Monthly Archives: June 2014

Are You Ready for Some Futebol?

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In fifth grade, our P.E. teacher took us down to the football field one day and tried to talk us into playing soccer. The only rule we were told was “Don’t touch the ball with your hands.” For the next 40 minutes, we played some combination of kickball, flag football, and Lord of the Flies. And after Soccer Week was done, we filed that game away with the metric system and got on with our lives.

Well, things have changed in my life, to put it mildly. After eight years with a Brasilian, I have learned to holler at futebol the same way I holler at football. But watching soccer is EXHAUSTING. Here are a few reasons why:

1. I don’t know where to look. With football or basketball, my brain knows how to follow the ball. With soccer, that ball could go anywhere at any time–backwards, forwards, up or down. I can’t even blink or I’ll miss the Big Shot.

2. It never slows down. This isn’t the good old “first down, let’s show a Budweiser commercial while they move the chains” kind of football. These players run for 90 minutes straight. A midfielder can run 10 miles in the course of a game. Flat out, backwards, forwards, up and down.

3. The hotness never lets up. I mean, have you seen these fine men? No helmets hiding their beautiful faces, filled with intensity. They’re not wrapped up in pads and those shirts get sweaty with a quickness so there’s a surplus of curvaceous musculature on display. From the back, from the front, up and down.

4. Futbol is serious business in Brasil. Y’all know how it gets between Auburn and Alabama or Army and Navy? Yeah, that’s NOTHING compared to the way Brasilians live for futbol. G gets kind of crazy every four years. He made himself sick this weekend in that game against Chile. He wears his official canary-yellow jersey to work if there’s a game that day. He won’t wash it during the tournament. Seriously, the other day he had taken it off and left it lying on the sofa. Carlos picked it up and was using it to smack at stuff. G came in the den and yelled, “RESPECT THE STARS!!!”

4a. Stars, you ask? Each time a country wins the World Cup, the team adds a star to its official jersey. Brasil has won the World Cup five times (a feat only recently tied by Italy…who’s already been eliminated this year, so Brasil has a shot at pulling ahead again).

4a1.CORRECTION: I have been schooled by no less than 3 Brasilians on this mistake. To quote G: “Brasil is the ONLY country to win five. We are also the only country to have played in every World Cup. Italy has FOUR…four. We have FIVE. Five!” All of this said with his fingers used as illustration, as if he was teaching me that A is for apple and B is for buffoon.

4b. G is considering getting the CBF (the official governing body of soccer in Brasil) logo tattooed over his heart, but he wants to wait for the six-star design after they win this year. He has the children’s names on his arm…and would put Brasilian futebol over his heart. Priorities.

5. I can’t even learn the rules from listening to the commentary. He prefers to watch the World Cup on Univision or other Spanish-language channels because it’s…better. So I’m watching a game I don’t understand in a language I don’t speak well enough to follow. This is what a game sounds like to me after three years of high school Spanish and 1000 episodes of Dora the Explorer:

…..ball…..team…backpack?…ball…..no…Benecio del Toro…..can….yes…time…ball….head….shoe…ball…time…ball…. GOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL!

It’s wonderful to be part of something that brings the world together. Even if most of the world goes home in tears. Go Brasil!

P.S. He just came home from work with a surprise for Vivi. It’s a picture of Pele the Great. I shit you not. She dropped her Barbie and went to hang it in her room.

Letting the Air Out

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My late husband, Richard, taught me how to float in the summer of 2002. Even though I have been able to swim since childhood, I had somehow lost the ability to float. I couldn’t relax the right way in the water so my long legs sank like marble pillars as soon as I tried to float. I had lost that limber trust in the water. I didn’t want to rely on it to hold me up.

One afternoon at his parents’ place, we went down to the pool. They live in a very nice condominium complex, not exactly a starter home kind of joint, so we were the youngest people at the pool by a good 30 years. We waded out into the shallow end for my lesson.

“Just relax your body,” he said. Oh, OK. Gosh, I didn’t know it was that simple. I stretched out my legs and stuck out my arms but as soon as I dipped my head back towards the surface of the water, my legs dropped like a lever.

Richard was a born teacher–he taught skiing to tourists, he taught canoeing to campers, he taught finance to business majors. He tried to break it down into pieces. I held the side of the pool and let my legs float. No problem. Then he held my legs–not in a racy fashion since we were being observed by about 30 Nanas, Bubbies, and Pop Pops. I tried to tip my head into the water but began to thrash as soon as the water touched my head.

Clearly, my head was the problem (this is where my therapist would probably raise her eyebrow and say, “AS USUAL!”). So he promised that he wouldn’t let my head sink. He held me under the shoulders and I stretched out into the cool blue water.

“Now take a breath in. See how you float up?” It worked!

“Now let that breath out and feel your body sink.” I exhaled and felt the water climb higher around me. I started to wiggle in panic. Quickly, Richard said, “Breathe in!”

I floated right back up to the top of the water with a triumphant grin. And a little knot in my neck dissolved. I had learned that I could loosen up a little and the water would catch me. “Now let it out…” He held me while I practiced letting go of my breath and slowly taking it back in. My head still lay on the valley of his forearms, high and dry.

“You’re going to have to let the water get in your ears if you want to float. It will be OK.” He let his hands drop slowly from beneath my shoulders. I felt the cold water tingle up the back of my scalp and pour into my ears. I took a deep breath to bob back to the surface. It wasn’t so bad. I let the breath go and just like that…I was floating. On my own.

Straight above me stretched the clear blue sky. To my right, the open stretch of the Potomac River, with a jet following the path of the water on its descent to National. I floated in a perfectly round and perfectly blue and perfectly cool pool next to a man who loved to show me all I could do. If I just let my brain get out of the way.

I stood up to see the world from vertical again. I gave him a chaste little kiss and said, “Thank you. I’m proud of myself.”

He grinned and said, “Next I’ll show you how to do THIS!” He curled up into a tight ball, squeezing his knees to his chest, and with a long slow exhale of bubbles, he sank to the bottom of the pool. It was one of his favorite tricks.

As I stood there waiting for him to bob back up when he got tired of holding his breath, one of the residents joined us in the pool. Well, she came as far as the third step. In her black maillot and swim cap, she stood in the water up to her thighs, splashing a little water up onto her arms.

And she farted.

I don’t mean “toot toot” like you think a Nana might fart. I mean “BRAAAAAAAAPPPPPHHH!” Like someone stepped on a duck.

Since I had been raised right, I pretended not to notice. We all suffer a little slip now and then and pools can make for confusing acoustics. Who am I to judge?

Richard erupted from the water with a splash and a gasp. “I’m losing my form. I used to be able to stay down a lot longer.”

At that very moment, the woman beside us let fly again. “BUH-WONK!” Richard’s eyebrows shot up and he–having also been raised right–looked ever so casually around to see who had stepped on a duck. It was just us and her in the water. Everyone else chatted on lounge chairs in the shade of the pergola. He turned back to me and gave the straight face double eyebrow raise.

We tried to be nonchalant about it, but we started making our way to the deep end as she continued to toot her own horn. Once we were a safe distance away, I said, “Do you think she thinks she under water and no one can hear?”

Richard said, “No, I think she’s lived long enough that she just doesn’t give a shit.”

Kids In the Hall

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After we got the kids to bed tonight, I came into the den to discover that the carpet was covered in a colorful blanket of tiny paper slivers that Carlos had cut from a junk mail circular. No big deal–I had given him the safety scissors and the flyer before I walked out to take a call from my friend, Rachel. It’s just that in the 30 minutes I was occupied….yeah, those of you with kids are laughing right now, right? What could go wrong??

He hadn’t cut his hair or the sofa or the dog’s tail. But he had sliced up the program from Vivi’s theater camp performance, a stack of yellow Post It notes, a bag that had held some leftover chips from Willy’s, a few other pieces of mail, and one very special list that he unearthed from the back of my desk drawer.

When G came in and found me standing there in the middle of the paper flurry, transfixed by the piece of white paper that I held in my hand, he asked, “Did he cut up something important?” I considered his question. “Not important. Just…old.”

Here’s what remains:

I wrote this list in 2004, when Richard and I bought this house together. I lived here by myself for a couple of months before he moved back to Georgia, so while I was getting the place habitable, I jotted down ideas for every room. I found the notepad a few years ago and stuck it in the back of the desk drawer. There are still some good ideas on there but they don’t exactly fit my current living situation. I like the note about getting pictures from Helen–I wanted to surprise Richard with some family snapshots from his childhood in our first home. But a gray and white paint scheme with window pane checks and black and white picture frame collage? These were the ramblings of a woman who had:

A. HGTV Poisoning

B. An irrational belief in the power of painter’s tape

C. No children

D. No idea what a Magic Eraser was, much less why a homeowner might need one

Here’s how that hallway turned out. It’s still yellow, still dark, still got the scratches on the doors. There’s one door covered in butterfly stickers. One door with a warning sign Vivi drew of all the things that aren’t allowed in a baby nursery (sharp things, chokies, balloons, gum, etc). There’s the bathroom door with a big hook lock on the outside that G installed after Carlos plugged up the toilet so bad that we had to replace the whole thing (it was a kid’s vitamin bottle). There’s the door to the room with the big bed where we all piled up together on Sunday morning. Where Carlos bounces then puts his hands on his hips and declares, “Dis not a trampoline. Dis a BED!” There’s the traveling trunk that belonged to my great-grandparents. That’s what Carlos leaned against when he was first learning to stand. Above the trunk hangs a Matisse poster that I bought in London on my first big adventure. Vivi used it to learn her colors.

So I never got to the ideas on that list. Maybe the hall didn’t need that much work; maybe it will get some real attention one day. We have made one “improvement.” I called in a muralist who expressed his own vision on the wall beside the bathroom door. I think he really captured the cacophony of modern life rendered against the clean lines of the mid-century modern aesthetic. He’s a real up and comer.

Even Magic Eraser couldn’t clean it off, so I guess it will be there for a while.

Saturday Snort–Mr. Tea

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mr afternoon t

I PITY THE FOOL!

Painting Your Elephant

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Scott and the parts of his elephant that he was contractually allowed to show.

One morning at work when I was feeling particularly beige and suburban, like a…oh, I don’t know, like a beige Suburban, I stomped into Nicole’s office and whined, “My friends have the coolest jobs. This man, Scott, that I know from GHP? He’s an artist in LA and he’s spending this morning painting an elephant. Not painting a picture of an elephant–putting paint all over an actual elephant and getting paid for it! And me? I’m sending emails warning people that they better return salad bowls to the cafeteria or there will be hell to pay.”

Nicole, ever the great friend and cheerleader, replied, “Well–wait a minute. You just had that great weekend at Wesleyan with all the alumnae stuff and giving the speeches and parties. That’s you painting your elephant.”

She had a point. “Painting your elephant” has now become one of our shorthand phrases to each other. The words we use to remind ourselves to take pride in our own kind of creativity.

My friend, Margaret, who blogs at Grit Girl Runs Fast, is the reason I have been thinking about painting the elephant this week. She wrote about how she’s intimidated by some of her women friends because she thinks they are more accomplished or educated. Pffffft. But she doesn’t let that stop her from loving them. She surrounds herself with people who make her want to grow.

Who make her want to….(wait for it)…paint elephants?

I know what she means. Our GHP group, our tribe, met 29 years ago this week. I love these people like I love butter but they intimidate the ever-loving shit out of me–ALL THE TIME. Look at them:

January 2013, NYC

There’s Michelle who saves little babies who can’t breathe. Jimmy raises the money that changes the world. Ridge designs fantastic NYC store windows. Sara, the poet. Trajal, the choreographer. Ginny, a psychologist who also finds time for community theater. Jill is a big time business lady and bon vivant. Deidre? She’s an award-winning actress in LA who you’ve seen on shows like Southland, E.R., The Riches…and some Popeye’s Chicken commercials. Seth is a defense attorney who performs Shakespeare in his spare time.

These are people who intimidate me. But I find the courage to hang out with them because LOOK AT THE JOY. And this photo was taken after a funeral.

These people are so alive that they sizzle with energy. We talk ourselves hoarse. We laugh until other people turn to see what the fuss is about.

These people are creators. They make things that didn’t exist before. They remind me that it is possible to spin gold from straw. Check out some of this awesomeness:

Here’s what happens when Mike gets bored working in his yard:

Here’s Bryn playing M’Lynn in Steel Magnolias (NOT her real hair):

Here’s Shannah, reigning Romulan Miss Galaxy (NOT her real superorbital ridge):

Julie in Austin with her award for best comedy pilot:

This is Brantley, who’s currently in Switzerland on the European leg of his ukelele tour:

Look at the smile on John’s face (second from left) that night that Ruth Bader Ginsberg came to see his play “Arguendo” then stayed around for the Q&A panel:

And here’s me, painting my elephant behind a podium:

Margaret–please keep hanging out with people who make you want to grow. I’ve been doing it for 29 years and it’s working out just fine.

GHPeeps–Thank you. I’m proud to know you. I love you.

Statistically Significant

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Thank you all so much for the kind messages of support that you shared privately and publicly yesterday. I am encouraged and inspired by the stories you shared about your own experiences with kids and labels.

On the subject of labels…another label that was thrown about when we first began seeking help for Carlos was “significant developmental delay.” He had just turned three but was talking like a two year old. When kids his age are slow to communicate it can be due to autism, speech problems, or significant developmental delay (SSD). Or a combination. It really is difficult to tell whether they don’t know how to speak or don’t grok why we speak. Maybe Peppa Pig is on and they just don’t care to speak.

Now, you better believe that when I heard that phrase uttered by the school psychologist, I heard something along the lines of, “crippling developmental delay,” or “life-shattering developmental delay.” I imagined that my sweet-voiced boy would wake up one morning and say, “Hodor!” and that would be it. “Hodor hodor hodor.” (For those of you who don’t read/watch Game of Thrones, Hodor is a gentle giant who can only say one word. Yep, you guessed it–Hodor.)

After a few days of being afraid to even look at the paperwork that had Significant Developmental Delay listed as a possible situation, my lifelong curiosity about words broke through the blaring sirens of panic echoing between my ears. I parsed the phrase.

NOUN: Delay–yeah, I get that. He’s behind on the sentence making.

ADJECTIVE: Developmental–okey doke. He’s hit some milestones but others are still ahead of him. He’s developing at his own pace.

INTENSIFIER ADJECTIVE: Significant–ugh. That’s where life implodes and all I can see is a wall of white light and Carlos living in our basement for the rest of his life.

In my English major brain, “significant” means: consequential, earth-shattering, eventful, historic, momentous, monumental, tectonic, weighty. (Thank you, Merriam-Webster thesaurus!) When I mentioned my fear of this label being stuck on our kid, G and his scientist brain said, “Wait a second! ‘Significant’ means something worth noticing.'”

WUHT?

He started in on statistical significance, standard deviations, black magic statistics, Greek symbols. But he was right. “Significant” doesn’t mean cataclysmic. If I skim all the way down to meaning #5 in the dictionary, significant means “sufficiently large in size, amount, or number to merit attention.” Well, shucks. That doesn’t say anything about my basement. The synonyms for this meaning are downright cuddly: biggish, healthy, respectable, sizeable, substantive, good, tidy.

Would I have gotten less freaked out if the form said “Biggish Developmental Delay?” Probably. This lesson in semantics reminded me of the danger of labels for people: words mean different things to each of us. A school psychologist means one thing when she says “significant” and a mother hears a different thing, while talking about the same tiny person.

My friend, Wise Heather, shared an interesting article today: 10 Scientific Ideas That Scientists Wish You Would Stop Misusing. In light of my struggle with significant, number seven struck a chord.

7. Statistically Significant

Mathematician Jordan Ellenberg wants to set the record straight about this idea:

“Statistically significant” is one of those phrases scientists would love to have a chance to take back and rename. “Significant” suggests importance; but the test of statistical significance, developed by the British statistician R.A. Fisher, doesn’t measure the importance or size of an effect; only whether we are able to distinguish it, using our keenest statistical tools, from zero. “Statistically noticeable” or “Statistically discernable” would be much better.

For the rest of this journey, I will be cool if my son receives extra help at school because he has a Discernable Developmental Delay. I want him to be comfortable in the world.

With the progress he’s making, I’ll also be cool with buying him a thesaurus for his fifth birthday. Either a thesaurus or an erector set because Dude is wild about the mechanical toys! I find that…significant.

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I’m Going to FIX This.

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“Point to the picture of something we eat.” Carlos pointed to the picture in the middle of a set of three and said, “Apple!”

“Which one do we wear?” He pointed to the right one in the next row and said, “Hat!”

“Show me an animal.” He chirped, “Frog!” and pointed to the right card.

“Something we ride?” “Scooter!”

I shuffled the array of Memory cards on the dining room rug. “Carlos–find something we have at a birthday party.” He searched through the rows of pictures. “Pwesents!”

“Wonderful! Can you find something else that we have at birthday parties?” I tried to light up the little picture of balloons with the power of my stare. He didn’t notice it. Finally, after he had lost interest in that question, I said, “How about the balloons? We have balloons at birthday parties.” He grabbed up the balloon card and pressed it together with the picture of presents. “Ballooooooons!”

I looked up to find that G was watching us from the doorway. He had gone in to work for a few hours while I stayed home with Carlos. I told him, “Hey, watch this!”

I pulled a little alphabet abacus kind of toy over to Carlos and said, “Carlos? What letter is this?”

“B! Buh-buh-buh…”

“Yes! What letter is this?”

“F! Fuh-fuh-fuh…” His attention wandered back to the Memory cards. The toy has a little row of people at the bottom, each with a different numeral from 1-10 and a different facial expression.

“Carlos? Can you find someone who is sad?” He looked up and down the row then poked an image of a girl with a downturned mouth and a tear spouting from her eye. “Nine!”

“Yes! Good job! Can you find someone who looks angry?” He considered carefully then answered, “Six!” Yep. That boy’s eyebrows came together in a sharp V shape and his mouth was a straight line.

“Yes! He looks angry. Can you find a silly boy?” He pointed to 10 and mimicked the way the boy was sticking his tongue out of the side of his mouth.

That made G laugh. Carlos hopped up from the rug and ran to give G a hug. That was my sign that our game had come to an end. After Carlos wandered off into the den with the stack of Memory cards crammed into a circus train caboose, G gave me a hug and asked if I was OK.

I said, “I read that report from his last evaluation and got a little nervous about today.” “REALLY?” G snickered and nodded at the dining room.

In the two hours he had been gone, I had turned it into a learning lab. We had played hide and seek in the big cardboard box (cooperative play). We had played Memory (receptive language). We had stacked objects into the train cars (fine motor) and climbed in out around and through the box (gross motor). And all of this while he was bare ass nekkid because it is TIME to get this potty training thing locked up. I even had Sesame Street playing in the other room for good measure. I had the day off and I WAS GOING TO FIX THIS. Whatever it is.

Remember that story I wrote a while back about Carlos having some kind of speech issue–“How Could I Have Missed This?” Today was Chapter Two. Today was the day we took Carlos to the Marcus Autism Center for testing. There–I said it. I said the A-Word.

And guess what?

Maybe, maybe not. If so, not very.

Because, y’know, he’s three and it’s hard to tell at this age.

In the end, the conclusion was “Keep up the good work.” And we’ll go back in six months and see a developmental pediatrician. By then I will either have chilled out a little, or sold the dining room table to buy more flashcards.

As his mom, I am going to do everything in my power to get him what he needs. And I’m going to do everything in my power to understand what is–and isn’t–in my power.

Sunday Sweetness–My Daddy

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Happy Father’s Day to my Daddy. Here’s a story about his stinky old boots. Click on the toe if you’d like to go there!

Saturday Snort–Shockingly Bad Jokes

Baddest Mother Ever

Gratitude. Grief. Growth.

Monthly Archives: June 2014

Are You Ready for Some Futebol?

Letting the Air Out

Kids In the Hall

Saturday Snort–Mr. Tea

Painting Your Elephant

Statistically Significant

I’m Going to FIX This.

Sunday Sweetness–My Daddy

Saturday Snort–Shockingly Bad Jokes

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