Farmer boy

Imagine that most of this post is backed by intermittent screaming, the kind that jerks a parent awake at night and sends her running down the hall. That was Charlie, several times a night, from the start of this post almost to its end. Here, just shove these in as you're reading, whenever you get to a comma:

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AAAAAAAAAAGH EEEEEEEEEEEEEE NNNNNNNNNNNNGGGGHwhyohwhyohwhyyyyyyy

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His ear hurt, you see. Since he's had several ear infections, we pretty much knew the drill. You give him Tylenol, you apply a warm compress, and you dully wish for the quiet of the grave as he wakes you yet again.  We did what we've always done: we comforted him in the night, held him until he relaxed, then stumbled back to bed muttering, "Oh Christ Jesus please just sleep." And took him to the doctor, who peered into Charlie's ear and said, "You know, I can't see much. There's a big ball of wax in the way." So she brought out her irrigation rig and a lighted curette and attempted to dislodge it.

She dug. Charlie screamed. The giant wax boulder didn't come out. But she'd managed, she thought, to see far enough past it to tell that his eardrum was in fact inflamed and bulging. (Suddenly realizing I'd never asked to peer into the otoscope myself, I wondered what she had seen, so I consulted the Internet. Free tip: If you're ever curious about what something INHERENTLY DISGUSTING looks like, Google Images will show you, but be warned: It is INHERENTLY DISGUSTING, and so are the fifty other unrelated INHERENTLY DISGUSTING things Google cleverly assumes you're also in the mood to see. Lissen up, Google: If I'd wanted to know what shingles plus ringworm plus throat cancer plus an ear infection plus a Speedo look like, all heaped on some poor golden retriever, I'd have searched for exactly that. ...Then it would have shown me a McRib.)

So she prescribed an antibiotic. Now, we don't give Charlie amoxicillin, for reasons that are probably more superstitious than reality-based.  (We're still scarred from the last time we did, when it had INHERENTLY DISGUSTING results; I cannot believe I wrote that, here, on the Internet, to be read by people I like. I cannot believe I'm linking to it now. Don't read that. Forget I was ever here. Lock up behind you when you go.)

But amoxicillin is the preferred antibiotic for ear infections, I guess, so when the pain hadn't abated by the end of the course of Zithromax, and was in fact made worse by the analgesic drops we'd been given, back we went to another doctor. Maybe it was time to give the more effective antibiotic another try.

This doctor didn't think so. Without seeing his eardrum, she said, she didn't want to hit him with another round of drugs. When she couldn't get the wax out, either — when Charlie's keening made her falter — she prescribed different drops to help dissolve it, warning us, "If it doesn't come out on its own, and if the pain continues, we'll need to consult an ENT." And almost as an afterthought, she asked, "Charlie, is there any chance something got in your ear? A bead, a pebble...?" And I laughed, because he knows better than that.

In went the drops, on went the screaming. No wax came out, so far as I could tell, and the pain was, if anything, worse. The ENT couldn't get it out, either. So they scheduled Charlie for surgery.

I am proud of the way my kid held up. He was worried, but he kept it together, and in fact stayed very much himself, struggling hard to see every single thing in the operating room. He was still in the middle of asking, "And what does that thing do?" as he sank under the anesthesia. (It replaces your blood with zombie juice. Breathe deep! Sweet dreams! We'll see you on the flip side!)

The operation was brief, as we'd expected. Afterward the earnosethroatician stalked out to the waiting room, still in his scrubs and booties. "He had something in his ear, and it wasn't wax," he said, all scowling and j'accuse-y.

"What is it?" I asked.

"I don't know," he answered irritably. "I didn't really look. It's disgusting. You can examine it if you want," he said, leaving unsaid, "...you gruesome freak." And handed me a jar.

And there...in the jar...was a bean.

"I know that bean," said Paul in affronted recognition. He explained that it had been used in a school science unit. On seeds. And germination.

We could pinpoint the date of insertion because Paul volunteered on bean day. This particular bean had somehow gotten into Charlie's ear — soooomehowwwww — two weeks prior. During that time, in the warm murk of our son's ear canal, the bean found a comfortable home. With every drop of moisture that entered, the bean began to do...what beans do...when given dark and warmth and water.

One end of the bean had split. It had begun.

The craziest thing is that as Charlie's pain had increased, we'd been giving him ear drops — first to relieve the pain, then to dissolve the wax. We had been unwitting abettors. We were practically farmers, when you get right down to it. We had watered Charlie's ear bean. We lovingly tended his bean.

Two hours after the operation, Charlie was as good as new. "Is it possible," I asked him, sidling up to the obvious question, "that you put the bean in your ear...without noticing? And then forgot?"

"I suppose," he said doubtfully, looking at the floor. The thing about Charlie is that it is entirely possible; in fact, it's likely. I don't believe he consciously thought, "Hey, let's cram some produce on up in there." I think he was probably absentmindedly noodling around, maybe grooving on the sensation of it — because I guess shoving something in your ear hole feels...good? — and then got distracted. For two weeks. As something started growing in his head.

So the upshot is that we had about two weeks of shrieking hell here; everything's fine now; I've labeled the jar CHARLIE'S EAR BEAN and intend to show it to his children; and when the nurse called the next day to see how he was, I invited her for cassoulet.

(Hat tip to Nicole for the song.)

Oddly specific

 

Seven

It's the monthly birthday breakfast in Charlie's class, and I've volunteered to take food.  I get up early, bake a double batch of muffins, and swear only a little when they sink in the middle and refuse to come out of their pan.  This is not ideal, but okay; on the way to school I swing by Dunkin' Donuts and get a box of Munchkins, which delights Charlie far more than home-baked goods ever could.

He asks to carry the box as we walk the two blocks to school.  This kid is proud of his donuts, the unexpected windfall.  He swaggers with those Munchkins.  I am feeling good.

When we get to the classroom we put the box on the table and he slips into class routine.  I stand over with the other mothers.  You need to know they're not bitches, despite what I'm going to tell you.  I like them and I like their kids.  I think, in the main, they're normal.

One of them says, "Ohhh, Munchkins!  M. will be excited — she never gets those."

Another says, "K. will love them.  I don't give her sweets at home, so this'll be quite a treat."

A few other comments to that effect and I'm feeling this nagging urge to justify myself.  I say I baked, but it didn't work out.  ("Oh," says one mother, "I don't ever bake.  It's easier not to have that kind of stuff around.")  I make a joke of my incompetence, when I know I'm a very good baker.  I say the donuts were our emergency fallback.  And then I hear what I'm saying and want to punch myself in the face.

I look at Charlie, who is talking, laughing, and cramming a Munchkin into his mouth simultaneously.  (He is also riding his desk chair as if it were an angry bull.  He goes the full eight seconds, and no rodeo clowns are harmed.)

I look around at the other kids.  I know them fairly well.  I like something about every one of them.  I know their parents love them every bit as much as I love mine.  But I get a little weird this time of year.  It's hard for me to shake the knowledge of how improbable Charlie is.

And I suddenly wish I'd said, "I give Charlie Munchkins at least three times a week."  Joyless granola, my pasty white ass: I want to say I stuff him full of donuts till they ooze out of his ears.  I make my kid this happy all the goddamn time.  "If you lick his skin," I want to say, "he tastes like honey glaze."

...

Seven.

At seven, Charlie is worldly enough to want to be a secret agent.  Smart enough — terrifying enough — to debate the merits of various kinds of explosives.  Child enough to be rendered speechless by the gift of a set of "night goggles" for surveillance.  And dork enough to gambol around in Technicolor footie pajamas, saying, "These are great for a secret agent.  I can shove things down the leg!"

...

It's a tough day for me, Charlie's birthday.  We've told him about how it happened, but he gets the edited version, meaning I leave out most of the pain terror vomit fear WE'RE ALL GONNA DIIIIIIIIE.  It makes for a pretty short story.  Ate pie, got sick, happily ever after.

So he doesn't know — can't and shouldn't — that all day long I look at the clock and think, This is when I stood in the aisle at the supermarket, tearing into that box of Zantac with shaking hands, panting and sweating from the pain.  I think, By now we were in triage; in a quiet room to wait for tests; in an urgent conversation I was too drugged up to follow.  I think, This is when they told me the baby had to come and wheeled me, fast, into surgery.

To shift between that and candles on a cake — well, the dissonance is profound.

Would it be better, I wonder, to live only in the moment?  As Charlie gets older, the circumstances of his birth matter less and less, and I can imagine a time when I think of it only in passing.  When 10:22 PM is simply the time I step on a LEGO as I go in his room to check on him, instead of that plus I heard your first cry and I'd never been more scared.  I don't know; I guess it would be less disorienting.  Less painful, minus the LEGO.  But would some of the sweetness be lost?

In reverse

God, it's been so long since I wrote here that I had to enter my TypePad login and password using cuneiform. Okay, I'm exaggerating, but only a bit. Actually it was hieroglyphs. It took me a while to get in, too.  I kept typing Severed Arm-Severed Arm-Snake-Zigzag-Thing That Might Be a Pelican instead of Severed Arm-Severed Leg-Ditto.  And in fact it was not a pelican, but a carrion bird of prey, and I was almost overcome by the majesty of it but managed to click "Log In" before it went for my eyes.

So here I am, many ages later, and I think I am best served by going in reverse chronological order, see how far I get.  Here we go.

Yesterday Charlie came home with a note from his teacher saying he had written the F-word at school.  No, wait, I'm going to give her credit: She didn't get prissy.  She wrote that he had written "fuck."  (You know you're through the looking glass when someone using unvarnished profanity in a professional communication increases your respect for her, but that, it seems, is parenting in a nutshell.  Through the F-wording looking glass, six ways from Sunday, sideways.  And also the horse you rode in on, wearing its underpants backwards.)

I always laugh a little, if weakly and self-consciously, when he does stuff like that.  It's so normal.  There's enough of his behavior that's...let's just say outlierly...to worry about without getting all freaked out about a swear word.  Even if he did write it on his nametag, like, HELLO MY NAME IS MATTER OF FACT I DO KISS MY MOTHER WITH THIS MOUTH.  I don't know, I guess I think it's a little bit funny, and even almost sort of sweet, this eager lurch toward big-and-badness.  My goddamn baby is growing up.  Sunrise, sunset, bitches: This shit is going too fast.

Halloween was pretty fantastic.  Charlie wanted to be a pirate, and Ben wanted to be Charlie, so I bought — yes, bought — two flimsy pirate costumes and considered it $4,678.00 well spent.  This isn't a good picture of Charlie, but it's the only one I have of the two of them in which he did not appear to be menacing his brother with his gimcrack plastic flintlock:

...I said appear.  Sure, he might have been about to cold-cock Ben with the stock of the thing, but actually he probably wasn't.  At first glance Ben might look a little Adam Ant, but I see a baby Jean Lafitte.  Would you try to steal his candy?

Bringin' doom, sportin' plume

I bought the costumes instead of making them because I had some travel planned and knew I wouldn't have time.  Charlie and I went to Julia's to surprise her for her birthday.  Because apparently I can't travel without the whole trip turning into some unholy mashup of The Amazing Race and The Most Dangerous Game, the six hours of padding I'd built into our schedule shrank, thanks to a Philadelphia snowstorm, to an uncomfortable 20 minutes, and we arrived at the restaurant with just enough time to knock back a glass of wine (me) and three cupcakes (Charlie) before Julia arrived.

I wish I could show you how she looked as she scanned the room to see who was there, and then noticed me.  Watching the ...Wait, what? change into recognition was — well, it was just wonderful, and it made it worth the trouble we'd taken to be there, a thousand times over.

Okay, maybe nine hundred times over, because afterwards, as soon as I started driving — Charlie had gone with the babysitter earlier, and Julia rode with me — she started to look a little peaked.  Later I would tell anyone who would listen, "I knew she wasn't drunk-sick, because she didn't have that much," not realizing quite how creepy that made me sound, as if I'd been counting from across the room.  (I was much too busy making an ass of myself at my end of the table, where I complained loudly about the amount of friśée in the salad — "Frisée is nothing but bitter, curly bullshit" — without knowing that the restaurant was owned by a guest's parents.  The moral is, never complain about anything, ever.  Or, from the other end, have friends with better manners, because, damn, I am still embarrassed.)

Julia tried to make conversation, but we both gave it up rather quickly.  I thought she must be carsick, an impression that was bolstered by her rolling down the window and tilting her head out like a coonhound, and as she barrelled out of the car and sprinted straight for her room, I assumed she'd be fine the next morning.  She wasn't.  All night Saturday and all day Sunday she was ill, and Edward along with her.  She made a few heroic attempts to join the rest of us, but it never lasted long; no sooner would she settle on the couch — draped for vomitproofing with a quilt I made — than she was making a break for the easy-mop bathroom tile, or Edward was.

I talked with Steve and Julia's mother and brother; I admired Caroline; I thought appreciative thoughts about Patrick, who was entertaining Charlie handsomely.  I folded some laundry.  I washed some dishes. And I was grateful.  No, I didn't actually get to see my friend, but I have her.  I have a life that let me drop everything to go spend time with her, or at least her washing machine.  It wasn't the weekend I'd hoped for — especially not at 4 AM Monday, leaving for the airport, searching for the rental car keys in the gravel of her driveway, thinking Shit shit SHIT, did I lock them in the trunk? — but I am glad I went, just for the look on her face.

So that was just Charlie and me; Ben stayed at home, and a very good thing that was.  The week before, see, we'd gone to my mother's.  This is a feat that can be accomplished in no fewer than three flights.  Our closest airport is small, and so is the one on my mother's end, so you leave early, carefully plan your connections, and pray.  (There are no atheists in the Atlanta airport.  Satanists, perhaps.)

The trip down there is mercifully a blur now.  I thought at the time about writing about it, but I knew the resulting screed would be incomprehensible: Noose-Knife-Angry Eye-Rearing Cobra-Chupacabra degenerating into Spittle Fleck-Tic-Tic-Seizure.  I will just say that contrary to the plan, which had us arriving at my mother's at a very civilized 1 PM, our day — our first day— began at 4 AM and reached its nadir, though by no means its end, at midnight with me weeping in the lobby of the Dallas airport Grand Hyatt.  (Its end didn't come until an hour later, after we'd called a taxi, gone to another hotel, checked in, undressed, and gotten into bed, when I yelled at Charlie in the loudest, most furious whisper I could muster, "STOP TALKING AND GO TO SLEEP.  NOT ONE MORE WORD.  NOT ONE.")

But that was just day one.  The next morning began with Ben losing his mind in the hotel corridor at 6 AM because I had thoughtlessly pressed the elevator button instead of asking him to do it.  Screaming. Thrashing.  Throwing himself on the floor.  So I did the sensible thing and gathered him up in my arms, leaving Charlie, six years old, to drag the suitcase and the car seat into the elevator.  That all worked about as well as you'd think, plus I fell.  On the marble floor.  While holding my three-year-old child.

I...am remembering why I didn't think it was a good idea to talk about this.  I'm not coming off so well.

Anyway, we eventually did arrive at my mother's, at a completely different airport than originally planned and with a stack of, no lie, two dozen different boarding passes — delayed missed cancelled rerouted cursed plaguey Noose-Noose-Noose — and had a wonderful time.  Four generations carved pumpkins together, and my kids wore shorts in October.

The trip back — oh, God, the trip back — took four airplanes and a Xanax.  Ben.  Lovely, lovely Ben.  As Sideways Guy in Tennis Skirt and Snake Hat is my witness, I am never again taking him any farther than the grocery store downtown, and only then if I can't find a sitter. Oh, I don't blame him personally; he was exhausted and anxious and three, and he had every reason to be.  He had every right to be.  But that didn't make it any easier when he decided to lie down keening in the middle of the line for Delta Airways' Special Services. (Translation: Please Stand By for a Full-Price, No-Frills Fucking Oh Wait Did We Accidentally Say Please?) Or when he went boneless during the mad sprint from Terminal A to Terminal Ω via a thundering corridor of taxis that did not stop for pedestrians, no, not even a little, and I am not exaggerating.  Newark, or Laguardia, or JFK — I don't even remember which airport it was. I don't even know what city it was, actually.  Does Mordor have an airport?

Nor did it make it easier during, oh, many of our 38 flights when he decided to kick the seat back in front of him.  I don't mean he idly bumped it with the toe of his shoe; I mean he went totally Riverdance, usually because I'd made him stop slamming around the tray table or muscled him back into his seat belt for landing or asked him to put out his cigarette or something — legitimate airplane business, non-negotiable stuff. He was mad as hell, and some stranger's lower back and kidneys were gonna pay. Or, I was going to hold his legs to prevent it, which is pretty much what I did.

This may be the first trip when I've had to deal with that kind of onboard outburst.  So far as I remember, my trips with Charlie, even during his most challenging phases, were always uneventful in that regard.  I was less embarrassed than I'd have expected; I didn't care for the looks I was given, but my conscience was pretty clear.  Seemed like an easy choice: Either you let the kid hammer the seat for everything he's worth, or you keep him from doing it and treat the entire plane to his enraged screaming.  You consign a single passenger to extreme unpleasantness, teaching the kid nothing in the process, or you subject the entire plane to it, but you also impart a lesson.  (You hope.  Oh, God, you hope.)

To me, there wasn't even a choice.  Still, I'm honestly curious about what you might have done in a similar situation.  I've read enough online articles about travel to know that about 75% of the American childrephobic public would answer, "Jettison both parent and child after setting them on fire," but F-word that.  Excuse me, Ankh-Ankh-Dung Beetle that. I don't care about them.  I want to know what my fellow parents and "When I'm a parent"s think. 

And I want to know how your Halloween was, and what you do about kids swearing, and the things you pick out of a salad, and, oh, you know, just everything.  I've started a new job that's taking a lot of my time, so I'm around even less than before, but I miss you.  And I Heart-Tear-Harmless Garter Snake you, and that's the fucking truth.

Hail fellow well met

Hey, have I told you I'm diabetic?  I forget.  I'd look it up but I'm too spacey from snorting that 2-pound bag of brown sugar to be able to use the search function.  (I kid, I kid.  They only sell Billington's in 1-pound bags, and I take it intravenously.)

I had gestational diabetes with Charlie; after that pregnancy I was classified as prediabetic.  When I was pregnant with Ben, I was once again gesticulationally diabeticalistic melliteriffic — medical term, look it up; although in most women with GDM the condition resolves as soon as the placenta hits the bucket, I wasn't so lucky.

It's been okay.  It's been controlled by diet, which is to say that I no longer eat my mashed potato sandwiches on white bread but on healthful whole-grain donuts, and I've discovered that you can hardly tell the difference between premium full-fat ice cream and frozen Miracle Whip Light, even if you've swapped your old favorite sugary hot fudge sauce for an artifically sweetened beef gravy.

But type 2 diabetes is by its nature a progressive disease, and mine has gotten worse.  (My A1C is now 8.1, for those of you playing the home game.  And as long as we're getting personal, I make $750,000 a year blogging, my cup size is Ω, and I watch ANTM.  Now guess which of those is true.)

My doctor has put me on metformin to lower my blood glucose.  All I know about it at this point is what Google told me yesterday, which was Blue Ball Blockhead Gumby Yellow Dinosaur Guy, and what was on the package insert that came with the meds, which I confess I didn't read thoroughly because none of the words bounced or turned into Pokey when I moved my pointer finger over them.

Now, I know many of you have been on metformin for PCOS.  In fact, lo, these many years ago when we were still trying to conceive, I read posts by fellow infertiles about "the met"'s side effects that scared the bejesus out of me and made me think, "Wow, yeah! Hey! Good thing that'll never be me!"  And then I got distracted by a strange jingling, which in retrospect was probably the sound of Fate buckling on its strap-on, and forgot all about it until now.

So I humbly ask, please, what your experience with metformin has been — side effects, adjustments you had to make, things that make the experience better or ohGodpleasehelpme worse.  I'd click around more on the big impersonal web, but your stories are always more helpful, and Google might make me watch Davey and Goliath, or possibly even Jot.

The office

Have I shown you Charlie's office?  There's a nook in his room where we've placed a desk, a chair, and a set of drawers for his supplies.  It was he who called it an office; I'd have been inclined to call it The Place Where Seriously Kid You Have Got to Stop Uncoiling Paper Clips and Using the Wire to Make Brother Traps.  It's where...he does stuff like that.  And a lot of cutting and gluing.  He comes up with these excellent contraptions, these highly sophisticated papercrafts that leave us laughing, incredulous, at his inventiveness.

Aaaaand then he makes stuff like this:

What unnerves me here is that the tag came unmoored from the actual kit, whatever that might be, which I have yet to find.

I looked.  And in cleaning up his office I found some great stuff.  Here, do you need one of these?

And then there was this plan...

...which I think is for an unstoppable killing machine to rid the earth of the earwig, Charlie's most hated bug...

...on whose pincery graves we will...dance?  Leer?  Be perforated?  Whatever.

I also found proof of something I hadn't known: temporary tattoos can be removed with Scotch tape.

And also proof that if you ever come to my house, you should...just...you know, be careful:

And finally, proof that my sense of humor is no more highly developed than my six-year-old's proofreading skills:

I was telling my friend T. about the things I've found.  "Charlie," she said, "is so fantastically weird."

And she's right.  He is fantastic, and he is weird, and it's the kind of weird I dig.