Making Christmas

This year, my goal is to put some effort into Christmas again. Holidays aren't difficult for us anymore, but during the two or three years when they were, I got into the habit of doing the bare minimum, and then inertia took over and I never bothered to ramp back up.

On top of that, for a couple of years now G has been in the Preteen Killjoy phase that most of us went through at the same age, during which you don't want to do anything that might be remotely embarrassing or make you look childish. (She was mortified that her school had "Santa's Village" out in the quad last week, until I said "They don't actually think you believe in Santa, it's for fun. Remember fun? That thing you'll have again once you're old enough not to worry that someone will think you're immature?") This eliminated most of our traditional leading-up-to-Christmas activities, such as visiting Santa, riding the Polar Express train, making snowman crafts out of cotton balls, etc., and made it even harder to get in the Christmas mood--a condition that a friend of mine described last year as "lack of Christmas foreplay."

With these things in mind, this year I'm taking a combined approach of:

1. Not being a lazy slug. I put the tree and lights up in early December and have plugged them in every night; I went out and bought new ornaments to replace the ones we lost, and I'm actually sending a few cards for the first time since 2005. I also bought an additional, tiny, real tree to put on a high shelf in hopes of infusing some pine scent into the house--we can't have a full-size real tree because one of our cats likes to eat greenery--but somehow I managed to choose a totally odorless one. Oh well, it looks nice.

2. Finding acceptable Christmas activities. In G's defense, she's right: a lot of local holiday-themed events are geared to very small children--we had the same problem at Halloween, when she would have loomed like Gulliver among the Lilliputians at the various face-painting, pumpkin-decorating, costume-parading festivals, but was too young for haunted houses aimed at teenagers--and she doesn't have younger siblings to give her a reason to attend anyway. Instead, we've been watching more grown-up Christmas movies, listening to Christmas music together at home, and drinking hot chocolate and apple cider, all of which she's enjoyed. Hopefully we'll get around to baking cookies sometime next week.

This year is also a little different from previous ones in that for once, there's no place we're required to be on either Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. G, whose idea of a perfect day involves pajamas, video games and not much else, is ecstatic, and I'm looking forward to spending the time quietly at home. I may be putting more into "making Christmas" this time around, but I'm still all about doing things my own way.

She so did

Me: Did you eat breakfast?
G: Yeah. I didn't eat breakfast food, but I ate it at breakfast time.

(pause)

Me: You ate leftover Halloween candy, didn't you?
G: ... Maybe.

Gimme a [letter of your choice]!

G's school had tryouts for the middle-school cheer squad last week. G wanted nothing to do with them because she prides herself on being a sort of anti-cheerleader--if you remember your early adolescent stereotypes, G is the Artsy/Goth Girl, although she hasn't yet embraced the music that goes along with it--and also because, as she accurately observed, "I can't do a split to save my life." The newly anointed cheerleaders appear to include the usual complement of popular girls, with one exception: G's friend "Penny," whom I think made the cut due to sheer dance/gymnastic ability.

This fascinates me for a couple of reasons:

1. How do the cheer coaches know, six weeks into the school year with a brand-new crop of seventh graders, who is popular and who isn't? Does it show somehow, or do the popular girls just tend also to be the bouncy, outgoing type who have taken lots of dance lessons?

2. If you become a cheerleader because you have actual skillz, does this automatically make you popular too? Can you be a cheerleader and be socially shunned by the other cheerleaders? Penny is a cute, sweet little girl, but kind of like an overeager puppy who does whatever she thinks will please whomever she's with at the time, and I can imagine the cheerleading crowd dismissing her as a wannabe.

To show her total rejection of cheering and all that goes along with it, G instead used last week's club rush to join the newspaper, which is much more her sort of thing. The meetings happen during zero period, which means she'll have to be there by 6:45 a.m., but she's pretty motivated and I think she'll do fine. She's been like a different kid this year in terms of the morning routine: where last year I had to drag her out of bed and she was late a shocking number of times, this year she gets up on her own when her alarm goes off, gets dressed without being told, finds her own breakfast (not the healthful bowl of whole grains and fresh fruits I'd like her to eat, but at least she does it herself) and is usually downstairs waiting at the door to the garage while I'm still brushing my teeth. I don't know why this happened, but I'm glad it has. We had quite a few no-holds-barred cage matches over getting ready last year, and I wasn't up for another 10 months of that.

Said is NOT dead

Last night G informed me, "Mrs. M (her English teacher) told us we shouldn't use 'said' in the stories we're writing," and then showed me this handout she got in class:



ARGH.

"Well," I said, trying to be diplomatic, "I see what Mrs. M is getting at, but I don't actually agree. It's fine to throw in a different dialogue tag here and there, for variety or emphasis or color, but 'said' is really the best one to use. It's straightforward and not distracting, and if you're writing your story and your dialogue well, you won't need anything else 90 percent of the time. Also, if every other line of dialogue ends with 'he laughed' or 'she divulged' or 'he nagged' or 'she smiled*' it's going to sound awkward and overwrought. This is my professional opinion, by the way."

"Really?" she said.

"Yes," I said. "And not only mine. Here, look at this." I grabbed the nearest book and showed her that in three pages of mostly dialogue, the only attribution other than "he/she said" was one instance of "he roared," and that one was used when it was really called for. Then for good measure, I showed her places where the author had written some of the dialogue so as not to need a "he/she said" at all, and explained how that worked. I did tell her that of course her teacher is the boss in her classroom and she has to follow these instructions at least somewhat or she'll get marked down, but not to go overboard with it.

I suppose what they're trying to do is teach the kids that there are other words available if they need them, but kids are literal, even in their early teens, and most of them are probably going to take this handout to mean that "said" is evil and they should never use it. This is why so many adults are convinced that it's wrong to write in the second person and that starting a sentence with "and" or "but" is verboten--their seventh-grade English teacher said so and they've never forgotten it. As far as I'm concerned, the only thing that's really forbidden in writing is doing it badly (she pontificated), and even that isn't true if you happen to be entering the Bulwer-Lytton contest. Save the droning, drawling, giggling and stammering for then.

*I have a special hate for "smiled." I used to read a decorating magazine that used it at least twice in every article with an interview--"'We love our kitchen's new look,' smiles Susan"--and it nearly drove me around the bend. Not only does it sound smarmy, it's impossible; you can say something with a smile, but you can't smile your actual speech any more than you can hammer it or swim it. Gah!

So far so good

Here we are at the end of week 2, and school is still gliding along as smoothly as can be. G was bumped up into honors biology this week, putting her in all honors classes except for math, and we've had no issues with homework - she's been finishing most of it during her tutorial period or while she's waiting to be picked up, and what she's had to do at night has been quick and easy. It helps that the assignments she's getting are more creative than in previous years; instead of "write these 20 spelling words five times each," it's "use this list of geographical features to design and draw your own island." I know which one I'd rather do.

She also asked earlier this week if we could go to New School's football game on Thursday night, which was not a request I'd ever expected to hear from my determinedly non-sporty child. I would have taken her, even though I have zero interest in football myself, but we had tickets to see a cinema broadcast of Shakespeare's Globe's Henry VIII that same evening, and Shakespeare trumps football in our house. Now is when her father, a devoted fan of anything involving a ball, should be here; he'd not only take her to the football games, he'd be over the moon that she wanted to go, and patiently educate her in the finer points of the sport. I know I wouldn't know anything at all about football (or basketball, or baseball, or golf, or or or) if it weren't for him.

Anyway, while walking out of the theater last night, G and I agreed that we're going to try to see all of Shakespeare's plays together. We've seen this one, The Taming of the Shrew and Much Ado About Nothing, we have tickets to see Twelfth Night in November, and if I can swing it (tickets are expensive), we'll also see the Globe's touring production of The Comedy of Errors the same month. She wants to see A Midsummer Night's Dream after that, so I'll have to look for a production that's not too far from home. There was one at our local repertory theater back in January, but we missed it. Rats!

Time keeps on slipping

If I'd needed something to underline the fact that we've entered a new era in G's life, I got it by seven a.m. on the first day of seventh grade. At her small, familiar old school, the first day always meant a stream of parents walking hand-in-hand with little girls sporting braids and fancy barrettes, little boys in new, dark-blue jeans, and tiny kindergartners laboring under backpacks bigger than they were. At her giant new school, I drove past a crowd of unaccompanied teenagers who looked old enough to be driving themselves, stopped, and waited as G gave me a casual "see you later," hopped out of the car, slung her bag over her shoulder and walked away in a pair of my knee-high boots that she'd successfully campaigned to borrow. I'd warned her that those boots would hurt by the end of the day, but she didn't believe me. When I picked her up late that afternoon, the first words out of her mouth were "OMG, my feet are killing me. I'm never wearing these again." I suppose when it comes to some things, experience is the best teacher.

Aside from sore feet and a broken P.E. locker, her first week as a seventh-grader was supremely smooth and easy. She has six classes--biology, honors history, honors English, P.E., pre-algebra and vocal music--and already seems to have mastered traveling between them, as well as using the library and navigating the food service lines at lunch. (That said, I think I'm going back to packing a lunch for her, because on three out of four days, the only vegetarian item was pizza, and on the fourth day she had to get pasta and pick out the bits with no meat sauce.) She says her teachers are nice and is happy about all the subjects she's taking, so from her perspective, everything is roses.

For my part, there's been some emotional adjusting to do. I'm not sitting around sniffling soppily over her baby photos, mind you. If anything, I'm excited for her, because it became obvious to me last year that she'd outgrown the confines of elementary school and was ready for something new. But at the same time, this transition has really driven in the fact that she's getting older and the number of years she'll be at home with me is dwindling fast. Of course I've known ever since she was born that one day she'd get her driver's license, graduate from high school, go off to college, be grown up; but these always seemed like things that would happen far off in some hazy, half-imagined future. Now they seem like real events that are coming soon (very soon - she can get her learner's permit in less than three years) so I'd better start mentally preparing myself for them, not to mention figuring out what I want to do with myself after she flies the nest.

Of course she's only in seventh grade and it's not as if she's moving across the country tomorrow, and I don't want to spoil the next few years by constantly focusing on what's going to happen later. But time has a way of sneaking past faster than you think, and I don't want it to catch me off guard, either. Looks as if she and I both have a lot of work to do.

Vacation, all I ever wanted

A short review of the first week of my end-of-summer vacation:

Had car problems
Was without a car for 48 hours
Registered G for junior high
Paid $450 for new brakes
Had repair crew in house for an entire morning*
Did work
Found BEES IN MY HOUSE**
Watched a week's worth of groceries vanish in four days
BEES. IN MY HOUSE.
Did more work
Went nowhere except grocery store and post office
OMG BEES

* The good part of this is that our air conditioning finally, finally works. It works so well that yesterday I thought "Wow, it's nice and cool in my bedroom; I think I'll lie down and enjoy it." Next thing I knew, I opened my eyes and an hour and a half had passed. I went downstairs and G was huddled under a blanket, shivering. Do your worst, California autumn! We're ready.

The bad part is that one of the repairmen asked to use our upstairs bathroom while he was here, and let's just say it wasn't a Number One. I know when you've got to go, you've got to go, and I could hardly send the poor guy to the service station down the street, but the idea of a total stranger taking a dump in my bathroom really bothered me at a visceral level. (Yes, I know, I use public restrooms that thousands of total strangers have used before me. It's not the same.) I need to go in and sanitize now that some time has passed - I couldn't bring myself to do it earlier.

** Yesterday morning I was lying in bed, drinking my coffee and reading my email, when I heard a loud buzzing/humming noise. Investigation revealed a large bee/wasp/hornet thing bumping around the inside of my bedroom window. I managed to trap it with my empty cereal bowl and release it outside, and then I heard the same noise coming from inside the wall behind my bed, near the electrical outlet where my bedside lamp plugs in. While I was taping up the open space in the outlet so nothing winged and many-legged could squeeze its way through, G called "Mom, there's some kind of insect on the wall down here, and I don't know what it is, and I'm not going close enough to find out." I went downstairs, and sure enough, it was another flying stinger. I couldn't catch that one, so I sucked it up with the vacuum hose of doom. I haven't seen or heard any more since then (the one in the wall buzzed a bit more and then stopped) but I did find about 30 of them lying dead on the little balcony outside my bedroom. If I don't post again, it will be because a swarm carried me away in the night and made me their queen.

Mr. Sandman

Apparently that three-hour nap I took this afternoon was a bad idea, since it's 3:41 in the morning and sleep is nowhere in sight.

I wasn't intending for the nap to stretch out that long, and indeed when G was younger she would have woken me almost as soon as my eyes closed. But now she's twelve, and twelve-year-olds are crafty enough to know that if they wake you up, you might make them stop watching TV and clean their rooms or take a shower or something equally heinous. So, if I happen to doze off, she leaves me unconscious until I wake up on my own. In fact, she has literally tried to lure me into napping in the past by covering me with a blanket when I'm lying on the sofa, which seems all sweet and solicitous until you realize it's like throwing a towel over a parrot's cage. Hey, you're annoying me. Stop squawking and go to sleep.

The worst part? It works!

Mathletes

G: We had our math placement test for junior high today.
Me: Oh?
G: There was stuff on there I've never seen before. What are those problems with the number between two lines?
Me: I don't know, draw one for me and maybe I'll recognize it.
G: It looked like | 25 |
Me: I have no idea what that is.

(pause while both of us look at it, baffled)

Me: Maybe it means, "Twenty-five, YAY!"*

We both got a good laugh out of that. Clearly neither of us will be medaling in the Math Olympics anytime soon.

*Like this emoticon: \o/

All right, I won't eat your baby, but your soul is fair game

I had forgotten tomorrow was Valentine's Day until I went to the supermarket this afternoon and saw all the massive displays of merchandise. Good thing I did, because I was able to pick up some cheap packs of Valentine-themed Skittles for G to hand out to her class. Oh, lucky teacher, locked up all day with 35 preteens who not only are under the influence of raging hormones, but also have a metric ton of pure grade-A sugar coursing through their bodies.

In other news, today we made a special trip to my office to collect unsold Girl Scout cookies so we could return them to the "cookie leader." G was extremely annoyed about having to interrupt her Sunday-afternoon schedule of sloth and indolence to go with me (I needed her to help carry boxes out to the car) until I reminded her that they were her cookies for her Girl Scout troop. I don't know if she was any happier about it after that, but at least she kept her displeasure to herself.

I'm feeling a little miffed at Girl Scouts in general after once again being the recipient of judgey looks from Girl Scout mothers when I went to pick G up at yesterday's International Fair event. I was wearing more or less what I usually wear--black velvet jeans, long-sleeved black shirt, black shoes with a skull-and-crossbones design, and black sunglasses--and all the Girl Scout mothers I passed on my way into the building stared at me as if I were going to steal their souls and eat their babies. These are clearly very sheltered women, because while I was the only person there in head-to-toe black, my clothes were still completely mainstream by almost any standards, nor did I have tattoos or piercings or a hair color not found in nature (and if I had, who cares), and yet you would have thought they'd seen Marilyn Manson stomping up the sidewalk toward the high-school gym.

I wonder what it's like to be that uptight. I also wonder what sort of reception is doled out to people who do have tattoos, piercings, etc., and daughters who are Girl Scouts. It can't be very nice.

Six things make a post

1. G has missed two days of school this week due to a sore throat, fever and general yuck. She should be going back tomorrow, as a visit to the doctor today revealed that her throat is red, but probably not strep-laden. Her consolation prize for enduring the throat culture was a chocolate strawberry cupcake at the bakery next door to the doctor's office (which I'll bet just rakes in the cash from parents offering similar bribes consolation prizes), and then I decided I needed some consoling too and got an Oreo cupcake for myself. Mmmm.

3. A friend of mine texted me to see how G was and to say that he picked up a box of Ghirardelli brownie mix for me when he went to Costco at lunch. I texted back "thx for the brownie mix" and my phone autocorrected it to "thx for the brownish lox." G and I got a good laugh out of that one.

4. Last night, we whiled away half an hour by watching a DVD of this production of The Cat in the Hat, which was marvelously inventive and looked exactly like the book come to life. We then pondered the hypothetical answer to the question "If our mother could see this, oh, what would she say?" and decided that it would probably be "YOU TWO ARE IN SO MUCH TROUBLE" and perhaps also "WHAT HAVE I TOLD YOU ABOUT LETTING ANTHROPOMORPHIC ANIMALS INTO THE HOUSE?" (Although maybe not the latter since they do have a talking fish.)

5. Being at home for the last two days has motivated me to do two of my least favorite household chores: cleaning the bathrooms, and washing the cat bowls and cleaning the plastic mat that goes under them. I hate doing both of those things, but it's amazing how much better the whole place looks and feels after I do. Especially the cat area--something about spilled cat kibble on the floor creates very bad feng shui.

6. Being at home for the last two days has also apparently made me a very boring person who posts about boring things. Sorry about that. :P

Well, when you put it that way

Me: You know, torturing Mommy is not a game we play.
G: But it is. It's exhilarating fun.

Darned smart kids and their big vocabularies!

The "torturing Mommy" conversation came about because G has lately rediscovered an interest in roughhousing with me. We used to do a lot of this when she was younger; it's something kids normally do with their dads, but because I was always the stronger parent, even when P was alive, I was the one who tossed her up in the air and wrestled with her and gave her horsey rides around the house. It was all good fun when she was little, but now she's 5'5" and weighs 125 pounds and she can just about take me down in a tussle. I've told her repeatedly that she's too big to play like that and she needs to stop before someone gets hurt, but she insists on running up from behind and tackling me, or trying to knock me down and sit on me. I'm at a disadvantage when it comes to defending myself because I don't want to hurt her by accident, so I deliberately hold back a bit. But she knows no such caution, and I usually end up yelling "I said STOP IT!" as I extract myself from a stranglehold.

It's a problem, not only because of the risk of grievous bodily injury (mine, not hers), but because it won't be long before she's bigger than I am, and I don't want her getting the idea that she can push me around physically. She's just playing now, like an overgrown puppy that doesn't know its own strength, but I can envision scenarios a few years down the road when she might not be. I guess my first step ought to be cutting her off as soon as she starts to play rough, and if that doesn't work, I'll have to think of some sort of consequence. This is certainly not an issue I expected to have when I gave birth to a little girl--though at 10 pounds, even newborn G probably could have played in the defensive line on a baby football team.

Optimism

G: Am I going to get a car when I turn 16?
Me: If you save up some money, I'll put in the extra to help you buy a nice used car.
G: Can it be a Ferrari 458 Italia?

At least she dreams big!

Holiday music and magic

Today was the annual holiday music performance at G's school. They split it up this year so the upper grades performed first thing in the morning and primary performed just before lunch, and also flipped the order around so sixth-graders were first on the program. It really reduced the crowding in the auditorium, and also prevented the "disappearing audience" phenomenon I've witnessed at other performances: when younger kids are performing, the whole Mom-Dad-Grandma-Grandpa-Auntie-Uncle-baby-cousins family shows up, whereas older kids are lucky if they get one parent. These big packs of people watch their children perform and then get up and leave, so the last group in the rotation ends up playing to a nearly empty room. That didn't happen this time, and I was glad.

Because G is in band (she plays flute), she was part of the show from beginning to end: she sang with her grade, played with the rest of the band between each grade's performance, and also had a duet with her friend A, who plays the piano. They did Bert the Sweep's song from Mary Poppins, and it went quite well, I thought--not to mention that it was a huge deal for G, who has a very pretty singing voice but doesn't like being the center of attention, to grab a microphone and perform on her own in front of 200 people.

Watching her up there, all tall and confident and grown-up looking, I couldn't help thinking of her kindergarten and first-grade holiday shows, when P was still alive, and we couldn't quite believe we were the parents of a schoolkid. It doesn't seem like that long ago, but G herself reminded me just how far she's come since then. When I picked her up this evening, I asked her how the second show was (she played with the band at that one too), and she gushed, "Mom, the little kids were SO CUTE! They're just so little and young!" Yes, my big girl, they are.

La mauvaise influence

G and I amuse ourselves with Google Translate:

Your face looks like a monkey's butt

Votre visage ressemble les fesses d'un singe.

A monkey put a banana in my ear.

Un singe a mis une banane dans mon oreille.

I said, "At least I'm smarter than a monkey."

J'ai dit: "Au moins, je suis plus intelligent qu'un singe."

The monkey cried.

Le singe pleuré.

And then flung poo.

Et puis merde jeté.

After we finished giggling over this, G said meditatively, "I think I'll take French in high school." I should probably warn her that high-school French involves lots of useful phrases, like "My aunt's house is yellow" and "Stephanie and Laurent are going to the disco," and little to no mention of butts or poo.

Disconnected

On Monday, the cable went out at our house and took our broadband with it. This was annoying for me, since without Internet access I can't read blogs, waste hours watching old commercials from my childhood on YouTube, or enjoy Photoshopped images of Michael Bublé and a velociraptor. But for G, being Internet-less for the evening was a tragedy so epic that Euripides might have hesitated to tackle it. She didn't want to draw, or read a book, or write a story, or play video games, or watch a movie, or dangle toys for the cats, or do any of the myriad other activities that she normally enjoys--she wanted to be online, damn it, and nothing else would do. We got home at 5:30, she finished her homework by 6:30, and then we had this conversation over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over:

She: Is it working now?
Me: Not yet.

I hadn't slept well the night before, and by eight o'clock I was so tired my head was spinning, so I went upstairs to lie down for a while. It would have been great, except that G followed me and spent the next 45 minutes hovering over my semi-conscious body and asking "Is the cable working now? Is it working now? What about now? Can you check and see?" until I finally sat up and said "Look, kid, humans survived for 100,000 years before the Internet was invented. I think you can make it for one night. GO FIND SOMETHING ELSE TO DO."

"This is torture," she groaned, and moped off to her room, where she sat--surrounded by TV, DVD player, Wii, Nintendo DS, flip video camera, books, movies, art supplies, and various other amusements--and was grumpy until bedtime. I was strongly tempted to get out our copy of The Phantom Tollbooth and make her read the first chapter, where Milo has everything in the world and is still bored.

(Actually, if someone had delivered a phantom tollbooth to our house right then, I probably would have paid the toll and waved her on her way. She could have come back when she'd learned her lesson, or when the cable was fixed, whichever came first.)

Anyway, the next day we had Internet access again and all was right with the world. I'm starting to wonder, though, whether I ought to restrict her computer time more if she's that obsessed with it. I've never actually seen a crack addict in search of a fix, but if I had, I'll bet it would have looked a lot like G did when she was stranded at the side of the information superhighway.

Altercation

I hear a commotion in G's room and go in to find her all tangled up in a disheveled bed ...

Me: What happened?
G: I got into a fracas with the quilt.

Living the dream

G: *hands me empty food wrappers*
Me: Why are you giving me your trash?
G: Because you like cleaning things.
Me: I don't like cleaning things. I clean because someone has to do it. It's not my hobby.
G: Yes it is.

Sometimes you have to fight dirty

Today I insisted that G get dressed and go out with me for the afternoon. She wasn't thrilled, but gave in because she could see I meant it, and I wasn't going to let her get away with dragging her feet until it was so late we ended up staying home, which is her usual ploy when faced with the dreadful possibility of leaving the house on a weekend.

We had a nice lunch at Buca di Beppo - spaghetti for her, ravioli for me, cannoli for us both - and when we got back in the car, she asked, "How much of the afternoon is left?"

"That depends," I said. "Do you mean how much chronological time is left until the afternoon ends? Or do you mean how much longer am I going to keep you prisoner on this outing?"

"The latter," she said.

"Oh, about a couple of hours."

"Two hours! But --"

"There's no point arguing," I said. "We're going to spend some quality time together whether you like it or not. If you're nice, I might buy you the book you've been wanting. And if you're not nice, then we'll go shopping for new underwear for me."

"Oh no," she said, turning pale.

"Oh yes. I'll take you to Victoria's Secret and hold up every bra in the place and ask you loudly what you think of it. Maybe I'll even try some of them on over my clothes."

"I'd die of embarrassment," she said.

"I know," I said. "Let's go to the bookstore, shall we?"

House of cards

This school year began with high drama when, a week before the first day, I was informed that the city-run afterschool program had been cut for budget reasons. I had personally called the city's administrative offices the day before and received confirmation that yes, the program was on and would move ahead while the school tried to raise money to help pay for it, so it came as a surprise to me when I received a terse e-mail from the school that essentially said You are all fucked. Actually, I sort of wish they had just come out and said that. It would have added some much-needed humor to the situation.

I called the YMCA, which was the alternate suggestion provided in the e-mail, and was given a price quote for ~12.5 hours a week of "care" that made my head explode. After I'd picked up the fragments of my skull, I spent the next three days worrying and coming up with Rube Goldberg-esque plans for transporting G the two miles from her school to our house. I knew she would be fine on her own once she was safely at home with the door locked, but getting her there, in the absence of school buses, seemed next to impossible. Then, the Friday before school started, I got an automated message on my voice mail - actually half a message, as the first part had been cut off - that retracted Tuesday's e-mail and confirmed what the city had told me in the first place.

If you're imagining me being jerked around like a marionette on a string, that's more or less how I felt by that point. Hey, it's okay! I enjoy stress and uncertainty! They keep life interesting!

Only not.

Anyway, this experience highlighted just how much I rely on the routines I've developed over the last four years. I frequently get told that "you make single parenting look easy," and maybe that's true, but if so, it's not because I'm some sort of superwoman - it's because I have systems in place to keep everything running more or less smoothly. Throw a wrench into one of those systems, and instantly I become that single mother, the flaky, unreliable one who makes people roll their eyes and say uncharitable things under their breath. I've sometimes found myself in conversations where people say those things to me about other single mothers they know, and I always tell them to have a little more sympathy, because I know I'm just one broken-down car or canceled afterschool program away from being in the same position - and that's with only one child to tend to. I can't imagine what it would be like if I had two or three or four.