Harry who?
Mr. Potter's a mystery to us.

by Terri Mauro

Attention deficit
My kids need me most when I have the least time.

by Terri Mauro

There's nothing that makes a child need his mama like his mama needing to do something else.

My son can usually play independently with very little input. He loves to roam the house looking for items to "recycle," which basically means putting them into plastic bags and carrying them to another part of the house. At any given time, a quarter of our household junk is being "recycled." This game requires very little parental input...unless, of course, the parents are busy. Then, it's time to go to the recycling center, and he needs company. He's going to have a garage sale, and he needs customers. He needs to load his recycling truck, he needs to unload his recycling truck. He needs attention, and he needs it now.

I've long ago discovered the magnetic power of the telephone. Children can be scattered to all corners of the house, happily absorbed in their toy cars or their TV shows or their Gameboys, but when the signal goes out that Mom is talking on the phone, they're suddenly and irresistibly drawn to her compass point, with deeply important requests like, "Can I have a piece of candy?" "Can I go to the bathroom?" "Can we go to Toys R Us later?" "Can I crawl in your lap and wrap the phone cord around me until the phone falls on the floor?" If I'm talking to someone from work, my son is liable to just go ahead and take that lap space without consulting me.

Now, I have about the best possible work situation you can have and still be working. I telecommute three days a week and go into the office two. I do this because I want to have as much time as possible home with the kids, infuriating as that time may sometimes be. But as many times as I have told my children how lucky they are to have me home so much, and how other kids' mommies have to go to work every day, they still see work as an unforgivable encroachment on my time, which should be naturally totally 100 percent devoted to their interest and amusement. My daughter keeps saying, "Just tell your boss you don't want to work now." She even gave me a drawing of herself saying how much she loves me, with the words "Show this to your boss" down the side. I hung it up over my desk. As yet, it has not led my boss to cut me any slack.

Not this weekend, anyway, which was spent working way, way overtime on a way, way under-progressed project. And so of course, my son was clingy in a way far more extreme than usual, constantly begging me to play with him, with ascending degrees of neediness and an astounding capacity for guilt-wielding. I think I may have spent more time with him this hectic, deadline-plagued weekend than I usually do in a normal weekend, just because he was so demanding and so whiney and so in my face. And did I mention guilt?

Of course, if I ever did really quit, and was home all day with nothing to do but nurture, I feel certain that the two of them would want nothing whatever to do with me. The unattainable is always more interesting.

Licorice is for losers
Can candy make you thin?

by Terri Mauro

Need to slim down? Break out the Twizzlers.

Ouch!
'Tis the season for scrapes, scratches and scabs.

by Terri Mauro

It's summer, time for kids to run and play, jump and climb, ride and romp and slip and fall. Which means, in our house, it's flesh-wound season.

Yes, there's something about warm weather and exposed skin that leads directly to bloodied knees and raw elbows. It is comforting to know that this is one area in which my children are blissfully normal. I remember having my share of skinned knees as a kid, and I didn't have low muscle tone or Sensory Integration Disorder or poor depth perception to blame it on. I was just a klutz. This year, however, my kiddos seem particularly intent on making the antisceptic and band-aid industries very healthy indeed.

We started the summer with a decidedly otherwordly blister on my daughter's thumb. This turned into many blisters, then into many puss-filled grotesqueries that necessitated a lot of painful whining, then into lots of loose flappy skin. She'd had similar yucky business two summers before, so apparently this is an every-other-summer sort of thing. Every other millennium would be too soon for me.

That wound was still in the band-aid cover-up stage when my basketball-camp-going girl suffered what might have been a career ending injury: a traumatic blow to the pinkie. Oh, the agony. She was sure it was broken. We were sure it was bruised. It sure did get black and blue and puffy. Showing her mettle for future professional athletics, she did manage to finish out her time at camp, dribbling in a particularly gingerly fashion, no doubt. She is now proudly able to bend it completely without screaming once again, so no harm done.

Then we have my son, who is racking up the injuries with each new day at camp. He must always fall to the left, because he has two separate skinned spots on his left knee and two more on his left elbow. These are in a constant state of regeneration because he is in a constant state of scab-picking. Here again, a resoundingly normal activity for a small boy, but the extremely expensive special-needs camp would like us to tell him to cut it out all the same. We cover the owies with bandaids, he peels the bandaids off, then peels off what's underneath. It's a regular science experiment. Threats of infection do not concern him; more research!

Today we added to the collection a mark on my son's shoulder-blade that looks like an abrasion to me and a bruise to my husband, and a small cut just below my daughter's nose from where her baby cousin through her Gameboy at her. The Gameboy, I hasten to report, is just fine. But if it wasn't, we'd have had more than enough band-aids to patch it back up.

Pity party
The mother behaved badly but the son had fun.

by Terri Mauro

On Sunday, we went to a party that I really didn’t want to go to. Truly, desperately, deeply dreaded. I said I didn’t want to go when we got the invitation. I said I didn’t want to go when the RSVP time rolled around. I whined about going right up until the time we left, at which point I threw a major embarrassing screaming tear-filled tantrum. And still, we went.

It was a graduation party for a relative of my husband’s I don’t know. The graduate’s mother, one of my husband’s five million or so cousins, I could pick out of a line-up if I had to. There were some cousins I knew, many many cousins I didn’t, lots of kids, lots of noise, lots of food, lots of mess, lots of cars, lots of distractions, lots of stuff not to touch, lots of disruptions. Which is why I didn’t want to go. Or why, more specifically, I didn’t want to bring my son.

One of the things I’ve always tried to do with my active, distractible, impulsive, sensory-integration-disordered boy is to control the environments I put him in. Short, specific trips with specific intended outcomes. Trip to the mall for an in-and-out visit to the toy store, yes. Trip to the mall to stand in line for an hour to see some loser in a Disney-character costume, no. Party close by with people we know and a clear escape route, yes. Party two hours away with strangers and an equally endless ride home, no.

I want my son to have as normal a life as possible, but I also know that when he’s put in a position where he can’t behave, he won’t behave. Sometimes, there’s not an option: Church, for example, is a nonnegotiable part of our week, and even though it is a sensory and behavioral disaster for our youngest family member, there’s never a question of not going. But a party—a party too far away—a party with too many relatives—a party that made me exhausted just thinking about it—that party, surely, we could skip.

Especially when it was raining the morning of the party, which was supposed to be a pool party. Especially when my son started coughing and seemed tired and out of it and vaguely pre-cold all morning. Especially when I had a stressful week at work. Especially when I went to all the trouble of throwing a tantrum. But my husband—whose policy in all such events is just to ignore emotional outbursts and keep moving forward in the belief that things will just work themselves out without our help—just kept putting people in the car. And so, we went, with me sulking and sniffling and predicting bad behavior and bad health all the way.

So of course, it wasn’t so bad.

The party was mostly indoors, very crowded and very loud, which instantly put my son into hyperdrive. But his dad took him outside, and walked around looking at cars, and then walked around looking at cars some more, and then gave him some food, and then walked around looking at more cars. They were at the party, in that they were in the same town and on the same block, but out of the four hours we were there father and son were on party premises for about one.

During that one hour, the small boy asked everybody, but everybody, for their keys. Old people, middle-aged people, young people, teenagers, everyone got hit up for their keys. That’s his thing—his party parlor trick—looking at people’s keys and telling them what kind of cars they have. Sometimes people find a small boy sticking his hands in their pockets annoying. Sometimes people find it cute. In this gathering, the latter outnumbered the former, though maybe they were just being polite. At any rate, he looked at a lot of keys and conned a few people into actually letting him in their cars to play.

He didn’t melt down. He didn’t break anything. He didn’t have a screaming fit, or cause one of his parents to have one (though actually, I’d already had one, hadn’t I?) It was, all in all, a successful day. Which is a triumph of sorts for him, coming at a time when he’s had lots of experiences in which people felt he was just the worst little boy on earth. And my appreciation of this is only slightly dampened by the fact that I behaved badly for nothing.

Although I still think it wasn’t necessary. And if he does get a cold, I'll know what to blame it on.

copyright © 2000 by Terri Mauro