Boys In Business

The boys have set up shop in the living room. It began in one corner with Nelson opening The Pokémon Shop. He sat in a Cracker Barrel rocking chair from Grandma Judy, behind a bench I bought from an elementary school craft show, wearing a $2 baseball cap from Target. He is wearing an old pair of my glasses with the lenses popped out. He spared no expense with presentation.

He positioned his biz just inside the back door, a lucrative location, catching his parents at least 20 times a day letting a cat in or out. Behind him, the bookshelf, another draw for his mother, quarters heavy in her hand.

He’s selling Pokémon cards. Ones that were handed down to him from a friend. For the first time, he’s in the driver’s seat of his brother’s life. He’s got something his brother wants. Desperately. And so, in a shocking turn of entrepreneurial spirit, the 7 year old set up shop during a commercial break of Beyblades.

The dynamics of the business world are alive and well, even in this small below-code operation.

Supply and Demand: Kendall has about 150 Pokémon cards in his hands. New ones, Christmas ones, eBay-coveted ones. But the ones he can’t have, he wants. And they sit guarded by a short man across the room. Demand is high. Supply is low. The cards climbed from a reasonable 25 cents each to a Star-Wars-wallet-breaking full dollar in less than 15 minutes.

Insurance: Nelson is running a clean, bright storefront. His quarters are sorted to one side, flat, heads up, a bottle of water on hand for long negotiations. He awoke this morning, his second day of business, and literally danced with possibility. “Open for business!” rang through the house from a businessman in camo footie pajamas. But when it was time to close for breakfast, he took no chances: “Mom,” he said, “I have 19 quarters. Make sure I have 19 when I get back.” He cast a furtive glance at his brother and ate Cap'n Crunch.

Marketing: Nelson has two piles of cards. Ones that are “in” stock and those that are “out” of stock. In stock are the ones he can’t read or can’t pronounce. Out of stock are the ones he wants to keep for himself but keeps in full view. I notice these “rare” cards become mysteriously IN stock if anyone shows up with a green dollar bill.

Competition: Within an hour, Kendall set up The Pokémon Trader at the corner of Love Seat and End Table. His location is a respectable distance but a harrowing threat. However, he is not selling cards. Instead, for 25 cents you are welcome to browse his world-class collection. For 50 cents, he is willing to part with an assortment of Pokémon plush toys also handed down to us. I am impressed. A business with low overhead and its own niche. Well played.

The Crash: About an hour into day two, the coin jar is empty at the Chapple House, I have a nice inventory of over-priced Pokémon and two disgruntled shop owners. The manual labor of manning a storefront is weighing heavy. The breaks are getting longer and the dream is getting smaller. I can see the test of their work ethic is at hand. The reality is harsh and the rocking chair is hard.

Finally, from the corner, after a long drought of no customers, Nelson declares this:

“If no one comes to my store, I’ll run out of business and I’ll have to sell my MONEY!”

I sit on the couch and, with no fanfare, agree. I’m secretly pleased. I just gave him a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Management for about 5 bucks out of the coin jar.

Mopping the floor. For once.

There was a little throwdown at Popcorn Friday at the elementary school last week.

With five moms and one dad huddled around a popcorn maker and 400 brown bags of popped kernels, the subject of housecleaning came up.

One mom pointed out that another — the brunette holding a shaker of “Ranch” flavoring in her hand — did not mop her kitchen floor.

A little sigh of recognition went through the group.

Then came the rest: “She wipes it by hand.”
This caused a disturbance to rifle through the group of moppers. I feared the woman would be banned from Popcorn Friday.

What’s wrong? she asked.

Nothing, we assured her, looking away.

I didn’t want to admit that I’d just paid my kids $1 each to wipe the floor the day before and that was still twice as good as I’d done in a year.

Here’s how the child labor went down: I’ve never wiped a kitchen floor without a child crossing it and careening onto his back, usually moments after I’ve warned one boy or another to stay off of it. Usually as I’m speaking the warning, they are nodding their heads in agreement and continuing their pursuit of injury at full speed.

So I thought, not only can they fall on it this time, they can clean it. 

I broke it into baby steps for them:

Move the Chairs. Simple enough: move the dining table chairs off the linoleum and onto the living room carpet. Do not, I repeat, do not take the time and precision needed to construct a shelter built to weather the Oregon Trail while I stand here and wait for you to complete this mission.

*While they build the fort with the chairs, go ahead and change the bed sheets. They’ll be pulling the comforters off anyway due to the sturdy, truss-free construction offered by a queen size.

Pick up the shoes at the front door. This means put them on the shoe rack. Left and right, side by side, a pattern pretty much like what you’re walking on.

*While they are searching for a bouncy ball they found in Dad’s shoe, which they ricocheted to the top of the cupboards, go ahead and put the shoes on the rack.

Pick up the cat dishes. This will alert the cats to the possibility of a feeding. A race will unfold, involving one very unwieldy calico and a cat that is such a flat, bottomless gray that she always has the same expression on her face. She will look ticked whether the kids feed her or not.

*While they carry the cats and the food bowls into their fort, add vacuuming the carpet to your to-do list.

Sweep. At least once in your parenting career, you’ll make the mistake of asking your children to sweep while they are still shorter than the broom. There’s a 100 percent chance that they will hit something with the handle while arguing with you that they know what they are doing.

*While you are re-magnetizing everything to the front of the fridge, you’ll see a well-defined line of sand left where they tried to mount the front of the dustpan. When you cross to inspect it, your bare feet will gather even more sand. The floor will feel (and be) dirtier than when you started.

Mop. Just kidding. Of course they can’t mop. They are spilling the bucket of water in the fort as we speak.

Now, you want to know about the inset picture? That’s me, drying the floor after mopping it myself in a bid to keep the children from killing themselves on it when they came roaring out of the fort.

Note to all Popcorn Friday moms: This is the closest to hand washing I get most days.

Book Excerpt: The Forgotten Present

Here's another scene for my book (maybe!). This is true and so true about my mother! I love thinking back to all the birthday gifts she gave us when we got older. The older we got, the funnier it got. My dad once estimated there were "at least 250" gifts under the Christmas tree. Birthdays weren't much calmer. Today is the 5th anniversary of saying good-bye to her. I miss her so much.

~

Lainey was secretly dreading her birthday. Every milestone without her mother was sharp and bittersweet, another year without her, another year closer to her mother’s age, age 42, when she’d been diagnosed.

On the surface, she made a lot of fanfare about Thursday, when she would turn 37. Oh, the spoiling she would receive. She ribbed the boys, asking for pink Legos and pink Beyblades. She had decided, again secretly, that because she could not beat them, she would join them, this houseful of boys. If she couldn’t convince them to sit and read a book or bake a cake, she would at least infiltrate their world with color.

But when Thursday came, she woke at 6 a.m., an hour before the alarm would sound, and stared at Nick, willing him to open his eyes and wish her happy birthday, willing him to open his eyes and forget. She felt a rise of panic in her chest when he rolled and sighed and pulled up the covers. It was a strange sensation, one of stirring and fear, one of inevitability.

He awoke then and saw her face, just inches from his. “Morning, birthday girl,” he said and smiled halfway before going back to sleep.

She felt a full, happy, rushing love, so grateful was she to have this man next to her on this day, every day. But she fought it, held it in check. She was afraid to breathe too deeply, to take too much.

The boys came romping in then. They jumped and elbowed and kicked their way under the covers. Lainey liked the distraction. They had forgotten it was her birthday and it offered her a reprieve.

She kissed and snuggled them until Nick woke again and pulled their ears close and whispered. And the boys complied, belting out the birthday song and looking under the bed for her presents, betraying that they knew where she kept theirs.

Her presents would wait, Nick declared, until after school. And with a thunder they were gone. Nick headed to the shower but he stopped when he saw her still there, not following the boys to the kitchen.

“What are you doing today?” he asked.

She didn’t answer and when she didn’t, he sat on her side of the bed and put one arm over her.

The tears came then, tight and harsh. But they stayed inside, in her throat, in her eyes. Lainey looked at Nick and said nothing. He looked at her and saw everything.

“I’ll go shopping with my sisters,” Lainey said. “Like we used to.” Lainey barely got this out, her voice pitching with tears. She looked away, out the window. Nick nodded, quiet.

“Go shower,” she breathed, anxious to rid herself of witnesses.

And when he was gone, she lay there and let the days with her mom come into her chest, her face, her fingers. She tried to feel what she might have felt on this day five years ago. She didn’t let herself go back like this very often any more. She stayed above it, in front of it, as much as she could. To let the slide start was tricky business. Yet it felt delicious: to allow herself the sweet memory of her mother and her sisters, a merry jumble of women and laughter and bitchiness and, on days like this, shopping and fuzzy navels.

She lay still and took it then, head on. The loss and the longing. The feeling built in her chest and still, she held on. She closed her eyes and imagined lunch with her mother, or dinner. Her mother buying too many presents, the kitchen table full of bags and tissue paper so deep it was hard to see who gathered round it. Her father grumbling and watching the news at the far end of the party, out of sight. Her mother would fuss and forget, just one more, that’s right, there was still one in the bedroom, Lainey, wait, there’s one more.

The memories made her nervous at first, to know the crushing sadness that would come with them, after them. But she stayed with it, through the butterflies in her stomach and past them, until she felt her mother, with her family, dinner on the stove behind her, her daughters setting the table. Lainey would celebrate her birthday in this way, by letting herself remember.

And she found, as she lay there, that she could hold more sadness now, the happiness cupping it, bearing it, reaching around it. She leaned into the space, seeing how far she could go, relieved to have found a spot she could curl into.

She stayed like this until she heard the boys start to fight in the next room and then wrestle, followed by the contagious sound of one's laughter and the thump of another falling off the horseyback of his brother.

Lainey rolled out of bed, then, sat on the edge and let her eyes dry. She stood and walked to the closet, the boys deconstructing the couch in the distance. Lainey decided she would make breakfast wearing the last pair of slippers her mother had given her, red and fuzzy.

And as she dug through the closet, she found it.

A sleeping bag. For Nelson. One she’d bought for his birthday a month ago. A present she had forgotten to give him, the thought lost in the gift wrap that garnished the length of the bed the morning of his birthday.

Mom, she thought. She dropped to her knees and pulled the sleeping bag onto her lap, hugging it against her chest. She laughed into the quiet of the closet. Age 37 and here with her boys, with their jumble of shouts and jumps and Legos.

And, with her mother. Yes, she thought. My mother is here, with me, with my family.

My iPad, My Wrath

An iPad scuffle caught on camera:

I got an iPad for Christmas! Remember that editorial I wrote about only getting one present for Christmas? Turns out that’s A-OK if it’s an iPad. Tim certainly knows how to play this game.

I’m loving it. There's only one thing that stands between me and full enjoyment of that iPad: my children.

There’s Fruit Ninja, Angry Birds and DoodleJump that call their name. However, this is a legitimate business write-off and the iPad will be used for conducting business correspondence only. Such as posting my high score for Fruit Ninja to the GTWoman Facebook page.

Well, I'm tired of the constant battle for my only Christmas toy, so I've decided to institute an “invitation only” rule. They cannot get on my iPhone or iPad without an invitation. You don’t invite yourself over to someone’s house, you don’t invite yourself to someone’s party, you don’t invite yourself on my iAnything.

Agreed?

Amazingly, this is working for me. I am shocked to realize they understand that it is mine (only thing, ever). Sure, they’ll lean into my shoulders, one on each side, while I’m on it, to the point that I can’t actually move my arms and operate it, but still, it is mine.

Or sometimes they’ll pick it up gently from the countertop, travel the harrowing four feet to the living room, hold it in their lap, and burn holes in the side of my face with their pupils.

But they do not OPEN the cover for fear of my wrath.

My wrath goes something like this: 

1. Head whips sharply. Works best if hair flips over forehead in erratic pattern.

2. Eyebrows shoot up. I did not just see you open that, did I?

3. Lips set. Pressure making lips disappear altogether into the face of fury.

4. Hand held out. Give it to me. Fingers stiff, death by Pinky.

5. Eyes bug out. Make eyes look as large as inhumanly possible. An alien force has entered their mother’s body and there is no accounting for what will happen next.

6. Silence. Deafening silence. My arm is starting to shake with anger (and effort), my eyes are drying out, but I’m enjoying myself. How ugly can I make myself look?

7. Stand-Off. At this point I’m having more fun than any iPad app. I’ve got a fair amount of improv theater invested in the moment and I’m in no hurry to end this. Let’s just see how hard they can push.

About now is when a banner alert beeeeep comes in. I pounce on the child and yank it from his hands. Momma has work to do, stand back!

Wait. Looks like there’s an update for Angry Birds.

Slide… App Store… updates… install …password… waiting… loading…  the blue bar….

Game on.

So. Who wants to play with Momma?

Mom's Handwriting

I just had my friend Barb mail me a Christmas card my mother sent her years ago. It's a TREASURE! If you have an old card or letter my mom sent you and would like to pass it back to me, I would treasure it. Please let me know. Seeing her handwriting and her thoughts and her life at that time would mean so much to me. ♥

I wrote this passage below after I got it. It might go in my book, who knows! It was hard to read the card, but nice to feel close to my mom. I will tuck this card into my Christmas decorations box and find it new again each year. Thank you to my friend Missy for such a perfect idea.

~

The handwriting was in blue ink, by a pen that was spotty and uncooperative. But her mother had written through the fading in and out of it, two sides worth. Lainey liked that, the optimism it implied, that she would carry on her conversation with the pen and the page regardless of what either thought of it.

The Christmas card was seven years old, sent to her by her mother’s friend Barb who had come across it in an old drawer. Lainey did the math. It would have been the last Christmas card her mother had written to her. Lainey’s stomach turned at the thought. That her mother had written a long, cheerful note, and not a word of it about how her body was betraying her. How this card sounded like any other year, any of the countless years her mother sent out cards. It was a small, envelope-sized picture of her mother’s strength. Maybe, Lainey thought, at the end, you go back to the things that comfort, the things that work. The growing kids and the new snowmobiles and the neighbor’s dog.

Her mother wrote of Lainey and her sisters, her husband and her neighbors. And then she wrote of her two grandsons and Lainey stopped reading to touch the words on the page, shocked and comforted by this, this concrete evidence that her mother and sons had lived in the same lifetime.

Some days Lainey worried that she couldn’t remember a single word her mother had said to her children, or they to her. But there had been thousands. Thousands of words and kisses and hugs and minutes. Her mother had lived to see Kendall reach 4 and Nelson 2. Had Nelson spoken much at that age? Lainey was pressed to remember something specific. How would her boys remember if she couldn’t? But here, the card said it was so. Her mother had been here with them, it was as simple as that. She took that feeling and held on to it, thinking of her boys in her mother's kitchen, underfoot, laughing, her mother pulling them on her lap while she rocked in the living room, kissing their soft hair.

Lainey closed the Christmas card and recognized the cover design, having signed fifty of them for her mother, their writing then nearly identical. She had signed card after card, a simple “Judy and Barry” while she sat on one side of the kitchen table, and her mother sat, sick, on the other, insisting that she write some cards with personal notes. Lainey had forgotten about this, the last round of cards sent as a team effort. And it caught her breath to think that she could have easily opened this old card to find her own writing.

But she hadn’t. It was her mother’s, the writing so pretty and consistent that it would be a font a designer might use. Lainey’s handwriting was nothing like it anymore, sharp and hesitant from years of little use. The writing was like her mother, soft and warm and unassuming. The kind you read and folded up and saved to revisit again.

Lainey finished reading the card, twice, and then she let the sadness come as she stood in the driveway, her long dirt driveway, and cried. She wondered if her neighbors might come out to see what was wrong and hoped they would, the chance to share her mother’s writing welcome. But she stood alone in the January afternoon, an unseasonably warm breeze in the air, holding her mother’s hand in her own hand, cherishing it.

 

GTW Editorial: 2012 Resolution Repeats

Do you remember two years ago when we listed our 2010 Resolutions? Neither do we. So we thought we’d revisit them and see what 730 days of diligent behavior gets you:

 1. We will not wait until the last minute to write the editorial.
Not True. We fear the day the printer accidentally prints the initial draft of our issue where we send a blank editorial page with nothing but the word “Surprised?” written on it.

2. We will not promise everyone an article in the magazine and then have Kandy worry about the true space available.
Not True. Kandy still promises a story to nearly everyone she meets, even some she doesn’t. This behavior has become viral, like a YouTube video. So, if she promises you a story, can you gently tell her, “Promise nothing.” It’s the new motto around here and we’d like if it you could help Kandy remember it.

3. We will not wait to find something to wear to our own events the hour before we are to arrive.
Not True. In fact, Kerry found a silica gel pack inside her left shoe 20 minutes into a luncheon last month.

4. We will finally order name tags that are legible.
Not True. We gave up on nametags altogether. I’m Kandy, she’s Kerry.

5. We resolve, when asked to partake in a bowl-a-thon, to train for it.
Again, not true. We not only lost at raising the most funds this year in the BBBS Bowl For Kids Sake, we lost at knocking down the most of those little white things. We have put in a formal request that they consider Laser Tag For Kids Sake in 2012. We figure this would minimally allow for better photo opps. (Vests and guns, what’s not to like?)

6. We resolve to have more staff meetings.
Not true. We haven’t had a staff meeting in two years. Unless you count gathering once a month with our “staff” of 120-140 women, having lunch or wine with them. The more we think about it, our monthly GTW events are more productive than nearly every other meeting at every other job we’ve ever had. Turns out when no one’s looking, we appear to have a plan.

7. We will not bring work home with us.
Not true. While Kandy was typing this in her living room she was momentarily stunned by a Nerf bullet to the right ear. (Laser tag training not looking so hot.) Working from home has actually improved our quality of life, giving our children easier and more frequent targets.

8. We resolve to end each luncheon on time.
TRUE! People, do you see this? TRUE. Hallelujah we have met one of our goals! Wow, there is excitement unfurling here not unlike a parade.

9. We resolve to honor the Network Nite “after party.”
Another TRUE! Jackpot! So proud that we committed to more parties, the toughest resolution of all, and persevered.

Well there you have it. Two down, seven to go. We figure there’s no reason to write any more resolutions. At this rate, we’ve got another seven years of work in front of us. But never fear, when we are feeling weak and overwhelmed in the face of change, we will stand back and hold forth the strength and commitment we have shown in the last two years. In the New Year, we wish you the same.