All Wound Up (11 page)

That alone would be enough to put most mothers over the edge. Three children had a water balloon fight in my house. Worse than that, it wasn’t like three children broke into my house and had a water balloon fight; they were my own children. I froze. They froze. What happened next is a testament to my parenting self-control. As images of selling the lot of them into a child labor camp sprang to mind, as I felt my throat fill with anger and screams of unbelievable rage, I counted to twenty-three and took as many deep breaths (I tried counting to ten but a water balloon fight in the house calls for just so much more). When I’d regained something resembling composure, I took a step forward. The carpet sloshed under my feet.

“Unacceptable,” I said, as calmly as the white-hot anger would allow me. “You three need towels to clean up this mess. Run. Run quickly.” They ran. They fetched every towel in the house and as they mopped it up (and I did the high places—the drips falling onto my back alerted me to the wet ceiling) I didn’t say much. Somehow, in my fury, I managed to convince myself that they weren’t actually hell-hounds sent to punish me for some of the things I did to my own mother (who was just going to love this) but instead that the girls simply didn’t have enough information. Sure, you would think that not whipping water-filled projectiles around the living room was common sense, but these are children. They have no common sense. It’s why we don’t let them vote, buy firearms, or carry lighters.

When the worst of it was sopped up and the towels were put in the washer (by them, not me) I sat the three of them down on the couch and as water soaked uncomfortably into the bums of their shorts, I explained. I explained that I understood that I had never expressly forbidden water fights in the house, but that I was doing so now. I explained that it was uncool, damaging, and absolutely not anything that civilized people did. Ever. I showed them how wet things still were, and explained that the entire downstairs of the house was going to be wet for several days, as in this sort of humidity, things did not dry well. (I then added that even in lower humidity, I was still entirely opposed to the practice, just in case they thought it was a loophole.) I gave them a list of places that water was allowed to be in our house—the bathtub, the sink, glasses—and, to be clear, I followed it up with a list of places it could not be. Places like the dining room walls, the ceiling, or the brown chair by the window. My tone may not have been entirely calm during this phase, but I did resist the urge to scream “What were you thinking?!” As I mentioned before, I am a mother of some experience. I knew they weren’t thinking at all, or that they were thinking something that was so insane that if I had known what it was, it would have put me completely over the edge. All it would have taken was one nine-year-old looking me in the eye and saying something like, “You put water on the table when you wash it, what’s the big deal,” and I would have taken all of their belongings outside and stood there with the garden hose streaming onto the lot of it while shouting, “How do you like your stuff all wet!” just to show the ingrates what it felt like. (This is not an accepted method for teaching empathy and likely would have been poorly understood by my neighbors.)

I was stern. I was disapproving, and, just like all the parenting books said to, I followed protocol. I told them what they had done was wrong. I told them that it could not happen again, I got them to clean up so that they had reasonable and related consequences for what they had done, and then I told them that they had made me very upset. That it would be some time before I felt right about this, and that smart girls would be getting some books to read and having a little quiet time while mummy went and had a bit of a lie down. (Points to me for not saying “a lie down and six gin and tonics,” though that was my impulse.) The ladies got books and sat down angelically to read. I staggered off, head pounding, wondering if this sort of thing ever happened to other mothers. (I bet it does. I think they just keep it a secret.) I lay down on my bed with my eyes closed, keeping an ear out for further mischief from the damp axis of evil allegedly reading Beatrix Potter stories to each other in the kitchen.

If there had been an incident report filed for that day, and frankly I’m still shocked that there wasn’t, going to lie down and leaving convicted (if shamed) felons in the kitchen alone would be referred to as “a strategic error of epic proportions.” Myself, I’ve moved through the pain and forgiven myself, and now think of it as a rookie mistake, made because of the burden of parenthood and the fact that I hadn’t properly slept through the night in a decade. As I lay there, eyes closed, plotting some sort of teachable moment to install compassion and law-abiding behavior in my daughters, I did not hear them. I did not hear anything at all, and instead of letting that register as a warning, I simply thanked my lucky stars that I’d gotten another thing right. Yes, that’s what I did. I lay there, congratulating myself on silence and absolute peace gained through superior and thoughtful parenting. I lay there, in fact, while my daughters realized several things—or so they told me during the debriefing much later, when I could stand to look at them again.

Here is what they realized.

1. There were balloons left over, still in the kitchen drawer.

2. They were in the kitchen with the balloons.

3. There was a tap in the kitchen.

4. Despite everything that I had told them, if I really, really didn’t want them to throw water balloons in the house, I would have taken away the balloons. (Point to the nine-year-old on that one. The force is strong within her.)

I will spare you the details of the inevitable scene that followed, and only tell you this. When I started to run after the first splash, I was without thought. I was so angry that I could no longer think. I entered the kitchen at a dead run, confirming with shuddering disbelief that my little daughters, apparently no longer human but transformed to vile demon-spawn, were indeed in a second water-balloon fight happening within the walls of my home. I opened my mouth to say any number of things—none of them kind, civil, or responsible—and as I took a deep breath to unleash the fury I could no longer contain, I really had no idea what sort of things I might do to my children in that moment. Right then, a sky-blue balloon sailed through the air… and hit me square in the chest. It exploded on impact with my body, drenched me head to toe, and covered me not just with freezing tap water but also with an almost preternatural sense of calm.

I suddenly knew what I had to do. I did not ask them to clean up and take responsibility. I did not explain what they had done wrong, or attempt to salvage their precious developing senses of self. As I stood there, with a shred of blue latex shrapnel clinging to the edge of my nose, I could feel that I was way past being concerned with imparting life lessons. I realized that I had to do the right thing. I had to save their lives. I picked the evidence off my face. I wiped my dripping forehead, and I said one word.

Bed.

They stared at me for an instant, and then I saw it come over them. They realized that what they did next was going to determine their survival, and their instincts kicked in, and without a single word of complaint or explanation, all three of them filed upstairs smartly at two o’clock in the afternoon, changed into pajamas, and lay motionless in their beds. Not a single child moved, and they remained soundlessly there until an unbelievable seven o’clock the next morning.

If you ask my children now about that day, they all remember it clearly. They remember thinking that at some point I would cool off and come up and get them, talk it through, and forgive them. They remember listening to me come up the stairs at five-thirty, thinking that this was the moment of exoneration, and then being astonished when I wordlessly set plates of supper by their bedsides. Megan remembers the sun shining in her face while she lay there. Amanda remembers feeling guilty. Sam only remembers that the whole water balloon fight thing wasn’t her idea, and maintains that she was a baby, drawn into evil by her older, wretched sisters. Not one of them can tell me why they didn’t get up. Why not a single one of them challenged the ban, made a break for it, tried to negotiate, or even called out to me to apologize in the seventeen hours that they lay in their beds. I don’t know why they didn’t either. Think about that. They were nine, seven, and four, and they lay there soundlessly without a single word. I remember that whole afternoon thinking that I should go and make peace with them, and wondering why they didn’t call out to me. (Admittedly, every time I thought about going, I was dripped on by more evidence, and that helped me maintain a clarity of vision and resolve.) Mostly what I remember is that the next day on the playground, when all was forgiven and my incredibly well rested children were playing and explaining to the other families why they had missed an evening at the park, that face after face, parents and children alike would turn toward me and stare. I think it was respect, I know it was likely also fear, but I tell you this: They never heard of anything like it again, and I am legend.

hen I was in the seventh grade, I had a real barker of a math teacher. My mother maintains that he wasn’t as bad as I recall him, but she wasn’t there, day in, day out, and I still remember that sort of madness where a whole class of seventh graders knew without a shadow of a doubt that the man was both sadistic and out of his mind, and there was somehow not a single adult who could see it. (I admit, now that I’m a mother I wonder how often my kids and their friends sit around boggling at my brand of madness, but I try not to think about it.) The point is, this guy was not cut out to be a teacher. He was just too loud, too jumpy, and too high strung. His name was not Mr. Franco, though that’s what I’ll call him here, to protect his privacy on the off chance that there has been an injustice and he has not yet been struck by lightning. Mr. Franco was a crappy teacher, and I was a crappy math student. I struggled with the concepts at the best of times, but he got frustrated when I couldn’t learn, and once he got upset and started yelling, then I got upset and once I was upset I got stupider by the minute. Realizing I was upset further discombobulated me to the point of idiocy and then I couldn’t even add, and then Mr. Franco would become crazed and start doing things like slamming rulers against tables, and then one girl always cried. It didn’t matter who Mr. Franco was yelling at, or what he was yelling about, this tall girl with the desk behind mine would just suddenly take to a sort of desperate weeping. It was horrible. My mother believes that my difficulty and general lack of good feeling about mathematics began that year, but I know that it’s just her maternal love for me that won’t let her believe that I’ve always been terrible at it, even before Mr. Franco gave me the pseudo–post-traumatic stress disorder that crops up and makes the little muscle over my right eye twitch every time I hear the word “multiply” even in a biblical context.

Mr. Franco, in addition to being mean and smelling funny, was also the first teacher to tell me a lie. I was old enough that by then I’d been told lots of lies by other people, and I knew it. That the tooth fairy gave the kid down the street more money than she gave me because Bobby had bigger teeth, that other children loved doing chores and never tried to dodge them, or that it was absolutely normal to have a great aunt who drank milk with rye (equal parts) for breakfast. This, though, this was the first bald-faced lie told to me in a school by someone who was supposed to be in the business of revealing the truth about how things worked. The lie was this: Mr. Franco told me that there was only one right answer to a question. 7 x 7 was always going to be 49 (I think that was the number he said) and he maintained that if you got any other answer, then you were wrong. Absolutely wrong, and he then said (here comes the lie) that mathematics was beautiful because that was always true. One right answer, no exceptions.

Now, I’m not really a “no exceptions” sort of person, which is probably why I was suspicious from the minute he said it (mostly because I was working hard at multiplication and got bizarre answers all the time) but the older I get, the more I come to completely understand that he was wrong. The world is simply not that black and white, even when it comes to math.

Knitters engage in math all the time. If you’re going to start designing stuff or altering patterns or thrusting your own ideas from yarn to reality, then you’re likely going to get in pretty thick with it, but even habitual number avoiders like me will find that even with diligent effort, it’s just about impossible to knit and not do any math at all. When a pattern tells you to increase fourteen times evenly across seventy stitches, there’s almost no way out of it without doing simple division (70 ÷14 = one increase every five stitches). Similarly, if you want to make a scarf and use a particular stitch pattern, one with a repeat of fifteen stitches, you’re going to have to be able to add fifteen together enough times to get the width you’d like to have. (Don’t forget the addition you’ll need to do to add stitches for the edges, and then the subtraction when the thing is inevitably wider than your neck.) Even if you’re not doing math computations, mathematic concepts start cropping up where you least expect them, and I’m not even talking about simple math. Knitting math is higher math. Math of a philosophical nature. Math they talk about in lecture halls in universities with ivy on them. Math I will try to explain now, although remember, Mr. Franco’s seventh grade class took a terrible and permanent toll on me. If you’re a math teacher reading this, cut me some slack.