Unlike most babies who look like old men with their sweet, bald heads, my son was born with a shock of blonde hair.

In his hospital pictures, Gabriel’s hair stands up in a Mohawk, looking like a teenager seeking attention. Only instead of wearing the accompanying scowl and studded bracelets, Gabe is shrieking, pink-faced, kicking his feet from where they’re bundled into his tiny yellow onesie.

I can’t deny that I was smitten by that hair from the very beginning. As he grew, his Mohawk morphed into white-blonde curls that began to fall around his face.  By the time he was two, they’d expanded into a mop.  But there was something about the way the cork-screw curls flopped around his head as he waddle-walked that brought smiles to people’s faces. 

Only our nanny disapproved. “He looks like girl,” she scolded in her broken English as she combed her own daughter’s jet-black hair into orderly ponytails and nailed them down with bright-colored ribbons. “He looks like messy,” she said under her breath. 

I didn’t care. I refused to let anyone else cut Gabe’s hair, making sure to snip off only the bare minimum. 

We got used to total strangers’ regular commentary. “Where’d you get those curls?” the older ladies would ask Gabe. At three years old, the question perplexed him; by four, he just smiled before he shrugged and ran off. 

“Oh those curls,” women were always saying with longing. “If you only knew how much we pay to copy these,” they’d say while petting Gabriel’s head like it was an irresistible puppy.

Then at five years old, other boys started getting buzz cuts.  To me, they looked like stock issued GI-Joe dolls with matching molded plastic heads. 

“I hate these curls,” I caught Gabriel saying one day as he stared miserably into a mirror after kindergarten.  

“Why?” I choked. 

“Girls like curls,” he grimaced, trying unsuccessfully to flatten out his hair.

My husband and Gabriel began making noises about a father-son trip to the barbershop.

“Think of all the money we’ve saved over the years,” I tried to bargain with my husband.  “Twelve dollars a month in seven years. That’s almost a thousand dollars!” I enthused. 

When Gabe was eight, they launched a surprise attack, setting off for the barber without telling me. When they returned, I thought Gabe looked awful.  Like a pinhead, barely recognizable as himself. 

“It’s what he wanted,” my husband shrugged as I fumed at him behind a closed door. “It’s his hair.” 

I couldn’t wait for those curls to grow back. 

Now Gabe is nine and I know my husband’s right. I have to let go, mostly because if I keep making such a big deal I’ll only push Gabe to exert his independence even further. 

For now, he’s decided he wants his hair ‘medium short,’ and those beautiful curls are not meant to be.

Just wait, I think. Time is in my favor with his hair. As he once said – “Girls like curls.”

By Mary Beth McClure

Labels: boys, curly hair, Mary Beth McClure, Mohawks

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You’re the mother of a gap-toothed, tow-headed, nine-year-old boy and you’ve been trying to pull this off. You realize there’s something un-Good-Mother-like, even un-American about you. But here’s your secret confession:

You hate baseball.

It wasn’t so bad in the T-ball years, those clueless little five-year-olds in baseball gear; the sheer novelty of it all in the low expectations. The ball set lovingly on the T-ball stand that the miniature players hacked away at. It was all so cute. Then the next year, you knew what to expect, how to not get snookered into bringing a dozen balloons for Opening Day Parade, wrestling them into your car -- only to get rained out. The following week you’d repeat the whole ordeal and eighty dollars later, you’d made your contribution to baseball.

A veteran now, you know how to elbow in and grab that sign-up sheet, scribble down your contribution of a dozen donuts.

Done!

Even still, four years later, something is rising up in you -- rebelling against the prospect of another season. You try to give yourself a break. It’s spring, the beach beckons and by now, you’ve been a sport spectator every Saturday since last fall. Soccer, floor hockey, indoor soccer; all keeping you bench-bound, often in freezing gyms with those other mothers who actually know the game-rules, and who appear to be interested.

You never played a single team sport as a kid. Your mother never sat on a bench to watch you do anything. Instead, she mostly sat on the couch and read, soundlessly turning pages and munching on a bowl of crackers. Occasionally, you or your sisters would make a bid for her attention, trying for conversation. She’d blink, like she couldn’t quite place you. She tried to look interested as she thrummed her fingers on the pages of her book, which lay open, calling her back. She licked the salt from her fingers, nodded, put another Wheat Thin on her tongue and sipped Tab, her Holy Communion.

You gave up and read beside her.

Somehow, your son has found his way into a little pack of five sports-minded boys. They are inseparable, playing together every recess and weekend. At first, when Sam was invited to join the group’s teams, you were all for it, hoping to save him from your childhood fate of being the shy, odd, teacher’s pet. Gradually, you realized the mothers had their sons in not one, but three simultaneous after-school activities. Football, gymnastics, chess, newspaper, math mania. The sheer logistics overwhelmed you. Not to mention the various articles of uniforms that needed to be purchased, washed, remembered. Or the making of team shirts, banners, coach’s gifts, engraved trophies, end-of-season parties. You wanted to go back to the toddler days when he happily covered himself in mud so he resembled a miner.

Your husband, God-bless-him, is not working this weekend and is at the game to give you a reprieve. “How’s it going?” you ask, trying for cheerful and low-key, when you call to check in.
“Oh, we’re fine,” he says. Then there’s yelling in the background and he’s screaming,

“Go, Sam! High-five!”

Your son just hit the only homerun of the season and all you can think of is, “Shit.” I am so screwed.

You drag yourself back to the field for the impromptu celebration, thinking how you’re sick of raising kids like hot-house flowers-- constantly taking their temperatures to judge yourself: OK or failing. What about our happiness? you want to ask these parents, sitting here placidly putting everybody else’s needs first. On the bench, you try to act like you’re following a play, alternate between discretely checking your watch and mild hyperventilation. Your hands hold your book like a prayer.

Your fingers strum the pages.

By Mary Beth McClure

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I was prepared for motherhood to change me in myriad ways. I thought the adage, ‘Life will never be the same,’ meant that my body, sense of humor and priorities would be different. But one thing I never counted on is that since the birth of my son, I’ve gone from dare-devil to worry-wart.

I have become my mother.

It’s a family joke that mom is known for phrases like, “Be careful. Slow down. Don’t run. You’re going to fall.”

For a kid like me, this was impossible. There are home movies of our old Rambler station wagon pulled over at a rest stop on a road trip. My six-year-old sister is desultorily jumping rope. My four-year-old self is without rope: simply, gleefully jumping. What has always defined me was moving for the sheer joy of it.

I graduated to cartwheels, to veering down the hill on a bike with handlebar streamers flying out behind me, to jumping on planes. To anywhere. I’d buy a “Lonely Planet” Guide, get a ticket and figure arrangements out when I got there.

That was me. Before motherhood. Now slowly, I’ve come to accept that I am no longer the ‘give me a destination and I’ll go there-girl’: Hong Kong, Katmandu, all the better. Now I’d just as soon not drive on the freeway.

This is not even the worst part. I’m not just the garden-variety “Do we have enough diaps, wipes, sunscreen, juice and goldfish?” kind of mom-worrier. The “Do you think we should do X now so he’ll nap, or Z to ward off a fuss?”

My secret confession is that I’ve become absorbed with stories of children’s accidents. Detail by horrifying detail, I pour over the news of children: swept out to sea by sneaker riptides, falling out un-screened hotel windows, smothered by collapsing sand dunes. Has there been an extra slew of these things? More coverage in the news? How could I have lived my entire life and never noticed these stories before?

Reading, I swing from looking for someone to blame; ‘Where was that parent? Why weren’t they paying attention?’ to the deepest of sympathy. To shame. How many times have I made one more phone call, read one more e-mail while I vaguely knew the whereabouts of my son? How many lapses of attention could have resulted in these same horrors? Finally, I’ve come to understand my own mother’s anxiety.

Along with the expansiveness of giving birth, the unavoidable truth about mortality has slowed my life down.

So when my husband finds me an over-worrying nag, I try to clue him in to the accident stories. This hyper-vigilance must be hard-wired into us mothers, I tell him: survival of the species and all. My mind crunches out possibilities of disaster scenarios; this calculation of odds and dangers, it’s always with me. I try to strike a balance between healthy watchfulness and respect for the survivor’s tragedies. The least that I can do is to use them for perspective, to be grateful for all the gifts of motherhood, even the baby spit-up that’s gone down my back and into my shoe.

In the meantime, riveted, I scan the headlines. The same way my mother used to scan the horizon, waiting for me to come home. I hold the stories out in front of me, like a talisman, pretending I can keep us all safe from harm.

By Mary Beth McClure

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Here’s the dirty little secret they don’t tell you in the glossy parenting magazines.

You miss your brain.

You miss conversations where you had something to offer other than this floaty, under-water feeling, this blank mush that used to be your frontal cortex that can no longer be counted on to fire.

You watch and listen to adult activity going on around you and think, “Do something now,” but your brain is on strike. “Ya talkin’ to me?’ it says, at which point, you’ve missed your opening and the conversation moves on. You smile gamely; you keep expecting some version of your former intelligence to be available. Time after time, it surprises you that all you have left is this blank, vacuous, space in your head.

Conversations aren’t the only challenge. There’s also the brain-dead activities: like when you go to the grocery store and come back with everything but the crucial ingredient for the recipe that you’re trying to prepare. Or you go to the computer to order a prescription on-line and instead answer a bunch of meaningless e-mails but log off without the re-fill. Even after you have bypassed all those political ‘must-read’ messages.

Someday, you tell yourself, you will be politically informed again. In the meantime, you’re very active in another sort of politics; in fact, you’re sort of an ambassador of peace. You patrol the borders of the daily sibling squirmishes and the uncertain dynamics of playground inclusions and exclusions; you negotiate play dates that teeter from gleeful to hostile, moment to moment.

You hope these are good enough excuses as to why your brain is so fried. But you even got sleep last night and today, have childcare. You should be making a list, getting organized, knocking things out. Instead, you’re sitting glazed over, watching the world pass.

Last night, when you sat with Little Sister clinging and drooling all over Big Brother’s book, attempting to defuse his annoyance before it escalated to outrage, “Why does she always ruin my stuff?” because the last thing you wanted were tears before bedtime, that wasn’t at all what you’d pictured when you’d snuggled down with both kids who were miraculously bathed and powdered before eight-thirty. This was supposed to be the sweet time of the day, during what were supposed to be the good years. At least that’s what all the older parents keep telling you as they watch your kids twining themselves around you when you just want to extract your wallet in the grocery line. The older parents stand there, wistfully telling you how much you’re going to miss these tender years.

But there was nothing pleasant about trying to prevent Big Brother from pulling out all Little Sister’s hair, or buying him off with promises of a new book tomorrow, just go to sleep now so you can get off Damage Control Patrol.

Last night when you got yourself through those melt-downs by picturing these glorious two hours that you have, all to yourself today, you didn’t imagine that you’d be sitting here like a sticky lump of Play dough, unable to move.

Your brain and body don’t seem to recognize each other anymore. They may be permanently estranged. Maybe it’s from eating only brown and orange-colored food for oh, about three years. The only things that have passed your lips are: Gold-fish, graham crackers, hot dogs, mac and cheese. And don’t forget those peanut-butter crackers that are basically fancily packaged sodium.

Or maybe your brain has gone on strike from the sheer monotony of being a Ph.D. who’s now working as a sandwich-maker/ sponge-mopper/ shelf-stocker. Maybe it’s from the years of having your musical repertoire reduced to a tune sung off-key by a fuzzy red creature. “La-la-la-la, Elmo’s World.”

What makes it worth losing your mind like this?

* * *
You return from your un-productive alone time and look at your children. Big Brother has his arm around Little Sister as he ‘reads’ her a story, flipping through the heavy pages of his card-board book. This time he doesn’t seem to notice the drool dripping off her chin, only that she’s gazing up at him, pouring adoration out of her toothless grin.

Your world opens up; the sky is raining love. There is a moment of sweetness. La-la-la-la.

by Mary Beth McClure

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My husband has started sleeping on the couch and it’s driving me crazy. At first it was just the occasional restless night, and then he got sick and claimed he didn’t want to wake me up with his coughing.

Gradually, he kept drifting out to the living room in the evenings and he refuses to admit it, but it is becoming his bedroom. I’ve tried to bring it up and the conversation goes nowhere. So now I’m trying to be the understanding wife. He’s in the middle of a big career change and he’s stressed out. It was hard enough for me to start a new career, young and single, let alone him being fifty-two with a wife, a kid and a mortgage.

So part of me appreciates how overwhelmed my husband is, how hard he’s trying to hold it all together.

Every night, he comes rushing home after his new clients, trying to make it in time for “family dinner” despite unpredictable freeway gridlock. Later, he climbs into bed to read stories to our son and often falls asleep as soon as his head hits the dinosaur pillowcase.

There’s still The List: take down the Christmas lights, pay bills, take out the garbage. Understandably, the man just wants a little s-p-a-c-e at the end of the day. Really, I tell myself, that shouldn’t be too much to ask.

He seems so happy on the couch. He gets out his blankets, his book, puts on the music he likes, gets his bowl of cashews. He’s got his alarm clock, his pillow. He is hunkered down.

Meanwhile, I’m in our California King; the one we picked out together back when I was hugely pregnant and we were making sure there’d be room for all of us. I remember how we weathered the newborn ‘family bed,’ the years it took to get our son to sleep through the night.

I kept thinking, ‘As soon as we. . . we’ll get back to us.’ Now I’m looking over at the empty spot in the bed where my husband used to be. I try to stretch out, read my book, end up instead with the stupid school newsletter that only reminds me of all the volunteer opportunities I’d be doing if I were a better mother. I’d actually like to help out more. Sometimes my work is like having thirty kids. So I’m not signing up for any volunteering this year. Except for Lice Check. I’m not giving any more because really, there’s not another piece of me left.

So I can understand my husband needing his privacy. I need him. I want my husband in our bed.

Deep down, I still believe that you need to get under the “same tent” with your mate, that you kind of re-fuel each other, that something happens when your dreams are floating around in the same room -- that it weaves you back together as husband and wife.

God knows, so much of parenthood makes you forget why, as a woman, you love this man. All those kisses and hugs for your kids, that easy, extravagant love you get to feel as a mom; it’s too bad it’s so much harder to get that going for the Spouse Person.

You tell yourself that there are times in a marriage your husband doesn’t want what you want and you have to decide: how important is it?

I’ve polled my girlfriends. Would this couch-sleeping bother you? I’ve discovered lots of people sleep separately. He snores, or we’re light sleepers. No big deal.

I've decided I can get used to having this big old bed, all to myself. Nobody to tell me when to turn off the light. I can tap these laptop keys to my heart’s content.

Then, just as I settle into this new arrangement, here’s the big lout, blanket in hand, back in MY room. It’s cold out there, he says, let’s warm each other up.

The mixed blessing: having kids means I can’t leave simply because my husband drives me crazy. Sometimes, that buys us just enough time to find the good in each other again.

By Mary Beth McClure

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