He Can Also Set Things On Fire By Looking At Them

If you read any parenting books on 3 year-olds, you will notice a theme: independence. Apparently, at the ripe old age of three, a child no longer wants mom or dad to do everything for him. According to these parenting books, parents are supposed to encourage this developmental stage so that when the child turns 18, he will hopefully move far away to attend Harvard on a full scholarship.

Great. I'm all for Mike wanting to get himself dressed and attempting to make his own peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch. But with a three year-old, a little independence goes a loooong way. And if you should dare to hurry the aforementioned three year-old along by, say, grabbing a cherry yogurt for him out of the refrigerator, his head will spin completely around while his forked tongue shoots out of his mouth hissing at you. Because those cherry yogurts in your refrigerator? Well, let's just say that each container is WAY different than the others. And apparently, only your little fork-tongued damien child is able to discern any difference.

The largest part of the problem with all of this independence seeking is that 99.9% of three year-olds aren't exactly high scorers in the logic department. AND, while they can walk and talk and use the potty and sleep in big boy beds and make up fantastic stories (like telling a complete stranger that I used to give him baths by throwing him in the washing machine), most three year-olds still express their anger and frustration a lot like my 8 month-old does -- by screaming, yelling, hitting, and kicking.

The combination of wanting to do things on one's own coupled with a complete inability to reason or express oneself results in much discord -- at least at my house.

To illustrate Mike's problem-solving skills and his amazing self-expression abilities, I've selected a small sample of meltdowns from the past week:

Problem: Mike did not want to leave the park to come home for dinner. 3 year-old solution: A 20 minute drive home from the park during which Mike screamed so loudly that not only did he turn heads the entire ride home, but his voice ECHOED off the buildings downtown. Then 25 more minutes of screaming while he took a time-out.

Problem: Mike wanted to get the towell down himself after his bath. 3 year-old solution: Since I had mistakenly believed I was helping him by doing this for him, he then wanted to take another bath JUST SO HE COULD GET THE TOWELL DOWN HIMSELF. Since another bath was not an option, he delivered a few swift kicks to mom's gut. Also over an hour of yelling.

Problem: Mike did not want the cherry jelly on his PB&J that I made for him and instead wanted the peach jelly that grandma sent. This, in spite of the fact that when I asked him what kind of jelly he wanted, he very clearly answered: "CHERRY." 3 year-old solution: Refusal to consume a bite of food while reminding everyone at the table repeatedly, "I don't like eating."

These are just the larger, more drawn-out 30-minute+ meltdowns. I'm not even going to waste space here going into the approximately 729 mini-meltdowns that have occured over such inane acts on my part as cutting a piece of toast in half when everyone should know that Mike doesn't want it CUT IN LITTLE PIECES {insert much yelling}, or pulling a shirt over his head when everyone should know that Mike can DO IT HIMSELF {insert more yelling} or by putting a top on his cup so he doesn't spill water everywhere when everyone should know that Mike WILL NOT SPILL {more yelling here}. And then when he does spill everywhere, suddenly he is incapable of doing anything himself except standing around yelling, "MOM, CLEAN THIS MESS UP."

Welcome Back

It happens every summer.

On our way back to Chicago to visit my husband’s family, a Chicagoan, who has spent the past several weeks fishing Montana’s waters, hiking our mountain trails, and sleeping under our big sky, asks, “Did you have a good time in Montana?”

When we explain that we actually live in Montana, but used to live in Chicago, the Chicagoan always announces, eyes wide, “Really? That must have been a big change.”

Exactly. Back then, big change was what I was looking for. I was tired of big city life – the expense, the noise, the go-go-go lifestyle. Montana seemed the antithesis of all that; it seemed like a place I could hang my hat and call home for the long haul.

True, I’d never been to Montana but there was something about it that held real allure for me. I don’t know what I expected – the photos of Glacier that everyone sees, men in cowboy hats walking down a dusty Main Street, Brad Pitt casting lines in a thunderous stream. But I am a writer and a diehard romantic and just saying “Montana” made me feel a little light in my very expensive high heels as I clattered up the steps to the el with the thousands of other people heading to their office for the day. The dream of moving to Montana gave me hope for a better life.

But it also made me nervous. I hadn’t lived in a small town in over a decade. In all of the places I had called home over the years, I had been intimately involved in the arts scene, from taking classes to attending openings. I volunteered in box offices and at fundraisers. I held season tickets to theater companies, opera guilds, and symphonies. In my mind, my access to all things artistic and creative were the payoff for everything I hated about big city living.

But, in Montana there was the possibility of Brad Pitt casting flies in a stream, so off I went to Big Sky Country. The reality of the situation, once we got our boxes unpacked and returned our Uhaul, was a little more harsh, as it often is with reality. First, no Brad Pitt – anywhere. I also spent the first year in utter disbelief that the closest sashimi was a seven-hour round trip. When I got my first paycheck, I actually went to the HR person and informed her that there had been a mistake – there was no way that these few dollars could be the salary for which I had actually agreed to work.

But the other reality that hit me as I settled into life in Montana was the amazing number of art and cultural opportunities that existed. If I wanted, I could spend virtually every evening and weekend, as I could in Chicago, running from a first-rate stage production to a cutting edge movie to a thought-provoking speaker to a range of gallery openings. I also had no problem finding like-minded friends – friends who acted, sculpted, took photographs, designed jewelry, and wrote everything from plays to poetry. Montana, it seemed to me, had the best of both worlds – peace and quiet, amazing vistas from pristine mountaintops, and all the art and culture for which a person could hope.

I’ve called Montana home for years now and I hate to admit this, but I’ve become somewhat immune to all that first impressed me about it as a newcomer. I barrel through mountain passes with nary a glance to the valley below. My little town is growing and I find myself grumbling about “out-of-staters” who drive up the real estate prices and clog up city streets. And all of that art and culture? Well, my husband and I now have kids and careers and a fixer-upper on the side of a mountain, which means that I don’t have a lot of time or energy to pursue any high-falutin’ art and culture.

Which brings me back to Chicago. Because every summer when we visit the Windy City, I spend the whole trip shuttling back and forth between children’s museums and the Art Institute and the Field Museum as if Montana is a desert of artistic and cultural opportunities and suddenly I am surrounded by the purest drinking water in the world. The whole experience always gives me pause and I must admit to feeling a pang of jealousy that all of these Chicagoans get to live in a big city and have access to all of this STUFF! 24 hours a day! The theaters! The museums! The culture! It is as if Montana is not even in the same hemisphere as Chicago.

Surrounded by big city lights (not the traffic lights that blink after 9 p.m. as in my town), I feel as if I have been living under a rock for the last several years. And I start to wonder, what, exactly, are we doing in Montana anyway? Are my children going to grow up thinking that the image of a unicorn on black velvet some guy is selling in the gas station parking lot is art? Will they get lower scores on their SATs because they’ve never battled with other kids for a turn at the car wash exhibit at some children’s museum?

It doesn’t take long before I am forced to actually answer these very questions as my in-laws ask the same thing. “You need to expose your kids to more,” they inform me when I admit that my 3 year-old had never been to an aquarium. “How exactly do you fill your days?” they want to know. “There’s more to life than big sky!” they admonish.

It puts me on the defensive. Certainly, Chicago is brimming with every kind of artistic, musical, and cultural encounter we could ever want our boys to experience. And certainly, if we lived in Chicago, we could spend every night of the week and all weekend long running from one museum to a play to an interactive music class. Not to mention, fighting with a bunch of other kids for a chance to pet the shark at the aquarium.

But I am fairly certain that our lives in Chicago would resemble our lives here – except with a lot more traffic, noise, and people. Because just like in Montana, life gets in the way and you lose sight of the amazing opportunities that are just outside your door.

Moving to Montana was a big change, but not as big of a change as I thought. Now, all these years later, many big changes, such as marriage, children, home-owning and career-building, are behind me. But another big change is in front of me – as I take off my blinders and experience, with my boys this time around, all that Montana has to offer – indoors and out. So this is Big Sky Country, where you can spend your time gazing at stars from the side of a mountain or just as easily gazing at world-class sculpture. After all of these years, Montana is really starting to feel like home.

Honey Dippin' Strips

About eight years ago, my friend Jason forwarded an email he had received from a mutual friend named Brent (not to be confused with my husband). Our friend Brent, who is an amazing artist, was fairly freshly minted out of undergrad and had taken a job designing toys. I've saved that email for all of these years and I'm going to put it in here for you in its entirety.

God damn when I first got my apartment, I loved chicken. Every fucking night...chicken salad, chicken fried rice, boiled, broasted, baked, battered...you fucking name it. I made chicken the other night. Nothing fancy. Just honey-dippin strips.

They looked great, smelled great, but when I tried one, I just about blew it. I mean it tasted like shit. Still tasted like chicken, like it always had, but it was as if someone had taken that memorably favorable chicken taste and replaced it with shit....runny, make you dry heave kind of shit. That's not my point though.

My point is that toys were perhaps the only thing in my life that made me really happy. You know, you don't have any negative thoughts associated with your Lego's. That was sacred. When I thought of toys, I thought of innocence and fun...pure, unadulterated joy. I'm 24 years old, probably closer to playing with weeble wobbles than sleeping with fishes and I have developed this horrible, obviously negative association with toys. They have lost their innocence. I create prostititued playthings and god damn, I am tired of it.

I save lots of things that "speak to me." The cartoon that shows a man saying to a future employer, "I am looking for a position where I can slowly lose sight of what I wanted to do with my life -- with benefits." The fortune cookie fortune taped to my computer that says: "Nothing can keep you from reaching your goals." But this email has stuck with me for a long time and every once in a while, sitting in my cube, I pause and think to myself, "My life is honey dippin' strips."

I just "celebrated" my 3-year anniversary at my current position, which is the longest I've ever worked anywhere in my life. I like my job. It's challenging and interesting and stressful. I get to work with a lot of really intelligent and thoughtful folks. And I'm producing some really amazing stuff. I should be happy with that, right? I mean, really, what more can I expect out of a job?

Not much, I suppose, but believe me when I tell you that I never thought I'd be using my creative energy or my writing skills to write annual reports and pithy brochure copy. But, surrounded by rejection letters, I'm really starting to believe that this could be "it." So, I've started applying for full-time work. I guess I'm getting tired of trying and maybe the easy way out is to just swallow hard and turn my attention to something that will move my family forward. Some of the jobs sound interesting, but after the excitement of a new challenge wears off, I know it will just be more of the same. In other words, chicken -- broasted, battered, baked or fried.

My friend Jason sent me another email a few weeks ago, and I keep going back to it. It's another one of those things that "speaks to me" and through job interviews, even the interesting ones, I remember this line: "You are actively pursuing a dream. You will get there one day. You will."

And with that, I know I'm not ready to eat chicken every day for the rest of my life. And so rejections, rejections, rejections -- someday maybe someone will say yes. Here's hoping some future big money employer doesn't say yes first.

Here's the Deal

I’ve been getting a lot of emails from people who are demanding to know why I haven’t written more on this blog lately. I say demanding because some of the emails have not been friendly; in fact, they border on downright hostile.

My personal favorite included a lot of expletives and wondered when I’d get off my “lazy fat ass” and start writing again.

Obviously, this person is a regular reader and knew how to get her point across because if you read this blog on an even semi-regular basis, you would know that I would feel very personally wounded if you were to refer to me as, say, lazy or fat. I mean, it’s one thing when I talk about my own lazy fat ass. When some complete stranger does it, I wish I could do some virtual ass-whooping. To say that I found this email inspiring in many ways would be an understatement.

So since people are asking, here’s what my lazy fat ass has been up to lately:

In case you haven’t noticed, I have two of the world’s most high-maintenance children. I know this because I occasionally go out in public, often covered in baby and pre-schooler slime, and I see other children. And these other children do not act the way my children do. For instance, other children do not insist on walking backward throughout the entire Super Wal-Mart with their head tucked under their own arm in some type of contortionist act. And, for instance, other babies do not stay awake 19 hours a day, during which they use every minute of that 19 hours to apparently try out for the World Wrestling Federation by demonstrating how easy it is to actually remove their mommy’s nose right from her face.

I have also been busy trying to make a living as a writer, which means what little time I do have is spent working on articles and essays that pay actual money. All I get from this blog is self-satisfaction and the occasional nasty email. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, self-satisfaction doesn’t pay the bills, people.

And apparently, neither does my writing. Because the other time-sucker as of late has been therapy to learn how to handle the daily rejection I am facing from editors all across the country. And if you go to therapy, you also know there is a lot of “self-exploration” and “soul-searching” and “self-realization” that you have to do after-hours.

Which leads me to what else has been keeping me busy and not writing blog entries – obsession. At least I call it obsession; the aforementioned therapist calls it one of the above quoted phrases and assures me that deep introspection will lead to enlightenment. But I quite frankly can’t seem to focus on being enlightened because apparently having children has killed more than ¾ of my brain cells or at least rendered them fairly useless, because when I am trying to be introspective, my mind tends to leap to subject matter like what I can make for dinner in four minutes or less, how to convince an editor to actually pay me for what I’ve written or the fact that some yahoo is actually making a living by selling a TV show based on the Geico caveman ads. I mean, really. Can you believe THAT? Then, as I am about to get back to being introspective, my baby wakes up from his approximately 6.3 minutes of slumber and my 3 year-old informs me that he will no longer eat anything except for goldfish crackers and gummy candy in the shape of trucks.

So this, THIS, is my life people and THIS is the reason that I have been sitting on my “lazy, fat ass” not posting blog entries for you to read so you can avoid what you need to do in YOUR life.

And, just as an FYI, all of this child-wrangling, four-minute dinner gathering, writing and editor-contacting, therapy and introspectiveness has also meant that I have approximately 37 seconds a day during which to consume food so that fat ass you were referring to? Well, it’s still fat, but it’s a lot less fat than it was. And it’s getting less and less fat by the day. So there.