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.

Being a Jungle Gym

By: Barbara Matousek

I stood in the front entry under the carved wood sign that said Jamie’s Play Palace. Four children patiently waited at the dining room table across the room and another one wandered around the princess castle on the front porch. Eva looked up at us from the nearly-too-small car seat bucket, and Sam stood behind me, his hands pulling down on my back pockets and his face occasionally diving into the small of my back.

“I’m going to be shy of Jamie,” he had told me in the car. He didn’t want to return to daycare after nine Mommy days in a row, nine days filled with playing in the Lake Michigan surf, searching for and finding rocks that were “very perfect” and “really prettyful”, building and counting sand castle turrets before smashing them in fits of laughter, hiking in the woods and picking wild raspberries and overripe thimbleberries, nine days of nearly constant contact with Mommy, nine days of running and jumping and climbing and hanging on Mommy.

I had to sneak out of the daycare while Jamie distracted Sam with a story about tomorrow’s field trip to The Bounce House. And as I walked to the car I exhaled. Liberation.

In my office I rejoined the real world, reconnected to instantaneous rapid-fire news headlines and constant phone calls and the expectation that emails will be answered within hours if not minutes. A different kind of chaos, though definitely less physically exhausting.

I posted a facebook message to a friend with twin boys, told her I couldn’t imagine how she stayed sane with two of them climbing and jumping and running all of the time.

On the phone I told my sister I was glad my second child was a girl; my 44-year-old body was exhausted from spending nine days trying to no avail to wear Sam out, that I honestly don’t think he ever stops moving even when he’s eating or sleeping. And I was really quite tired of being a jungle gym.

Ann told me she remembered when that started with her son. “It’s as if because you birthed them your body belongs to them,” she said. Her nine-year-old daughter still hangs on her. My sister understood exactly what I was talking about when I described the way I had yelled at Sam the night before to just give me some space. “Just five minutes. Can you please just not touch me for 5 minutes?” I begged as I tried to answer the emails that had piled up during our vacation.

At the end of the work day when I returned to Jamie’s Play Palace to pick up my children, Sammy hid behind a tree out front while Eva scooted towards me on her diaper-covered butt. And although I knew that Sam would hang on me the entire time I talked to Jamie about their day and the plans for tomorrow, a day at the office did me a world of good and I was ready to give my body back to him for a little while. Just a little while.

Cute Survival Mode

By: Barbara Matousek

Over ten years ago when I lived the single life, my college roommate Kelly and her husband and their two boys came to visit me. When they arrived they unloaded Rubbermaid totes filled with toys and sleeping bags and kid videos and I opened the first bottle of wine. The next day when we decided to make a quick trip to the grocery store, Kelly’s husband and I both stayed in our chairs in the living room and didn’t rush to get up.

“You know she’s going to have to make a list first, don’t you?” I said.

“That’s what she does,” he said.

The week before I had taken a Myers Briggs personality test for grad school, and after we got our results the instructor used me as a class example. She asked a guy sitting next to me his plan for tomorrow and he started listing his schedule. He was a planner. A list maker. A guy comfortable with routine and structure. I was not. I was the opposite of that. When she asked me what my plan was I said “I don’t know. It’s not tomorrow yet. We’ll see what happens.”

When Kelly sat down with pen and paper in my living room and said “Okay, what kind of meat do we want?” her husband and I laughed and I told her she was cute, that after fifteen years of friendship I always knew what to expect from her.

Fast forward ten years and I’m out with new friends at a local farm having wood-fired pizza with my one-and-a-half-year-old son. I have just come from a long day of work, and most of the other parents take turns chasing their children. Mom drinks wine while Dad takes their daughter to feed the chickens. Dad pours a Spotted Cow while Mom stands near the jungle gym. Mom rests in a lawnchair and chats with friends while Dad brings the pre-schooler to the port-a-potty. Dad enjoys his pizza and the live bluegrass music while Mom changes dirty diapers. I mostly chase my son. From the playground to the sandbox to the chicken coop to the tire swing to the slide to the pizza box. And when one of the dads takes Sam to see the baby cows I shove some pizza in my mouth and exhale and say that we’ll be going soon.

“Oh but Sam’s having fun,” one of the moms says. “Stay.”

“It’s getting late, and it’s already past Sam’s bedtime,” I say, feeling as if my exhaustion is not a good enough reason. “If we stay up too late it’s impossible to get him down and I still have a list of things to get done before we leave tomorrow.”

The next day we are headed out of town for a week of beach living.

“Oh, you and your routine and your lists,” she says. “You’re so cute.”

I don’t know why this triggers a defensive reaction in me, why being called cute makes me want to crawl out of my skin. But I’m exhausted and I start to rattle off the list: wash two loads of laundry, feed the cat and change its litter, put the garbage to the curb, water the plants, turn off the air-conditioning, water the garden, move the flower containers out of the sun, call the guy who mows the lawn, and pack everything but the kitchen sink. And packing will take at least an hour. That list is two pages long. Playpen, stroller, diapers, wipes, music player, lullabye CDs, blankets, clothes, bibs, and spoons. And for the beach there are diggers and shovels and floaties and swimsuits and swim diapers and beach towels and sunscreen and the inflatable plastic duck that quacks when you squeeze its nose. I feel my heart beginning to race, and a river of sweat is running down my sternum as I fold up my paper plate and begin putting blankets and toys and sippy cups back into our backpack.

When I’m in the car on the way home I call Kelly. Sam nods in the backseat and I wind the car through deep, lush valleys that are half woodlands and half farmlands. I tell Kelly that I’m sorry for any time I ever teased her or made her feel small for the way she was raising her children. I tell her she is my hero and only now do I truly appreciate lists and routine. When her boys were little I used to try to train them to tell her she was the best mom in the whole wide world, and I tell Kelly that when I grow up I want to be just like her.

“They are just so much easier to deal with when you have a routine,” Kelly reassures me on the phone. “Sam is so little right now and you’re in survival mode. You are a great mother.”

I tear up. I guess this is all we ever want to hear from our friends, that they recognize our strengths, that they see us doing the best we can for our children, that they understand. I struggle just like every other mother. I make mistakes like every other mother. I’m learning and changing as I go. I didn’t used to like to know what was coming next, didn’t want to be “held down” by a plan or a schedule or a commitment. The word “list” used to mean “boring” to me. But now as a single mother of two children under the age of four, I know I couldn’t function without my lists and our routine. There is too much to do and too little time to do it, and lists and routines are how I manage to stay organized and efficient. They are how I manage to get quality time with my children. They are why my children feel secure. They are why I am a good mother, cute or not.

Distraction

By: Barbara Matousek

My cell shows that the Saturday night call lasted twenty-nine seconds.  Twenty-nine seconds in which I said nothing but “Hello” and then Mom told me that she had driven herself to the ER and that she “almost called an ambulance and it was probably a mistake to drive myself but I was in so much intense pain and I threw up and I just wanted to get here and I’m calling to tell you to keep your phone on in case something happens.”  She was panting as if she had just finished sprinting.  And then she hung up.  I didn’t get to say anything else.  Just hello.

I was on the couch.  After a day of swimming pools and bikes and Frisbees and digging in the garden and making homemade pesto and pushing the stroller and collecting bugs and chasing butterflies, I had decided to leave the dishes in the sink and the homemade pesto smeared on the countertop and the layer of bugs and fine sand and dandelion fuzz collected at the bottom of the inflatable pool on the deck and just relax with my son.  Sam was hypnotized by Dora and Boots, and he had been quietly watching Nick Jr. when I crept out of Eva’s room and collapsed next to him.  I had just exhaled and sunk into the couch when my phone rang.  And when I hung up 29 seconds later I wanted to cry but I didn’t.

“Mommy, can I watch you play your bird game on your phone?” Sammy took his eyes away from the TV.

“Not now,” I said.

“Why?  I want to.  I love to.”

I told him I had to keep my phone free, that I was expecting another important call from TT.

“When is she coming?” he asked.

I said that she wasn’t coming, that she was in the hospital, that she was sick.  And because I was scared and alone with no adult next to me I did the thing I shouldn’t have done.  “I’m sad, Sammy,” I said.  “Sad and scared because I don’t know if TT is okay.”

Seven years ago when I got the call that Dad had finally died in his sleep in the middle of the night, the one night I didn’t stay at the hospital with him, my boyfriend at the time was there with me.  We lay on the bedroom floor and took turns tossing a small basketball towards the ceiling, a contest to see who could get it closest without hitting.  A distraction from the realization that Dad was actually gone.

“She’s okay, Mommy,” Sam said and he went back to watching Dora and Boots count in Spanish.

At my computer I looked to see if vomiting was a symptom of a heart attack.  When I saw the phrase “silent killer” at the bottom of the page, I closed the laptop and went back to sit next to Sam.  I scrolled through my phone.  Fourteen minutes.  It had been fourteen minutes since she called.  Surely something had happened by now.

I called my sister.  No answer.  I texted my sister.  No answer.  Ann is never away from her phone.  Was she on the phone with mom?  Was she on the phone with doctors?  Would the next person I talk to be my mother or a doctor?  I called my sister again. I texted her again.  Dora and Boots sang Happy Birthday in Spanish and Sam pulled a blanket up over our laps and said again “She’s okay, Mommy.  The doctors will make her better.”

I wanted to believe him.  I wanted to relax and watch Dora say “thanks for helping” and sing about how we did it.  But instead I frantically scrolled through Facebook and text messages and my recent calls list like some kind of trained rat who keeps pushing the bar, expecting a treat.  27 minutes.  No answers from anyone.  Where the hell was my sister?

I refreshed my screen over and over again until it said that it had been 30 minutes since the call.  A sane person could wait 30 minutes to call back, right?  I waited as my call connected and it rang once, twice, three times, four times.  I inhaled, wondering if ER nurses are allowed to answer a ringing phone next to a dying person, and the call rolled in to voicemail.

On the couch as Dora the Explorer credits rolled and Moose A. Moose said that Blue’s Clues was coming up next, I felt alone.  I thought about my son and how I would explain to him that TT wasn’t coming to visit again.  Ever.

“Okay,” I said.  “Bedtime.”  I stood and clicked off the TV and Sam’s voice began ramping up in firetruck fashion.  “Three books.  Come on.  Pick out your three books.”

We were halfway through Curious George’s camping adventure when the phone rang again and I sat up in Sam’s bed.  The phone said “Mom Cell” and I took a deep breath before answering it.

“I’m fine,” she said.  “I’m fine.”  She told me the service wasn’t great but she was at Bellin Hospital and they were going to do xrays and CT scans.  She was pretty sure she was reacting to a combination of medications and that she was having a flare-up.  The pain was in her gut.  Not in her heart.

When I hung up, I looked at Sammy and didn’t say anything.  His dishwater blonde hair was shooting out in all directions.  When he was a baby he looked so much like my father but now he definitely has my mother’s eyes.

“TT’s okay,” I said.

“Told ya’,” he said.  And then he wanted to get back to Curious George and the campfire.

The Story in My Coat Pockets

By: Barbara Matousek

Here’s a little exercise for all you writers out there:  Make a list.  Any list.  And you will find a story.  Here is my story, told through a list of items currently in my coat pockets:

A clear plastic Nuk with an orange handle, thrown into my pocket months ago in the hopes that some day my daughter would keep it in her mouth rather than spitting it out at me.  Last night at ten minutes to midnight I tried to convince her to take a similar one so that I could sleep without contorting my body and twisting my spine while she nursed.  Not sure why I still carry this one in my pocket.  Hope.  I guess.

A folded up paper bookmark with a little man looking through a gigantic telescope at the words “One World, Many Stories” and a paper coupon from the library’s summer reading program for a free ice cream cone at McDonald’s.  “It’s okay,” Sammy said to me when I picked him up from daycare and he handed it to me.  “McDonald’s doesn’t have peanuts in the ice cream.  We can go there, Mommy.  We can.  Really.  We can go there.”

A little plastic pig that Sam picked up from the floor of the Subaru as we were heading in to the daycare last week.  It is about the size of a quarter, and it has amazing detail, including perfectly formed hooves, a kinked tail and eight little teats that hang down from its underside.  Nobody seems to know where it came from and how it ended up in our car. Not even Sam.  Although when I ask Sam where anything (like the popsicle stick in the bathroom or the pile of spaghetti noodles in the living room) came from he usually says “I don’t know, Mommy.”

Kleenex.  Loads of wadded up Kleenex, some shredded from being in there for weeks, some brand new and neatly folded.  I grab some every time I leave the house because there have been more than a few occasions in which one or both of my children have sneezed or spit up or drooled or picked things out of their noses just as we were entering the real world where people don’t look too kindly on goop glistening your upper lip.

My circa 2007 Verizon Wireless Motorola Razor.  The paint is peeling on one side and the back is rubbed down to reveal the white plastic underneath on the other side.  It is worn and used, just like the pants I wear that are too long so that the edges have started to fray or my nursing bras which are so stretched that their elastic no longer really functions and I wonder why I even bother.  No money for new clothes.  No time or money for one of those fancy phones with all the apps.  I barely know what an app is.  When I’m with my kids, I’m with my kids, without all my facebook friends tagging along.

And yet I seem to be bringing all of you.

And despite having what was, I think, my first major hot flash after calling what I thought was a credit card customer service line only to later realize I had read an 8 where it was a 6 because I didn’t use my newly-acquired reading glasses when I looked up the number, I am NOT as old and worn out as all this sounds.  That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

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