Single mothering - TwinZebra's Blog - Raising Bakersfield

To be Jewish in Bakersfield

I will never get used to Bakersfield.

I have an interfaith family, so every year I go to Sears and get a family portrait shot and then use that picture for both Chanukah and Christmas photocards. I have done this every year for nearly a decade.

This is my first holiday season in Bakersfield. I took the kids to the Sears at Valley Plaza Mall last weekend and posed for pictures. Then when I went to order my cards, they told me they didn't sell Chanukah cards. Sure you do, I insisted. I have been buying them from Sears for years. Maybe at other stores, the saleswoman told me, but not at this location. We don't have them here.

Now, I could see if they had to physically stock the things. I'll grant that the Jewish community here is pretty small. But all of this stuff is stored digitally. You just put the photo on a stock background and send the order offsite to be printed. You mean to tell me the Sears in Bakersfield can't get online and choose a Chanukah card out of its OWN offerings at other locations? Gimme a break.

So I ordered some Christmas cards and then called WalMart and asked if they carry Chanukah photocard backgrounds. Nope, the woman on the phone tells me, but you can custom design one if you want. "We can put a cross on it for you...or that thing...what do you call it? The thing with the candles?"

"A menorah," I said, rolling my eyes.

And I'm silently thinking, if I'm going to be reduced to designing some amateurish looking thing on a PC, I could do that at home. What do I need you for?

I'm not very artsy or computer savvy so I was really not looking forward to having to make cards myself at home, but I guess I'm going to have to suck it up and learn how. Either that or drive to Los Angeles or some other REAL city, which would just be a ridiculous waste of time and gas money for something so basic.

cigarette question

At the risk of butting in (pun intended)...

The other day my 6-year-old daughter casually mentioned that a schoolmate, also in first grade, smokes cigarettes. We were outside taking a walk at the time and I stopped in my tracks. I said, "Are you sure?"

My daughter said yes.

I asked her if her friend's mother knew this. No, my daughter said. The girl only does it when her mom's not home.

My first thought was it just flat out wasn't true. Maybe my daughter misunderstood, or the girl was lying in the course of playground banter meant to make her appear cool and sophisticated.

Then again, maybe the girl was telling my daughter the truth.

If so, as unscrupulous as some retailers are, I am certain nobody would knowingly sell cigarettes to a first-grader. Probably one or both of the girl's parents smoke, and the little girl is discreetly stealing their cigarettes when they're not looking.

Personally, if anyone knew this about my child, I would hope and pray they would alert a teacher who could then relay the information to me so I could put a stop to it.

But if the girl's parents are smokers, they might resent the interference, especially when I don't even know if it's true or not. I don't know the girl or her family.

What do you think? What should I do?

A budding entrepreneur

I went to Los Angeles this weekend to see a concert.

In the car on the way down, I get a call from my mother. Call me. K. is in trouble.

Why, why, why did I think I could squeak out a night off?

So I call and the story isn't clear. Something about K. and Lauren, the little girl across the street, going door to door to ask the neighbors for money. K. told my mom she was at Lauren's house. Lauren told her father, Joe, that she was at our house. In fact they were apparently panhandling at doorsteps up and down our block.

They got busted when Joe discovered a $5 bill in Lauren's room and asked her where she got the money. Lauren tried to stammer a lie, which didn't fly, so he worked it out of her that she and K. got the money from a man up the street.

Joe was understandably alarmed and came to my mom's house to interrogate K. (Divide and conquer). K., who is only 6, broke down and confessed immediately that they had lied about their whereabouts in some strange scheme to get money.

Now, Joe's reaction is the same as any parent's would be if they learned a grown man had given 7- and 6-year-old girls cash for no apparent reason. So he angrily marched over to the man's house to return the $5 and asked him not to give his daughter money again.

Through all of this my cell phone is ringing off the hook with my mom offering updates as information trickles in. With each call, the story is getting worse, and I'm freaking out. Is this a pedophile paying my daughter for nude photos or something? How long has this money thing been going on? Who is this mysterious man up the street?

My imagination is running wild, and I can't take it anymore so I tell my mom to go across the street and get Joe's number so I can call him and hear the story first-hand.

Five minutes later I call Joe. The story has changed yet again.

The kids weren't panhandling. They were peddling jewelry. Some plastic bracelets of Lauren's, and K. contributed some hair barretts to the enterprise. Most of the neighbors politely declined the sales pitch.

Only one sucker was stupid enough to pay $5 for a plastic Barbie bracelet and some hair barretts.

I guess he was trying to be nice, Joe offered by way of explanation, since he knows you and apparently has met K. before. Some guy who works with you, I think?

And suddenly it's all clear to me.

A co-worker friend of mine lives three houses down.

I was so mortified I could have crawled under a car and died. I called my friend to beg his forgiveness and he was very gracious.

K. is grounded for a week.

J. to the rescue

K., at 6, is not allowed to touch electric outlets, so when I caught her plugging and unplugging an electric fan because she enjoyed watchnig the fan blades spin and stop, spin and stop, I scolded and punished her.

As she is wont to do, she flung herself on her bed dramatically and shouted, "You're mean!" before commencing her signature sulk.

I was in my bedroom when J., 3, sauntered over to his wounded sister on the bed and said, "Is Mommy mean?"

"Yes!" K cried.

J. then headed over to my doorway, struck a pretty impressive Kung Fu Panda pose (he hasn't seen the movie but loves the commercials) and swiped at the air.

"You're dead, Mommy," he announced solemnly before returning to console K.

"Mommy's dead. It's OK."

My son, the hero.

Won't he be fun as a teenager?

creepy crawlies

The day before yesterday K. found a black widow spider in the garage. She and J. were gaping: "oooo, big black spider!"

I wasn't thinking "dangerous poisonous creature" as I headed over. I was more in, "Ick, yucky, get away" mode when I sauntered over from where I was working in the garden to have a look. But although I am not an entomologist, I know a scary bug when I see one, and black widows are decidedly scary looking.

I went inside and Googled for pictures to confirm the guess. Photo was dead on (pun intended). So I went back out with a can of Raid and blasted the sucker, which had made a nice big web on the side of my $2,000 leather couch. (I know I should get it out of the 100-degree garage but I'm still in denial about living with my mother. It comforts me to know I will have furniture when I move out).

After the beast was slain, I sat the kids down and explained that this particular spider was bad, very bad, and if they see one again they are to run away and tell a grown up as soon as possible.

K., the thrill seeker, then offers that her science day camp had a tarantula as the "animal of the week" not long ago, brought over by an employee of CALM, our pitiful excuse for a zoo here. Everybody got to pet the tarantula, and apparently this spider handler didn't bother to explain to the very young children stroking the furry thing that it's generally not a good idea to pet tarantulas encountered in the wild. K. wanted to know why it was OK to pet tarantulas and not black widows.

Made a mental note to ask the director of that program to provide a little context next time they drop dangerous critters in my child's midst.

Meanwhile, the pesticide people are coming to treat the garage today. Not sure what the environmental PC meter says about spraying mists of poison all over a couch I hope to sit on again some day, not to mention the stacks of boxes of books lining the garage walls. Probably there are spider eggs in those boxes and I will open up a book one day to find some big black monster crawling around on the page.

My son is a lazy disgusting slob

My 3-year-old flat out refuses to potty train. It's not that he can't. He just won't.

Yesterday morning I saw a urine-soaked diaper in the trash can in his room. Now, that trash can's sole purpose is for Kleenex tissues and the occasional piece of drawing paper. I never put diapers in there. I keep the Diaper Pail in the garage so as not to stink up the house.

I asked my 6-year-old daughter how the diaper got there. She said J. put it in there, then went into the cabinet where I keep clean diapers and put on a fresh one.

HE CHANGED HIS OWN DIAPER!!!

If he can do all that...we're talkiing multiple physical and cognitive steps here...then WHY CAN'T HE USE THE DOGGONE TOILET!!??!!

Then to add insult to injury, last night I was lotioning him down after his bath and he peed on the bedroom carpet right in front of me. Now I had JUST TAKEN him to the toilet, which I do before every bath for obvious reasons.

What's up with that?

Exploration

J. seems to be in discovery mode. In the kids' bathroom we have those soft, stuffed vinyl toilet seats and lids.

The other day as 3-year-old J. was lowering the lid after doing his thing, it gently brushed up against his ... er ... you know... and he started giggling and saying, "It tickles" and lowering the lid up and down, up and down...

And so it begins.

I guess I should be grateful he puts the lid down at all, but then, being the sole male in a house full of females, he must intuitively know failure to do so could be life threatening.

Toilet Fiasco

The context for this is my 3-year-old son is about 50 percent potty trained. He hasn't had a bowel movement in his diaper for at least six months. All our "accidents" are urine. I use quotes because he knows darn well how to go, but he isn't the least bit bothered by sitting in pee all day and arbitrarily decides sometimes that it's simply not worth the trip. So this morning, when I discovered feces in his diaper, I was REALLY annoyed and made a big production of scolding and fussing after I got him all cleaned up.

ME: Go stand in a corner!

J. Why?

ME: Because you went boo boo in the diaper and you know better.

J. (folding arms) Hmmmf. I'm mad at you.

ME: Fine. You still have to stand in the corner.

J. I'm telling Auntie.

ME: You can tell Auntie and Uncle and Granny and anybody else you want. They'll all be really disappointed in you. And Auntie would make you stand in a corner, too. Uncle might even whup you.

J. (pondering the whupping a moment, then a lightbulb goes off over his head and he points to the clock, which reads 7 a.m.) No call Auntie. Auntie sleep.

Then he dutifully served his sentence in the corner.

A few hours later, he had to go again and this time went to the toilet. I think he must have put half a roll of toilet paper in there along with his personal deposit. The toilet is now stuffed up. It overflowed when he flushed. I poured a bottle of Drano in there and will call a plumber in the morning if it isn't clear by then.

GRRRRRR!!!!!

Omnipotent tastebuds

I thoroughly enjoy my brief window of being all but worshipped by my children. I am all powerful, capable of righting any wrong and healing any wound.

I remember the exact moment I lost this magic sense of wonder about my father. I was maybe 7 or 8, and some small appliance had broken and he couldn't fix it. My dad was pretty handy, and up until that moment I thought he could fix anything. When he threw up his hands on this project, I blinked with disbelief. Could it be he was...gasp!...merely human? Capable of failure? The revelation was genuinely shocking.

But my 3-year-old still thinks I am so much more than I am.

At lunch the other day, he protested the meal of the day. It was nasty, he declared, and folded his arms over the bowl.

"No it's not," I said. "Eat."

J. shook his head emphatically. "It is," he insisted. "Look."

He proceeded to shovel a bite into his mouth, screwed up his face in disgust, and then looked at me, palms up and shoulders shrugged. "See?"

"It's fine and I want you to eat your lunch," I said.

J. was incredulous. "No, look!" he said, and took another bite, then shuddered. "See?"

It took me a minute to realize J. was certain he had proved his point because he thought I could taste what he was chewing. Surely if he was grossed out by what was in his mouth, I must somehow have been able to psychicly connect to his tastebuds to feel what he felt and taste what he tasted.

I didn't have the heart to tell him that I don't have that particular psychic mom vibe. I do, however, have a soft heart, so I gave him an apple and excused him from the table.

Chicken alert!!!

I moved to Bakersfield to live with my mother and take advantage of free child care for a couple years until my 3-year-old is in school. Having mostly lived in big cities, it's been a culture shock. I didn't think things could get any weirder, but they have.

On my way home from K.'s weekly gymnastics class, I passed the Cal State Bakersfield campus and discovered they were hosting this big Relay for Life race and festival to raise money for breast cancer research.

Good cause, and we had nothing better to do, so I stopped. We ate, played carnival games, blah blah blah.

At one booth they were doing face painting for a dollar, a service advertised chiefly by the completely bald man sporting, on the back of his head, a painted pink ribbon over the slogan "Save the ta tas." K. got a butterfly painted on her cheek.

J. desperately needed a nap, so we cut the festivities short about 1 pm.

Two hours later, I woke J. and took the kids out into the backyard, which was a novel experience for them because my mother has a pool with no fence, so the kids are under strict orders to NEVER go back there unless an adult is out there with them.

Usually that's my mother, but I had to go out with them today because my mom works weekends. It was the first time, sadly, I've spent any real time back there.

Not 30 minutes into a makeshift baseball game with the extra thick, kid-sized plastic bat and whiffle ball, I hear rustling in the trees that separate our house from our right-side neighbor. I narrow my eyes and see something black hopping around the branches over the fence, and it's way too big to be a raven or crow. Only when the thing landed beside the pool did I realize it was a chicken.

An actual, live chicken.

Now, I spent the first half of my childhood in Chicago, and even as a teenager in Albuquerque we were in a very urban area, so my experience with chickens is pretty much limited to zoos and school field trips to farms. I have never, in my 41 years on this earth, had a chicken casually plop into my yard.

I stood there, dumbfounded, while the children shrieked with delight. It occurred to me that my mother had mentioned something about one of her neighbors having chickens. They are evidently very polite creatures. I've been here over a month and hadn't ever seen or heard one.

The chicken was quite comfortable around people. The sight of my children jumping up and down screaming and pointing didn't alarm her one bit. She just toured the edges of the yard, scratching for...food? What do chickens eat, anyway?

She didn't so much as glance at the rotting lemons that had fallen from my mother's lemon trees, so I guess they're not big fruit fans.

But that got me thinking that we really ought to either eat the lemons or pitch them, since rotting lemons don't look so hot after a while. So I grabbed a garbage bag and started collecting lemons in various stages of decay off the ground. That's when I spotted the other chicken.

The dead one.

Apparently the poor slob had been there a while. It was pretty much just a mound of feathers with some claws sticking out. It took me a minute to figure out what it was. At first I thought it was a pile of rags.

Dead chickens, I would think, are even more of a health hazard than rotting lemons. But I was not about to touch the thing with my bare hand. CNN sound bites about avian flu, West Nile virus and other diseases flashed through my mind.

For a fraction of a second I considered leaving it there. After all, it had been resting peacefully for at least a month or two, from the look of it. It wasn't MY chicken. It wasn't even my yard, technically. But then I decided that if one is to live off of one's mother without paying rent, removing a dead chicken now and then is the least one can do. So I donned rubber dishwashing gloves and grabbed a dustpan from the garage and deposited the thing in the garbage bag with the lemons.

The bag now sits on the side of the house awaiting trash day, which is three days from now.

The kids have been down for the night for over an hour and there is still clucking in the backyard as I write this. I wish our uninvited guest a long, healthy life, and strong wings with which to find her way over the fence again, cuz I've met my monthly quota for carrying chickens.