I’d have to rank report cards near the top of my Stuff That’s Fun About Parenting list. I love getting their report cards. I devour them in private with a heady and completely insufferable mix of:

a) Yeah, I could have told you that. The child is AWESOME.
b) She did what?!? I know, right?!? The child is AWESOME.
c) A 2? No way, she was robbed. The child is AWESOME.
d) This child must have a terrific mother. The child is AWESOME.

The girls and I make a date out of it. We snuggle up in one or the other’s bed, and we read our favorite parts aloud. This time around, for instance, H’s teacher declared that H’s “gentle and quiet leadership” was an asset to the class.

“GENTLE AND QUIET?” yelled S. We all fell over laughing, especially H, who toppled off the bed, cackling. “Gentle” and “quiet” are not words that accurately reflect her at-home personality, but it makes for good reading, for sure.
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In the faraway eras B.C. and B.H. (Before Children and Before Husband), I went through a particularly awful breakup back in 1996, when I was living just outside of New York City. My boyfriend of five years had just moved out. I asked my mother to care for my dog for a while. I begged her to take him back to Philly just for a few months, because the post-breakup depression was so intense. I felt like I could barely take care of myself, let alone another creature — this one in particular, the most soulful, sensitive dog I’d known, my very first dog, who sat beside me with a worried expression, pawing at my arm as I cried and worked my way through a bulk stash of Kleenex boxes. He missed my ex, too.

My mom refused to take the dog.

“If I take him, you’re never going to leave the apartment. If I take him, I worry what’s going to happen to you. As long as he’s with you, you’re going to need to walk him and care for him and go out to buy food for him. He stays with you. You need him. He WANTS to be with you.”

It was a wise move on my mama’s part. And so he and I would go on three, four walks a day — sometimes with me in my pajama pants, or in yesterday’s clothes, sometimes with me sniffling and gulping the entire way. I cried into his fur until he was damp. We drove to Philly in the middle of the night, when it was just the truckers and us on the wretched stretch of tangled highway between the George Washington Bridge and Newark. My dog and I listened to countless old mix tapes with the windows down, and I like to think that we left a lot of grief on the side of the highway at night.

My mom was right. That boy saved me. I rescued him from a pound as a puppy, but during his sixteen years of life, he did most of the rescuing. I still cry when I see a graying muzzle on a shep/collie/husky mix. What we save, saves us ten times over. I know this to be true.
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Lordy, lordy. Look at this MESS.

I don’t recall much of the time when my ex moved out. It’s a blur, a terrible gray blur. I know my ex took the couch and the good pots and pans and the guest bed and some bedding. But for the most part, STUFF stayed HERE. I mean a basement full of the detritus of a decade of marriage and a few more years of co-habitation. Boxes of books, receipts and taxes. Broken furniture we’d once hoped to repair. Bins of baby clothes. The old crib. Toys and games, long outgrown.

It’s taken me a long time to shake off the sentimental attachment to all of these things. But for almost a year now, I’ve been in the process of the Great Purge of 2011. The enclosed back porch and half the kitchen have been staging areas for all of the crap that must go. The unearthing of the stuff that’s no longer needed is the easy part; the sorting and ejecting from the house is the dastardly, difficult part of the job. I’d hoped that the Great Purge of 2011 would be done by now — uh, it’s not. I had grandiose plans for a massive yard sale this past summer (not that we have a front yard, but we’re good at improvising), but the more I purged, the more I found to purge.
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This morning, on the way to school, Daughter #1 says, “I’m making a board game based on my whore novel.”

“WHAT?!?” I shriek.

In the rear view mirror, I catch her baffled what-did-I-do-now expression. “A BOARD GAME. Based on my WHORE NOVEL,” she enunciates. “WHAT?”

“What the heck kind of book are you reading? A WHORE novel? In fifth grade?”

“Yeah,” she says. “What’s wrong with that?”

“What’s a whore novel?” asks Daughter #2.

“It’s a book about scary stuff,” says Daughter #1, perplexed. “I thought it would make a cool board game.”

It dawns on me, finally, that she is not, in fact, creating a game about prostitutes.

“OH,” I say. “A HOR-ROR novel.” I crack up. I can’t breathe, I am laughing so hard.

“Yeah,” she says. “A whore novel.”

“Oooooh, you are really going to want to keep that extra syllable,” I say. “Trust me.”

“Why?” they both ask, in unison.

“Um, remember when you said you wanted to start a cathouse?” I ask Daughter #1. She had meant, of course, a rescue home for felines.

“OOOOOHHHHHH,” she says. “This…is like…that?”
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S recently began offering her services as a mother’s helper. At 10, she is not ready to babysit on her own, but she’s sure as heck ready to earn some cold hard cash.

“I figure two dollars an hour, maybe two-fifty, would be fair,” she said.

“Oh, I think so,” I said. “It’s demanding work, taking care of mothers.”

“Ha.” She shrugged her best eh, maybe for you shrug. “I’m great with little kids,” she said, and flopped away casually in her distinctly floppy, distinctly I am a teen not a tween now way.

I did not point out to her that perhaps her own home might be a good place for an internship, before entering the job market.

Silly mommy.

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Back-to-school season is in full force, with its new schedules to be learned, its new equipment and supplies to be purchased, its new Sharpies for labeling every belonging imaginable. I am so darn weary right now, I can’t even think more than a day ahead. I wake up bleary looking at smudged notes I’ve scrawled on my hand the night before: SHARE KITTY OK? and ASK DID WE DO MGUARD RIGHT?

MGUARD: mouthguard. Elder daughter is trying field hockey. This is an OMG Mommy Moment: a field hockey player in the house? Not completely certain we DID DO MGUARD RIGHT, the gel horseshoe that gets boiled, then cooled, then pressed into her spiky teeth. We followed the directions, but not being an athletic star myself (or an athlete at all), I only have a dim recollection of how the mouthguard thing works, from my brief and pitiful attempt at college rugby.

S clamps it obediently in her jaws. “Twenty more seconds,” I say.

“Howwifahsapposstakkoomaiteemaze?” she replies, the dark waxy mouthguard protruding from her lips.

“What?”

“HowwifahsapposstakkoomaiTEEMAZE? ROODISS?”

“How are you supposed to talk to your teammates through this?”

“UHHUH.”

“Um, I have no idea. I guess you get good at it, eventually. Give it a try.”

“EAT GRAZZ.”
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If you have a daughter.

If you have a son.

If you ever loved anyone, and wondered who they were at 10 or 11.

If loving someone ever convinced you that, yes, yes, indeed, here is proof of God.

Today, I simply send you here, to my other (and my same) world. Because I have no better words.

I am getting better at forgetting what came before.

Or I am getting better at forgetting to bother remembering.

I cannot tell you what happened last Mother’s Day, or on the Mother’s Day before that.

This Mother’s Day morning, it does not occur to me to wonder what came before. I simply lie in my cool cotton sheets and listen.

Downstairs: the girls’ excited voices, the clink of plates, the slam of the refrigerator door, the laugh of a man who is not their father. I hear him chatting amiably with his giggling sous chefs. There is a touch of the South in his resonant voice, a flavor still unfamiliar to me.

I turn my head sideways, close my eyes, and smile into the softness of a pillow.

This is what is, now.

*****

Last night:

“How much do you remember about when you were a kid?” Sophie asks at bedtime. We are lying in her loft bed, the safest place.

“Some things,” I say. “But I’m amazed by how much I can’t remember. A lot of it just…goes away. There are entire years that are almost gone. I have no idea what I did, how the days passed.”

She considers this. “That’s sad.”

“It is, some,” I agree. “Maybe our brains aren’t meant to hold it all, though. Maybe we only keep what we need.”

“I can’t imagine not remembering.” She shakes her head, dismayed that today, yesterday, last week, could ever vanish.

“I couldn’t imagine not remembering, then. When I was a kid. Life is funny, that way.”

She leans her head against my shoulder. We stare at the white ceiling, an arm’s length away from me, an arm and a half away from her. She has said before that she remembers her father made pancakes the morning we told them we were divorcing. She has told me that she will never forgive her father and me for this idiotic gaffe, for connecting sweet goodness with something so terrible.
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This is the simple part: Late afternoon: crossing a parking lot, hand in hand.

She was telling me a story. Something had happened. Somebody hadn’t behaved well, at school. She’d cried, a little, she said. Then, she was able to stop crying, all on her own. Well, maybe with a little help from her friend with the pretty accent, she said, but not much help, really.

Then she said something else, one of her beautiful something elses that drop from the sky every day, shimmering, and vanish forever. The days rush in and out so violently, the moments are gone as they happen. I would change it if I could. But it’s not mine to change. Our memories choose themselves. One can write things down, but it’s still a ruse. There’s no way to catch a something else from a child, pin it behind glass.

You do the best you can.

The beautiful something else occurred just as she’d finished her story and hopped out of its bounds. She was commenting on her story, what she thought it all meant: her “takeaway,” as boring grownups like to say, sometimes.

She thought this, and that, and a little of this.

I listened. Then, out of habit, I tried to come up with a good, teachable this or that of my own. Another way the situation could have worked out. Something else she might have done. Something she might want to squirrel away, for next time.

We mamas get into that habit, after all.

But something stopped me, this time.

She’d already come up with this, and that, and a little of this, all on her own.

Two words. That’s all I needed, for today.

I squeezed her hand. “You’re right,” I said.
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The enclosed back porch is now a staging area.

What once was a pleasant summer room with its jalousie windows is now a curiosity shop, full of the leftovers, the no-longer-neededs, of my life. The chestnut table we used to sit at with the girls when they were small is covered in detritus: old toys, unwanted books, Christmas decorations, artwork, unused tools and wood, broken vacuums.

Once, the table hosted barbecued chicken and roast corn-on-the-cob and summer brew and dear friends and family. We had plans for the porch, back then. We would paint it, put down a new floor, build a deck extending into the backyard.

Every day I am more at ease with the fact that these plans will be someone else’s plans, in the end.
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