| Rayne Today Searching for dharma, in spite of the weather...
You Googled Me?: Slow-ish night on the Google front… It’s a tough one, the pickings are scarce. Not much humor in the three oddest referrals today from Google, Yahoo and AOLSearch. Check them here for yourself. (Please use the “You Google Me?” navigator link at the left if the link in this line isn’t active, having problems with upload at the moment.)  comment []DharmaSurfing: A book happened while walking the ‘hood… I’m thinking of starting a book. My morning walks with my sitter/friend are always chock-full of writing material. I swear there were 3 chapters alone in this morning’s walk. It’s not the “Nanny Diaries”, more like a reflection of the state of middle class life in Unfortunately, I’m not good at polishing this kind of stuff. There should be more adjectives, adverbs exchanged, snappy dialogues, sexy prose if it’s ever going to be a best seller. Something to dress it up, make it snazzy. The unvarnished truth seems to be pretty gripping at --- As I’ve said in an earlier post, the family daycare that Kay runs always has a “fringe family”. There are two families whose kids have been there the longest; both families are dual-career professionals (if you can call me a professional anything right now). The “fringe family” usually takes up the remaining couple of daycare slots. The “fringe family’ is almost always non-professional dual-career, with state-subsidized daycare vouchers involved. And this “fringe family” generally comes and goes with the wind, rarely in Kay’s care more than a year. The “fringer” causing the most early morning chatter this month is Mary, a divorced mother of two. A boy in grade school, a girl approaching preschool age. Cute, all three of them – button noses, curly brown hair, spunky. Well, cute at times. The boy has a mouth on him – he verbally harasses my daughter, says things to her that can curl an adult’s hair. I’m guessing he makes up for a general lack of attention in his life by attracting attention through his mouthy attitude. It’s sad that no adult has taken him aside and had a chat about making good choices, like choosing good yet infrequent attention instead bad yet frequent attention. (Kids this age understand readily there’s a trade off for everything – they’re nimble negotiators who can calculate the percentages.) I have a difficult time faulting the kid because he’s very much a product of his environment. But he’s already passing the point at which he can blame others for his behavior; he’s becoming entirely accountable for his actions now. I don’t know who to fret more about: my daughter, wounded by his sharp tongue, or this boy, who’s too rapidly lost his childhood and is starving for attention. Yes, his little sister is very cute, too, a veritable cherub with bouncing brown ringlets cascading around her head. A petite smiling angel who’s always getting into things, climbing uninhibitedly through the car window and into the car seat, rifling through her mother’s purse, clumsily bumping into everything and injuring herself. Kay does a good job of keeping her under control, but she’s still a handful with the bumping/self-injuring. The cherub definitely can’t be trusted near stairs. She’s also continually lacking clothes that fit which are appropriate to the weather. A couple of mothers have regularly offered clean hand-me-downs in good repair because this little one always appears to be in need. She’s wearing a little pink-and-purple winter coat right now, handed down from my daughter. It’s as cute on her as it was on my girl – but somehow it’s also a trifle pathetic, her arms being just a bit longer than my daughter’s, showing a little more skin at the wrist than the last child who wore it. Maybe I’m the only one that notices this detail, it’s just my sensitivity…I hope so. Both the boy and the girl are cute and both are a handful. Why? Our best guess is their mother. Not that their father is blameless; he leaves the son alone too often (for 3 or 4 hours after school) and forgets to send clothes back with the little girl when she’s returning from visitation. This might explain some of the little girl’s clothing shortages and the boy’s hostile mouthiness. It’s not a complete picture, though. Mary appears not to be able to deal with much of anything; she cannot muster up the intestinal fortitude to stop the little one from climbing in the car window, let alone deter her from rifling through her purse. Mary works in an administrative position for a local non-profit agency (read: not very well paid). Daycare is subsidized by the state because of her income level (at or below poverty line, let’s guess about 20K), and the fact that Mary also has a 15-year-old daughter living at home who had an illegitimate grandbaby 6 months ago. The situation has been ugly over the past 18 months – the 15-year-old abandoned the baby at the baby’s paternal grandparents’ house, has not been going to school regularly, generally been a hellion on top of it as 15-year-olds are wont to be. The state has been involved because of the baby – apparently the paternal grandmother called them to complain. Since the 15-year-old is technically a juvenile under Mary’s custody for another year, Mary’s also responsible for the grandbaby. And Mary is now seen by the state as neglecting her 15-year-old and abandoning the grandbaby. Oh yeah, the 15-year-old does not share a father with the boy and girl. Don’t know if her dad is even in the picture. It’s a messy, messy situation. Mary’s definitely overloaded – Prozac’s been mentioned a few times. The latest ex-husband is a winner, too. Imagine the balls it takes to ask your financially-challenged ex-wife to co-sign a mortgage so you can get a new home. He tells Mary, oh, I thought it would be easiest for you if something happened to me; your name’s on the mortgage and the title, they’d just rollover to you if I die. When I hear this, I’m thinking: wow, he’d die in testate, it’ll have to go through probate, she’d have to pay the mortgage for 18 months, etc. Not to mention she won’t have sufficient credit available to buy a new home or car of her own when the time comes, or that her credit will be ruined if he defaults. A bad deal all the way around. It just never occurs to her that her ex-husband might put her and the kids at risk for his own expediency. Somehow it seems natural that all the men she dates are cut from the same cloth. Mary’s always just scraping by. She does get a little help from her family. Her dad repairs her piece-of-crap car whenever it breaks down. Her folks bought a duplex and rent out one unit to her (renting the other unit to her nearly as dysfunctional sister). Mary’s dad handles the yard work and is building a new garden shed for each of the sisters. You can tell which unit is Mary’s right away, as you pull into the driveway: it’s the one with no landscaping or shrubs. The ever-so-slightly more functional sister does some of her own yard work, including planting shrubs and flowers. Not so for Mary. In addition to being short on shrubberies, the yard behind Mary’s unit is probably ripped up. I can’t be certain, but I’ll guess this to be true after last week’s manic episode. Mary recently got a bite splint to help with the night-time teeth grinding problem she was having, due in good part to the financial stress and family tensions. She’d put her week-old $400 bite splint on the bathroom counter one morning, only for it to disappear. She cornered her charming kids in an attempt to ascertain the splint’s whereabouts. The best she could get out of the 3-year-old was that her brother “did it”, whatever “it” was. Mary recounted all this to Kay the next morning when asked if she was okay – she’d arrived late, bleary-eyed and tear-swollen, sniffling when dropping off her daughter. Kay has a knack for getting information from nearly anyone – she really should consider getting her P.I. license. Sometimes I think Kay should become a paralegal to work on due diligence; I’d definitely want her on my audit team. I’ve seen her drill away on adults; they never even know what happened, they just roll over and give up information. Kids are no match for her. Not even the feistiest child can withstand the onslaught. There was information to be mined here, that’s for sure. Somehow out of an effortless little chat the next morning with Mary’s 3-year-old, Kay learned the boy had broken the bite splint in two and buried it in the backyard. The little one told all to Kay matter-of-factly, as if it was no big deal. Kay relayed the information to Mary. When confronted that evening, the boy confessed and said he’d been playing with it, thinking it was a mouth guard for sports. When it didn’t fit, he broke it out of pique and buried it. Mary spent that evening in the backyard in the cold with a shovel and flashlight, looking in vain for two plastic pieces shaped like her mouth…as if she could find those $400 dollars lying under the sod. We shake our heads as we walk; the mouthpiece incident takes up an entire hour-long walk during Kay’s recounting. How is it a fourth-grade child doesn’t understand the gravity of messing with his mother’s custom made bite splint? Does his lack of respect for personal boundaries impact his schooling? Neither Kay nor I can understand how this woman can lose so much control over such young children; we know what lies ahead, having already seen what happened with her 15-year-old daughter. It’s grim. And there’ll be no spine-transplant-by-osmosis in the near future. The latest incident: the bikini laser job. (to be continued…) comment []
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