punchdrunkmom

Typical

So I totally thought I’d be writing about Kai losing a tooth over the weekend. I thought I’d say something about how much trouble those teeth had caused us when Kai was a baby—sleepless nights and ear infections and lakes of drool. I thought I’d write about my thoughts on saving the teeth, which would essentially force the adult Kai and Ryan to figure out what to do with them (along with their umbilical cord stumps, every card and letter I’ve ever received ever, and my high school art portfolio) after I die.  I figured I’d write about what a Big Kid he was getting to be, what with his tooth-losing and kindergarten-graduating and what-not.

But as the hours of the weekend wore on with no forward movement on the whole tooth situation, I did a little sleuthing on the internet and discovered that it might be weeks before the damn tooth falls out.

So now I have to find something else to write about.

So, you know.

Uh, how’s it going?

:::

Just kidding.

We had an awesome weekend.

On Friday after dinner, I tossed the kids in the stroller and walked the few blocks to the toy store. We had presents to buy for a couple of birthday parties.

When we got there, Kai was immediately sucked into a stack of scooters in boxes.

“Can we get a scooter, please?” he asked.

Before I could even respond, the twee hipster who works there found the display model and Kai was soon zipping through the aisles.

Spoiler alert! I bought him a scooter.

To my credit, I did pretend to deliberate for 10 minutes.

Also to my credit, I bought one for Ryan, too.

But here’s the thing. It was a nice day. For once it was kind of warm, it was sunny. Also, it was Friday, and though my job is “mother,” therefore rendering the concept of Friday meaningless, there’s still a sense of optimism that comes on a Friday afternoon around 5 pm. And then there’s something that happens to me when Kai wants to do something, you know, normal. Like own a goldfish or try gymnastics. It’s hard for me to say no.

We put Kai’s scooter together in the store because Kai wanted to ride it home.

“You have to stay with Mommy,” I told him. “And you have to do what I say.”

“Oh yes,” he said.

“Kai,” I said, “what did I say?”

Kai was practically salivating.

“Tostaywithyouanddowhatyousay.”

I held up my hand and he high-fived me.

On the way home, he fell twice. He caught a sidewalk edge and crashed forward over his handlebar. But he got right back up. I followed close behind.

“Kai,” I said, “Watch out for that family. Slow down. Say ‘excuse me.’ You’re coming up to a street. Stop. STOP!”

Kai followed every direction, if reluctantly, and when we got home, the kids spent an hour cruising up and down the sidewalk. Kai became increasingly confident, leaning into his turns, mastering the foot brake. He started to hone his style, or at least that’s how Scott described it as Kai sped past us crouched low on the scooter. And we passed a mellow spring evening this way, until the shadows got long and we ushered the children inside for bed.

Rainbow rainboots. Fashion over function any day of the week. She gets it from me. Okay, who am I kidding? She gets it from her father.

:::

This weekend underlined the fact that we have been enjoying a period of peace with Kai, a sort of Pax Judy, part of the ebb and flow of a spectrum disorder. Every day his teacher tells me something that Kai said or did that caused everyone’s jaw to drop. Kai tried to cheer up a kid in his class that was melting down. Kai told his substitute special ed teacher that he wanted to do his math himself without her interference.

He’s taking an art class on Saturdays, soccer on Mondays, gymnastics on Fridays. He’s reading at grade level. He’s sleeping through the night. He asks me a ton of questions.

“What’s muchtime?” he asked me today.

“What?” I asked.

“We don’t have muchtime. What’s muchtime?”

“It’s a unit of measurement,” I said, reaching into my butt for this one. “’Much’ refers to quantity, and ‘time’ is time.” I smiled in what I hoped was a helpful way.

So okay, the questions aren’t what a regular six-year-old kid would ask, but they show that he’s figuring things out.

And then there’s the loose teeth.

For months, I’ve been asking him if he has any loose teeth.

“No,” he says. “My teeth are tight.”

He still thinks so, despite evidence to the contrary.

But I find myself strangely excited for those teeth to fall out. Normally I’d dread a milestone like this—tangible proof that all traces of baby Kai are long gone.

But there’s something so fantastically, deliciously, amazingly typical about it.

The funny thing about a family with a spectrum kid, is that we aspire to typical. We covet it.

So I had a great weekend. We did what every family with kids did—we sat outside in the promising April sunshine, watching our kids be regular kids. We grilled brats. I went for a run on the lakefront.

All weekend I’ve had that feeling that you get when you buy a new pair of really awesome shoes, watching my children race up and down our sidewalk on their scooters, helmets askew, cheeks flushed.

The teeth will happen in their own time, as all things do. In the meantime, I want a million more weekends like this one.

 

Things Chicagoans Hate

Sometimes we have a chance to look at something familiar through someone else’s lens, as I had the opportunity to do this week while my sister was in town visiting.

She lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband. They own five bicycles between them, and have only one TV, whereas we have three TVs, four iPads (on which you can watch TV) and no bicycles.

We have plenty in common, however, including a love of gyms, pork belly, day drinking, and things we find on youtube. We had a great time—we went shopping and to the roller derby, on an architectural boat cruise, ate at a heavy metal burger bar and killed a box of Target wine among other things.

But Laurel pointed out to me some things about Chicago that I didn’t really realize before, and so, for those from Chicago or contemplating a visit, please enjoy this list of things Chicagoans hate.

1.)    Chicagoans hate the weather.

If you live here, or if you know someone who does, you know that this has been a shiteous spring. You can’t even call it spring. It’s cold. Like really, really cold. And of late, it’s been really, really rainy.

In Portland, they regard the rain with a kind of radical acceptance that would put Buddha himself to shame. The rain just is. Last year I went out for a visit and Laurel suggested I bring a raincoat.

“Like a macintosh?” I asked, picturing a thick yellow slicker, something the Gorton's Fisherman would wear.

I don't always wear a raincoat, but when I do, I wear one like this.

Laurel laughed, which I took to mean that my question was a stupid one. But who has a raincoat?

Turns out everyone in Portland does—a thin nylon windbreaker type with a hood. It starts to rain and the hood goes up. It stops raining and the hood goes down.

“Everyone here has their Hunter boots and their umbrellas,” Laurel observed, incredulous at our fussiness and cumbersome gear. She laughed at the pile of umbrellas by the door of every restaurant, each slammed down in disgust by a Chicagoan sick to death of the @#$% rain.

But what she really found funny was how testy we all were about the weather. She mentioned this to a waiter on Thursday.

“It’s not just ‘a little rain,’” he spat, all traces of good humor sliding from his face. “It shut down two highways.”

“But this is what I mean,” Laurel pointed out. “You seem really angry about it.”

“You’d be angry, too, if your mother had two inches of water in her basement,” he said, stalking off to fetch our bloody marys.

We told that story to the girls in the gym the next day.

“Laurel’s from Portland,” I said to the girls in cycle class. “She thinks we’re too grumpy about it all.”

“They shut down two highways,” one girl said.

“I can’t stand it,” said another. “I’m ready to move to California.”

The others chimed in, a chorus of complaints about the ridiculously late spring, the depressing nature of the constant gray, flooded streets and general dreariness of it all.

“They’re all making my point for me,” Laurel said.

But it’s not really the rain we hate. Chicagoans hate an extended patch of bad weather. In a city where you can go to work in the morning and it’s 70 degrees, and when you leave your office at 5 pm it’s 40, we hate anything that lasts for more than a day or two, be it heat or cold or snow or rain.

We hate being told to get over something, to get used to our circumstances, especially if we don’t like those circumstances. To be sure, we’re a city that reversed the flow of the Chicago river because we didn’t like the direction it was flowing.

Show me a Chicagoan who will radically accept the weather, and I’ll show you an ex-Chicagoan.

2.)    Chicagoans hate the way you drive

Laurel laughed one day after I jammed on the brakes to avoid some jackass who pulled out in front of me.

“What?” I asked.

“A foot on the brake, a hand on the horn, it’s like it’s your first reflex.”

It is, in fact, how we drive around here. Because Chicagoans hate the way you drive.

Yes. You.

We hate how long it takes you to parallel park. We hate when you can’t make a decision about which lane you like. We hate when you apply the brakes. We hate that you got here first and now we have to wait for you to do whatever it is that you’re going to do. We hate that you made that sweet move and we didn’t think of it first.

We hate when you drive too fast because that’s dangerous, you asshole.

We hate when you drive too slow because c’mon Grandma, get off the road!

I was driving in Minnesota with my mother once, and some guy cut me off or some such. I don’t even remember what he did, but I laid on the horn and yelled out the window.

“Do you need to find some food?” my mother asked, concern etched in her face.

“What are you talking about?”

“Well, you’re acting like you’re having some kind of blood sugar incident.”

I was outraged.

“But that guy cut me off!” I exclaimed.

“So?” she asked

So, indeed.

Laurel went to the grocery store with my car on Saturday night. She told me that she honked at someone on her way home.

“You’re one of us now,” I told her.

In Portland, you drive a lot slower because you never know when a hipster with a Wyatt Earp mustache is going to dart in front of you on his unicycle. That happens here, too, but when you honk at the guy for doing something dangerous, he yells a string of obscenities back at you and flips you the bird.

You know why? He’s a Chicagoan. He hates the way you drive.

3.)    Chicagoans hate the Earth

If you want a bottle of water in Portland, you have to bring your own bottle. Plus, you will be bottle shamed for trying to buy a bottle of water.

In Chicago, you can get a bottle of water from a guy hanging out on an expressway off-ramp. They’re everywhere. Bottles, I mean. Well, and those off-ramp guys, too.

Also everywhere? Grocery store bags.

I bought some wine this week at the grocery store. The guy double bagged each individual bottle, telling me that he didn’t trust those bags not to break.

“Jesus,” my sister said under her breath as we were unloading the car.

While she was here she made it a point not to use bags.

At Whole Foods, she declined a bag for her lunch. I, of course, was given a bag. I offered her space in mine, and even that was too much for her.

“I’m good,” she said, carrying her salad.

I took her on an architectural boat tour on our last day together, and we saw this:

Chicagoans go on an architectural boat tour and take a picture of the garbage in the water.

I told her that no one here actually uses a garbage can. We just take all of our Starbucks cups, plastic grocery bags and water bottles and pitch them in the river.

Of course that's not true. Chicagoans love the Earth. Don't we shop at Whole Foods? Buying the super-expensive, locally sourced produce? That we drive home in our Hybrid SUVs?

What?

Other things Chicagoans hate:

4.) Waiting for a table at a restaurant

5.) The way this cab smells

6.) When people from New York diss us

7.) Deep dish pizza

8.) Rahm Emanual

9.) Phonies

10.) Saying goodbye, for now, to your sister

 

Ninety-three punchdrunk seconds

 

In which I was once, briefly, a little girl

 “Mommy,” Kai asked in the car on the way to school, “what did you like to eat when you were a girl?”

He says “girl” with only marginal success, since his Rs and his Ls come out like Ws. You can hear him trying to wrap the sound around his tongue. Gur-yur-wul.

The question surprised me because Kai’s interests are largely a.) Kai-related and b.) squarely in the here-and-now.

“That’s a good question,” I replied, trying to remember back to what appeared on the table when I was six years old. “I liked Chicken McNugget Happy Meals and macaroni and cheese.”

Kai laughed. “Just like me!”

Just like Kai, indeed. I tried to picture my mother feeding her family as I do Kai and Ryan, separately from Scott and me because of work schedules, and short order style. What do you want for dinner, guys? Pizza? Nuggets? In our house, when I was a gur-yur-wul, we all sat down together and you ate what was served, and if you weren’t enjoying your mother’s vegetarian phase, you kept it to yourself. But the question was about what I liked to eat, not what I actually ate.

“Just like you, Buddy.”

And then, even more surprising than the original question, was the follow-up.

“What did you like to drink?” he asked.

I glanced at him in the rearview mirror.

“I liked milk and Kool-aid.”

“What’s Kool-aid?” he asked.

“It’s kind of like juice,” I said. “I’ll get some and show you so you can taste it for yourself.”

:::

I remember asking my parents what it was like when they were kids. I remember asking if, for example, when they were little, the world was black-and-white like the TV shows and photographs from that time. I remember asking my father what it was like to go to school. He seemed surprised that I asked, but for my effort I got all kinds of stories, including the one about his principal who kept paddles in his office for kids who had misbehaved, one with a nail in it and one with holes for less wind resistance.

Maybe things were pretty black-and-white back then after all.

But anyway. I remember asking my parents these questions, but I never really thought Kai would ask them of me.

We drove in silence for a few blocks. I was following the thread of my own thoughts, of Kool-aid, of remembering to buy him a packet of it and whether I should get regular or sugar-free, of remembering that when I was pregnant with him I couldn’t stand the metallic taste of water and drank Kool-aid sometimes instead. I’d have to be sure tell him about that, and about the Kool-aid guy, who comes through the wall and says, “Oh, yeah.”

“Mommy,” Kai said.

“Yes?” I replied, pleased and proud of Kai, for making this conversational leap, for being so sweetly adorable, flattered by his interest and eagerly prepared to answer more questions.

“Bowling balls are heavy,” he said.

Rainblow Pie

Me: Kai, what do you want for dinner?

Kai: Rainbow Pie.

Me: You got it, kid. (Goes to kitchen, makes the following:)

Rainbow Pie: red peppers, carrots, pasta or scrambled eggs, grapes, blueberries, banana, toast clouds.

Me: Kids, dinner’s ready!

Kai: (Points) What’s that?

Me: A banana sun.

Kai: I don’t like bananas.

Me: (removing banana)

Kai: I don’t want blueberries.

Ryan: I no want red peppers.

Me: Fine. (Scoops up red peppers, gives to Kai.)

Ryan: I no like carrots.

Me: What are you talking about? You eat like a hundred carrots a day.

Me: Kai, what’s this? (Points to pile of grapes off the table.)

Kai: Don’t want grapes.

Me: Then put them in the garbage.

Kai: No. You do it.

Scott: Don’t speak to your mother that way.

Me: Here. (Hands Kai grapes, pushes back his chair.)

Ryan: All done! (Gets up from table.)

Me: You didn’t eat any of your dinner. Look! I made a cloud out of toast.

Ryan: No toast.

Me: Kai, here’s another cloud.

Kai: All done. (Gets up from table.)

Me: But Kai, you've barely touched...Right. I’ll be downstairs for a while.