I have a huge mule and he has a cut leg.
Has Ava ever laid eyes on the offspring of a jack and a mare?
Wikipedia says the average weight for one is between 820 and 1,000 pounds. While they can be male or female, mules can’t reproduce due to their odd number
of chromosomes. The good news is, there will never be a song that goes, “baby mules, doo doo doo doo doo doo.”
The last mule I remember lifting had vodka and ginger beer in it. The first nasty cut I remember Ava suffering was on her toe. I’d guess she was 3ish. The weather had begun to warm, the daylight in the evenings stretching and beckoning the neighbors to hang up their plaid parkas and come play outside. Ava and the girls next door had been trying to balance their wobbling little bodies atop a swim noodle on our uneven concrete driveway. We don’t have a pool, but I’m not convinced the availability of water would’ve changed the course of that particular evening anyway. Besides being cylindrical, I bet that swim noodle was purple, Ava’s favorite color.
This anecdote is all secondhand.
I’d been inside, maybe cobbling together tacos for Tuesday’s dinner. Al had been the one to witness Ava slipping. He’d been chatting with the parents of the girls next door, so he couldn’t be certain how Ava’s fall led to the flap of skin dangling from the end of her toe. Was it her baby toe? She sobbed into his shoulders, then into mine. The bad news was, there wasn’t a song that went, “baby toe, doo doo doo doo doo doo.”
Please clean the chimpanzee’s cage this week.
Pick up your markers. Clean up your legos. Put your dirty clothes in the hamper. Mommy doesn’t like to waste food, but throw away your half-eaten apple. Brush your teeth. Don’t forget to wash your armpits and your butt and your vagina. Yeah, yeah, that’s funny, but you have to wash there, too. You’re not a baby anymore, you’re 7-years-old, I shouldn’t have to do it for you. Flush the toilet. Rinse the dishes. Wipe your face. Want to help me mop? I’ll let you use The Swiffer!
Sweep the crumbs onto your plate. Hang up your coat. …
I’m not the tidiest person. In fact, my focus on cleanliness has significantly blurred since Ava’s arrival. Still, I do prefer some semblance of order. After all, we shouldn’t live like poop-slinging chimpanzees. Yet humans sleep in dirtier beds than chimpanzees. (“About 35 percent of bacteria in human beds stem from our own bodies, including fecal, oral and skin bacteria.” Look it up if you don't believe me.)
… Ava, when you’re done jumping on it, please make your bed.
Tidiness is learned, not innate. Or is it the other way around? No, we have to teach our kids the intrinsic value of cleanliness. Why? Because it is next to godliness? Nature versus nurture is something I can’t help but think about when it comes to my daughter, but like the vacuuming, the dusting, the laundry, and haha, the ironing (our ironing board is on permanent basement sabbatical), I usually let it go.
A cute wren can sing a big tune.
Bird is the nickname Al gave Ava. She loves to sing in the bath. Lately it’s all Kidz Bop all the time, but she’s been known to belt out "S.O.B."
That’s got to be the textbook definition of a big tune.
We stay on the sea and sail all day.
Ava loves the water, whether it’s in a pool, lake, puddle or miniature plastic tea cup. Besides a kayak, the only other boat she’s been on is the ferry to Mackinac Island. We went over to the island last summer and again in the fall. In the summer we sat in the outdoor observation deck, the Mighty Mack in the distance, blue skies and sunshine and summer breeze in our hair. Picture-perfect ride, except for the terrible head cold that made me cloudy and dizzy, and the worst: a mouth breather. I couldn’t taste the fudge or the fresh air.
In the fall it poured and the big lake roiled. The sky was bleak and the wind relentless. My husband and I rode over first for The Great Turtle Run, a 5.7-mile race through not around the island. Ava and my mom joined us later. Separate voyages, but all of us sat inside and none of us suffered sea sickness. Ava loved the crashing waves, the ferry’s rocking and rolling. I worried about my mom, but she said the scariest part had been a little boy choking on a butterscotch. The paramedics came, but thank God he’d coughed up the disc the color and the circumference of a harmless dandelion head. No Heimlich needed.
Ava enjoyed trick or treating on the island. A tradition for October, their last official tourist weekend. It was too cold and windy, but she grabbed gobs of salt-water taffy. To our relief, no butterscotches. We still steer her away from hard candy.
Pete the cat is a funny pet.
We have a couple of Pete The Cat books, but Ava prefers Dog Man. She named our new puppy we rescued last November. Squirt, inspired by the book with the same name, the true story of an orphaned otter. Her first choice (and a distant second for her parents): Cheetah Pup.
Squirt doesn’t wear or love tennis shoes, but she has dainty white feet and the funny cat-like tendencies of scratching and kneading. She has the dog-like tendencies of caring what humans think about her and barking, often too much.
Monday through Friday I take Squirt and our other dog, Charlotte, out to wait with Ava for her school bus. Some other snapshots from their Club Med lifestyle: We walk the neighborhood twice a day. I feed them fresh-cut vegetables, expensive dry food, treats with zero grains. They lounge on furniture and in our beds. When it snows more than a few inches, I shovel a path in our backyard so they can frolic, play ball and do their business (almost) free of hassle.
I am that dog lady. In my next life, I hope to return as a dog owned by me, that dog lady, in my present life.
Meg is a girl with lots of curls.
Oh, Meg, you don’t know the half of it. Ava spelled “lots” “lost” in this sentence. May our daughter never lose the tightly wound spirals that crown her head.
About every six to eight weeks Ava’s curls are strong-armed into braids. Most days I might wash and throw my hair into a tangled bun. It grows curlier and frizzier with age, and when the weather’s damp, it’s often hidden beneath a baseball cap. Nobody stares if I don’t comb, straighten or otherwise tame it. Nobody says I should “fix it.” Nobody places a finger on it without my permission. To my recollection, no kid has ever laughed at my hair or pronounced it ugly. My hair is part of my forty-six years and who I am, but it makes no political statements whether braided, ponytailed or in its free and natural state.
Ava’s hair, however, elicits constant advice, handling, whispers, touching and opinion, well-meaning and not.
The snail went under the tree to look for food.
Ava dressing herself. Ava entering and exiting the car. Ava reading aloud to us when told she must read aloud to us. Ava going to bed. Ava rising from bed. Ava returning the blankets and the pillows from the fort she built to their rightful places. Ava running if told she must run. Ava eating a single sprig of broccoli. Ava taking a bath.
According to snail-world.com, snails are one of the slowest creatures on the planet. “Garden snails (Helix apersa) reach a top speed of 50 yards per hour (or about 0.5 inches per second).”
I’ll wait for you to play with my trains.
She clings to her set of Thomas & Friends trains. Though Ava hasn’t played with them since well before the show added more gender-balanced, multicultural characters to its cast, she refuses to let me relocate her less diverse, really useful crew to Goodwill.
Ava is an only child. At least in our home. To our knowledge Ava’s birthmother is raising two of her other biological children, a boy and a girl. Her son and her daughter. So outside of our family, our daughter is not an only.
We’ve never been secretive about the limited information we have on Ava’s birthmother, but I’m positive we’ll have to answer more questions, whether sooner or later, down the pike or straight away. A few months ago Ava asked me, “Who is my real mom?” An innocent question, but one that stung nonetheless.
What does it mean to be somebody’s real mom?
While on the subject of language, please stop using natural to describe maternity, paternity or children. As in, “they have two natural children and one adopted child” or “he is her natural father.”
Some synonyms of unnatural include abnormal, unorthodox, fake, deviant, weird and unusual. That said, despite being “contrary to the course of nature,” adoptive parents do try to be exceptional or extraordinary. We share that worry and goal with biological parents.
Ava’s brother and sister would be teenagers now. We’ve mentioned her birthmother has two other children, but I’m not sure if Ava’s connected the genetic dots. It’s likely the three of them will never play trains together. It’s possible Ava might travel by train, plane or Uber to meet them someday. How much longer will she wait to ask?
Does Thomas have siblings?
The coach had a yellow pillow and a red bed.
Ava listens to her swim coaches and her teachers. She follows rules at school and in the pool.
At home she can be wholeheartedly willful, particularly with her parents. I’ve read articles and laughed at memes about willful children, particularly willful daughters. Most conclude this is a trait that will serve her well as she grows. We women need to be strong, after all. Dogged to get the respect we deserve. But most days in the present I can only peek through the slats of the bars that are my fingers covering my face and wince at Ava’s red adolescence on the yellow horizon.
Last night she screamed at me and threw herself on the kitchen floor. She whined and wept and pouted and huffed because the banana slime I allowed her to make while I simultaneously prepared dinner didn’t have the right consistency. Too sticky. I had given her three times the amount of cornstarch. No, I’m sorry, she couldn’t have more.
She’s a pro at telling me it’s all my fault and I don’t know anything. You’re mean, Mommy. Mommy, you’re mean. You’re mean, Mommy. Mommy, you’re mean. M-o-m-m-y, you are m-e-a-n.
Sometimes I am mean.
Sometimes I yell back. Sometimes I say nothing, let the immature words of my child wash over me, the mature adult who is her mature mother. Sometimes I laugh. Sometimes I cry. Sometimes I tell her to please leave me alone, that I don’t want to talk to her. Sometimes I fold her into my arms, tell her I love her no matter what. Sometimes I toss banana slime in the garbage, bowl and all. Sometimes I add more cornstarch and sprinkles and water, and sugar and spice and everything nice. Sometimes I take deep breaths. Sometimes I shut myself in my bedroom, lie on the bed, cover my head with a pillow and pray to do better. To be better.
The caveman ate bread for breakfast.
The pediatrician says kids Ava’s age usually eat too many carbs. Her BMI is too high. She should be somewhere between the 5th and 85th percentile. He always smiles and shows us the handy chart with the curved lines.
Ava loves bread. Of course we want her to be healthy, to adore fruits and vegetables, but the thought of giving her any kind of appearance complex permeates, resonates, nauseates. She’s a freewheeling first grader, for God’s sake. She has a whole life ahead of her to wring her hands over The Scale of Judgment, to fret over her reflection in society’s mirror.
In her book Hunger, Roxane Gay writes: “This is what most girls are taught—that we should be slender and small. We should not take up space. We should be seen and not heard, and if we are seen, we should be pleasing to men, acceptable to society. And most women know this, that we are supposed to disappear, but it’s something that needs to be said, loudly, over and over again, so that we can resist surrendering to what is expected of us.”
I want nothing more than for Ava to defy expectations, to take up space, to come alive and revel in full glorious view. But how often do I send her the wrong message about body image? Once a year? Once a day? Twice an hour? If you ask me, bread is the greatest thing since sliced bread. My BMI barely falls within what’s considered healthy by medical standards. I don’t have the drive or bone structure or walk to pursue a career in modeling, but if I did, in my size 10 I’d shuffle myself down the plus-sized runway in a trench coat, hoping nobody would notice me.
America, where beauty is so easy even a caveman could do it.
Those five pails are full of green paint.
Green is a popular color in our home. Two different shades in the living room, one in the basement, a variation of bronze in our bedroom that in the right light somehow shimmers green. Maybe I’ve just got green on the brain. It’s a symbol of growth, nature, innocence and fertility. It’s a symbol of greed and envy. It’s gender-neutral.
It’s a color that’s meaningful to us. In our house we say, “Go green!”
Before Ava was born, I painted two walls of her bedroom a celery green. The adjoining walls are burnt orange. Though we stated a preference for a girl, we didn’t know for sure what gender we’d ever be lucky enough to adopt. Years of “trying.” One miscarriage via in-vitro. One failed adoption.
Then the safe delivery of a baby girl.
For the last year or so, our daughter has asked to repaint her room—first purple, next pink, next blue, now rainbow. Ava, our pot of gold.
1) It seems a bit on the nose, but worthy of note nevertheless. Of course, I am thankful for my family. Perhaps I am most thankful for Al’s recovery from back surgery and the debilitating pain that wreaked unbelievable havoc on his physical and mental health. I wish I could find something funny to say about this journey (you know how I love deflecting with humor), but being a helpless bystander to chronic pain, especially when it’s afflicting somebody you love with your whole heart, is its own special brand of agony. 
