Rejected Hand-Me-Downs

By: Barbara Matousek

Recently on Facebook, one of those viral status updates about brothers was making the rounds, one of those posts you’re supposed to read and feel all warm and happy about and then cut and paste in to your own status if YOU have a brother who will always be there for you. I never had a brother so I wouldn’t know what that’s like, but I do have a sister. An amazing sister who put up with being tortured by her older sister and frequently had to wear my hand-me-downs or play with toys that were originally bought for someone else.

Last year when I had photos taken of the kids and I was trying to figure out what shots to blow up in to wrapped canvases for a collage on my living room wall, I sent a few ideas to a friend. She looked at my proposed layout and said it looked great but it seemed “a little Sam heavy.” She admitted this came from her middle-child perspective. I told her I understood, that there was a lot of Sam compared to how much Eva there was, but Eva was just six months old. Sam was 3 and 1/2. I had a lot more Sam under my belt, a lot more Sam material available.

I come to this parenting thing as a first born. I never had to put up with an older sibling demanding that I do what they say or I will tell Mom and Dad. I never had to wear someone else’s hand-me-downs or play games with torn cardboard and missing pieces. I never had a bigger, stronger sibling sitting on top of me holding me down and threatening to spit in my face (sorry, Annie). But I also was the one who got in the most trouble for everything. I was the one caught by the all-encompassing “You’re older and you should know better.” Yes, I got a lot more attention from Mom and Dad, demanded a lot more attention from Mom and Dad. But I also got a lot more of the blame and a lot more of the responsibility.

Eva’s first word was not ball or doll or puppy. It was “stop.” As in “Sam, stop that!” Sam is older and during that first year (and still sometimes now) whenever I was exhausted or overwhelmed and just needed something to change for just one second, it was Sam I would demand things from. Stop. Now. Stop whining. Stop running. Stop kicking your chair. Stop hanging on me. Stop bouncing off the walls. Stop.

This weekend I went to all the usual places to find something clean for Eva to wear so I could put off laundry just one more day. I glanced over the piles of too-small pants stacked in her bedroom closet, piles I haven’t had time to move to storage or donate. I dug through the drawers of the changing table. I pulled out the Rubbermaid bin of still-too-big clothes handed down from my cousin. And when I came up empty-handed I remembered the cardboard box of Sammy’s clothes that had come back from a neighbor after she’d sorted through it and decided not to take all of it. Not just Sammy hand-me-downs, but Sammy’s rejected hand-me-downs. I dug out a pair of 2T jammies with little green and orange dinosaurs. They smelled like a musty version of Johnson’s Baby Shampoo mixed with Dreft. I chased down my naked toddler who is happiest when her big belly is sticking out and she’s running to get away from Mommy, and she sat perfectly still while I pulled on her big brother’s hand me downs.

I will never know what it’s like to be a younger sibling, never know that feeling of wanting to be like an older sibling, of waiting patiently for an older sibling or an overwhelmed parent to notice me. But when I watch my children together and the way they interact, Sammy always trying to get Eva to bend to his will and play what he wants to play, Eva always trying to get in the middle of whatever Sammy is doing (even if it involves small pieces or red markers or sharp objects), I get a small glimpse into my own childhood. I feel so incredibly blessed that I have a little sister that has always been there for me, and when Eva sat up straight in her new jammies and ran her hands over the dinosaurs on her legs and grinned, I wanted to call my sister and tell her how grateful I am…even if I don’t cut and paste any viral Facebook post that says so.

A Curve in The Road

By: Barbara Matousek

Packing up the night before it hadn’t occurred to me that we could go in a ditch, that my Subaru could keep sliding as the road curved. And to be honest, even after we saw the first pile-up of cars where I-90 turns and crosses the Mississippi River in La Crosse, I wasn’t concerned about the roads. I had called my mother and told her I was watching the weather, and I had checked the forecast at least thirty times that morning. The Weather Channel and all the local TV stations had said the worst of the snow would move in between 11am and 5pm, and up until the moment we got on the road just after noon, I wasn’t sure if we should go early and try to get ahead of it or wait and go in the morning.

We had planned our trip to Great Wolf Lodge in Wisconsin Dells months ago, and Sam had been counting the days until we stayed at “TT’s hotel.” A year and a half ago we’d stayed at TT’s hotel in Chicago on our way to visit relatives in Michigan, and last summer we stayed at TT’s hotel in Milwaukee while I ran in a 5-mile race to raise money for Children’s Hospital. TT is Sam’s grandma, and when we travel with her we stay in her hotels. TT’s hotel in The Dells has a waterpark, and we’d all been looking forward to this trip long before January first pretended to be spring and then quickly turned frigid and reminded us of her true colors.

We were in the car about twenty-five minutes when we came across an accident scene just after we crossed in to Wisconsin. Traffic that had been moving a steady sixty miles an hour came to a sudden stop, and I pushed the brakes slowly and thanked God the semi behind me had been following a safe distance. Eva was still awake because Sam had been screaming for several minutes that he couldn’t get his Leapster Explorer to do something he was absolutely sure it should do. I had long since given up on trying to convince him to be quiet and let me concentrate.

“Look at the fire trucks,” I said, and Sam looked up, suddenly quiet.

Mangled pieces of cars and SUVs littered the ditch and four or five firemen in coats with bright yellow striping lifted a woman wrapped in black blankets on to a stretcher. Her neck was in a brace and the SUV next to her was bent and caved in on one side.

“See why you need to be quiet and let me focus on driving?” I said without thinking, just grateful for a reprieve from the back seat screaming. “It is very dangerous out here. I would not want to go in the ditch.” My hands gripped the wheel and traffic crept forward and I glanced at the cars facing the wrong direction on the other side of the highway.

Sam looked up at the two firetrucks with flashing red lights and the smaller ambulance parked in front of it. He said nothing.

“Look at the firemen,” I said. “They are helping that lady. They’re going to take her to the hospital.”

Traffic merged in to one lane and I let the semi next to me pull ahead of us. I turned on the wipers and sprayed the windshield with blue fluid that froze almost immediately.

“Don’t worry, Mommy,” Sam finally spoke just before going back to his video game. “They can fix her.”

The accident scene scared me, made me hold the wheel a little tighter, let up on the accelerator slightly, focus more intently on staying at least six car lengths behind the vehicle in front of me.

Sam was, thankfully, unaffected. My anxiety hadn’t spread. About five miles later as I quietly cursed at a souped-up pickup that whizzed past us and then switched back in to our lane leaving us in a white out right behind his bumper, Sam started yelling about needing something to drink RIGHT NOW and when-are-we-going-to-get-there and “Where else does TT have hotels that we can go to?” By the time we arrived safely at TT’s hotel an hour later my fingers were cramped and the sides of the windshield were caked with blue ice, and Sam and Eva were sound asleep in the back seat.

The Perfect Season

By: Barbara Matousek

In the car on the way across Wisconsin Sam is still conflicted.

“I love Green Bay and I love Aaron Rodgers, but I also like the Lions,” he tells me. He wonders if Jack’s daddy would be sad if the Packers won. “What if the Packers won by just a little?”

Jack’s Daddy is my cousin John and he’s joining me at Lambeau Field for the final game of the season. Sam has been speculating on the outcome all morning. What if the Lions had forty-eighty and the Packers had twenty-seven? What if the Lions had one hundred and the Packers had zero? What if the Lions had eleventy-seven?

A few weeks ago, the weekend of Sam’s 4th birthday, the Packers were still undefeated and Sam wanted to know what color the Kansas City Chiefs wore. When I told him red, Sam insisted on wearing a red t-shirt despite the pile of Green Bay Packer clothing that he’s accumulated over the last few years.

A little background: I grew up in Green Bay, a small city spreading out from the banks of the Fox River near Lake Michigan. It is a town with more bars than churches, and paper mills steam the cold Midwestern air with a pungent sulphur smell. It is the smallest market in North America with a major league team, and Green Bay holds the only community-owned franchise in American professional sports. The Packers have won 13 NFL championship titles including 4 Super Bowls, and “Titletown, USA” appears on the Green Bay city seal. Five times during the history of the team when they needed money for stadium upgrades $200 value-less shares of Packer stock ownership sold out quickly.

During my childhood Sunday morning sermons in the fall were short, and even during the 80’s when wins were rare and coaching and quarterback changes were frequent, the wait time for those joining the season ticket wait list was estimated to be several centuries.

Sam is not growing up in Green Bay. But I did. I sleep in NFL pajamas and drink water out of a stainless steel water bottle stamped with a G. I do not carry a purse or a laptop case. Everything of value that I need during the day is stuffed into a backpack emblazed with a big white G encircled in green and gold. The blanket on my sofa is a woven picture of Lambeau Field. My father made me a shareholder in 1997.

So when a 4-year-old boy wants to assert his independence from his green-and-gold-loving mommy, he starts cheering for the other guys every week. Near the end of the 4th quarter of the Chiefs game when the TV showed Aaron Rodgers smiling on the sidelines after pressure for the perfect season finally subsided, I told Sammy I was a little sad.

“No, no,” he said as we watched the Packers file off the field. “I didn’t mean it. I want the Packers to win.”

So as we head across the state where Mommy will go to the final game of the regular season with Jack’s Daddy, Sam is still on the fence about who to root for. He knows Jack’s Daddy is bringing him a little present for his loyalty to the Lions during the early part of the season. But he also knows that green and gold make his mommy happy.

“I like Aaron Rodgers and I like the coach,” he tells me. “But I don’t like the other guys as much as I like the other guys on the Lions.”

I tell him that he can root for whichever team he wants to but Mommy’s team is going to win.

He declares his love of the Packers again but is still conflicted when Jack’s Daddy shows up at Grandma’s house dressed in a Lions jersey holding the promised present.

“I like the Lions,” he says looking out of the corner of his eye at my cousin. “But the Packers are going to win!” And he smiles and jumps into my arms.

Who is Richard Patience?

By: Barbara Matousek

Eva is babbling in her car seat behind me and Sam is gnawing on fruity gummy chews that I got from the co-op last week, so I dare to turn up the radio. On NPR Paul Brown (or maybe it’s Craig Windham) tells us about the compromise reached at the United Nations climate talks in South Africa. He explains that “richer nations will funnel money” to poorer nations through a fund.

“Who is Richard Patience?” Sam asks.

“Richer Nations,” I say. “He’s talking about countries that have money.”

“Where do they get their money? Where is it?”

“I don’t know but they’re going to share it.”

“Oh,” he pauses for just a moment before screaming at me that he is done with his gummies and I need to take his empty bag. “NOW Mommy. HERE!” I reach in to the back seat and exhale.

I start humming you’d better watch out, you better not cry, you better not pout I’m telling you why, something I’ve been singing since Sam insisted he dress himself this morning and then nearly melted into a puddle when he couldn’t get his arm through his inside-out sweater sleeve.

Mornings are not always fun in our house. The LEGO advent calendar has helped. It gets him out of bed. He lifts his sleepy head and runs to the kitchen counter and looks for the next number. Sometimes he’s punched through the cardboard and pulled out the little creation before I even catch up with him. But some days his frustration at not being able to do the build by himself and my frustration with the incredibly long amount of time it takes for a 4-year-old to dress himself collide in a frenzy of “COME ON we need to go RIGHT NOW or we’re going to be late!”

This morning despite his sweater sleeve frustration and my will-I-never-learn decision to snooze the alarm clock an extra 20 minutes, we made it out of the house on time without major incident. And for the first time in weeks everyone in the car is happy and quiet enough that I dare to listen to the news headlines.

Paul Brown tells us that the NTSB is recommending a ban on all cell phone use in cars. The recommendation, he explains, came on the heels of a pileup in Missouri in which two people were killed. Records show one of the drivers was texting right up until the moment of the collision.

“Killed? Why were they killed?” Sam asks.

“They were in a car accident and they got hurt,” I say.

“But who killed them?”

“Nobody. They were in a car accident. Their car got crushed. This is why I need to always pay attention when I’m driving, so we don’t get in an accident.”

“But where did they go?”

“They are dead. Killed and dead are the same thing.”

“But where did they go?”

“To heaven.”

“But what happened to their car. Who is going to fix their car?”

“I don’t know.”

And I turn down the volume and start singing.

We will not be listening to NPR as a family any more.

Wonder Woman

By: Barbara Matousek

When Jamie’s name appears on the caller ID, I know it can’t be good. I always hold my breath when she calls because I imagine she might be calling to tell me they used the epi-pen and Sam is now on his way to the hospital. I am lying sideways in my Lazy-boy, trying to find a way to feel comfortable when I see her number on my cell. Every muscle and joint in my body aches and I feel much older than my forty-four years. I just brought a pyrex bowl of plain white rice back to the kitchen after sampling a few bites and deciding I wasn’t ready to eat when the phone rang.

Sometimes I call Jamie our “daycare provider” but over the years she has become so much more than that. She is a friend, an advice giver, a consultant, a teacher, a partner in crime, and very frequently a therapist and rescuer. Sam calls her family. I call her Wonder Woman. When she closed the daycare earlier in the week because she was “in no shape to watch kids” we all knew it had to be something nasty. Jamie never gets sick. Jamie is the one that takes care of all of us — children and parents. After a day of rest she was back on her feet and the daycare was open and all of the parents breathed a sigh of relief. Whew.

I texted Jamie at 5am that I was puking, and she volunteered to drive out to the country in the dark to gather my children before all her other kids arrived. She came to my door and I handed her my sleepy children, still in their pajamas. She soothed them both and tucked them in her van and waved as she pulled away, planning to give me twelve hours to rest and medicate. And when I asked her later in the day if she could keep them overnight, she said what she always says, “No problem.”

I often wish I had the time and energy to write an impassioned letter to one of those home makeover shows about this woman and the way she cares for her community without ever asking for anything in return. She is the reason I am able to manage two children on my own. I’m not on my own. I have Jamie.

In the Lazy-Boy I sit up and answer the phone and say “This can’t be good” before I even say hello.

Jamie asks if I saw her earlier messages, and I see now that she texted twice while I was taking hot baths number 3 and 4 as I attempted to soothe my aching body.

Sam has thrown up. Sam has it too.

I say a little prayer of thanks that I didn’t actually take the Tylenol with codeine, and I line the inside of the car with blankets and towels and a bucket. When I arrive at Jamie’s Sam is curled up under a blanket on the bathroom floor, sound asleep. He is a four-year-old boy so he is seldom this still. Even in his sleep he moves and kicks and squirms and talks about diggers and bad guys. I lift him, and Jamie follows behind me to open my car door and hand me a Target bag filled with vomit-covered clothes, and I thank God once again for this woman who makes my life possible.

When I get Sam home I bundle him with blankets and turn on Nick Jr. He asks for apple juice and I sit with him while he sips it. And I’m in the laundry room piling his coat and hat and pants from that morning into the washing machine when he tells me he’s going to puke just before he sprays corn all over the bathroom rug. I tell him it’s okay and I help him back to the couch before cleaning up the mess and realizing that having a sick kid makes you forget all your own aches and pains.

People often ask me how I do it, how I manage to be a sole parent of two kids. And I usually tell them that it really isn’t that extraordinary, that our family isn’t any different than any two-parent family. We have logistical challenges that other families might not have, but I also don’t have to find time to balance a relationship with the demands of a family. Every family has to find balance, and for the most part I feel like our family is just like any other.

Until I’m sick.

And then we have Wonder Woman.

Is He Calling?

By: Barbara Matousek

Maybe it’s because the Packers are 7-0 for the first time since 1962, or maybe it’s because my sister and I will be together for Thanksgiving for the first time since the year Dad died, or maybe it’s because my son is attending a Catholic preschool and brings home things like “A Christian pumpkin”, or maybe it’s because I recently re-read my friend Katherine’s book about her battle with cancer, or maybe it’s because I watch my mother aging and realize how really tiny our family is, or maybe it’s because I’m developing a friendship with a woman who has complete faith in God the way my father did, or maybe it’s because I’m raising my children surrounded by families with good fathers. Maybe it’s all of these things, but I find myself missing my dad a lot lately.

Last night I had a dream. Dad and I were in a hotel room casually packing up the last of our things after having spent a few days traveling together. We were getting ready to re-enter our normal lives. The time and place of our adventure weren’t clear, but it was clear we were accustomed to traveling together and had been traveling for several days. We had our routine. I was going through the drawers, finding little things we’d left behind and shoving them into one of my smaller carry bags. Dad said he was going to make a trip down to the car with the big bags.

“Take your time,” he said. “I’ll meet you down there,” and he left. Just like that. Casual.

I finished cleaning up the room and threw my bag over my shoulder and then pulled the door closed behind me. The rest of the dream I was going up and down in elevators and going to every door of the hotel, looking in each parking ramp and parking area. I wasn’t frantic, but I couldn’t find him and I wished we’d been more specific about where we’d meet. I wished he had a cell phone. I woke up before I found him.

Yesterday during the daily preschool-to-daycare shuttle another 4-year-old announced from the back seat that “when you’re dead they take you to the hospital and touch your heart and make you better.”

“When you’re dead,” Sam said, “You’re just dead. And you’re always dead. You don’t come back.”

And then the two of them spent ten minutes talking over each other, Sammy talking about heaven and cemeteries, Zayda talking about her cat and bones in the ground.

My dad died in the middle of the night on the 4th of July. It was the first night I hadn’t slept at the hospital in over two weeks. My sister had taken the night shift and I had headed home. I hadn’t said my usual “See you tomorrow, Dad.” I somehow knew I wouldn’t. I kissed him goodnight and left the room and never saw him again.

Maybe he’s in the front of my mind so often now because I know that Sam is on the verge of more specific questions about why he doesn’t have a dad. My friend Kate would probably say this is God inserting himself into my life, God calling. I don’t know. I like to think it’s my dad. He’s found a payphone and he’s calling my cell to tell me he’s still there waiting for me and I can take my time.

Worms on the Kitchen Counter

By: Barbara Matousek

On my kitchen counter is a small, clear Rubbermaid container filled with black dirt, six earthworms, and a tiny yellow inch worm. Sam collected them this weekend as he “helped” me dig up the gravel that lined our driveway. I started this project in April. I anticipated replacing the gravel with fresh grass, planned to relocate the rocks overgrown with sandburs that stuck to our clothes and caused endless tantrums when they found Sam’s bare feet. But with a baby and a three-year-old, the opportunities to complete even a simple landscaping project are few and far between, and it got to be September before I finally said out loud to my neighbor, “The goal is to get this done before the snow falls.” When I said it out loud I suddenly became focused on getting it done, and despite a late bedtime the night before and being up twice to feed the baby and once to change Sam’s sheets, when the baby went down for her morning nap, Sam and I headed out to the driveway.

I was focused, but Sam was not.

I lifted and raked and squatted and dug, and Sam buzzed around me needing help with his bike helmet or help with his gardening gloves or help getting the hose untangled or help remembering to stay out of the bag of salt leaning against the side of the garage. To be fair it was a beautiful fall day, perfect for throwing the Frisbee or digging in the sandbox or collecting crickets in the bug boxes from Grandma, all the things we usually do on the weekends. And he is three. But after the fifth or sixth time I had to get up from my position on the ground and take off my gloves and help him with something, the worm in the dirt was a welcome sight. I eventually finished my rock project and Sam helped me toss new grass seed, but the single worm ended up with several friends, and after three days in the refrigerator they are now cluttering the kitchen counter.

A few days ago my friend Becky and I were sitting on the beach watching our boys walk in the water. Sam had on shoes and socks and long pants rolled to his knees and soaked to his thighs, and the boys were taking turns splashing each other and then complaining about being splashed. Sam had handed me a broken piece of glass he’d found on the bottom of the river. He had insisted that I keep it, that I hold on to it and put it in my pocket, but as soon as his back was turned, I tossed it into a pile of bright yellow leaves at the base of a tree in the woods behind us.

“He’ll forget about it,” Becky said. And then she told me about the wooly caterpillars she’d thrown out during the weekend, the way she’d left the cover off their box and told Hamilton in the morning that, dang it, they’d escaped.

When I was a kid my parents played bridge with an older couple named the Marshalls. I don’t remember what Mrs. Marshall looked like. I don’t remember what her perfume smelled like or what color lipstick she wore or even what her voice sounded like when she said “taint sorted yet” as everyone waited for her to play a card. And perhaps I might not even have remembered she existed at all except for the weekend we spent at their lake cabin collecting clams. Twenty years later Mom admitted to me that she hadn’t actually “accidentally” left the clams behind. When we had gotten home from the lake and they weren’t in the trunk, I had sobbed, heartbroken in the same way that I would be in later years when the string ran out and I chased my liberated kite down the street for blocks in my bare feet, heartbroken in the same way that I was when the maid in our Paris hotel room threw out all of the beer cans I’d collected for my high school boyfriend throughout our European tour.

So on my kitchen counter is a Rubbermaid container filled with black dirt, six earthworms, and a tiny yellow inch worm. It’s right next to the bug locker with the dead moth and the bottle of monster spray a friend of Grandma’s made for Sam this summer. I’m not sure when I’ll throw any of it out, but the new grass seed is sprouting and I no longer have rock and weeds lining my driveway, and the first snowfall is probably (knock on wood) at least a few weeks away.

A Survivor’s Heart

By: Barbara Matousek

When I pulled into the driveway and saw the package sitting by the garage door, I starting unhooking my seatbelt before I’d even stopped the car. I had been waiting for this package all week, since the day I got the email from Amazon telling me it had shipped. And as I stand now at my kitchen counter flipping through pages like some sort of restless child, I want to go door to door and start passing out books. I turn to the first page and read a blurb from Pam Houston about Katherine’s humor and her survivor’s heart, and I smile. On the back cover is a picture of Katherine with her daughter, Katherine’s pale nose and chin resting on Josies’s dimpled brown cheek. Josie’s hair is up in braids, and Katherine’s long straight hair hangs below her shoulders.

The first time I met Katherine her hair was just a few inches long. It was a curly mop that accentuated her big green eyes. We stood on a gravel parking area near the compound of cottages our writing group had rented for the week in Pt. Reyes, California. Our writing community had been around for nearly five years, but Katherine had joined us online the year before and she was joining us for an in-person workshop for the first time. A few months earlier she had emailed us all about her clean scan and the anniversary of her mastectomy. She told us all to have a drink for her on that day. “One might wonder if that’s a day to celebrate,” she said and then answered herself. “Hmmm. Sure!”

To be honest I don’t remember much about Katherine that week, because I was absorbed in my own insane and narrowly-focused world of IVF and follicle counting, and I was still struggling with trying to figure out what the latest ridiculous messages from my ex-boyfriend were supposed to mean. But I do remember Katherine’s beautiful eyes and endless curiosity and the way she confidently placed herself into the center of a new community. And I remember reading Made of Metal and Constructed with Fire (one of the stories in her new book) and thinking what an amazing talent she was already. In the back seat of a car headed to SFO at the end of our week together, the wind blowing the warm March air through the car until we rolled up the windows, she admitted how nervous she had been to join us all and I marveled at her balance of strength and vulnerability, her ability to be honest without being overly sentimental, and the way she always moved forward despite fear.

She may tell the story differently, but from my vantage point she was confident and beautiful and unbelievably funny. We’ve all heard the statistic that 1 in 8 women gets breast cancer, but Katherine was the first survivor that I met that was willing to share her story with me, the first woman who made me laugh about chemotherapy nausea and botched reconstructive surgery. After a week of intense writing workshops with dog-walking on North Beach and kite flying on Limantour Beach and oysters at Tony’s on Highway 101, Katherine’s place in our community was cemented. She not only fit in, but she inspired all of us to new levels of courage and commitment and heart.

At my kitchen counter I pull multiple copies of “Who in This Room: The Realities of Cancer, Fish, and Demolition” out of the shipping box and run my palm over the cover of each one. My son Sam was born nine months after that first meeting, and just before that Katherine had sent an email to our group telling us about Josie’s adoption saying simply “Our baby is here.” In the years since we first met our emails about writing and the creative process have occasionally detoured to complaints of sleep deprivation and baby gas and how it is still okay to complain about parenthood even though it was our choosing, but she is the first person to understand when I tell her how hard it is to juggle parenthood and the creative process.

I thumb through the pages of “Who in This Room” and think back over the friendship we’ve developed over the years, and I can actually feel my heart beat a little faster from the excitement of holding this tangible evidence of her talent. I want to pass this book on to everyone I know, to share this amazing woman and these poignant, funny stories with all my friends.

My friendship with Katherine is really difficult to define. In many ways we are strangers as we don’t bump in to each other at the local café or plan trips across the country to visit each other. But in a world in which we’re all busy texting and twittering while trying to find meaningful connection, our friendship is significant. The beautiful book she’s written and this journey she has survived remind me to be grateful for what I have and that when life becomes unbearable or simply scary and exhausting, I need to just slow down and pay attention and there are always reasons to laugh.

Katherine Malmo’s book, Who in This Room: The Realities of Cancer, Fish, and Demolition, is now available anywhere books are sold. In 2005 Katherine was diagnosed with Inflammatory Breast Cancer and spent a year in treatment. These days she is cancer-free and blogs about her family, adoption, race, health and living a low-toxin life at HystericalMommyNetwork.

Different is Good

By: Barbara Matousek

“Just a minute,” she tells her husband as she hands him their 1-year-old daughter. “I want to take Sam to the park. I told him I would and I want to make sure I do that.”

We are at a toddler birthday party, and after our boys finished eating bratwurst and pasta salad and finger jello, but before we sang Happy Birthday to a proud two-year-old, my friend Kay volunteered to bring our kids over to the playground. But then the cake rolled out and the noisemakers appeared, and the boys forgot all about the park. But Kay didn’t. As people begin packing up their things and heading to their cars, Kay wants to follow through on her earlier commitment.

“Come on Sammy,” Kay says. It would be easy for her to sneak out, to escape to the car with her family. But that is not who Kay is. Kay is conscientious and intentional. Kay keeps her word. Always.

I bend to lift Eva from the spot where she is scooting across the cement with a bottle of water, and I follow Kay and the boys.

Kay and I are mommy friends, women who might not have otherwise met if not for our children being the same age. I met her at another birthday party when our boys were two years old. She was there with her son adopted from Ethiopia and I was there with my son from anonymous donor IVF. What I remember most about that first meeting was her son’s big eyes and his quiet, gentle spirit. He stood near a giant exercise ball and gently rolled it while all the other two-year-olds wanted to bounce it and jump on it and make noise.

Over the last few years I’ve learned about Kay in the way that you do when you have young children…interrupted bits and pieces over time. She is tiny and she wears her dark hair at chin length, its natural curves beautiful against her pale skin. She is often dressed in light clothing made out of prints, sometimes sewn herself. She walks fast, and there is admirable power and strength in her stride. When I see her at parties and events, she talks to everyone, makes everyone feel comfortable. She sometimes knits as she talks, but she is always interested, always asking questions. She has endless energy. She is so conscientious that I have to remind myself that she is fifteen years younger than I am.

After she leads the boys to the playground, Kay and I sit on a swinging bench. I briefly nurse Eva and then place her on the grass, and Kay and I talk about how our boys will handle being different as they grow and interact with the world. Kay thinks about these things. Kay thinks about everything.

I tell Kay that I think our children will have an advantage as they get older, that all children will feel different at some point. But because our children know they are different at a young age, they will be used to dealing with it.

Our boys are starting to recognize they’re different, and we are on the verge of having those conversations with them, telling them that being different isn’t bad, that everybody is different, that they should be proud of who they are because they are special. She tells me that her husband is a little different, that he’s always followed his own drummer.

“Different is good,” she tells me, almost as if she is still trying to convince herself of this. “This is what we’re teaching our children.”

I agree.

After Kay and I talk for a few minutes about how to face these challenges and what we will tell our boys, Kay calls them over to us. She tells her son it’s time to go and he listens. He does not argue.

I’m still learning about Kay and who she is and where she came from, and the more I learn the more I know she is the kind of friend that everyone needs. She is conscientious and intentional, compassionate and generous. She thinks through her decisions. She commits.

A few days later when I sit across from Kay in a café downtown, our first free Mommy night together in months, she tells me she wishes she could be less anxious, that she wants to learn to worry less and let go of control more. I tell her someone once told me that if there is something you want to be, make friends with someone who is already that way. If you want to be thinner, make friends with a thin person. If you want to be more spontaneous and playful, make friends with a free spirit. If you want to be more thoughtful and intentional, make friends with someone who lives their life with intention and forethought.

Years ago I used to say that I believed that everyone who came in to my life could teach me something. I just had to be open to learning it. When Kay said she wanted to take Sammy to the playground it was important to her that she follow through on what she said even though it wasn’t the easy thing. And even though she is nearly fifteen years younger, I am learning from her about commitment and intention and accountability. I am remembering the importance of a person’s word and how following through on commitment creates security, both in children and in friendships. I watch her do the right thing over and over again and it makes me grateful for this new friendship and the things I am learning that will help me be a better parent.

Becoming a Firefly

By: Barbara Matousek

The tears surprised me. Mine. Not his. It didn’t go at all the way I had expected it to when I had envisioned it the night before. I had expected tears and anxiety, perhaps a little back-and-forth-please-don’t-leave-me-but-I-LOVE-you at the door. But instead Sam posed for a picture near the front steps, his arms big and wide in his new red and white striped shirt, his smile genuine. And when we entered through the front door rather than the side door that we’d used during the open house the day before, his new big boy shoes slapped the tile floor as he started to race down the hallway to Mrs. Heather’s class. He found his classroom and only when we discovered the door was closed did he slow down.

During early morning, before classes start, the younger and older kids in the pre-school program play together. The day before we had learned that they alternate classrooms, but we had never gone into Miss Mary’s room, never met Miss Mary. I didn’t know who she was or what she looked like and I hadn’t discussed peanuts or epi-pens with her. She hadn’t been there the day before when Sammy nervously sat down to color his firefly and sprinkle glitter on its hind end. She hadn’t asked my son if he wanted to be called Sam or Sammy or Samuel. She hadn’t showed him his cubby with the blue sticker that had his name on it or his coat hook with his name written on a picture of a spiral notebook. We didn’t know Miss Mary. We didn’t know Miss Mary’s classroom.

Sam held my hand and followed me as I looked through the halls and the classrooms trying to discern which woman was Miss Mary. So many parents and so many first-time students. A sign on the wall between classrooms reminded parents to Please Sign In, and although nobody had told me about this the day before, I skimmed the list for Sam’s name, wrote the time and signed my initials. Had I done it right? Is this all I need to do? Where do I leave him? Who is responsible for him now?

Just as MY anxiety was reaching its peak a familiar voice laughed, and I looked down to see Jamie, the woman who cares for both of my children every day while I work, squatting by Sam giving him a big hug.

“Aren’t you so excited for your first day of school?” she said, and Sam let go of my hand and beamed at her.

After I had Sammy deposited in Miss Mary’s classroom (but not before spying three boxes of cereal and milk on a table and wondering how they controlled who ate what), after I hugged him and kissed him and watched him walk off to play puzzles, after I walked down the stairs and out to the parking lot, after I got in my car and turned the key to start the ignition, after all that…I exhaled and tears unexpectedly filled my eyes. As I drove to work in silence I thought about the moment when Jamie had lowered herself next to him in the hallway and how I will forever remember the look of joy and security on my child’s face when he saw her. I thought about how truly lucky our little family is, how this incredible woman who has made our family possible had once again come in at just the right moment and helped us during transition.

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