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Working mom lit: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Posted on September 5, 2008 by jlord
Filed Under books | 1 Comment
All I needed to know about being a working mother, I learned from “A Tree Grows In Brooklyn.”
I know, Betty Smith’s classic is technically about a bookwormish girl growing up on the mean streets of Brooklyn. I, as a bookwormish girl growing up on the mean streets of Bellingham (I may be exaggerating), totally devoured it and I’ve read it so many times since that I actually had to buy a new copy. (I just can’t get rid of my old, battered one, however. The cover’s ripped, there are yellowed pages falling out, but it’s an old friend.)
But consider the character of Katie Nolan, the mother of heroine Francie and her brother, Neeley. Katie made a bad choice in husbands — Johnny’s a lovely, singing Irish lad, but he’s a drunk who can’t hold a steady job — so she goes out to work, arranging to clean their tenement in exchange for rent and picking up extra money on the side cleaning homes and doing laundry.
Katie realizes she owes it to her children to ensure that they will have a better life. That’s why she takes the advice of her own mother, who suggests that she read them a page from the Protestant Bible and a page from William Shakespeare’s collected plays each night. By exposing them to good writing, she believes she will inspire her children to seek out something better and continue their educations.
As a family on a limited income, Katie knows to plan ahead for meals. One of the food porniest passages in the book (why are books about hungry people always full of loving descriptions of food?) describes all the ways she uses stale bread, bought at a discount from a neighborhood baker, to feed the family for the week.
She’s also big on disease prevention, knowing she can’t take time off from work and the family can’t afford a costly doctor. When the kids report an outbreak of lice in the school, she coats Francie’s hair with kerosene, braids her hair tight, and sends her off with the warning to stay away from lit gas jets. The children wear garlic around their necks, which probably did little for germs, but definitely kept the germy people away from the garlic-stinking Nolans.
And she knows the importance of checking in with her kids when she knows they will be home alone. That’s how she ends up catching a child molester on the prowl for Francie.
In Katie’s family, everyone has to pitch in. The kids are required to turn over half of their money from selling scrap metal each week to the family’s tin can bank, nailed in a back closet, with the hope that the money they save will help them move up in the world. She makes up games to get them through times when their father isn’t bringing home money and food is scarce. And when she’s forced to decide which of her children will become the family breadwinner and which will continue with school, she decides Neeley will go to school — not because he’s her favorite, but because she acknowledges that Francie will go to any lengths to educate herself.
Smith gives Katie what can be perceived as a happy ending: she’s leaving the neighborhood, never having to clean again. I can’t quite picture her content to be a lady of leisure.
Maybe she goes back to school and opens her own business: a restaurant based on her uses for stale bread. She hires young mothers as staff, offers flex-time and child care.
And hopefully a decent health plan. Garlic and kerosene really aren’t cures for everything.
A night in middle school
Posted on September 4, 2008 by jlord
Filed Under education, schools | Leave a Comment
I’m late for school.
I knew it was going to be a tough squeeze — Wednesdays don’t come with a fixed exit time from work — but I’m a half hour late for open house. It’s only my son’s second day of middle school and, already, his mother is falling down on the job (his father, however, is right where he should be, taking the kids to flag football). I run through the middle school doors just as the first bell rings.
“Find your child’s schedule, report to class,” a teacher directs.
I catch the principal’s eye. Darn it, I thought I could just sneak into school. “Don’t worry, we’re only on the first period,” he reassures me as he glances at my schedule. “Library, up the stairs, all the way down to the end of the hall.”
I pass a friend in the hallway. “You’re late, big news day?” she calls out.
“Nope, just Wednesday!”
There are seven periods in all and, tonight, we’re going through all of them. We have the same amount of time to pass from class to class as our kids do during the day. We’ve been provided with school maps, although sixth graders, for the most part, do tend to stick to just one corridor.
And, just like on the first day of school, the teachers quickly make their impressions. Some come down hard on the strict this-isn’t-elementary-school thing, touching mainly on our children’s homework and classwork responsibilities without talking too much in their allotted 7 minutes about what they’ll actually be teaching. Others get us laughing and display incredible amounts of energy.
The math teacher is wearing a Louisville Slugger tie. His classroom is a shrine to the Red Sox. He has a challenge problem in the front of the room, a sample question from last year’s MCAS on an easel in the back and he talks enthusiastically about the ways he makes the kids compete with each other to turn learning negative numbers, charts and word problems into one big game. I wonder if it’s too late to go back to math class myself — he’s making it sound like fun.
Earth science, social studies, research, language arts. I’m in classes with a few friends — the parents of my son’s friends, that counts as friends, doesn’t it? — and a few faces that are familiar from my dealings around town. I end up in the wrong classroom only once and emerge, giggling, with another wayward mom.
Hmm. Middle school isn’t quite as scary as I thought it might be.
It’s more than saying no
Posted on September 2, 2008 by jlord
Filed Under friends, health, politics | 2 Comments
My friend had a confession, shared in a whispered giggle in an empty classroom: she and her boyfriend were going to Do It.
We dissected it all. Where It might happen. Why she decided It was the right thing. Whether or not he was going to brag about It or whether, once they’d done It, he would turn around and dump her.
It was true love, we decided, and very romantic. She had only one qualm: she didn’t want to get pregnant and he, being a staunch Catholic, didn’t think they should use birth control.
“But if he’s Catholic, he shouldn’t be wanting to have sex at all,” I argued.
“He thinks birth control is a sin,” she said.
“So is sex when you’re not married!”
We went back and forth over the issue. If sex is a sin, I argued, it wasn’t like she was going to get sentenced to extra hell for using birth control. Personally, I felt the issue was more that he didn’t feel like using a condom. He wasn’t going to be the one to get pregnant either way, I added.
“If you get pregnant, are you going to get married?” She didn’t know. “Abortion’s out of the question if he’s so Catholic, right? Are you going to have a baby and give it up for adoption? Are you just going to skip college?”
A few weeks later, another friend had a confidence: she was Doing It. But they were using withdrawal and, anyway, she didn’t think it would be too easy for her to get pregnant because her periods were so infrequent.
“We’re Catholic, and birth control is a sin,” she explained.
“What the heck are they TEACHING you in CCD?” I wailed.
I’ve been thinking about these high school conversations and Bristol Palin, a 17-year-old who has the misfortune of being 5 months pregnant at the same time that her mother, the governor of Alaska, is running for vice president. Her mom believes in abstinence education. She doesn’t believe teenagers should be taught about birth control, because birth control isn’t part of God’s plan.
And I’m guessing she’s a big believer in public shaming, because she’s dragging her pregnant daughter into a huge public spotlight. If the daughter couldn’t say no to her boyfriend, why couldn’t the mother say no to John McCain?
Her daughter’s made a mistake, the conservatives say. It just demonstrates their commitment to family values and hey, she’s getting married, they trill. And at least she’s not getting an abortion.
Because, really, when you’re a teenager, the choice must be either abstain or get pregnant and have the baby. There’s no in-between, no birth control, no planning so a child who’s on the verge of graduating high school doesn’t turn around and have a child herself.
I’m thinking about another conversation. This one is with my mother. Long before I even had a boyfriend, she went over birth control with me. She wouldn’t be in favor of me having sex before graduating high school, she said, but if it came to that point, she wanted me to be prepared. She had plans for my life, she said, and teenage motherhood, or an abortion, weren’t among them. She gave me books, she signed off on Bellingham’s version of sex ed (It was called “Human Relations,” if I remember right, and Mr. Christie was blushing bright pink through most of it) and she nagged the heck out of me once boys were in the picture.
I didn’t get knocked up.
Neither did my Catholic friends. Turned out, their boyfriends’ definition of sin were very flexible when it came to having sex out of marriage, even if their girlfriends were on the Pill.
First day of school
Posted on September 2, 2008 by jlord
Filed Under education, schools | Leave a Comment
The back-to-school supplies are packed in the backpacks, one last year’s model with a camo pattern of pink and green butterflies, one new and red, sufficiently grown-up for a middle school student.
In one room, a back-to-school outfit, complete with shoes, headband and carefully selected jewelry, has been laid out for over a week. In the other, the alarm has been set for 6 a.m. and he’ll fumble through the drawers for something sufficiently clean and sports-themed.
It’s the first day of school and the house is asleep. Except for Mom, whose dreams all night have been school-themed. Both kids start new schools today. Megan’s school is an old friend after three years with David in residence, the town’s newest and brightest school. David’s school carries an imposing name — middle school — and the equally daunting title of the town’s most crowded school.
The kids are happy to be getting back to their school friends. Megan’s third grade teacher is on maternity leave and she’s starting the school year with a substitute, someone who just happens to already be a family friend. David will be switching classrooms for every class and he’s looking forward to having several male teachers after an education career that has been largely feminine.
They’ll both come home tonight with a lot of homework.
All that homework will be for me.
There will be emergency contacts and medical forms, schedules for band and afterschool activities, a note from Megan’s school about the “responsive classroom” format and an explanation from David’s about how to keep up with his grades online. The official countdown to the first fundraising plea starts today.
The first big yellow bus will roll down our street in an hour, at 6:30 a.m.
It’s the first day of school and everyone knows what to expect. They’ve been primed, quizzed on afterschool schedules. Numerous calls have been made to friends exchanging information about homeroom and teacher assignments. There should be no surprises and the sleeping children are clearly confident that they know what the day — heck, the entire school year — holds.
There should be no surprises.
So why the heck can’t Mom sleep?
Summer passes by…
Posted on August 30, 2008 by jlord
Filed Under Mommy-world, friends | Leave a Comment
We swore at the end of the school year that we’d get our families together over the summer. We talked about maybe organizing a neighborhood block party, a chance for everyone to learn the names of the people with whom they exchange waves and small talk at the communal mailboxes. This summer, we said in June, would be different.
It didn’t happen. It never happens. My kids are at Camp Harrington all week and our one weekend day together, Sunday, is spent fitting in everything else. Andrea’s kids have their own day camps and then they’re off to their cottage in New Hampshire. Annie’s kids have day camps and swimming lessons and spend their weekends by the pool.
We wave. We talk via email and cell phone. This weekend? No, we’re off to the Cape. Next weekend? No, they have family visiting. The weekend after that? Oh my God, can you believe Pop Warner football is starting practice this early?
I finally caught up with both of them this week. We spent a day off hiking with Andrea and her kids with the children running off ahead as we slowly climbed over rocks and gossiped.
“I know we said we’d get together over the summer and we never did –” she began.
“I know, isn’t it crazy?” I said.
“Then you’re not mad?” she asked. “Some people get really offended when your life gets so busy that you can’t see them all the time.”
But it’s hard to get mad at someone when you’re just as busy.
It never seemed to be this way for my parents. They used to get together with the same couple every week for bridge, while the kids watched “Creature Double Feature” and snuck into the dining room for hits of onion dip. When we were older, they hung around with another couple with younger kids; I was grateful for the standing Saturday night babysitting appointment.
But fall’s here — the calendar may say it’s summer, but Labor Day weekend means fall — and it’s time to slow things down. There’s time to catch up on the sidelines for flag football. I can drop by for some Mom Time at the morning bus stop after getting Megan to the school down the block. There are open houses and back-to-school nights, the occasional walk after work, and Patriots season is starting — there’s no better way to ensure that we’ll all be around for the weekend than to have our husbands and kids tied to the television.
Isn’t it great summer’s over? Now we can finally relax.
Does a third grader need a bra?
Posted on August 27, 2008 by jlord
Filed Under too grown up | 2 Comments
Shopping with my daughter has always been an interesting experience. She’s had definite opinions about what she wears since she was about 6 months old (people who say a 6 month old doesn’t have opinions has never tried to put one in an outfit she absolutely hates) and has been vocal about her fashion choices since she learned to talk.
Hey, she even manages to dress ME successfully, even if I do have to remind her now and then that I’m just not a sequins and sparkles kind of girl.
She dragged me into Limited Too the other day. I’ve been avoiding her introduction to Limited Too — I’ve seen some clothes in there that appeared to be a bit too baby hooker — but the back-to-school clothes fell right into her style aesthetic (layered, with a bit of a rock edge, but still girly, and I’m just as amused to be describing my 8-year-old’s fashion influences as you are).
It wasn’t until she was trying on the clothes in the dressing room that I noticed the sticker on the camisole top: “Built-in shelf bra!”
WHAT?????
She’s 8. She wears a size 8 in girl clothes. She’s even on the tiny side for third graders. She doesn’t need a bra. Her body’s not even THINKING about producing anything that might require a bra.
I checked the smaller sizes in the same style and, sure enough, they all boasted both the tag and the bra.
Maybe the factory finds it easier to just cut everything down to size, including the entirely unnecessary bra. Maybe the company believes that little sister might want to dress exactly like big sister. Maybe it’s a conspiracy to give my child body image issues at the tender age of 8.
Or maybe it’s just an extra layer of fabric and an elastic band. The entire outfit looked cute on her and I removed the tag without comment.
Early lunch or late breakfast?
Posted on August 26, 2008 by jlord
Filed Under food, schools | 4 Comments
David starts middle school next week and while I know I should be fretting about the school’s space issues and the possibility that, OMG, he might actually see public displays of affection in the hallway or get picked on by the bigger kids, I keep stopping at one item on his daily schedule.
Lunch: 10:36 a.m.
Roll that around in your head awhile. Better yet, wait until 10:36 rolls around one morning and think about how hungry you are. Are you ready for a hamburger or a coffee break?
His new principal reassured parents at orientation (because, let’s face it, parents need much more orientation than kids at the mere thought of middle school) that, yes, our kids will be hungry. After all, they’re going to be starting their school day much earlier and, chances are, breakfast will have taken place at dawn. And growing kids are always hungry.
Still. 10:36 a.m.? In our newsroom, that’s barely the start of the work day. We’re all stumbling around, bleary-eyed, hoping someone will offer to make a Dunkin’ Donuts run and bring back some coffee and Munchkins.
A more upscale school system would spin it better, I suspect.
They’d just call it brunch.
The most ridiculous thing I’ve said this week
Posted on August 24, 2008 by jlord
Filed Under i can't believe i said that | Leave a Comment
“No! You can’t cut his hair! He has a photo shoot this week!”
Oh my God. I sound like a stage mom.
It’s not a competition
Posted on August 21, 2008 by jlord
Filed Under Mommy-world, sports | 2 Comments
I’ve squeezed three giant bus routes onto my pages. I raise my arms in victory.
No medals. No “Star-Spangled Banner.”
I manage to make up a recipe using four vegetables from our CSA share, some leftover tortillas and some bits of this and that in the refrigerator. I also whip up some brownies while simmering the impromptu stir-fry. I am a goddess, an American hero, the working mother, hear me roar.
No medals. No “Star-Spangled Banner.” I don’t even get a moment on the “Today” show.
Maybe I’ve immersed myself too much in the Olympics. I watched synchronized swimming and marveled that someone has finally created a sport that combines both water and makeup. I spent a morning locked on rhythmic gymnastics. My son, who has developed a previously unknown love for women’s beach volleyball, asks me what my Olympic event might have been.
“Speed reading,” I say. He’s not terribly impressed.
But my moment arrived Wednesday morning, which arrived with a bit of fall chill. At the camp bus stop at the Boroughs YMCA, I realized the kids had forgotten their sweatshirts. Maybe shivering for a morning would toughen them up. But as I got in my car, I heard the dramatic voice over.
“Jennifer wasn’t content to be a neglectful working mother. She wanted to be something more. She wanted to be a champion.”
My God. It’s worse than I thought. Bob Costas has taken up residence inside my head.
“She looked at the camp bus. She thought of her poor, shivering children. Megan, her adorable daughter, had complained of a sore throat only the night before. A cold morning in the woods, on the lake, could create complications.”
Get out of my head, Bob. I turned onto Rte. 9.
“Ahead of her, a beacon, a symbol, was the giant red bulls-eye — a Target.”
The kids really do need new sweatshirts. David’s is practically a three-quarter sleeve.
“Her challenge — can she hit the Target, grab two sweatshirts, pay for them and race, against time and traffic, without breaking any speed limits, and meet the bus at the Northborough stop?”
Well hell, if Dara Torres can grab a silver medal for swimming at the age of 41, surely I, at the same age, can get sweatshirts on my kids’ backs in record time. Bob, step aside — it’s time for me to compete in the Mom Olympics.
“And she’s in the store! There’s no dwindling by the $1 bins in this competition — she’s on a search and destroy mission. She stalks the aisles with no hesitation. This mother knows the layouts of at least three Targets intimately and she knows exactly where to find her prey. Yes! She’s found a gray hoodie, size large, for her son! She’s run to the girls’ section and… wait, what’s that on the sales rack? A pink sweatshirt, marked down to $3? That adds bonus points for smart shopping! And she’s at the register, making small talk and counting out exact change and out the door in record time! Can she beat that bus?”
I run into a door that was supposed to be automatic. Why does this have to happen in front of an international audience?
“Ooh, let’s see that again in slow motion.”
Don’t make me hurt you, Bob.
“And she’s crossed Rte. 9 and she’s taking the backroads to Rte. 20. Oh no. Is that a power crew up ahead? Is that a police officer stopping traffic? She’s never going to make it now.”
Stop saying never. There is no never. There’s always a late parent or two and the Northborough stop is the last one before they head to camp.
“She’s past the block and on Rte. 20! The lights seem to be in her favor. It’s going to be close. She’s scanning for the top of the bus through the trees. Is there yellow? Can she make it? Can she make it?”
The parking lot appears to be empty. There’s another anxious parent turning in, a camper in the back.
“The bus is there! The bus is there!”
I toss the bag with two sweatshirts at my surprised daughter and the bus driver laughs and gives me a thumbs up.
“And there you have it, folks. From bad working mom to Olympic legend. I’m Bob Costas.”
And I really don’t need a medal. Just a little break from reality would be nice.
Mom-me-downs
Posted on August 20, 2008 by jlord
Filed Under Mommy-world, friends | 2 Comments
The coat is denim, treated with something that makes it sparkle. It has pink rhinestone buttons, a row of pink sequins above the pockets and “Princess” is embroidered in silver on the left hand side. On the back, a satin Cinderella holds out the folds of her ball gown, ready for a night on the town with her prince.
It rarely left Megan’s back for a full year during her princess phase. It hasn’t fit her for a couple of years and has come close to the Goodwill bag many times. But I couldn’t just stick it in a clothing bin. I couldn’t even list it on eBay. The gaudy little denim jacket needed to be a mom-me-down.
Anyone with kids has experienced the mom-me-down — that’s the handing off of an item that was cherished enough by a child (but not too cherished) that it becomes something, after it’s outgrown, that can’t just be discarded. It needs a good home.
I’ll even extend the definition to include getting-ready-for-kids items — maternity clothes, for example. The second my pregnancies became public, I found myself showered with maternity clothes. My friend Elyce, stationed with her husband on an Army base across the country, even directed her mother to ship a giant box my way, happy to find a home for her green maternity Christmas dress and some favorite blouses. That wardrobe was ultimately returned after the kids were born — another friend was in need back in Texas — but I passed on to other friends my own favorites, the vest with the fasteners made from old-fashioned diaper pins, the soft green suit with the lace-up waist.
With David, we accumulated a fleet of trucks, some easily discarded through our daycare center, others not. At a party, a cousin’s son took great joy in the ride-on front-end loader that had been taking up space in the corner of our driveway, dodging our thoughts on trash day — it became a mom-me-down. Another cousin walked away with a set of Rescue Heroes. The little boy next door has toys that are all the more precious to him because David, his idol, used them first.
Megan’s entire wardrobe for the year she took dancing lessons was made up of mom-me-downs. Her doll crib was a pass-along from another mom. And she’s given away her fair share — her Cinderella dress up costume, a pair of princess Barbies, Christmas dresses and a pair of mittens shaped like Teddy bears.
And her little denim jacket. It’s lined with hot pink at the cuffs and collar. It made her feel simultaneously cool and princess-y. It’s lined with memories of apple picking and dog walking and transitioned her from the wish that she could be a princess to the dream that she’ll become a rock star. I mom-me-downed it to my co-worker’s daughter, Catherine.
It will be a little big, but that’s OK. Princesses don’t come one-size-fits-all.
keep looking »
