by Christine S. Lucas

Published April 20, 2013 in the Savannah Morning News

I am not a control-freak, but I have taken great comfort in my ability to soothe my son’s heart. I kiss boo-boos, fix food, wash and entertain him, but we finally reached something I couldn’t make better.

The saga began when I showed up at day care to learn that Elliot had “graduated” from his day care class. It seems a mother complained that he was hitting her little girl, and so my son graduated from a teacher he loved and children he’d been around since he was 8 months old. If he graduated, then his diploma must have read, “Suck it.” These were my thoughts as I went to fetch him from his new digs in the other wing.

It isn’t standard procedure for parents to be notified when a child progresses from one class to another, but Elliot was moved because of a complaint. Parents were, I imagine, kept from communicating because of the instinct to defend one’s own.

My issue is that one mother understandably expresses a problem, and her opinion is given complete weight enough to remove another child from class. Her point is taken into consideration, but it is done so while leaving another mother completely out of the loop. The end does not justify the means.

The reaction the day care staff expected, I came to resent this week. I have tried to remain positive that he has moved to a room that is good for him. His teacher is great, and he’s not languishing throughout the day. Now, however, for the first time he doesn’t want to go to school. At night he requests his old class before bed. He talks about it on the toilet, at the breakfast table, on the car ride, and mama can’t make it better. Only time will do that.

The hitting that prompted his being yanked has not continued at all in his current class. Not once. He’s learning new songs, keeping his Pull-ups in good shape, and he’s even been invited to a birthday party. The heartbreak that I couldn’t fix is starting to mend. What is replacing it, however, slowly, is a sense of pride in himself. It’s the first time he’s really had to test his coping skills, and I think he’s managing better than his mother.

The lesson of late has been learning when to hold back. The world is not a satin pillow on which my beloved can sit forever. At the park, I have to let him be his own protector sometimes.

A 6-year-old boy says “baby alert” at the approach of my child who only wants to play. On a cellular and energetic level I want to put that crummy loser in a half-nelson and make him eat monkey balls (from Sycamore trees). I can’t though, and Elliot learns to stand his ground — something very unbaby-like!

I also have to learn that Elliot can act a fool and it doesn’t reflect on me. When he furrows his brow at another child, I want to correct him. I don’t want kids to hate him. I want them to think he’s the lovable spec of God dust that happened to land before them. He’s a spirited spec, and he wants to get his way. Be compassionate. There I go trying to put him back on the pillow again. It’s so hard not to be protective.

In the constant comparison between working and nonworking mothers, this is where extra time benefits the parent. In the course of your day you see your child interact with more children. You learn whether his behavior is a one-time thing or a habit that needs more diligent correcting. When to intervene is probably the question parents ask themselves most often, and I doubt it’s going to get any easier.

At first I just wanted to keep him alive. Now he’s supposed to be a pleasure to be around, too? He’s supposed to be law-abiding and respectful? I’m going to need your help world. Be good to him, and I’ll keep my mouth shut.

I’ll try and have faith that good people will find him and good things will happen for him. It reminds me of a new ditty Elliot has been practicing of late. In his 3-year-old speech, it sounds like, “God our fodder. God our fodder.” When things we can’t control happen, we have to see the blessings among them. One is the smile that comes across my face when Elliot ends his religious tune saying, “Awwww, man.”

Christine Lucas writes about being a first-time mom and adventures with baby. Contact Christine at christineslucas@yahoo.com.

Published March 9, 2102; Savannah Morning News

Does your child like writing? Have you asked? There are ways to tell whether you have a future Nora Ephron or Dan Brown on your hands.

The first time I was told to read to Elliot, we were still in the hospital. I was ravenous and began with the menu, “Once upon a time there were four, no five, slices of french toast and three plump sausages.”

Since that time we have been filling his brain with stories like Violet the Pilot, The Library Lion, and QuickBooks for Dummies. I look forward to a time in the future when he can string sentences together. If literacy is a coin, writing is the b side. There are ways you can encourage it in your children.

We know how to say, “Tell me about your picture.” Most parents are good at seeing a child’s promise in the visual arts. Writing talent is harder to spot early on. It’s less of a show pony. Wyman Bailey is a 13-year-old eighth-grader at Oglethorpe Charter School. His mom, Carol Bailey, says his talent started simply. He left his mother notes around the house.

“Well, he would tell me something he wanted to do,” Bailey says. “He would want to go to the mall, and then he would tell me all of the reasons he needed these things.”

An ordinary list written by your child is a window with an excellent view, but parents must not overlook it. For example, it tells you whether your child can spell. It tells you about the dying art of penmanship. Let’s also remember the effort. Writing a list means: This is important enough for me to take the time to put it on paper.

Last year Wyman started taking creative writing workshops with the local nonprofit called Deep. These workshops take place after school in over 17 different locations around Savannah and are taught by volunteer writing fellows. Donations enable the work of these kids to be professionally published and sold.

The story Wyman wrote for Deep is about a boy’s first kiss.

“It was really descriptive,” Wyman’s mother remembers. “I remember the girl had hair the color of lemonade and cotton candy lips.”

Was this nonfiction? Bailey suspects it was, but she admits she is not sure. “That’s when I figured out that the stuff he’s writing about, he’s thinking about. It’s stuff he doesn’t feel comfortable talking about.”

Writers are notoriously insecure about their writing, so count yourself lucky if your child shares a poem, story, or sentence. Choose your response carefully as well. You’re not an editor at The New Yorker. Your first response should not be to spell check or monitor punctuation. What if your child writes something shocking? Well, it might happen. Nail him to the wall, however, and you’ll no longer have a window seat. The view inside will be boarded up just like that. Wouldn’t it be better to draw more out and learn what’s cooking?

Wyman enjoys writing short stories that, according to his mom, are about three or four pages long. He has fun with it.

“I like to write, because it brings my entire imagination out,” he says. “It inspires me to do it again and again.” His story backdrops have included everything from the jungle to the sea. He has recently done one about two friends living in a concentration camp. “I also like to write because it usually is a way I get to tell people what’s going on in my head.” Wyman also says he loves the support he gets from the volunteers at Deep.

The fridge is good for drawing out all of the writers in your family. Magnetic Poetry is a company out of Minneapolis that makes all sorts of word magnets. In the Kids section of their website, magneticpoetry.com, you can try it out. The owner, not surprisingly, is a writer named Dave Kapell who was suffering from that viper bite known as writer’s block. He wrote down words on little pieces of paper to come up with song lyrics. The trouble was that he’d sneeze and blow away song after song. Magnets were his answer and might be yours too.

Start your own poem now: left, inside, lawnmower, shamrock, presentation, angry, founded, treats, dog, floated, sky, Susan Catron, urged, the, that, dug, stung, Oglethorpe, grommets, dentist, faxed, sprouted, duck, recycled, Pad Thai, Savannah, rabbit, don’t, at, what, sagos, plunge, mole bait, deflected, sunburnt, tabby, spirit, around, butter.

I should have known, because today I was restless during his nap time. Should I meditate and then fall asleep after only balancing my three lower chakras? Should I read something useful? Should I take the movie back to Red Box? It was a cereal aisle of indecision. Should I eat cereal maybe?

The door opens and he’s got poo-poo. I stay positive, because he is serenading me with the song I began singing him at birth. I’m not proud, but here goes:  Let’s take the dookie from your diaper. Let’s take the mushy from your tushy. Let’s make your bootie feel better. Let’s make it not smell like cheddar. Then you improv with a little let’s take the dookie, let’s take dookie, let’s take the dookie.

I send him back to bed and fetch my laptop. Maybe I’ll write that masterpiece now.

The door opens and he comes back out,

Me: Elliot, it’s nap time. Go back to bed.

Elliot: No, I can’t because it’s time for oatmeal.

Me: No, it’s not. (Dad chimes in) Elliot go back to bed.

Elliot: Okay. (starts closing the hallway door.) I miss you, mama.

Me: I miss you too. Go to bed.

(From inside his room) Elliot: lalabla.

Me: Elliot go to sleep.

Elliot: What you say?

Me: Elliot Grissom go to sleep!

Elliot: What are you doing, mama?

Me: Waiting for you to go to sleep?

Elliot: What’s daddy doing?

Me: Waiting for you to go to sleep.

(Door opens to his bedroom and the hallway)

Elliot: What you say about me?

Me: Nothing. Go to sleep or no party (he has two birthdays).

Elliot: I miss you, mama.

BOTTOM LINE: KID IS OUT OF BED AND NOW I CAN’T WRITE THIS BLOG! GOD!!!!!!!

I’m back, and now I feel bad because he made me laugh then I yelled at him to get back in bed. Now he’s saying he had a bad dream, but he hasn’t fallen asleep. These two hours were going to be the time I buckled down, the time I wrote something or aligned myself with my soul purpose, or organized my fridge. Oh, gosh, these two hours I took for granted. Like my twenties they went by so fast.

Elliot:I had a bad dream.

Me: Go to sleep.

Elliot: Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?

(Shhhhh. The WHY phase. GD it came so fast. I knew it was coming. I never read any books. Wasn’t there a brochure or something I tucked under the bed? No, that explains toxic shock syndrome. Grrrrrr.)

Elliot: I hurt myself. I have a boo-boo.

Me: (Not buying it and looking at his exposed elbow.)

Elliot’s brow is furrowed. It really hurts he tries to say. I feel like I’m trying to hide a fart in church. I can’t help but smile. Then the giggle rises and I bury my face into the side of a nearby cat to stop him from seeing.

Me: Go back to bed. It’s quiet time.

Happy Sunday!

I’ve been writing this column for three years, and I have largely focused on the moms out there. Dads out there, are you rattled, too?

Dads get flustered and overwhelmed just like moms, but different things get male noses out of joint. Just the other day, I sat in a Mexican restaurant enjoying the bliss that is a plate of chicken flautas topped with guac.

After a couple of minutes in my cumin cocoon, I began to wonder what had become of father and son. They’d gone to the restroom. A few minutes earlier, a waiter summoned me at my husband’s request — the Pull-Ups were in the car.

With that remedied, what was taking so long?

The guys returned, and my husband looked like Kermit the Frog with his face all folded in disgust.

“Was it bad?” I asked.

“He didn’t go,” said the frog. “I waited and waited, and he didn’t go. He just wanted to waste my time.”

The flauta in my mouth should have but failed to prevent my commentary. “I don’t think he put that much thought into it,” I suggested mildly.

That’s when I got the salsa stare. It had been an ugly experience where a hungry man had to do battle with a son wanting to touch every germ-ridden surface with the efficiency of someone hunting for a secret passage.

I can hardly take myself to the bathroom, so I’m glad that this is largely my husband’s job.

Just this evening, I was walking through the Publix parking lot and discovered my fly was down. I pulled my sweater low and tried to right the situation. Good, Christine. Get her up before the security camera at the entrance spots you. I did but then realized the security camera on the outside ATM had caught the whole thing.

Our child also has a love of buttons; more specifically, pressing them.

This is a little infuriating for me, because he’ll come up and press my laptop keyboard as I’m writing. Dad has an iPad, though. He’s been waiting all day to read that one story on ESPN.com, but Elliot’s little hand comes in and swipes the story away. Another brush across the touch screen, and he’s got dad’s tale of a pro-athlete choking on Donny Deutsch’s garden gnome locked deep in the bowels of the Library of Congress.

“What,” I ask, like my partner’s snit is a cat turd in my freshly raked Zen garden.

All I see is Elliot cuddled in his lap, snug as a bug.

It’s not that we don’t understand a man’s right to be angry or even annoyed, but we scope out our peace and defend it.

We got over our own snit minutes ago. Plus, fellas, we’ve got so much oxytocin running through us that we’re bonding with houseplants and pencil sharpeners half the time.

It’s got us empathizing with our young as much as we can, and then we move on to grieving for half-eaten Fruit Roll-Ups and bananas.

When we make peace over it, don’t you come in here and cock it up. Men only get surges of oxytocin during orgasm. Too bad.

We’ve spent all day long caring. We’re tired of caring. Well, all right. Give us a little red wine, and we’ll try to care some more.

Really, most dads work as hard and care as long as most moms.

Dads are at the park wiping runny noses, fixing snacks and doing the potty thing, just like us. They’re facing tantrums and trying to teach and tell bedtime stories. They’re allies who parent with a slightly different accent.

Dads don’t always make it clear when they’re worried, and moms don’t always see through our own haze to understand.

I guess the only thing we can try to do for each other is be aware, not just of the kid but each other.

Recognize each other’s tells. We do it for the children. Aww, you’re rubbing your ear. That means you’re tired.

Let’s look at our spouse, too. When mom puts her hair in three ponytails, I take over for a while. When dad starts a bitter search for every screwdriver he’s ever owned, that means he’s cooked.

Let’s take our own advice and try to shake more things off than we take personally.

Let’s encourage each other by granting solitude, me time, renewal.

Then, as a family, let us all go out and make fun of other families not doing it as well.

Christine Lucas writes about being a first-time mom and adventures with baby. Contact Christine at christineslucas@yahoo.com

I’m not sure whether Mercury was in retrograde or whether His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama perhaps stubbed his toe. Something happened yesterday, and the butterfly effect fanned the flames in my house of communication.

I went to Darien last week and did a bunch of interviews, only to have my voice recorder corrupt the files before I could transcribe them. The morning I thought was going to be productive was spent rescheduling interviews in which I’ll have to coach my subjects time and again: “Pretend you didn’t tell me this. Can’t you say it more colorfully like the last time? Was the shrimp good, or did it, in fact, make you smack your mama?”

It never ceases to hurt when technology that was meant to make our lives easier is but an unsupportive brace on a serpentine spine. Just last week I updated my one-and-only Mac to Snow Leopard from plain old Leopard. It’s just a CD install, a $20 upgrade meant to allow me to then install Microsoft Office. I went to get Elliot at day care only to discover the install failed, the CD was stuck in the drive, and the old system software was giving me the finger. So, my voice recorder’s bird was just the icing on the cake.

After three quarters of a wedge of brie and more salami than my cholesterol medicine deems appropriate, I took a nap. I’d have to get Elliot soon, and there was no way I wanted him to see me cheesed to the gills and muttering about my career going down the toilet thanks to a $35 piece of equipment from RCA. I’d regroup, carry some worry stones in my pockets, and take him to the park.

It started well at first. The park is a piece of rawhide for Elliot’s inner wolf. I let him out of the car, and he heads into mass of kids covering the entire surface of a merry-go-round. Elliot even enjoys pushing but inevitably falls to the ground once or twice like a hampster who has got his wheel going too fast.

While this is going on, I take a seat by a picnic table and notice how I’ve graduated to one of the outer rings of playground mommies. The innermost are standing in the mulch with the kids. Some of them are pregnant again, and I can’t even imagine a second. I am a whole swatch of grass away from the chaos caressing polished stones in my coat pockets. Elliot’s fallen again and calls mama this time.

We escape the fray for the calm of the baseball diamond. A couple kids are drawing in the red dirt with sticks. It’s nice until Elliot gets in the middle of two adult men kicking a soccer ball. He has to move their cone thing and wear it like a hat. I remove the cone, and it crashes the hard drive that is my son. He spits, falls to the ground, screams some MS-DOS commands that I don’t understand, and forces me to carry him to the car like an ungreased tin man.

It’s a long walk to the car, and I explain that he wasn’t playing nicely. Tantrums mean we go home. I’ll play nicely. I’ll play nicely, he says. Nope. You don’t show your tush, spit like a camel and get to stay at the park. I put my son in the car seat, and he’s essentially gone into the Macintosh spinning rainbow wheel mode. Nothing is getting in or out of him.

He’s screaming enough to make himself choke, and I make a great sacrifice by inserting the Barney Christmas CD. I don’t like Barney, he tells me. Great! Me neither. I take it out. I like Barney! I like Barney! We go back and forth inserting and removing the CD a few times until I say forget it and play Lindsey Buckingham’s Big Love. Elliot calms a bit, because he’s waiting for the dog barking at the end. I use this time to suggest he say the months of the year. I don’t like it, he says. The months are your thing! Come on: January! I get nothing except I want Barney. If you’d just give Lindsey a chance. Wait! The dogs are at the end of Holiday Road!

Finally, we’re on the final approach. I ask who do you like better: Cookie Monster or Grover? He snarfs a bit and then cries, January.

Thank you for allowing me and my son to go to Walgreen’s and buy trash bags without  him tearing down life-size cardboard Taylor Swift. Thank you for having somebody in Walgreen’s say they read my column every week even though it comes out every two weeks, because that made me feel like the actual Taylor Swift. 

Rattled: Where do our children get their intuition? | savannahnow.com.

We have a basket on our kitchen counter where we unload Elliot’s backpack from day care and repack it for the next day. Today I decided to go through the stack of his artwork and put it in a place where it could be preserved for future generations – or me twenty years from now. In the middle of this stack what did I find but a birthday invitation from the mother I mentioned above. It was her daughter’s third birthday in November, and we didn’t RSVP! We completely overlooked the invitation in the stack of papers. I immediately called this mother on the phone and left a voice mail asking her to call me. I couldn’t bring myself to leave my apology on a recording. Mostly, because I need absolution.

So, I am not finding crow recipes on the Food Network web site. I’m guessing low and slow is the best cooking method. Maybe add a little salt, pepper, and thyme.

Rattled: A 3-year-old boy’s best friend | savannahnow.com.