punchdrunkmom

The Empty Child

Yesterday I asked Kai what he was saying that Shelby heard the other night, what woke her up and prompted her to come outside.

“I was calling your name,” he said.

“Megan?”

“No. I was calling for you, for Mommy.”

I’ve been trying to tease details out of Kai about his little trip outside, to piece together the narrative.

I’ve also been making a point to semi-stalk the approximately 14,685 red brick houses on our block to see if I can find Shelby. I didn’t know why, exactly, I wanted to find her. I just did. I felt like we shared quite a moment the other day on my porch, and the goodbye we said was just so, I don’t know. Lame? Anti-climactic? Inadequate? I’ve hugged strangers for less than returning my son to me. Way less.

So anyway, I saw her today, coming out of a red brick building. She looked different this time—fresh in a cobalt dress, clearly on her way to work.

“Shelby?” I asked.

“Yes?”

“I’m Megan, from the other day,” I said.

“Yes,” she said.

I discovered that I still had no idea what to say.

“Uh, thanks again, for, uh, you know,” I stammered.

We stood there awkwardly for a moment.

“Which way are you walking?” she asked, and I gestured to my house. We began to walk that direction. She lives two doors down. I think I mentioned the red bricks.

“So, did you tell, like all your coworkers that you found some kid on the street?” I asked her, because for some reason, I couldn’t help myself.

“Yes,” she said, laughing. “But the funny things is—” she hesitated. “Do you watch Dr. Who?”

“No,” I replied.

“It’s like the X-Files only, well, less—” she searched for words. “Out there, I guess. Anyway, the before we went to bed that night we were watching Dr. Who, and the last episode we watched was about this kid in a gas mask, and he can’t take the mask off and all he does is call for his mommy.”

We stopped walking in front of my house, and Shelby continued.

“So when I heard a child calling, ‘Moommmyyyyyy’ I pretty much freaked out. My husband heard it too and we were like oh my god*.”

I laughed. Leave it to Kai to be the creepy kid from someone’s nightmare. Sometimes he walks silently into our room in the middle of the night and just stands there until we sense his presence and wake up to find him staring at us.

“What if you’d looked outside and he’d been wearing a gas mask?” I asked her.

“Oh, I never would have gone outside.”

Which means, you guys, that we will never buy him a gas mask, because I’m pretty sure the only reason he wasn’t wearing one is because he doesn’t have one.

And believe me, the only thing creepier than Kai staring at you in the middle of the night, would be Kai in a gas mask coming for you in the middle of the night.

 

*The original post had Shelby’s husband not hearing Kai calling out. Apparently he DID, though after watching this video, he may have pretended not to so he didn’t have to go out there…

A breath of fresh air

Scott’s phone rang, and sound began to intertwine with my dreams. When he answered it, Scott’s voice, talking to whoever was on the other line, wound itself into the narrative, and in my dream the caller became one of Scott’s former clients, a guy for whom the word “boundary” was foreign, and who, at least by phone, seemed to accompany us everywhere we went. My dreamself advised Scott to tell the guy not to call so early, or to just not take the call for heaven’s sake.

“You’re outside?” I heard Scott say.

And then I was annoyed enough with this client that I began to surface from my dream. Really? This guy was here? Outside? I looked at my clock. It was 5:30 in the morning.

Scott got out of bed. The light coming in through the cracks in the curtains was the soft gray of dawn.

He stood there for a moment and seemed unsure of what to do.

“What’s going on?” I asked, groggy and confused.

“Kai’s outside,” he replied.

:::

I hesitated for a long second, trying to process what Scott had said through the haze of 5:30 in the morning.

And then I ran downstairs.

Three people stood at the front door, one of whom I recognized as my neighbor, one woman I’d never seen before, and Kai.

I opened the door and Kai walked in like he was just home from camp and plopped on the sofa.

The woman I didn’t know introduced herself as Shelby. She was wearing a nightgown.

“I live in the red house,” she said, pointing in the direction of her home.

I mentally scanned all of the houses west of ours. They were all red.

“I heard a noise,” she said, “and I asked my husband if he heard it too, and he said no, but then I heard it again and I looked out of the window and saw him,” she said.

Which house? I wondered. There were a couple of red brick apartment buildings in a row, and then a kind of gray brick house, and then a red house with a Blackhawks flag on the porch. That one?

When I didn’t speak, Shelby went on. “So I went downstairs and knocked on Sarah’s door and she tried to call you.”

Seriously, there are like six red houses.

“I tried to get him to come in and have a bowl of cereal,” Sarah said, “but he wouldn’t come in.”

We stood there for a long moment, three women in pajamas and rumpled hair.

And finally the weight of what happened hit me.

“Thank you,” I said, a sentiment wholly inadequate to compensate a strange woman for getting out of bed because she heard a child outside her window in the night. I don’t know what he was saying when she heard him. I never asked. I never asked how Sarah got involved, either, since Kai would have led Shelby to my house and not the neighbors’.  In fact, I never said much of anything at all. My brain was a tumble of thoughts, wondering if I should explain about Kai, about how he doesn’t sleep, about how he wanders (though not usually outside in the night), that we’re not bad parents—at least not in the child services sense of the word “bad,” and, of course, all of the horrifying ways the outcome of this might have been different. He had, apparently, been out there a long time.

Sarah and Shelby and I continued to stand on the front porch, not knowing what to say, each of us perhaps lost in our own sense of shock, fear, and disbelief.

:::

I lose Kai all of the time—at the Children’s Museum and at Target and at Rainforest Café. Twice I’ve lost him at parks including one time in which I almost called the police until he finally emerged from the women’s restroom (which I didn’t check because, you know, it was the women’s room) and he heard me screaming for him the whole time. Between his wandering and his nocturnal activities, I’ve always been afraid that one day he would walk out of the house, particularly in the winter. The door to the backyard locks behind you and Kai would have no way to wake us up, much like the way it happened the other night.

After Shelby and Sarah left, Scott and I sat down with Kai on the couch.

“What’s my job?” I asked Kai.

“Keep me safe,” Kai replied.

“That’s right. How can I keep you safe when I don’t know where you are?”
It’s a question I’ve asked him a million times. I used to mean for him to understand that if he wanders away, I can’t protect him. Now, however, I just mean it rhetorically. No amount of begging, threatening, cajoling or punishing has ever changed his behavior.

“You can’t leave the house in the middle of the night,” Scott said.

“But I wanted some fresh air,” Kai protested.

We stared at him.

“Just don’t leave the house,” Scott repeated.

Kai sighed. “Is the talk over now?” he asked.

It was. He put his head down on the couch and fell asleep and didn’t wake up until 11.

:::

All day I couldn’t stop replaying the whole thing in my mind. I wondered if Shelby was doing the same. I figured she’d told all of her coworkers that she found some kid wandering the mean streets of Chicago all by himself. I wondered what their reaction was. I wondered if she had called the cops what would have happened.

Several times I thought about getting her a bottle of wine to say thank you for finding my boy and returning him to me, but I didn’t know which house was hers.

No joke, there are like six red houses, you guys.

:::

Later that afternoon, on the way back from therapy appointments, I asked Kai if he’d been scared outside alone.

“No,” he said.

“I might have been scared,” I offered.

“Not I,” he said.

He was quiet for a little while.

“Next time I need fresh air I’ll just open a window,” he said.

I glanced at him in my rearview mirror. His head was bent over his iPad.

“That’s a good idea,” I said.

The Boy with No Red Shoes

Among Kai’s most baffling challenges is his complete inability to find things.

I don’t mean like the person who can never find her keys or sunglasses (guilty), but his inability to even organize a search.

If you lose your keys, you probably look in a series of likely spots, as I do. I start at the kitchen island, and if I don’t see them, I look for items I’m usually carrying along with my keys, such as my purse or a bottle of water. I also retrace my steps and think of the last place I remember having my keys in my hand.

But I’m not Kai.

I’ve asked Kai to find things, and he’ll start his search the unlikeliest place imaginable, like under a planter in the backyard for his library book, or in the basement utility closet looking for his pajamas—not because he was reading outside (unlikely for a variety of reasons) or was in the basement and suddenly decided to get naked (less unlikely but still doubtful just because it’s cold down there), but because he can’t think logically through where this lost item might be.

Me: Where did you last see your coat/backpack/helmet/iPad?

Kai: I don’t know. Maybe in the freezer?

Me: Kai, that’s impossible.

Kai: I don’t know wh—Hey! Can I have an ice cream sandwich?

And so it came to pass this morning that we couldn’t find Kai’s shoes.

His shoes are only ever in two places: by the back door and in his room, and when we couldn’t find them in either place, Scott and I were at a loss.

“Kai, where are your red shoes?” I asked him, for the ninth time, knowing it was futile but hoping for a miracle.

“They’re not in the freezer,” he said, shutting the freezer door.

We were, of course, running late.

“Kai, how about your green shoes?” I asked, thinking that at this point, we just needed to be shod and in the car, and if we had to wear an old pair, then so be it.

“I need my red ones,” he said.

“But we don’t know where they are,” I replied, logically. “We need to go. Your choices are your green shoes or your snow boots.”

“But snow boots will look silly,” he pointed out.

No sillier than showing up without any shoes, which is where you’re headed, I thought.

This is a threat that I’ve carried out before, tossing his four-year-old self in the car buck naked after he refused to get dressed after swimming at the pool:

 
Exhibit A

“Snow boots or green shoes,” I said.

“I need the red ones.”

“THEN WHERE ARE THEY?” I asked, louder and angrier, knowing that Kai had no answer but needing to release some frustration.

We were officially late by now. And beyond that, where were this child’s shoes? We’d been all over the house. I took a page out of Kai’s search handbook and texted my friend Sarah to see if somehow we’d left them there the evening before. I couldn’t imagine that we would have forgotten to put on Kai’s shoes, but, well, there had been wine involved and the shoes weren’t here.

Scott caught him by the arm and tried to put the green shoes on Kai’s feet, but Kai struggled and resisted. “It’s time to go to school,” Scott said, struggling to catch hold of one of Kai’s feet as Kai kicked and squirmed.

I pulled out the big guns.

“Kai, if you don’t put on your green shoes, I’m going to take away the iPad and computer for the rest of the week,” I said. This is a threat that works every single time.

I presented Kai with his green shoes. “Come on, pal,” I said.

And then he surprised me. His eyes welled with tears and he started to cry. “If I wear the green shoes, everything will be wrong,” he wailed.

And then he pressed his face into my belly and heaved a choking sob.

:::

For me, one of the fine lines I struggle to with is whether Kai is doing a particular thing because he is being a turd or because of his autism. I mean, if Kai’s just being a turd, and derailing the morning because he was tired or wants more iPad time, that’s one thing. If he needs those shoes or “everything will be wrong all day,” that’s autism.  Punishing Kai for being a turd is perfectly reasonable. Punishing him because autism is making him do something fairly benign he can’t help, no matter how annoying, is like punishing a blind kid for not being able to see.

What would happen if he didn’t have his red shoes? I have no idea. Certainly the world would continue to spin, but Kai would somehow refuse to spin with it.

Scott, correctly recognizing that Kai was physically too big to force into more convenient sartorial choices, decided to make one more pass through the house for Kai’s shoes, and found them, finally, mercifully, behind the door to Kai’s room.

Kai put them on, and we got in the car, 20 minutes after the morning bell had rung and everyone who hadn’t lost their shoes had started their day.

I let Kai take the iPad in the car.

“Kai, I was being unfair taking away your iPad.”

I didn’t know how to tell him why he’d gotten his iPad privileges back in a way that he could understand. I knew it was too complicated, that I’d screwed up whatever lesson he was supposed to learn, or autism did, or maybe the lesson learned was supposed to be mine.

“What would have happened if you had the wrong shoes?” I asked, but he was lost in Minecraft already.

And so, with the red shoes strapped to Kai’s feet, I put the car in gear and we left, finally, mercifully, for school.

 

In which I justify my existence, my continued absence from the workforce, and my Audible membership

On the Friday before Easter, Kai and Ryan and I went for a playdate at the house of a classmate of Ryan's. The kids were going to dye Easter eggs. There was another family there, and I was apprehensive about how this would all be for Kai until I discovered that the children were all younger than he is, and therefore sitting on the couch playing Minecraft looked less anti-social and more coolly aloof.

When we called all the kids over to the table to begin dying the eggs, Kai surprised me.

“You know,” he said, addressing himself to the whole table. “I can talk.”

I froze.

“I just don't talk very much.”

I wanted to hug him. None of the other kids paid him the slightest attention, wrapped up as they were dying eggs in a colorful tsunami of vinegar and overzealousness.

I've heard him say something similar before, that he can talk, he's just “slow,” which is absolutely the truth and absolutely heartbreaking—not just that he's delayed, but because he knows he's delayed, that his classmates leave him in the conversational dust, unable to get a word in edgewise because autism won't let him, and by the time he's formed the words the moment is gone, like all those times you thought of the perfect comeback to an insult you received yesterday.

:::

I saw his Special Ed teacher not long afterward, when I picked him up early for occupational therapy, as I do every Tuesday, and told her that Kai would be out today and tomorrow for more evaluations.

“Hopefully, over the summer he can do something fun,” she said, “instead of all of this stuff.”

I couldn't help feel a stab of guilt. I think about this all the time, wondering if what we’re doing is too much. And also wondering if it’s even enough.

“We have something every day,” Kai observed, and it's true. We have speech on Monday, OT and social skills group on Tuesday, he participates in a mentoring group on Wednesdays that he likes but is also for special needs kids and so it's still a thing, we have vision therapy on Fridays. Kai's only day off is Thursday, though last Thursday we had a make-up speech session and three hours of psychological tests.

I've been toying with taking a break from therapy, but which one? The OT for his sensory processing? Speech so he says “teeth” instead of “teef?” Vision so he can read what his teacher writes on the blackboard? And who would this break really be for, anyway? Him?

Or me?

And in any case, we don't do all of that because we want to. It’s not like I'm tiger-momming him into hours of violin lessons or grooming him for a spot with the Joffrey Ballet. I'd just like him to walk from one end of his classroom to the other without walking right into another second grader as though he didn't see her at all. Because he does that all the time. It’s hard to ask a girl to the prom if you don't know she's standing right there, you know? And you have to talk to her about something besides the number of rings around Saturn, because even if she's into that sort of thing, she'll once in a while want to talk about something else. And you can't honk her nose or violate her personal space or interrupt her or play Plants vs Zombies at dinner. Of course, that's all 10 years away and who knows if he'll even want to go to prom, but I'd like to give him a fighting chance at a normal, functional, independent life.

I tried to keep the defensiveness out of my voice, all the worry, all the temptation to say something snarky. She didn’t know she’d cut where it hurt. She didn’t even know she’d cut me at all.

“He’s going to summer camp,” I said, brightly.

And so I guess we keep going, at least while he still willingly gets in the car.

 

In which a misunderstanding leads to an existential crisis, which I exploit in order to get a hug and write a blog post

Whatever she said sounded to me like, “Mommy, can I lead the universe?”

It could have been anything: Mommy, can I have a new purse? Mommy, can I be the first? Mommy, have you seen a balloon burst?

“What?” I asked, distracted and cranky. I was unloading the car, draped with backpacks and shopping bags and banana peels and empty water bottles, and the rest of the tremendous crap that fills my car every day. “You want to lead the universe?”

She thought for a moment, a grin spreading across her face.

“Yes,” she said, with a confidence that comes from being 5 years old. Or a megalomaniac. They’re kind of the same thing.

When we got into the house, Kai dropped his own backpack on the floor.

“That sounds scary, Ryan,” he said.

“What?”

“You want to leave the universe?”

“Sure,” she said, not missing a beat. “When I’m a grown-up.”

“But,” Kai protested, tears catching in his eyes and his voice. “I will miss you.”

Ryan stared at Kai, unsure. On the one hand, she probably hadn’t even asked to lead the universe, much less leave it. On the other hand, Kai falls all over himself to tell her how much she gets on his nerves.

“You could stay,” he said. “Mommy said I can stay here with her as long as I want. Just stay.”

This is true. The other day he asked me if he could live with me forever, and I said that he could. I haven't told Scott yet.

“Even when I’m a grown-up?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Just stay. Or I will miss you.”

He patted her head with an awkward flat hand.

“Okay,” she said, the way you do when you don’t really mean it. She can’t wait to grow up and fly the coop, though she hasn’t yet realized that means she can’t sleep in my bed every night.

“You should give Ryan a hug,” I suggested.

He did exactly that, holding her with both hands. It took incredible restraint for me not to lurch for my phone to take a picture, or to ask them to recreate it once I’d found it in the depths of my purse.

But I’m an opportunist nonetheless.

“I’d like a hug, too,” I said.

And I got one—a full-on two-armed squeeze with his face pressed into my belly.

And good lord. I wonder what Ryan really said?

In which we write in our journals, some of us more willingly than others

Twice a week, Kai’s homework is to write in his journal. Or, to put it more accurately, twice a week I have to do Kai’s journal homework.

It’s useless to pretend that he has anything to do with it. He hates to write, so he tells me what to say and I write. He hates to think about writing, so I have to draw one-word answers into a three sentence paragraph. The truly annoying thing is that Kai doesn’t give a mouse-sized shit about his journal. He doesn’t read the teacher’s feedback, I’m not even sure he could identify the thing by sight, as I’m the one who takes it out of his backpack, opens it up, and writes in it.

I’ve come to hate the journal, too. I hate that I forget about it until Sunday night at 5 pm, and then have to scramble to get it completed. Even the topics, subject matter that would be innocuous or even fun in most households, kill me. The first of the year, Kai was asked to write down his resolutions for 2015. But since he doesn’t know what a resolution is, I would have to explain it, and since the only thing he’d change about himself would be to acquire more toys, I bailed on that topic and chose the next one: What could you do that your teacher would appreciate? Kai’s answer: Make popcorn.

Because popcorn.

This week’s topic was to list three ways in which you are important to your family.

I pulled out his journal and wrote the topic on the first line.

“Kai, how are you important to your family?” I asked.

“My hat,” he said.

“Your hat is awesome, but I’m wondering what is it about you that makes you special in the family? What do we like about you?”

He hesitated. “My iPad?”

“No those are just things,” I said. “What do we like about you?”

“My hat?”

“Yeah, but—,” I began, and stopped. But what? I stared at him for a long moment, not understanding why he couldn’t answer the question. Do I not tell him specifically why he’s important to me, I wondered? I wondered this because the mom-guilt is always the first place you go, like Oh, crap, I never tell him that I love his drawings or the way he plays peek-a-boo with crying babies. This, of course, is ridiculous. But still. Why was this so hard for him?

“Kai, what are some things about you as a person that make you special?”

He looked at me. “My hair? My eyes?”

By now I’d forgotten the original question.

“Well, let me ask you this,” I said. “What do you like about your family?”

“I don’t like Ryan,” he said.

I sighed and drew a big “X” across the entry. I turned the page and decided to go rogue and make up my own topic, and because this was now my show, I lobbed him a softball.

“Kai, what do you want to be when you grow up?”

“A builder!” he exclaimed.

I was surprised. Usually he tells me that he wants to be a waiter at the local pizza place.

“Why?” I asked, hoping he would give me some glimpse into his inner self—because I want to design a flying castle or because I’d liked to build a space colony on Mars. This is, I realized, the part of the journal that I hate the most—optimism that through this exercise I’ll glean some insight into this child whose brain is a swirling vortex of thoughts and ideas I’ll probably never even fathom, disappointment that he won’t (or can’t) let me in.

“Because I am strong,” he said. “And good at hammering things.” *

He drew a rectangle on the page, and then handed the pen to me.

“That’s the handle of a hammer,” he said. “You will draw the rest.” And he left to watch TV.

:::

I thought all afternoon about that journal question, about why he wouldn’t answer me. I couldn’t believe he didn’t mention his knock-knock joke skills at the very least. I could only assume that he just doesn’t get the question, that he doesn’t even think in that way about the nature of our relationship with him or his role in the Punchdrunk universe, least of all as an exercise in his school journal.

We drove to a birthday party later that day, and I was struck by an idea. I turned down the radio.

“Ryan,” I said, “Why is your family important to you?”

“Because you’re nice to me?”

I decided to accept that, though it is perhaps the biggest understatement of the decade considering just last week she threw up on me. In my bed.

“And why are you so important to us?” I asked her.

She thought for a second.

“Because I’m so special?”

“You sure are, honey,” I replied.

She is going to ace second grade.

 

*This is not true.

Shit, it's cold

The other day, I dropped my empty Starbucks cup on the sidewalk by mistake.

“Shit,” Ryan said.

I looked at her. “Shit, shit, shit,” she repeated.

I did my best not to burst out laughing and just ignored it. She had been looking right at me, daring me maybe, so instead of getting all bent out of shape, I just let it go. I mean, whose fault is that, anyway? I use the word interchangeably with “oops,” and, because I have one very speech-delayed kid, have never been in the habit of censoring myself.

I told Scott about it later that day.

“Shit, that’s my fault,” he said.

:::

We were in the car yesterday when I heard her little voice from the backseat.

“Dammit,” she said.

“What?” I asked, catching her eyes in the rearview mirror.

She hesitated, perhaps sensing that I wasn’t exactly pleased. “Nothing.”

I sighed.

“Honey, that’s not a nice word,” I said. “There are words like ‘damn’ and ‘shit’ that just aren’t very nice to say. You can say them at home, but you can’t say them at school. Or at your friends' houses. Or at Grandma and Grandad’s.”

“But Mommy,” she protested.

“Yes?”

“I said, ‘shit’ at school.” she confessed.

“You did?”

“Yes. Because I couldn’t find my gloves.”

“Well, shit, honey, that’s a pretty good reason.” 

In which we experience radical togetherness

 “How can I get my hands on one of those light sabers?” I asked the guy at the front desk when we checked into the hotel. There was a display behind him with a beach tote and a pair of glowing, multi-colored light sabers.

The guy behind the desk beamed at me. “I’ll give them to you for free. All you have to do is visit our Vacation Gallery for a brief presentation.”

So I signed up for the presentation and walked out of the hotel lobby with my new set of light sabers.

At the time, which is to say after a glass or two of wine, it seemed a small price to pay.

:::

Days later, Scott and I sat, sober and drinking decaf at the Vacation Gallery. Damien, a tall guy, no more than 30, joined us at our table. He was all limbs and a giant suit, but had a relaxed air about him as he leaned back and began to extoll the virtues of timeshare ownership—the hotel points, the resorts, the free tote bag.

Scott and I listened politely, drinking our free coffee and already feeling vaguely guilty for letting Damien go on, knowing full well that the only reason we were there was because I’d decided I had to have a stupid glowing light saber.

Damien finished his pitch, and was silent for a few moments, letting us drink it all in. And then he leaned toward us, like this was about to get very real indeed.

“Let me ask you this,” he said. “What do you want to get out of a vacation?”

I didn’t hesitate. “Radical togetherness,” I replied.

Scott and Damien both looked at me.

“The kids are seven and five. Now that we don’t have to haul diapers and car seats, they’ve become fun to travel with, they’re just going to keep getting older. We need to be together as much as possible and we need to do it now.”

Whatever Damien thought I was going to say (See the world! Get away from it all!), it was clearly not this. He and Scott went back and forth on the value of the points versus the money and whether it was worth it. While they were talking, and knowing that we were in no danger of buying a timeshare, I started thinking about what our next vacation would be. The value in the timeshare, I decided, was not the hotel points or access to the resorts, but the fact that you are pretty much forced to take a vacation. We are not good about making sure we get away. There is always some project, there is school, there’s the money.

Damien left to get some piece of paper he promised would make everything much more interesting for us. We watched him go.

Scott looked at me. “We should get the kids passports,” he said.

:::

The next day, at the resort pool, I saw a little boy about three, blond hair and blue eyes and a mischievous grin. He reminded me so much of Kai at that age that I was realized with a sudden jolt just how old Kai really is. When I kiss him, he says “Ew.” Whatever affection he wants to give me I have to wait patiently for. He holds my hand because I ask him to so I can be sure of him, not so he can be sure of me.

And later, on the way home, I found out that my children are now too old for family boarding on Southwest, that my days of bottles and strollers and holding a squirming kid on my lap for four hours are long behind me. Kai went to the airplane bathroom all by himself. When Ryan got hungry, she asked the flight attendant for pretzels. Neither one of them pestered me at all. Instead, I had some wine and did some writing and passed an incredibly pleasant three hours.

I don’t miss the work of caring for a baby, the diapers, the constant vigilance of trying to keep them from killing themselves. But I do miss their snuggly little bodies, the nuclear heat they give off when they fall asleep on your shoulder, the feeling of nursing them.

I miss having all that time with them in front of me.

:::

There was a moment during the trip when Scott turned to me as we were walking and said, “I like our weird vacation.”

It was true that this vacation was unlike any vacation we’d ever had. It was not in any way relaxing. Nothing major went wrong, just small stuff, like Kai freaking out during Captain EO at Epcot and needing to leave right now, or Kai telling the Japanese teppanyaki chef that he didn’t want to watch her “cooking show” any more, or Ryan having a massive meltdown because I wouldn’t buy her a cookie and punching me in front of an old lady who tsked and shook her head at me like I was the biggest failure in the history of motherhood, or repeatedly missing the free shuttle to the parks.

It wasn’t perfect, but nothing really bad happened, either. We hadn’t lost Kai, no one got sick, no one tried to drink the water in Small World.

But we were enjoying a moment in time, when we would walk four abreast holding hands, when the kids were seven and five and we went to Disney World together.

:::

On the last morning of vacation, Scott and I woke up with both children in our bed.

Kai had come in to bed with us around midnight, tossing and turning, eventually coming to rest with his head near our knees and his feet on the pillow. Ryan came in some hours after that, snuggling her jack-rabbity body against me and pushing Kai closer to Scott. None of us slept well, particularly Scott, who kept getting scratched in the face by Kai’s creepily long toenails.

I lay there for some time after I woke up. I put my arm around Ryan and held her close. She smelled like pee, and it took me a long time to realize that it was because she’d wet the bed.

And so we lay there, the four of us, Scott trying to avoid getting kicked in the head, me lying in a warm circle of someone else’s urine.

It wasn’t perfect, of course.

But we were, for a moment in time, radically together.

 

 

The Punchdrunk Guide to Disney

So I promised the kids that when we sold the condo, we'd go to Disney. They, of course, had no idea what I was talking about. I could have taken them to the Disney Store and they would have been delighted. I decided to do them one better and actually go to Florida for a Griswold-style vacation, the kind that scar children for life. All in all, we had a pretty good time.

If you are planning a trip to Disney, my first piece of advice is not to take a sip of any sort of beverage before you add up the cost of your tickets, because you will promptly spit it all over your computer when you read, with shock and disbelief, how much this little boondoggle will cost you.

The rest of my advice follows. I hope you will find it helpful.
-PDM

1.) The more things change, the more they stay the same

The last time I was at Disney was in 2002. I was in Orlando for a work convention, and with Scott no less. This was, of course, long before we had children. We rode Pirates of the Caribbean and tried on some funny hats before absconding to Epcot where they serve alcohol.

That trip required exactly zero planning, and while I remember being surprised by the cost of a ticket, I didn’t think about it again once I was inside the park.

This time, though, I had palpitations trying to plan a trip to Disney, and specifically trying to understand the “FastPass.”

Apparently, now when you buy a ticket to a Disney Park, you get three "FastPasses" that you can set up online. These are sort of appointments that you can make with the rides that allow you to jump the line. You can change them once you set them up, but they also sell out (I'm looking at you, Elsa, and you Splash Mountain, and you, Seven Dwarfs Mine Train), so it's hard to get them for the most popular rides.

Not helping was the fact that we planned this trip only weeks in advance, or that I kept logging onto the Disney Web site only to get overwhelmed and open up Facebook instead, or that Scott had advised me to, and I quote, make it awesome. No pressure there.

In the end, I persuaded a friend who had done this all before to come over to my house and plan the whole thing. We bought the tickets after she did some math about the best value, she set up my FastPasses for me, and even coached me through a conversation with the dining reservations people about booking a dinner with Cinderella, like some kind of modern day Cyranno de Bergerac.

Friend: Ask her what characters are going to be there.
Me to lady on phone: Yes, and who’s going to be there?

That’s how debilitating the experience was. I couldn’t even handle a dinner reservation.

The rest of the experience was pretty much the one you remember. The lines are crazy long and the rides are exactly the same. In fact, some of them are probably too much the same. The Carousel of Progress announces at the start of the ride that it “begins at the turn of the century”—by which they do not mean the one 14 years ago, but the one 114 years ago. The ride ends with a scene involving laser disks (!) and a vague notion about voice-activated appliances, only they mean  your crappy 1980s oven and not your internet-enabled computer phone. 

Disney did update Pirates of the Caribbean complete with no fewer than three—three!—anamotronic Johnny Depps (sadly not available in the gift shop). You'll be happy to know they replaced the pirate rape scene with a "wench auction," where pirates bid on women to marry, which in no way reminded me of Boko Haram. Gah.

But even though Small World takes a lot of abuse for being corny (which it is) and culturally insensive (which it is) when the boat went around the corner Kai said, “It’s so beautiful,” and at the same time Ryan said, “I’m so happy,” and we were all together and no one was on their iPad, I was so glad we’d set up that damned FastPass.

2.) Take the family you have, not the family you want

Is everyone tall enough to ride everything at Universal? Do they care about Harry Potter? Do they love 3D movies starring Michael Jackson and some space puppets? If the answer is “no,” do something else. Go to a different park, and go back to Universal in a few years. It will still be there.

Also, think about how you want to schedule your time.

I realized at 7 am on the first day that I'd planned out this whole trip not for my family, but for some other, different family—a family more like the one I'd grown up in, where everyone was awake at 6 am, dressed in matching outfits and ready to go to the Magic Kingdom to have some fun, goddammit, because we didn't come all this way and pay all this money just to lay around.

Scott and I had agreed that we'd try to be on the 8 am shuttle to the park, but when 7:45 rolled around and everyone but me was still sound asleep, I realized I had a choice to make. Could I have gotten everyone up and out the door? Probably. Would they have hated me? Absolutely. The amount of cajoling, nagging, yelling and physical prodding that it would take to get everyone on the early shuttle would 86 our entire vacation.

I sat down that morning and changed all of our FastPasses so that nothing started before 11:30. Did we miss Rapunzel? Yes. Did we miss Jedi training? Yes. Did we miss every (free) shuttle and instead took (very expensive) cabs to the park? Yes.

And was it totally worth it? Oh, yes.

We really did want to get to the parks early and milk every second of our time at Disney. But that is not the kind of family we are.

3.) You don’t have to bring cash

Me to popcorn lady: Do you take credit cards?
Popcorn lady to me: Ma’am, the mouse accepts all forms of payment.

4.) I hope you like nuggets and fries

It is incredibly hard to eat at Disney. Or maybe I should say that it was incredibly hard for us.

"I think it's not bad if you plan," Scott said at one point, apparently forgetting that I had put a lot of time into planning this trip. Never once did it occur to me to think about food.

I figured we'd eat at the parks. I also thought, stupidly, I guess, that the food would be easy to get.

The first place we tried was closed, even though my Disney app said it was open. After much debate, we ended up at some quick-serve place in Tomorrowland, where the options included chicken in Bay 1, burgers in Bay 2 and salads in Bay 3. We waited in a ridiculous line to get the kids chicken nuggets and fries in Bay 1. After we got the kids seated, I went after a salad in Bay 3, only to discover that I could have gotten the nuggets in the salad bay, that "salad" meant iceberg and giardiniera. I was, however, able to use my new knowledge to get Scott a hamburger even though I was NOT in Bay 2. Oh, and lunch was $50.

My family is really picky when it comes to food. Ryan eats pasta for every meal. Kai eats nuggets, but will ask for the occasional vegetable. They both like pizza, but only the kind I make. Scott's just as picky in his own way—he won't eat anything with mayonnaise or ketchup or pickles on it, nothing with any sort of sauce or clouded in any kind of mystery.

The food was slow, expensive and hard to find, which is the golden triangle of bad food decisions. You couldn't get a quick bite between FastPasses because there is no quick bite, and the nearest restaurant might only serve pot roast macaroni and cheese, which I swear to you is an actual restaurant and that is all they serve. At Hollywood Studios, I gave up and everyone just ate ice cream for lunch, because wtf.

5.) Bring sanitizing hand wipes

I am currently suffering from some form of dread disease, complete with a cough and an angry red rash, that I can only assume I got by touching seats and handlebars and railings that have been touched my millions of people, most of them children, since 1971 and then sitting down to lunch realizing I hadn’t washed my hands and the nearest bathroom was just too damn far away.

At the end of the first day, Ryan and I went to the Grand Floridian Hotel for dinner with Cinderella. I lingered in the restroom, washing my hands with almond-scented soap, letting them get extra-foamy, scrubbing between my fingers and up my wrists. I told Scott about how good it felt to wash my hands and he agreed, saying that he’d stood at the faucet for a lot longer than normal.

Anyway. Bring wipes. You’re welcome. Oh, and wash your hands after you see me this week.

6.) Keep an open mind with the princesses

I know, I know. Cinderella married a guy only to get away from her family, Belle could fix her guy if she loved him enough, Ariel gave up her voice for her man.

But THIS lovely princess got down on one knee and explained to Ryan that to figure out how many bows are on your t-shirt, you count the number of bows across, then the number of bows down and multiply them together. And that, my friends, is how a princess uses her brain.

7.) You might cry for no reason you can discern during the entire Frozen Sing-a-Long (and I totally did), which you can just chalk up to the magic of Disney

There was a moment when I stopped taking posed pictures of the kids and just tried to capture their faces—on Small World, on Dumbo, during the Beauty and the Beast show, during the Frozen Sing-a-Long.

Because this is why you go to Disney, why you pay the money and eat crappy food and stand in the crazy lines, why you brave the tantrums, including the one where your daughter punches you for not buying her a cookie.

  
Actual cookie-related tantrum.

It’s to see the wonder on their little faces:

And, anyway, it really is kind of a magical place.

 

In which we create a punchdrunk memorial for a departed friend

Sometimes I think that the worst part about our dog dying this past spring was the moment I told Kai, when I opened up my mouth and spoke the words that broke his heart.

Kai cried the next day in school, he cried a few times after that. We haven’t really talked about it much since, though.

For me, there are definitely times I miss the dog. There are obvious ones, like when I walk past Milk Bones at the grocery store. Elliott looked like the dog on the box of the medium-sized ones. Or when I drive past the vet and I am reminded of that last day. But worse are the unexpected moments, like the first time we had steak for dinner after, and we realized with tears in our eyes that there was no one waiting under the table to eat the fat scraps.

Kai has told me over the last couple of months that he misses Elliott.

“I do, too,” I always say.

He follows that up with a request for a hamster.

:::

About a month ago, I ordered “When a Pet Dies” by Mr. Rogers after reading some blog post or other about a dead pet. When it arrived, I meant to read it to Kai, but somehow I never got around to it. We’ve been too busy doing whatever it is we do, I guess, and the book sat on my counter next to my computer. It felt like maybe I shouldn’t just put that in the bookshelf, where it could be requested of unsuspecting babysitters like the book about the difference between boys and girls has been.

And then Sunday night, out of the clear blue, Kai came downstairs after we’d put him to bed. He was crying hysterically.

“I just miss Elliott so much!” he wailed in between heaving sobs.

Scott and I looked at each other like omgwtf. Because omgwtf? What sparked it I still have no idea, but I do know that grief is funny that way, a rogue wave that knocks you down when you least expect it. Like when you’re eating a steak, say. Or, apparently, watching your iPad in your room.

“Kai,” I said, “would you like to read a book about it?”

I pulled the Mr. Rogers book out of the stack of papers next to my computer, aware that Scott was watching me, that I had actually pulled a rabbit out of my hat, if by “rabbit” you mean book about pet death, and by “hat” you mean the pile of crap next to my computer. Still, though, it felt like kind of an advanced move, like, oh, you’re sad? Well here’s all the ways in which I anticipated this and have handy the solution, as though pet death books are always at my fingertips.

We sat down and read the book, which was full of the word “sometimes.” Kai was still howling, fat tears streaking down his cheeks. I may have shed a tear, too.

When it was over, Kai sat on my lap, sniffling, his breath coming in ragged bursts.

“I just miss him so much,” he said, the tears once again welling and spilling over.

There are families out there who would turn to religion in a case like this, that Elliott is in a better place, that he’s probably eating God’s fat scraps right this very second. But God didn’t occur to me at that moment—Courtney Love did. I’d heard her give advice in an interview once. It was about heart-break, that if you’re having a hard time emotionally, you should turn it into art. “It’s like that ‘Joe Lies’ song in Say Anything,” she’d said. “Write that song. Write 65 of them.”

“Kai,” I said, “why don’t you draw a picture of a good memory you have of Elliott?”

He stopped crying. “What?”

“Let’s draw you and Elliott having fun together.”

“Like the time I was holding his leash and I fell down the stairs because Elliott pulled me?” he asked.

I gave him a sad smile then, because that really was Kai’s happy memory of Elliott. Elliott didn’t really like Kai. Or Ryan. He didn’t lick them or present his belly for rubbing or bring them a ball to throw to him. When I brought Kai home from the hospital, Elliott correctly assessed where he, Elliott, now fell on the totem pole and never forgave Kai for that.

“I don’t know how to draw Elliott,” Kai said.

I showed him how to make a border collie out of a series of shapes—rectangle body, crescent tail, triangle ears.

“What’s that a picture of?” I asked Kai a few minutes later, pointing to a drawing of Elliott with a series of arrows moving hither and yon.

“That’s when I throw the ball and Elliott doesn’t chase it,” he said, laughing.

Falling down the stairs

I laughed with Kai, even though that’s a woefully pathetic memory.

But I was tempted then, to grab the crayon and draw one of my own memories of Elliott from when he was about 8 months old. I was a single girl then, working at an ad agency, and I clicked my high-heeled shoes up the stairs to my apartment one night to find Elliott standing in his crate, wagging his tail furiously.

I was horror-struck by what I saw, pleading with him to sit back down, but he just continued to wag that tail, his head cocked to the side, his tongue falling sideways out of his mouth.

He’d had diarrhea in his crate, gotten it all over his tail, and each wag sent a spray of liquid dog poop all over my apartment like some kind of nightmare Jackson Pollack painting from hell.

:::

When Kai was finally done drawing, and heaved one last shuddering sigh, I asked if he was okay.

“I just want another pet,” he said.

“Maybe we can think about a new puppy next spring,” I offered.

“Or a hamster,” he said.

“We’re not getting a hamster,” I said.

“How about a snake?” he asked.

“You’re making a good case for dog,” I replied.

“But when?” he asked.

“Maybe spring,” I repeated.

“Oh,” he said sadly. Tears welled in his eyes again and he rubbed them away with the heels of his hands, but they fell faster than he could swipe at them, and so, drained and out of parenting ideas, I finally just suggested we watch funny videos on Youtube until he was ready to go to bed.

 

The Elliott Memorial