Three and a half years of behavior modification therapy with Jesse have taken their toll on me. I’m finding that I see the positive side of things more and more. It’s positively unnatural.

This morning Anthony and I attended the PE/gymnastics demo for Jesse’s second grade class. Nineteen cute little second graders marched proudly into the gym and took up their positions. One little cutie took a look at the seated parents, turned around, and marched straight out of the gym in a nascent panic attack. Nineteen little cuties started doing their stretches and calisthenics. One little cutie huddled on the floor against the wall in a little ball, pressing her face to her knees. Nineteen little cuties moved quickly to their assigned gymnastics stations and got started. One little cutie mewled and made scaredy-cat faces and hung her head as she slowly shuffled over to her first spot.

Well. At least Jesse’s not as short as she used to be. I walked out of there a half hour later, feeling good. The vector of her emotional development continues to be pointed in the right direction. Two years ago, I kept Jesse out of school on the day of the gym demo. I made this promise to her a few weeks before the event, so that her panic attacks would stop. Last year, we prepared emotionally for the event for several weeks, at home and in therapy, with the hope that she could make a run at participating. This year, we didn’t even talk about it until yesterday, let alone plan for it. Last year, she started out crying and making weird noises. This year, she didn’t make any weird noises, or at least I didn’t hear them, which is close enough. Last year, she gritted her teeth and powered her way through the show. This year, once she got over the initial performance anxiety, she seemed to be enjoying herself. Last year, when friends tried to help or encourage her, she brushed them off. This year, she accepted their aid. Last year, she seemed mostly relieved that she survived the nightmare. This year, she seemed really proud of herself and downright happy.

This is all very encouraging. Plus there were at least four moms there who know Jesse well, and who lifted my spirits with the kind of wee chatter that reminds a person there’s kindness everywhere.

And see, there it is: I see KINDNESS everywhere? When did that start happening?

Before I left the school, I gave Jesse a big hug and a lot of praise. I made sure I found the gym teacher and told him what a spectacular job he did handling Jesse. Anthony told me the principal was the person who got Jesse back into the gym. So I sent her a thank you email and said all sorts of nice things about the school and its staff. I went to lunch with Anthony. When we left the shop, I actually told the guy who made our sandwiches that they were delicious.

That’s crazy talk.

I decided that seeing Jesse have these sorts of (increasingly rare) anxiety attacks is actually important. We shelter her from many stressors and we work hard to help her manage her feelings, so sometimes now almost a whole day can go by with no tooth-gnashing. An event like today’s reminds us that she does in fact have a severe anxiety disorder, so that the adults in her world need to remain diligent in helping her cope.

In other words, I’ve convinced myself that watching my daughter behave publicly in a way that would humiliate most parents is a good thing.

And there’s more. After school today, Jesse went to a friend’s house. I’ll call the friend L–, because I don’t have her mama’s permission to name her here. One of Jesse’s more serious tics is a tendency to blurt “I hate” about people she likes and loves. She describes it as a need that grows and grows in her mind until she can’t control it anymore–a pretty classic compulsion or Tourette’s style tic. She also sounds and acts really strange when she’s doing it, which is understandable because something is coming out of her mouth that she doesn’t mean, and she knows she’s going to hurt someone and also get in trouble. It must suck to be Jesse in those blurty moments. I know it’s really hard for her to control this thing, but I don’t think it’s fair to subject her friends to such hurtful words. So these days I’m really straight with her about it. I’ve explained that I’ll only let her have play dates if I’m observing that she’s using all the self control tools we work on in therapy, and I’m seeing her actually making good choices. That’s been going on recently, so I jumped on this play date offer. Jesse was really worried about how she’d do, but everyone was happy when I picked her up. She reported to me that she never said anything mean to L–, except once during the school day she ran to the bathroom, which is “sort of my private place”, because she really really needed to say it! She got in a stall and blurted it once, “I hate L–!”, and then she was able to take a deep breath and get a grip on it.

Hurray, I told her. Great job facing this challenge and succeeding! I’m so proud of you! Never mind that she put on a nice little freak show in the potty at school. And now I also know that she has a go-to spot in the school can for venting her compulsions. Great.

There was a time when I would have put this in a proper perspective. I would have gone off the deep end about kindness and kind words, battering Jesse with my verbal diarrhea as feelings of helplessness and directionless rage filled my heart, wondering what the hell is wrong with my child and will she end up in prison someday? On wings of anger, I would have circled back to the gym episode and blathered at her about getting along and doing what you’re told to do, just like all the other nervous little kids, instead of being a selfish little wanker trying to ruin a fun thing for everyone. I would have punctuated my tirade with a rising chorus of WHY’s, going on until I had fully indulged my own infantile feelings. Then, in a screaming coda, I would have sent Jesse sobbing to her room and stormed off somewhere by myself, my work of shredding my little girl’s spirits done, wondering why she turned out like this and feeling like complete shit. We would have spent weeks trying to sort through the emotional wreckage I created.

But that was the good old days. I honestly just feel happy today. I do feel like it’s another banner day for Jesse, despite her anxiety and tics and whatever else is going on in her intense, dark soul. Behavior modification therapy is working, slowly and inexorably. I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to thank her patient therapist, Dr. Abrams, without bursting into tears. I think I might even be making a difference myself, in a good way. I think I might not be a complete f@*#-up as a mom anymore.

Nothing good can come of this sort of cheerful, up-beat attitude. Next thing you know, I’ll be telling people what an amazing parent I am, and I’ll be trying to give people advice. When that starts happening, there will be no hope left.

I hate the phrase “use your words.” A few years ago when I was still paying some attention to the world around me, I used to hear moms saying “use your words” all the time. It started to take on the quality of a sort of Druidic incantation in my mind, echoing around playgrounds as a white noise chant, interrupted only by the high pitched shrieks of little tortured souls having trouble sharing.

I hated it because inevitably the mom I was hearing would say “use your words” to her child precisely because said child had lost the ability to use words and was in the middle of a tremendous emotional meltdown, at which point the directive meant as much to the child as hearing mommy say, “honey, speak a poem to me of 14 rhyming lines, using iambic pentameter. NOW.”

But cultural osmosis has caused the phrase to flow inexorably into my brain, and once in a while it pops out my mouth without my even knowing it was coming, like an unexpected fart. This morning during our daily mommy-child bed wallow, Nick rolled himself onto Jesse and squashed her painfully. “Nick!” She snapped. He continued to squash. “Niick!” Nothing. “Niiiiick!! Niiiiiick!!” Still nothing.

I interjected. “Use your words, Jesse. Use words to tell him what you want.”

Bleah. There was the use-your-words fart, stinking up the air in my bedroom.

She complied. “Niiiick! Get off me! You’re hurting me!” And like magic, it worked. He got off.

Okay okay, I’m full of shit. What actually happened is, after Jesse spoke those words, I realized Nick was going to ignore her. So I just pulled him off her. I could go off on a tangent about direct and indirect causality, but I won’t.

Now that Nick was off her, I added, “Seeee? You finally used your words and it DID work!”

Oh no you didn’t, Carla! Yes, I did. I made it a double fart, and a didactic one at that. Double stinky. Even worse, for reasons I can’t possibly explain, I was being all cheerful and up-beat about it, like I was channeling Kathy Lee Gifford’s chirpy voice and making Michelle Bachmann eyeballs. It was so wrong.

Jesse paused for a perfect beat before answering me, speaking slowly and with a mild tone of recrimination, like she was addressing a Very Stupid Person: “‘Nick’ is a word.”

TKO.

Honest, I’m not out of ideas. I just needed to wash the filters on my Dyson. Washable filters sound like such a great idea, but they need 24 hours to dry, which means my ‘cuum is out of commission until tomorrow at 3:01 pm.

Shit. It’s only been 15 minutes since I cleaned the filters, and I feel a desperate need to vacuum. I spied the glitter Jesse spilled in the basement, and a thousand dried play doh crumbs are all over the carpet in the same region.

If the Dyson were functional, I’d be ignoring the glitter and play doh brazenly. I’d walk right by it and think things like, “huh, I should probably do something about that.” On tough days I might stop to stare dumbly for a second, and then continue on while reassuring myself that I DID remember to restock the liquor cupboard. That sort of procrastination can go on for weeks in my world.

But now I’ll be thinking constantly about that mess, and waiting for the chance to suck it up, for the next 23-and-a-quarter hours.

I use a lot of irony, mostly in the form of feigned ignorance, to help me stay calm with the kids. It’s my private joke, a place inside me that’s mocking my children, and they don’t seem to get it. I know I’m being mean, like teasing a dog, but it’s so much better than screaming at them.

Kids are so literal, despite their wide-open imaginations. Kids love “opposites” games, but my sense is that they don’t really understand the humor of irony. It’s the silliness of imagining daddy with his underwear on his head instead of his butt that gets them rolling on the floor. Or it’s a fun oppositional thing to do things like smile after mom yells “I DON’T WANT TO SEE A SINGLE SMILE ON YOUR FACE TODAY!” I can’t wrap my head around it quite right, but I feel like there’s a difference between that and irony.

I rely on feigned ignorance — I love the sound of those two words together — in situations where I used to get really frustrated, sometimes enraged (always inappropriately), by Jesse or Nick heckling me with repeated questions. When I use irony, they’re the ones who get pissed off instead. That makes me feel good all over.

Nick hates it. If he asks me for the hundredth time in an hour if he can play with the iPad, I might answer, “oh. I didn’t know you wanted to play with the iPad.” I work on acting a little surprised, slightly out of touch.
“YES YOU DID, MOMMY!” He’ll yell back.
“No I didn’t.”
“YES YOU DID! I aaaaasked you.”
“No you didn’t.”
“I DIIIIID, mommy!!!”
“Really? I don’t remember that.”
“YES YOU DO! WAAAAAAH.”

Whatever. Score one for mom.

This morning before the drowsies had all worn off, I was rolling around in bed with—

I wish I was about to say “Anthony.” Sometimes it feels hopeless. I met a delightful woman from Virginia some years ago when Jesse was about 2. This mom had shared a family bed with her kids, who were now adults. We chatted about nursing and co-sleeping, and the pressure our culture applies to end those practices much sooner than I wanted to. She encouraged me to stay the course and ignore everything but my own heart, to treasure this and be patient (apply your best southern accent): “I guarantee you, when Jesse is 21, she will NOT be breastfeeding and she will NOT be sleeping in your bed.” She had a healthy long view of things.

Right. What? Oh, so I was rolling around in bed with Jesse and Nick. You know the drill — snuggle, tickle, hug, jump on mommy and crack her spine, etc. Jesse flopped on her back, relaxed and said, “So mommy. I really want to go back to little Grandma’s house.”

GGGGAAAH I’ve had to listen to some version of that every fracking day since before we even left California. It’s literally the first thing Jesse brings up with me every morning (until today), and then all day long until she closes her eyes to sleep. I’m hearing about this at least 30 times a day, no exaggeration, and lots of different versions, including proposals for travel dates. Jesse has been using her full emotional range as well. I’m being heckled.

Today I felt the demons awaken inside me. I fought them down. I took a breath and I answered Jesse sleepily, trying to sound as earnest as possible. “Really? I didn’t know that.” I prepared myself for irritability, whining, a challenge to my memory, all the things that empower me instead of her in these strange battles.

There was a moment of silence as I stared out the window at the rising sun, and then from next to me I heard an easy-going, grown-up chuckle. Jesse was laughing WITH me at my private joke. She got it. We murmured about it as we smiled. I didn’t know an 8 year old could grasp irony. Awesome.

But now I’m having mixed feelings about this. Watching children mature is a magical thing, and I love it. But Jesse has just taken away a really important device in my quest for sanity. It won’t be as fun anymore, since she gets it. Now what am I going to do when she drives me crazy?

I have an irrational fear of flying, which I manage these days by flying with the kids. Don’t all good parents cope by exposing their children to the things they fear most?

Um, anyway, flying with my spawn is very therapeutic. One, the rational part of me knows (or at least hopes) that I wouldn’t expose my children to situations that actually endanger them for no good reason, so this helps me remember that flying isn’t actually that dangerous.

Two, I can’t act anxious because of Jesse’s unerring anxiety radar. Once she senses my anxiety, she turns it on me and the world around her like a toxic mushroom cloud. Bad, very bad. Also I can’t just act not-anxious superficially, because Jesse sees through that sort of thing. So I have to dig deep and make the pretending as real as I can, calling on distant memories of Stanislofski. A mommy prepares. Pretending hard makes it more real, and I find I’m just not as anxious anymore. Ta-dah. Behavior modification therapy 101.

Three, explaining all the strange noises and bumps to curious kids takes the edge off my own out-of-control feeling. It gets me out of armrest-gripping mode and moves me closer to reality mode.

Four, I think I experience some sort of emotional transference, but I can’t decide if it’s a push or a pull. My kids exasperate me so completely. They don’t listen well and they run around like monkeys. They’re often loud. So that’s the pull option: I’m so anxious about them that I don’t have any anxiety left for flying fear. They’ve used it all up, sucking it out of me like leeches.

The push option is that I’ve simply transferred my pre-existing anxiety about flying onto my poor hapless children, who actually behave as well as other kids during air travel. In this scenario, I’m obviously the problem, overreacting to completely tolerable behavior and unfairly maligning Nick and Jesse, who deserve more tolerance and patience of me. I’m giving this some thought…

Nah. I think I’ll keep blaming the kids for now. I’m not mature enough yet to face emotional reality on this one.

Saying my parents had a “rocky” relationship doesn’t get it quite right. It’s more like they stood tethered together on cliff’s edge, never able to decide whether they should push each other off or jump together.

When I was in high school, they went through an especially bad spell after a massive fight, probably about finances. It was intolerable. For weeks they wouldn’t even look at each other. I don’t remember a single word passing between them. Dad slept on the living room sofa. One day during this episode, I asked Mom point blank why she didn’t just divorce Dad. Mom told me melodramatically that they were only staying together “for the children.” I was so miserable that I replied, please don’t do me any favors. If you love me, get a divorce NOW, because I can’t live like this.

No one ever listens to me. They stayed together. They patched up that rent in the fabric of their relationship, and they kept the fight/get-along loop going until Dad died, about 40 years into their marriage.

Some time in my 20’s or early 30’s, while Anthony and I were visiting my parents (probably for Christmas), we suffered through the fight half of the loop. During this part of the cycle, each of my parents typically came to me with their complaints. I suppose I’m glad they were open with me, but I really hated listening to them bitch about each other. As Anthony and I were debriefing on it in private, I wondered aloud why they even stayed married when they were always so unhappy together. Wasn’t divorce the only sensible option?

Anthony looked at me with that special bemused look that tells me he’s thinking, how can someone as smart as you be so stupid?

“Don’t you know why, Carla?” he asked me. NO, I replied emphatically, I have no idea why! Anthony responded with a gentle sweetness in his voice I didn’t expect. “Isn’t it obvious they love each other?”

(Have I mentioned yet that Anthony is a perfect human being? Okay, I take that back, but look. My friend Phyllis told me recently that I’m among the approximately 5 percent of women who DON’T think their husbands are assholes. Damn.)

Anthony’s astonishing insight rocked my world. He was right, of course. I never saw my parents – or their fights – the same way again. Mom and Dad were grumpy in love. Instead of only seeing the grousing and bitching anymore, I also started noticing the little giggles and the big laughs. I watched them hang out together like old comfortable dogs, and also exchange sweet little kisses like prepubescent teenagers. I peeked around corners to catch these moments. Thanks to Anthony, I had a chance to spy on their grumpy love affair in its twilight years. It was anything but perfect, but it was enough.

I hope I’ll write someday soon about how they met in Korea, the sweet and curious stories they told me — never talking together, but only in separate and very private conversations with me — about how they wooed one another. Those stories, most of which I heard even as I advocated for divorce, never took root in my heart.  I guess I thought of them as fairytales. It didn’t occur to me that my parents were sharing them not so much to inform me of something lost, but to remind themselves of the deep, unbroken roots in their own hearts. Maybe they were also asking me, in some inchoate way, to stop being so cynical about them.

My mom was stoic at Dad’s funeral. I don’t think she shed a single tear. We muddled through, and she even made a few jokes with me. A man came through the receiving line, weeping. I held and comforted him, which was strange in itself. He moved on and I asked Mom who he was to be so upset. Mom leaned over to whisper in my ear with a twinkle in her eye, “He’s just crying like that because he’s having a quadruple bypass next week.”  (Dad had the same a few weeks before he died.)

I remember Mom standing next to Dad’s coffin as they prepared to close it. I couldn’t go near his body. I should have been beside her, but I just couldn’t. I didn’t have the courage to feel his cold body; I didn’t think I could stay on my feet. I was weak, but not Mom. She stood firm, silent, still, looking down at Dad’s face for an unendurable length of time. Her hands rested quietly and peacefully on the edge of the coffin. I have no idea what she was thinking.

But my guess is, she was saying goodbye to her devoted lover and best friend of half a century. Simple as that.

I never went to daycare or had an official nanny. In Korea I had grandma, and also we had a live-in housemaid who did de facto duty as my nanny. We were taught to call the maid “ohn-nee,” which means big sister. The first maid I remember, Song-Ja, was someone I truly loved, and I was heartbroken when she left us to go have her own life, never to be seen again. Among other things, like reading and two-wheeling, she taught me to skip properly. I must have complained to her about my one-sided half limp-skip, so she held my two hands in hers and let me mirror-image her until I got it right. We giggled and giggled, and we romped around the yard skipping triumphantly when I got it right.

For some reason, that’s an important moment in my life — perhaps a spot of kindness and attention that lifted me up — and I got to relive it a couple years ago when Jesse developed the same gimpy-skip. It felt like a call of love and thanks to Song-Ja, over time and space, when I grabbed Jesse’s hands and we cheerfully skipped together until she got it right, girly giggles and all.

I’ve been both mom and nanny to my children, which is a bit of a surprise. I quit working only a month or two before I got knocked up with Jesse. After 12 committed years of lawyering, no one really knew how parenthood would suit me. My mom and Anthony placed bets that I would be back to work within 6 months (Anthony) or 3-months-I-guarantee-it (Mom). I thought they were in the right ballpark, but in my heart I was committed to about 9 months before I thankfully delegated parenting to a well-paid third party bearing the title “nanny.”

But then (doom-and-monster music overlay): Jesse happened. I got Jesse’ed. Everything about her was a challenge. She nursed constantly and she pooped even more. She had reflux, and she acted colicky. She needed constant human touch, CONSTANT. She was covered in painful rashes from head to toe; she had repeated ear infections; she had clogged tear ducts. She was late to solids, well over a year. She refused anything but breast, fresh. No pumped milk would do. At 7 months, I tried joining a gym so I could at least work out. Each of the 4 times I went, Jesse screamed at the gym daycare staff without pause for 20 minutes until they came to get me, and then she spent the following week recovering from some sort of illness.

Knowing now what we do about Jesse’s food allergies, severe anxiety, and behavioral quirks, it seems clear that Anthony and I did the right thing when we quickly conceded defeat and became enslaved by parenthood. 8 years and 8 months after Jesse was born, I’m still an unemployed housewife.

I admit that the control-freak in me would probably have had trouble letting go to nannies. Also I do love being as connected to my kids as I am. All parents should be as lucky as me, to be spending so much hypothetically-quality time with their beloved children. But damn, there’s a big part of me that wishes I popped spawn that just couldn’t wait for the nanny to show up. I would have hired the best nanny I could buy — someone who reminded me most of Song-Ja — and said goodbye cheerfully Monday through Friday, looking forward to delightful weekends and never even knowing what I was missing.

I wrote a post about a week ago and made a big typo. I wrote “complement” instead of “compliment”, over and over again. I do know the difference. I was tired and rushed, and I just spelled it wrong. In context, any reasonable reader would have known what I meant. Still, it was kind of embarrassing. I’ve fixed it, but it got me stewing helplessly about a mindset that I find fantastically, roll-my-eyes-and-make-gag-me-fingers irritating: the smug, I’m-smarter-than-you, finger-wagging grammar nazi. I can’t get it out of my head, so I must lance this boil. Please forgive me as I vent.

I’m not talking about people who kindly correct others, like my friend Steph who pointed out my mistake. (thank you, Steph.) I’m talking about the smug assholes who circulate smug memes about “grammar” and make smug generalized fun of folks who can’t get it right. George Takei went through a phaser of doing this, for instance, and I stopped being as interested in his ever-so-popular Facebook posts. There, I’ve said it.

I’m a recovering grammar nazi myself. As a lawyer I was a ruthless editor, especially of my own work. I felt (still do) that if your audience has power over you AND may include grammar nazis, then you ought to write to their rules so they don’t get distracted from what you’re trying to convey by something silly like a misplaced comma. But at some point it dawned on me that people who get distracted by that sort of thing are looking for excuses to be distracted, because frankly, most common grammar errors don’t really cause readers or listeners to become confused.

Here are some of the reasons I think it’s incredibly lame to be a grammar nazi:

1. A lot of the jive talk I see from so-called grammarians is actually about spelling. Saying you’re a grammar smartypants because you know the difference between their and there is like saying you’re an astrophysicist because you know the order of the planets in our solar system. Grammar is commonly defined as having to do with how words are put together in sentences. That’s a matter of syntax, structure, and linguistics, not the collection of letters one writes down to help a reader identify a word. If you focus heavily on the morphology angle, one could argue that spelling is part of the study of grammar, but they’re called spelling bees, not grammar bees. I personally wouldn’t conflate spelling and the linguistic structure of a language. Yes, I tried to use fancy words and sound extra smart in this paragraph. Right now, do you share my feeling that I sound like a smug, trying-to-sound-smarter-than-I-am wanker who’s actually full of shit?

2. If indeed your grammar nazi’ing is about spelling, odds are pretty good you’re just making fun of a dyslexic. I’m married to one, and I gave birth to at least one (jury’s still out on Nick). The dyslexic has trouble hearing the separate sounds in a word, so the phonetics of a written word make little sense without hard, ongoing training. The reading disability is also frequently accompanied by word retrieval issues and, understandably, anxiety. A dyslexic who trains her brain to sound things out feels REALLY GOOD about being able to spell a word phonetically, even if it’s spelled wrong. Then she has to wrap her head around the idea that the same-sounding word might be spelled two different ways, like too and two or it’s and its or their and there or then and than, which creates significant word retrieval problems. And also if she’s on social media she knows there’s a healthy cohort of peeps taking pleasure in putting her down. Well goody for you, grammar nazi. I hope you feel good about making fun of someone with a hard-wired reading disability.

3. Even if you’re picking on actual grammar, odds are still good you’re making fun of someone who has a legitimate reason for not being grammatically correct all the time. Maybe an immigrant, for instance. There’s interesting research on how difficult it is to “get” the linguistic structure of a language after the youthful years. As an adult you can memorize a kabillion words in a foreign language, but it’s almost impossible to gain true grammatical fluency. So if you want to pick a grammar fight, maybe you’d be well-served by trying to, say, go to China and speak Mandarin for a while, and see how it feels to have a Chinese grammar nazi call you down for being an idiot, when the actual problem is you’re from somewhere else. The grammar nazi and the xenophobe, joined as one.

Or maybe you’re making fun of someone who hasn’t grown up in circumstances where he was exposed to standard, uppity, proper English. Poverty is a powerful force, especially when it lands you in crappy schools. Making fun of people for having poor grammar, when they haven’t had an adequate opportunity to learn good grammar, is an asshole move.

Worse yet, the grammar nazi might just be making fun of someone who has an intellectual deficit, what we used to call IQ deficit or mental retardation. Not. Nice.

4. Everyone makes mistakes. Hence, hard core grammar nazis might as well lie down on their backs and spit. I have a neighbor who’s a self-professed grammar nazi. She regularly bad-mouths other people’s grammar errors. Last year she posted something on Facebook making fun of a published author for writing in bad English. In that very post, she constructed a sentence so convoluted that she had to put a comma exactly between the subject and verb for it to make sense. There was no irony or humor. It made her look like a self-righteous, hypocritical, smug boob. To me, at least.

5. If I can figure out what the person is saying to me, then in most settings I should be satisfied, because the purpose of language is to convey a message of some kind. Sure, I prefer standard English, but could Faulkner have written The Sound and the Fury in proper English without losing something?

6. It was not uncommon in my experience for some lawyers to poke fun at opposing counsel’s English in written submissions to courts. Usually, it meant the poker didn’t have enough substantive arguments to make. And most judges readily overlooked writing errors and focused instead on substance and merit. They were substance nazis. I too find that I’m more impressed by badly stated substance than well-written fluff.

I could go on, but my boil has been lanced. That’s a relief.

Listen, if you ever catch me grammar nazi’ing, you know what to do: mock me, head slap me, give me a laxative, tell me to f** off. Whatever it takes.