Advanced Planning

I’m trying to get over feeling like it’s a bit absurd that I’m in Rhode Island for two weeks, and for 99% of that time my Dad’s not been here. Well, he’s here as in in-state, but he’s not in the hizouse, as it were. He’s on the DL at a rehab center after getting a hip job. 

And after spending a week here, Mark returned to Cali yesterday, and to the 9-to-5 today. With him gone, Dad on hiatus, and my womb-to-tomb amiga Amelia bound back to DC today, I’m nurturing a small abandonment complex.  

Thankfully, today was The. Perfect. Beach. Day.

And I am lucky enough to have a handful of most excellent friends who live here. So my friend Story, who I’ve known and loved since high school when she had a cigarette butt from the lead singer of Echo and the Bunnymen taped to her bedroom wall, she and her sons met the girls and I in Newport at the beach.

Oh, and did I mentioned Story’s an amazing chef? I’d been joking when I asked her to pack a gourmet box lunch for me, but didn’t object when she handed me a divine BBQ chicken sandwich.

All that, plus the bliss of seeing her boys and my girls running in and out of the waves, squealing with summertime glee. And Story and I getting our annual what-feels-like seven cumulative minutes of kid-interrupted in-person catch-up time. 

At home post-beach Paigey took an epic nap. Kate and I ate excessive pizza, read Angelina books, and I marveled over the fact that I have real estate envy for a literary mouse family’s charming Costwalds cottage.

Lots more things happened that were mostly fun and all exhausting. I was staggering towards the finish line to get the girls bathed after a dinner in which I sprang from the table no less than six times to cook peas, get more corn, grab a sippy, get a spoon. I grabbed Paige and my untouched wine thinking I’d make it my end-of-the-day treat. Then Paige plunged her grubby fist deep into it. 

Oy. 

So, well past her bedtime and getting only one book (not two), I crawled into bed with Miss Kate for a day’s end snuggle. Sometimes I do this, blurring the lines between who’s really tucking who into bed. 

Kate: [cradling her stuffed dog] “Dottie is my baby. He’s a newborn.”

Me: “Oh, really?”

Kate: “Why do newborns make mommies sleepy?”

Me: [Lunging into a 50-minute diatribe including, "And then there's the burping, and more diapers to change, and some little babies just cry and cry and cry for no reason---in the middle of the night!"] “When you were a little baby Grandma Peggy came to visit and she helped us take care of you.”

Kate: [excited] “Did she take care of me in the middle of the night?”

Me: “Well, I don’t think so, no, but sometimes in the morning she’d take you and let Daddy and I sleep if we’d been awake a lot during the night.”

Kate: “I want to have two babies.”

Me: “Well, if you want, I can come to your house and help you take care of your new baby so you’re not so sleepy. Because I’d be the grandma.”

Kate: “That’d be good.”

Me: “I think so too. I would actually love to do that.”

Kate: [perks up] “So then Daddy could be the Grandpa!”

Me: “That’s exactly right. If you want, I bet he’d like to come help out too.”

Kate: “Okay, Mama, good. Night-night.”

Only in Bristol

Mark and I are still shuddering with PTSD from our day of travel yesterday. One which commenced hellaciously waking at 5AM, arriving at the SF Airport at the spry hour of 6:30, and due to all manner of evil airline juju, finally had us on a plane at noon. By which point, after hours in United queues and some neck-vein-popping negotiations with airline personnel, we found ourselves heading to Boston not Providence and arriving at 10PM, not the too-reasonable-to-be-true 6:30.

Before even setting foot on an aircraft I had the Bad Mother realization that I’d forgotten extra travel duds for each girl. (I know. Total rookie move.) So 16 hours later when we stumbled woozily into my Dad’s house, the kids were not only wrung out and weak from hunger, but chicken-fried in a coating of sweat, milk, Cheerio grit, and sugar drool from the Mike & Ikes the boys seated behind us snuck to Kate.

Well then, what doesn’t kill you, gets you cross-country for $500 a ticket, right?

And so now we’re here. And though I’m still scuffing around in a groggy haze, Bristol isn’t waiting for me to come to before packing its little hometown punches.

At the back road’s Super Stop & Shop with the embedded Dunkin’ Donuts (please scatter my ashes there when I go), I’m ambling down an aisle trying to remember what my kids eat when someone bellows, “Kristen Bruno!” It’s my cousin. The sister of the cuz who gallantly fetched us at the airport the night before.

And before she and I made our way through basic howayas, another woman pulls her cart up right near us, looking me square in my eyes. “You,” she says wagging a finger, “look just like Marie Bruno.”

I mean, how small is this town that someone calls me out for looking like my oldest sister who, if you ask me, I look the least like of all of them? (She of the wee button nose. Damn her.)

Anyway, it was the daughter of an old friend of my mom’s. The owners of the pool that’s responsible for my eyebrow scar. (Back flip—okay, attempted back flip—off the diving board.)

When my mother drove me to the doctor’s house (old school) to get me stitched up that day, I had a bloody towel clamped to my head. But what transfixed me was the fact that my mom put her hazard lights on to get us there right quick. I couldn’t remember a time when she’d driven with those lights flashing, so whatever’d happened to me musta been serious. Cool even. Warranting my mom to transform her old Volvo into some kind of citizen’s ambulance.

Pull aside, people. Comin’ through.

To this day, whenever I double park and flick on those lights, I think of that.

So I realized that this grocery store woman, Cathy, appeared in a photo someone gave me this winter of my mother. It was old and orange-toned. One of those square ones with rounded corners—the format even screamed 70s. Cathy then was a teen, a long-haired brunette beauty in a brown knit bikini. She was holding a bottle of hootch out to my mom and hers, and they were both laughing. It was, the giver told me, a going away party for a friend.

My mom at that time had short hair—a pixie she’d call it—and was thin and tan. I figured out the year it was taken, and realized she was 42 at the time. My age now. Weird.

So in the juice aisle, Cathy (who I’d introduced to my cousin who she said also looked familiar) and I were well on our way down Memory Lane. I ran through how my sisters were doing, Dad’s impending hip surgery, got the report on her mom’s hip job, her dad’s dementia.

If it weren’t for Kate’s embarrassing, huffy, “Let’s GO, Mom” laments, I could’ve leaned over, cracked open a bottle of Cran-Apple and chatted with those two for hours.

But before Kate’s whining became painfully rude, I shoved off in search of Portugese chourico. And without us having directly mentioned her in our chat, Cathy said by way of good-bye, “Your mother. She was TOO much. God, I loved her.”

Later, screeching into the liquor store minutes before the sign flpped to CLOSED, I chatted up the old Italian owner about the bleak weather. “What’s up with this?” I said. “I came home to go to the beach.”

“FUH-get about it!” he grumbled, swatting the air. “I just took the afghan off my bed. YEStuhday!”

By the time Kate and I got back to the house, hours had passed. Paige’d gotten up from her nap, and the pocket of kid-free time I’d tried to give Mark had turned into him waiting out our return, wondering what’d become of us.

I hadn’t gone far, nor accomplished terribly much, but by the end of my errand run I did feel, despite our flightmare and my numbing case of jet lag, like I was finally home.

Four is a Magic Number

Today I had to jump in a lake.

Because yesterday, the wretched gray-skied June gloom we’ve been enduring finally skedaddled. If only temporarily. And at last, it seems that summer has arrived.

So like some child slave from an episode of Law & Order, I positioned Kate on her stool at the kitchen counter to make PB&Js, while I threw towels, swim diapers, and sunscreen in a bag, and lamented Paige’s famous just-as-we’re-about-to-leave poop.

Lakeside, my friend, uh, Lulu and I wrangled the kids and attempted to catch up. The topic du jour at every barbeque this summer—at least for the men at the grill—seems to be The Big Snip. When they’re doing it to maximize sports viewing. What they heard about how bad it was from other guys. And jokes about snuggling up with a bag of frozen peas.

Lulu’s husband and mine are both game to get the job done. And, after years of having our bodies be the setting for baby growing, baby feeding, and the fending off of potential pregnancies, it does seem nice to have the lads take their turn.

Their willingness to step up for the snip is both noble and kinda cute.

But still, Lulu and I agreed. We’re just not ready.

“I tell Mark he’s got to think about his second wife,” I tell her, ankle-deep in the lake, and watching that the kids don’t go out too far or sneak off for ciggies. “I mean, she’s younger. She doesn’t have kids yet. What about her?!”

But seriously, Mark knows I’d kill anyone who he ever tried to leave me for, so that’s not much of an issue. What has been though, has been my lingering baby lust. My lack of conviction that I’m altogether done with the baby-makin’.

Though, driving home later it dawned on me that my hunger for another cherub seems to have subsided a bit. I mean, I saw a 6-week-old napping angelically in one of those beach tents today, and didn’t feel at all compelled to crawl in there with it. A few months back, Lulu would’ve been holding me back by my ponytail.

And other little things. Instead of waiting for them to rot and fall out, I decided to go all out and buy Paige her first toothbrush. She’s got six and a half teeth now, so it seems as good a time as any. So yesterday, while Kate and I brushed our morning breath away, Paige for the first time fervidly got in on the action.

And after prying the thing from Paige’s steely baby grip, I plopped the toothbrushes back in their little stand.

“Here’s Mommy’s, Daddy’s, Kate’s and Paige’s!” I singsonged, in a vain attempt to quell Paige’s give-that-damn-thing-back-to-me hysterics. And, ignoring her wailing screams, and Kate’s ensuing, “She’s TOO LOUD, Mommy!” laments, I went into my own little housewife daydream… Four places in the toothbrush holder. Four of us. Why…. it’s perfect!

Of course, not everything on the domestic family-of-four front has fit like a glove.

Sometimes I need a hit upside the head when change is required. And Mark recently pointed out that I have to start making more food for us. Usedta be that one kielbasa fed he and I perfectly, sometimes with a bit leftover. Well, turns out our little Polish princesses can hork down some serious sausage. Seems we’re no longer a one-link family. One pound of ground beef just wasn’t cutting it for our taco nights any more either.

But thankfully, I’m a fast learner.

Not enough food you say? Some intense Italian Need to Feed surged up through me like a tsunami, and the next night I’m setting out a dinner that’d put a midnight cruise ship buffet to shame. (Though sadly, I offered no melons carved as swans.)

And once again, order is restored. Two more eaters? Need more food. Check.

But what if we were to add a fifth? Eventually would two kielbasa links not be enough? Would the implausible two-and-a-half links be what we required? And what of pre-weighed pounds of ground beef? Boxed rice pilaf? Packaged chicken breasts? I mean, two two-breast packs are reasonable enough to purchase and prepare, but five breasts? There’s no situation in which five breasts ever make sense.

It’s not the cost of the food that concerns me, it’s the likelihood that we’d find ourselves in the OCD-unfriendly need for half of this, a third of that. Would we be trapped in the untidy position of always having too much or too little?

To say nothing of the toothbrush dilemma. Does one buy another holder then simply leave the three extra spaces vacant? And worse, do those three voids then loom, challenging you, your aging body, and mounting college tuition fees to produce even more children? How would I be able to face down those taunts twice a day—or even more if I’d eaten something garlicky?

On the walk back from the lake, we came to a dark patch on the sidewalk that was soft and gummy in the sun. We’d passed over it on the way in, and Lulu was smart enough to direct her kids to walk around it this time. Me? Kate and I just tramped through it again. Leaving, what I noticed later, was a thick coat of tar on the bottom of our flip flops. (Paige, the non-walker, smiled at us smug and clean from her stroller.)

At home, Kate stomped across our overpriced Crate and Barrel porch rug, leaving a trail of black shoe prints like those Arthur Murray dance class footsteps. I kicked off my flip flops just in time to not make the same mistake. And setting Princess Paigey on the living room floor, felt grateful that there wasn’t another little McClusky tearing through the house, leaving a mark of her own.

For us it seems, for now at least, four is a magic number.