with a minimum of anxiety. They have to have a bath on Saturday, because if they take it on Sunday, then they need another one on Tuesday when they have CCD, and that just doesn’t work out for me. Unfortunately, on Sunday one of the neighbors came and asked the kids to come play outside. Normally I love to have them outside, but of course with the weekend I was having, they couldn’t just play on the playground or bounce on the neighbor’s trampoline.

The set of eight community swings, conveniently located directly behind my house, does not sit on a bed of mulch or a bed of grass, but within a small oasis of sand that was brought in and dumped sometime long before we moved here. For the most part, the kids ignore the sand and when I am forced to push Marty on the swings I always make sure I change out of flip flops into closed shoes so I don’t get that sand on my feet. I am always grossed out by sand that is not on a beach, even the sand from our old sandbox in Kentucky which was equipped with a lid. But this loose sand out there for all the wild animals to scratch and poop in, disgusts me. And just my luck, the neighbors had arrived with sand toys to play in this nasty sand, and all the kids jumped right in and dug with them. I could practically see the germs on them when it was time to go inside, so I sent them all to the bath tub, but could only gain their cooperation by promising not to wash their hair. Then on Monday, after they had spent hours in the sun jumping on the trampoline, I had to put them in the tub yet again to clean their grimy faces and sweaty hair. Talk about karma – three baths for three kids on each of three days – that will teach me to show a little self control the next time I am tempted to be a bad mommy.

Life is hard when you are a bad, bad mommy. I try as hard as the next girl, but there are times, particularly in the past few months and more specifically last Friday, where I lose all concept of the age of my children and what I can expect of them. At those moments, a certain ghost from my childhood reappears, and is unleashed on my sweet unsuspecting kids with the force and fury of a hurricane that has been spinning and gathering strength unnoticed in the warm waters off Florida for 20 years. When I feel it coming I try to hold it back, to protect the weak and small, but these days the levies sometimes break. I’ll never hurt my kids, but I am sure the angry specter of their once reliably fun-loving and understanding mother startles and upsets them.

I spent my childhood making no attempt to control my horrible Irish temper. I wasn’t particularly violent or even mouthy, since I was too much of a runt. However, I imagine I spent a lot of time with a scowl on my face because everything pissed me off, particularly every member of my family, every other kid at my school, every figure of authority, every soccer referee, and every lame boring homework assignment. (Anyone who had ever encountered my father in the act of being especially disappointed by the behavior of one his children or the Washington Redskins, would have had an immediate clue as to where my tendencies came from. If my father had been born in an earlier time, when language was just developing, thunderstorms would likely have been named after him.) However, I guess that much rage finally burns itself out and when I started high school I got tired of being so mad. I was finally free of the school where I had spent nine years with all the same kids, years when I was unable to change because my place in the landscape was so well entrenched. I decided to reinvent myself as a calm person, and after four years of high school, my classmates bestowed on me what once would have been the unlikeliest of titles: Most Laid Back. Now, I must give my title back or find a way to earn it back.

In my throes of guilt over an incident Friday evening, I came to the realization that all of the things that the kids did to upset me that night were entirely caused by me. My sister and I joke that someday I should write a parenting book since I have been known to say things like “Sometimes you have to make them cry” and “no books tonight, watch TV or go to bed.” Here is some additional advice I would put in that book:

Never tell your kid you are taking them anywhere. That way they can’t nag you to find out when you are going or cry when you decide that you are not going to Target because there is a monsoon outside.

If you are dumb enough to tell them your plans in advance, never take more than one kid out with you to Target in the pouring rain.

If you are dumb enough to take more than one kid, let’s say you take three kids, to Target in the pouring rain, don’t buy a big square basket with a lid that requires one whole arm and hand to carry.

If you are dumb enough to buy a big square basket, don’t buy so much other stuff that you need both hands and your six year old to carry it all. This means you must put your four year old in charge of walking your two year old across the Target parking lot in the pouring rain.

Never inform your children that TicTacs are available to the general public. Everyone will be much happier if they only exist in Grandmom’s handbag (much as Froot Loops only exist in Grandmom’s cabinet).

Never buy a car that has operable locks in the back seat. This may seem like a challenging requirement, but decommissioned police cars will likely fit the bill.

If you follow all of these rules, the following incident will never happen to you: Due to our urgent need for a manual pencil sharpener, the movie Because of Winn Dixie, and some sort of basket to contain the kids books in the living room, we headed out to Target in the pouring rain. The kids were reasonably behaved in the store, although the two year old (Marty) kept pitching things out of the cart, and the four year old (Lauren) kept insisting on pushing the cart, and the six year old (Aislinn) declared as we were headed out the door that she had to go to the bathroom and couldn’t possibly wait until we got home. Since, like a moron, I had bought a big square basket with a lid that required one arm and hand to carry, I was really counting on momentum to get us out the door and off to the car, but trying to be understanding I let the two girls scurry into the bathroom by themselves while I waited with all of my wares and Marty. Marty put on quite a show, banging on the gift registry computers repeatedly asking “How do you get PBS kids on this ‘puter?” and then running in larger and larger circles around the entranceway. When the girls finally reemerged and we tried to go outside, Marty had to try every door as I said, “that door doesn’t open, come here buddy, that door doesn’t work.” When I finally managed to herd him out with my knee, we stopped under the awning to put everyone’s hood up, I picked up the big basket and all of the bags, handed my purse to Aislinn and began to direct everyone through the rain, down the sidewalk, toward the car. At this point, Aislinn asked “Mom, can I have a tic tac?”

Is that the sort of question that should make a mother turn and with a measured ominous voice say “Do not ask me that question again.”? Obviously it should not be, but that is what came out of me. When we stepped into the street I directed the Lauren to take Marty by the hand and hold onto him until we got to the car. The car was close, but Marty, unfazed by the weather and the car heading right toward us, began to pull away from his sister for a little bit of splashing. I grabbed him by the back of the raincoat, not roughly (although anyone looking at my face in that moment might have thought I was going to throw him down into the puddle) and hurried him along, not noticing that the bags I had slung over my arm were banging his little back with every step. We reached the car and I loaded them all in and closed the door while I deposited all the purchases in the back. When I went to open the door and buckle the car seats, the door wouldn’t open because Lauren had locked it from the inside as a joke. If the face I’d made trudging through the rain was bad, I can only imagine how frightening the one staring through the locked door at little Lauren was. She immediately began to cry, telling me she was sorry, but instead of accepting the apology as I require all the kids to do, I said “I have told you already that that is not funny, and you can’t say your sorry and then keep doing it over and over again.” When the red finally began to fade from in front of my eyes and the crying began to reach a rather desperate pitch, I finally said, “That’s okay Lauren. Here, take these tic tacs and pass them out to every one.”

“How many can we have?”

“You can each have two.”

“How about three?”

“Okay you can each have three.”

“Can we each have four?”

“Mommy needs a drink.”

When I put the kids to bed, I had a quiet evening to reflect on my bad behavior, and decided that unless I wanted to be cast aside when Daddy gets home from Afghanistan, I’d better put in some time as the good mommy. So on Saturday, when the buddy boy finally went down for his nap and the girls were still finishing their after lunch treats and distractedly watching TV, I remembered that Lauren had asked if she could decorate a box as a house. Hoping for a hero moment, I quietly made my way over to the pile of boxes in the entryway (we keep a large pile of boxes on hand so that we always have the size we need for whatever we are sending to Afghanistan) and found two that seemed to be manageable in size and more or less house shaped. I began pulling the address labels and other stickers off, but the girls heard me and soon from the living room came the inevitable question “Mom, can we decorate some boxes to look like houses?” Seeking some redemption, I said “I’m way ahead of you girls, I’m getting the boxes ready now. Why don’t you go find the big bag of markers?”

“We want to paint the boxes.”

“Paint the boxes?”

“Yes, with paints and paintbrushes.”

“The only paints that we would have that would cover these boxes are those smelly ones. (tempera) Are you sure you want to use them?”

In a scene that would have made Walt Disney proud, the girls looked at one another, then at me and with huge grins on their faces, nodded yes. What could I do? I was the bad mommy, so I said “Okay” as cheerfully as I could and went to find some newspaper to spread on the ground. I got the paints down from their high closet shelf, made each girl a palette on a paper plate, found brushes, and got them each a big cup of water for rinsing their brushes. I watched them get started and admired their artistry for a few minutes and then inched away to the living room where my la-z-boy and huge book awaited me. I figured that we would all have a little quiet time and then we would be refreshed and ready to spend the rest of the day in harmony. I was seated and reading for about 3 minutes when the question barrage began.

“Mommy, want to see what I did?”

“Mommy, is this a good color for the chimney?”

“Mommy, when we finish painting these boxes can we paint another one to be a library?”

“Mommy, can I have some more yellow paint?”

“Mommy, if you are committed to an insane asylum, who will take care of us while Daddy is in Afghanistan?”

As a bright little 13-year-old Catholic girl, I spent the summer before my first year of high school studying Latin. I had managed to place out of taking Algebra thanks to the tireless dedication of my eighth-grade math teacher, but to join the honors program at my Immaculata Preparatory School for Girls, you had to spend the summer learning Latin. I had never studied any language other than English, and had no idea what I was in for when I stepped into Sister Petra’s classroom that early June morning. Not only was I meeting a whole new language, but a whole new group of girls. I was extremely wary of my new school since I had already been chastised by Ms. Ciacio, another Latin teacher, for wearing pants to the placement testing. I was sure my missteps would pile up quickly, as would the scoldings and detentions.

About 30 of us came into the bright classroom, which was the only room in the school with windows on both sides, which I took as a sign of Sister Petra’s stature in the nun hierarchy. We took seats and waited expectantly to see what would come first from the quiet little nun in the floor length habit (although it was the 1980s, she was dressed like the nuns from The Sound of Music – head to toe in black). Her face seemed old, but it was impossible to tell her age since there was no other visible part of her to consider. When she got up from behind her desk, the change from sitting to standing did not give her much additional height, but the look on her face impressed all of us immediately that the summer session of Latin 1 was going to involve a great deal of work, and very little nonsense. I’m sure she led off the class with a prayer, in her inimitable high-pitched old lady/football coach voice. Then she reorganized the room alphabetically, moving me from my carefully chosen seat in the center of the back, to a new seat in the front row of the class. My seatmate, a girl named Carla with beautiful huge eyes, a friendly smile, and a sleepy voice, made me feel a little safer since she was technically between me and the podium where Sister Petra stood.

Unfortunately, Sister Petra never stood at the podium. When we were rearranged and seated, she ordered our books open and began the lesson with “Repeat after me: a, ae, ae, am, a, ae, arum, is, as, is.” We all mumbled along and then she began picking us out like a sniper “Miss Nicklaus, repeat after me…Miss Oudens, repeat after me,” and finally, “Miss Kelly, repeat after me.” I had never volunteered to answer a question in grade school, and having attended the same school for nine years, the teachers knew my reputation. Since I got good grades, they basically left me alone and did not randomly call on me. I was almost too shocked to speak when I heard Sister Petra call on me, and my voice sounded unfamiliar and shaky as I squeaked out “a, ae, ae, am, a, ae, arum, is, as, is.” From that moment on and throughout my entire academic career, Sister Petra’s class was the only one that ever had my undivided attention every day. While history or religion might be a good spot to get some math homework finished, in Latin all I ever did was Latin.

I really enjoyed Latin 1, learning all the vocabulary and all of the words in English that were derived from Latin. All of the rote repetition of endings for nouns and verbs was quite effective at drilling the declensions and conjugations into our skulls. However, thanks to our summer school jump start on Latin 1, we were ready for Latin 2 in the second Trimester of school, and Latin 2 was a whole different story. Weeks of learning vocabulary and grammar would seem to be the perfect precursor to translating works in Latin, but I was absolutely lost when Caesar declared that “Omnia Gallia est diviso in partes tres.” I did not know anything about Caesar, the Roman empire, or the wars that Cicero was describing, so I had no frame of reference for the sentences I was piecing together from the Latin. Without fail, every morning as we went through the translation I would line through what I had come up with and replace it with what Cicero had actually said. I can still feel the dread that I felt in Latin 2 (and 3 and 4 for that matter) when Sister Petra would call on me to translate. First she would let us dig a little hole by starting out with what we thought Cicero said. Then she would say “Wait a minute, now what does that word mean, and what does this word mean, and now why would you say this when you know this means that?” At times she reduced some of my classmates to tears, but I never cried because I knew that crying prolonged the torture, and I wanted it over as quickly as possible. My main defense was to go red in the face, smile, and say “okay, sorry…okay, sorry,” until we had finally both had enough.

We began sophomore year with Latin 3, and Cicero. My translating had not improved over the summer, however I did find a copy of Cicero in the dusty bookshelf of “Great Books” that my parents had bought when they were first married. Unfortunately the translations in the great books were not great, and I had trouble matching up the English to where we were in the Latin. If you read a modern translation of Cicero’s Oration Against Lucius Catalina, in English, it is actually pretty racy:

“For what is there, O Catiline, that can now afford you any pleasure in this city? for there is no one in it, except that band of profligate conspirators of yours, who does not fear you,–no one who does not hate you. What brand of domestic baseness is not stamped upon your life? What disgraceful circumstance is wanting to your infamy in your private affairs? From what licentiousness have your eyes, from what atrocity have your hands, from what iniquity has your whole body ever abstained? Is there one youth, when you have once entangled him in the temptations of your corruption, to whom you have not held out a sword for audacious crime, or a torch for licentious wickedness?”

But none of that came through in the halting translations coming from the girls in Sister Petra’s room. We could appreciate Cicero when Sister Petra read to us, but she only did that when her frustration had pushed her to the brink of behavior that was unsuited to her sisterly garb. When we moved on to Latin 4 junior year, we moved onto Virgil, who again should have provided us with some interesting poetry, but I was unable to grasp it. I had a copy of the Aenead, but none of it seemed similar to the phrases I was teasing out from my textbook. Latin 4 also brought about the horror of “site reading” where we were supposed to draw on our vast stores of knowledge of vocabulary and grammar and read from the Latin as if we were ancient Romans or perhaps Sister Petra. Halfway through my junior year the nuns decided to close our school after more than 80 years, and so I never continued on to Latin 5, and there are probably few schools now where such a class would even be offered.

When I finished my post for last night, I was slightly horrified with myself that I had so much trouble coming up with the latin word for “to live” and even if I had managed to recall any bit of conjugation, I was completely unable to determine which tense I wanted. Sister Petra would be truly appalled. My brothers and sisters and I can still conjugate “amo amas amat amamus amatis amant” and decline “agricola, agricolae, agricolae, agricolam…” but we are out of luck if we want to say something other than “I love the farmer, You love the farmer, He loves the farmer.” I have read that every memory is down its own path, and if you don’t keep the path well-worn, it will be overgrown and you won’t be able to find your way.

I guess my Latin memories are all overgrown, except for the memory of Sister Petra. While she was our teacher she almost never related to us in a personal manner, she was always in charge, never our equal and never particularly sympathetic to our teenage complaints. She always seemed puzzled by the girls that would cry, since she was only asking them to display what she had taught them and expected from them. Although she lived a life none of us believed we wanted, I think many of us would look back on her now as an example of the kind of woman we wanted to be. She harnessed her skills for teaching and passion for Latin and improved the lives and vocabularies of all the girls she taught, all the while maintaining her dignity and respecting her students (quite unusual in some classes at Immaculata). She had a self assurance and commanding presence that made her seem bigger, louder, and stronger than any nun I had ever encountered. Surviving three years in her class is a point of pride for me even all these years later.