Feverishness and Guilt



Fiona, feeling fine

So, last night, Fiona woke me up at about one thirty in the morning, and even as I was waking myself up and trying to focus on the words she was saying, I could tell she was talking very fast in the hot, breathy voice that always accompanies a fever.  Well, accompanies a fever for her.  Each of my kids has a "tell" that lets me know they are really sick, not just tired or having a round of allergies.  Delia's eyes get very cloudy, and the the area under her eyes is a transparent purple.  Usually that means she is going to fall deeply asleep or throw up, or both,  some time in the next two hours.  My oldest son had a pinched look, as though he weren't getting enough air, which was fitting, because he also battled asthma symptoms and carried an inhaler at least until junior high.  My younger son got pale, and extremely cranky.  The crankiness also comes over Fiona, and Delia gets kind of weepy.  All of this has always made me cranky and kind of weepy too, not only because I suffer when my children suffer, but because so often, sick children present a gigantic logistical challenge.  Oy!

That's bad, right?  It's bad to not only feel sorry for the sick kid but to feel sorry for yourslf too, because you have to go to work tomorrow, even though it looks like your kid is going to have to stay home.  Because no one can cover for you, or you've had to miss too many days already, or because you just flat-out won't get paid, and then the whole family will suffer next week if you miss this shift.  And by "you," I mean me.  I confess that I own this particular badness, because as I look back on my life as a mom, I realize that I have spent days and nights hoping a fever will break, not only because I want my kid to be better, but because I really don't want to have to call out, or to call in a favor, or to call and ask someone who doesn't owe me a favor to help me out, or to switch shifts, or to work 10 days in a row because I had to switch shifts, because someone had to do me a favor.  I also own the badness of sending a kid without a fever, who might be better off at home for the day, to school, and then spending the day at work feeling guilty and keeping my fingers crossed and sending up thank you prayers every hour I didn't get a call from the school. 

I hate being that mom.  The mom whose kid feels under the weather and walk like zombies through the school day.  The mom who might be sending a germ bomb to school, just to be sure that we can eat next week.  And I am not always that mom.  When I had the good fortune to have a job with sick days, I never took them for myself.  I went to work with a fever, if necessary (hello germ bomb!) to make sure that I could take off when the kids were sick.  I worked all weekend most weeks, when I knew someone could cover for me at home, so that I could be more flexible during the week, especially during cold and flu season, which, if you have kids, you know runs year-round. 

And tomorrow, I will stay home if Fiona is sick.  I already dread the call-out, the work-around, the anxiety of trying to figure out how I will cover any lost hours.  But what I dread even more is the possibility of spending eight hours feeling like I did the wrong thing for Fiona, by making her go to school sick. 

She's sleeping soundly now, cool as a cucumber and breathing lightly.  It looks like we've turned the corner, but I won't really know until she gets up.  And yes, my fingers are crossed, and I'm sending up a prayer.  For her, of course, and for me too.   We could both use a break...

Mom Friends

Fiona asked me the other day why I wasn't friends with the moms of kids in her class, like I am with the moms of Delia's friends.  I really didn't know what to say, because there isn't really a reason, but there are some explanations, beginning with how we all got to know each other. Mainly, I got to be friends with "the moms," as Fiona calls them, because we were all sitting together waiting to pick our kids up and we all kind of bonded over that.  Our family had not been living back in Scottsdale that long when Delia started kindergarten, and we really knew no one here with school aged kids-- except for my true bff Alex who has three boys a little older than my girls, but I knew her way before we had these kids, and I'm not sure that counts-- so when Delia started school, it was all new.  Plus, Delia simultaneously made friends with the kids that belonged to the moms I was hanging with, so it was easy to talk about what was going on, and to make plans to get together outside of school because the kids also wanted to hang out.  Another factor was that we live walking distance from the school, so the moms saw us around the neighborhood, and often offered us rides home, and then to school for pick-up time, because, in Arizona, the school year starts in August, when the days are 100 degrees and above and even a short walk can be exhausting.  It was also easy to have them stop in at our house here and there after school, since we were close by.  So, I guess, I got to be friends with these moms for the same reason most of us end up married to people we meet at work, or school, or church:  access.  It's easier to make friends with someone when you share interests, and you can't make friends with people unless your paths cross pretty regularly.


Now that we've all known each other a while, we talk about lots of stuff that goes beyond our kids, and we support each other and have a really nice network of families.  We have gone through job changes and family health issues together and we've vented and laughed and bitched and cried together.  We've seen our kids grow and change together over the last couple of years.

It's not that I don't want to be friends with moms from Fiona's class, because I have met a few women I like really well.  But a couple of things have changed since Delia started school that make it harder to fall into the natural rhythm of getting to know new people.  One thing is that, this year, the school district has developed a new policy of "kids only" inside the school yard during school hours as part of its safety and security program.  So now, instead of walking the kids onto the playground and standing around chatting while the kids play before the bell rings, parents walk the kids just up to the school gate or let them out of the car in the parking lot drop off lanes. Without the opportunity to congregate in the morning and get to know each other, there isn't an effortless exchange like there was when Delia started kindergarten.  On this same note, I realize that I wasn't working when Delia started school, so I was there on the schoolyard to pick her up every day, opening up another possibility for meeting other parents.  Now, I work part time, so I am only there in the afternoon a couple of days a week, and then, I tend to spend the time catching up with the moms I know-- my mom friends-- instead of striking up new relationships.  A mom can only spread herself so thin, after all.  

Fiona, 3 year old "wing-girl"

And finally, I can't discount the fact that, when Delia was in kindergarten,  I always had Fiona with me, and there is no better ice breaker than an active, chatty three year old, except maybe a labradoodle puppy.  She was a great "wingman" for making mom friends.  

I also have to be honest then, and take some of this on myself.  I'm not really good about putting myself out there and being a joiner.  I'm pretty strongly in the introvert camp.  I mean, I'm a writer partly because I like to sit by myself and think.  A lot.  And I'm much older than a lot of these moms (like, I could be their mom) and I admit that this even made it hard for me with the mom friends I have made.  Yeah, you caught me, I am whining in self defense.  

I have tried to step up my efforts to help in Fiona's class, so I have volunteered for Art Masterpiece, and I did go on the field trip to a farm in October, and I helped out with the fall festival (oh, wait, that was for Delia's class, so it didn't really help me meet kindergarten parents...)  I did see a promising sign a couple of weeks ago.  I was walking to school to help with a kindergarten party/art activity, when one of the kindergarten moms stopped and offered me a ride the rest of the way.  Our kids are friends, so we had plenty to talk about and it was fun to work in the classroom with her.  We've just become Facebook friends, so I think that's a start...

School yard pic from this page

First Grade is Not a Drill

I went to Delia's school last week to help with  a program called "Art Masterpiece" which gives a brief lesson on an artist and then allows the children to do a quick project that reflects the artist's style. 

 

"Memory Quilt" More info and beautiful images at Faith Ringgold.com

 

Last semester, Faith Ringgold was the featured artist and the kids did drawings about a family memory and framed them with squares of paper and fabric so the whole thing looked like one of Ringgold's memory quilt square pieces.  It was just before Thanksgiving, so many of them drew turkeys based on the outline of their hands (even though one young lady huffily declared, "that is so kindergarten!") They had a good time, and I am all for encouraging creativity and artistic exploration, etc... so I signed up to go again this semester.

 

This time, the focus was Georgia O'Keeffe and her amazing flower paintings.  I was glad, because, through some sad quirk of taste,  I'm not a huge fan of the drying skulls in the desert, though I'm sure that some of the 1st graders might have enjoyed executing those with gusto.  After a quick explanation of O'Keeffe's themes and methods, including a first grade translation of the idea that young art student O'Keeffe had been frustrated by the limits of naturalist expression, so she strove to show something conventional, like flowers, in a new way. Then the kids were shown  assorted images of O'Keeffe's flowers along with real flowers to get their imaginations revved up. 



White Flower on Red Earth #1 1943, found here

With such an endorsement of what everyone now uniformly calls "thinking outside the box," the kids were directed to outline a flower in crayon on a sheet of watercolor paper so that the flower filled the whole page, even spreading off the page if possible, to mimic some of O'Keeffe's work.  Then they got to use watercolors to fill in the flower, doing shading and color work that was supposed to flow and pop like one of the flowers in an O'Keeffe painting.  Then twenty-seven first graders had forty minutes to create some art.

But before we could get the creative mojo going, the bell rang for scheduled "lock down" drill.  The drills have increased in frequency since the Newtown tragedy last December, in part, I suppose, to help quell the fears of parents concerned about the preparation for something like that here, and in part to really prepare.  During the drill, we filed into a workroom adjacent to the classroom where the door could be closed and all lights shut off.  Essentially, the children were practicing hiding in the dark to fake out a crazed intruder.  I had been there during other drills since Newtown, and this was the first time I just got a lump in my throat, but didn't actually sob. 

When I was in elementary school, the only thing we had remotely like this were earthquake preparedness drills, "duck and covers," where kids scrambled under their desks and put their arms over their necks as they tried not to concuss themselves on the under-desk cubbies.  (Yeah, one year a kid had to go to nurse with a cut on his forehead from the drill...) Every year, we watched this film,

or one just like it, until I was out of sixth grade.  The teacher usually had trouble with the film, but  there was always a boy (I did not say nerd) in the class the teacher could call over to thread the film onto the back spool so that the whole class could collectively sigh with disappointment as the narrator intoned the opening words:  "The San Fernando Valley, six a.m.  An almost ordinary day..."    The 1971 Sylmar quake was a big deal when I was a kid. The epicenter was local, about 90 minutes from where I grew up, with effects that most adults throughout California could still vividly remember, as in, "I was standing in my kitchen having a cup of coffee when the everything started shaking and all the glassware fell out of the cupboards."  or "I wasn't awake yet, and I thought the world must be ending.  When I went outside, my patio was cracked in half."  I think they were still showing the same film when my sons first went to elementary school, but by then, all the teacher had to do was call on a boy to pop in a VHS tape. 

 

By today's cinematic disaster standards, the footage of an actual earthquake with falling buildings almost seems quaint:  No aliens, no lasers, really, how bad could it be?  But then, we were supposed to be afraid enough to be compliant during a drill, in case local tectonic plates shifted and the seismic shit really hit the fan. 



The drill at Delia's school was short.  I mean,  how long can you keep little kids silently huddled in the dark when there is really no imminent danger?  But the teacher, to her credit, took it very seriously and strenuously encouraged the students to do the same.  "This could save lives," she said. And afterward, as she chastised some gigglers, not calling them out by name, but intoning that they knew who they were, she asked them how they would feel if their noisy chatter actually brought harm to their classmates.  Heads were bowed, but after a minute to consider what this might mean, time marched on and it was time to go back to the art lesson. 



White Flower, 1929, from this source

The main direction to the kids was to use the entire page,  give a close-up view, as though the person looking at their picture were inside the flower.  The flowers were meant to flow off the page.  Some kids dove right in, natural artists I guess, producing big, blowzy blooms and using bright colors.  But some of the kids struggled.  They asked questions like, "which of those flowers should I copy?" and "what color am I supposed to use?" and "am I doing this right?  I can't do this right."  One young lady insisted she would never be able to finish, so she might as well not start.  Take that, artistic expression!

I was surprised by how much trouble even a little abstraction caused them.  Several of the kids in fact, could not make themselves follow the directions, and ended up producing a standard child's view of a flower, a single bloom tidily sitting atop a stem, with the yellow sunshine drawn in the upper corner and the green grass indicated at the bottom edge of the page.  The teacher shook her head, but each of those rebels seemed to harbor the proud notion that they had done the right thing, like there was no reason to produce something that didn't look like a real flower.  I hope none of them are ever forced into art museums.  They will feel like they are in hell.  

While they worked, I couldn't help thinking about the drill, and the collective responsibility it imposed on them.  Everyone's fears had to be constructively channeled for the good of the group.  We all had to duck and cover back in the day, but that was about saving ourselves from natural disaster, not helping protect the group from a psychotic rampage.  How do you teach kids to be afraid enough to hide and brave enough to hide quietly?  It was no time to rebel, no time for abstraction. 

Three and a half minutes later, they come back into the brightly lit classroom and are instructed to put themselves inside a flower.  It's a lot to be asked before lunch.

By the time class ended,  most of the kids, even Miss "I'mNotGonnaTry," were able to finally complete an O'Keeffe-esque picture.  I'm sure the whole gallery will look great hanging in the cafeteria on the night of the PTO's Spaghetti Dinner.  While everyone eats industrial spaghetti with Parmesan cheese product, the principal will reassure the assembled parents that the school is ready for whatever comes.  "The lock down drills are going well...and please, take a look at the beautiful abstract art our first graders did this semester."  I'm sure there will be some parents nodding with approval that their child was able to show an actual flower, with grass and sun.  The way flowers should look.