Well. Half of them are Michael’s. But we forgot which ones. This may be important, because last year he named all his butterflies “Junior.” Since these will be “painted lady” butterflies, mine are traditionally (this is our third year, so now it’s a tradition) named after other famous painted ladies: Cathy Ames, Belle Watling, Sydney Barrows, and so on. Even the males. Especially the males.

I keep thinking of our “release party” last year, in the spring of 2020. Michael hadn’t seen his best buddy, Theodore, in months. His family lives only a few houses away, but no one was playing together then. Even playing outside felt too risky. But for this occasion, we invited Theo’s family to come see us release ten butterflies. We all stood scattered across the yard, and I had a long pole so the little ones could see how far “six feet” was. They wanted to get closer to watch the butterflies, but every time one of us moved forward, we had to do all kinds of mental trigonometry to calculate the distance adjustments required by seven people from two households. It. Was. Awful.

(Over the course of the year, we got a better sense of what our risks were (and weren’t) and formed an informal “pod,” without which we all would have lost our damn minds. Leaky but ultimately functional (the pod, not the minds. Okay, maybe those too). None of us got COVID, not even Theodore’s dad, who is a teacher. Knock on wood and all that. And I scored a vax Monday. Whoo! 🥳)

This year, Theodore and his sister have their own cup of caterpillars, and I hope they have more creativity with names than Michael does, because we cannot have ten butterflies named “Junior” on our street. It’s absurd.

I think eight-year-old Michael is about to turn into a real “tween,” and I think maybe he knows it, too, or at least intuits how fast he’s moving away from me.

He’s been, well, tweeny. Selectively deaf, contrary, dismissive. Preoccupied with XBox “Rocket League,” senseless screamy YouTube videos, and terrible, terrible music (I’m told it’s by Neffex, and that it is in fact more than one song. I call shenanigans on the latter point). And refusing to bathe or seek out clean laundry. Hard times are coming.

Tonight Dave and I heaved him into the shower and held the door closed until we figured most of the crust had sloughed off. He emerged into his bedroom extremely nekkid and visibly damp and whined, “I don’t know how to dry myself! Please help meee!” I told him he was not a baby and went back to my crossword. He moaned and begged for my expert assistance, dripping into the carpet.

Finally I said, “Okay, but if you’re going to be a baby, you’ll have to do what I say.” I was taken aback when he happily agreed and popped up from the floor to get a towel. For several months, he’s strictly avoided anything I request. I mean, like, anything I say. At all. If I asked the child to inhale, he’d turn blue and keel over to spite me.

So I was suspicious. But Michael let me dry him, rub lotion on his arms (which he’s steadfastly refused to do because I asked him to), comb his overgrown blond mop, and brush his teeth (which I’ve begged him to let me do because he does a crappy job and his teeth are about the consistency of firm-ish latte foam to begin with).

Expecting that this would end the game, I announced that I would select his pajamas for him. I figured that would be a hard pass. For reasons best known to himself, he’s spent the last few months of chilly nights, and most weekend days, in nothing but boxer shorts. He refuses extra blankets. I keep the house cold at night. And in the morning, there he is playing XBox in his skivvies, all bare legs and chest and tweeny nonchalance.

But oh, dear reader, how I miss little-boy pajamas. The friendly frogs, the bears, the dinosaurs, the raccoons! The plastic zippers that must be kept away from tiny penises, the contrasting-color cuffs and collars, the snuggly jersey, the fleece! The motorcycles, the stripes, the monkeys on surfboards… Oh, I could just weep. He’s always been very tall for his age, so he outgrew the cute stuff long before I was ready. Finally I settled for buying monochrome long-underwear sets and t-shirts, but now in his polar-bear phase he’s rejected even those.

Until tonight. I don’t know why. I chose plain white waffle-knit pants and a short-sleeve royal-blue t-shirt. It’s too cold for short sleeves, but considering he’s used to so much less, I tried to meet him halfway. He sat on the end of his bed and I knelt on the floor, working his big ol’ feet through the cuffs as I’d done hundreds of times before, but so long ago I couldn’t remember the last time. And I thought, It may be the last time.

There is something archetypal about the image of a woman tenderly bent over the feet of a beloved young man. It’s Mary Magdalene wiping Jesus’ feet with her hair; it’s Odysseus’ old nurse gasping as she recognizes the old scar on his leg; it’s the mama who loves Paul Simon “like a rock,” who “get down on her knees and hug” him. And it’s me with my tall gorgeous blue-eyed son, his enormous feet emerging like unwieldy miracles from the legs of his thermal bottoms.

As Michael got into bed, I decided to push my luck. “Do you want me to sing to you, too? We always did that when you were a baby.” This is true, but it’s also true that when he was three or four years old, he forcefully requested that I stop singing. Please. Since I’m not good enough for karaoke, this development was deeply disappointing, effectively ending my “career” in “singing.” At the time, I put it down to the emergence of some actual taste in music. But now we have the Neffex situation, so I don’t know about that.

“Yes, sing,” he said now. “No. I don’t know.” So we just read our usual chapter of Perseus Jackson and turned out the light. I lay beside him awhile. I asked him again when he was almost asleep, and he said yes.

I sang “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” very softly. Just the first verse. I used to do the extended dance mix, but I didn’t want to overstay my welcome, so to speak. And then he really surprised me and said drowsily, “Now ‘Rockabye, Baby.'” And that was indeed the next song in our traditional sequence, all those years ago. I sang that, too.

I wanted to finish with “Sweet Baby James” the way we used to, but he was already asleep and I did not presume. I lay awhile in the dark, thinking, “Maybe you can believe it, if it helps you to sleep. / Singing works just fine for me…”

When I thought he was soundly sleeping, I got up to leave. He immediately asked where I was going. This happens sometimes; generally I just make up some nonsense and go, since he’s not really awake anyhow and he’ll be snoring again before I reach the door. “I have to ask about something,” I offered lamely. He said that was okay, but then I said, “But it can wait. I’ll just stay. It can wait.”

Kitchen. MEGHAN, DAVE, and angel-faced seven-year-old MICHAEL are putting away groceries

MEGHAN

DAVE, did you get the nuts I ordered you? Your nuts should be in there.

DAVE, deadpanning

Yeah, I got them. No one can separate me from my nuts.

MEGHAN smirks

I bet I could separate you from your nuts. Maybe I already have.

MICHAEL

Mom could separate Dad from his penis nuts!

MEGHAN and DAVE in concert, agape

WHAT?!

MICHAEL, innocently

His penis nuts! Penis. Penits nuts?

MEGHAN facepalms

DAVE enunciates carefully

Peanuts, dude. Pea…nuts.

DAVE

Splutters, blusters, and otherwise rages about the state of the world and every asinine waste of oxygen in it

MEG

Desperate to stem the flow of murderous expletives

Hey, look! You never even opened this package from Amazon!

The package is small and light. She picks it up in one hand and hesitantly proffers it to DAVE, like a treat to a mad dog

DAVE

Accepts the box but does not open it. Visible storm clouds ring his head

Oh. It’s just my Keri Russell figurine from the last STAR WARS.

MEG

With forced, almost manic brightness

Well, I bet she can cheer you up!

DAVE

Gloomily regards the box in his lap

I doubt it. It’s not even her whole face. She has a helmet on.

I thought being stuck at home with a seven-year-old might be at least slightly fun. We could do puzzles and finger paint and plant flowers and have dance parties and go for long walks and bake cookies and bread and learn to play the ukulele (yes, he has one) and film our cocoons opening. 

But his idea of fun and mine are many, many miles apart. As far as I can tell, all he wants to do is watch videos of other people playing video games. Games we own. Games he could be playing himself. But no. Stare blankly for hours as spastic pubescent assholes play them instead, screeching like gibbons all the while. I hate it.

So I guess I’ll go plant some flowers. By myself.

Or there’s always more sleep.

I may be getting a little depressed. I’ll try again tomorrow.

Michael, my seven-year-old, has seen too many movies where portable drives and disks are crucial to some dastardly scheme. For months, he’s been finding my old ones around, engineering ways to hide them or covertly wear them on his person, and demanding that I make them DO whatever magical thing they do. He’s convinced I’m hiding something.

I tell him they’re just boxes for stuff. That the box is useful only for transporting things that he neither has nor needs. But he continues to hoard them in great secrecy and plug them in to anything they fit, expecting…I don’t know what. The last one was empty except for an Invisible Man essay test and the multiple-choice answer key to goodness-knows-what. Maybe he thinks the nuclear code is ACAEEBACEB.

Facebook flashback, originally posted March 30, 2018.

The story goes something like this.

We thought we had a boat, so I told Michael we could use it Sunday.

We found that no, we had no boat. We had two oars, a foot pump, and a box with a picture of a boat on it. Read more

My theory is that muffins are inherently high in comedic value.

Consider my favorite joke:

Two muffins are baking together in an oven. The first muffin says, “Man, it’s hot in here.” The second muffin screams, “OMIGOD A TALKING MUFFIN!!”

This is GOLD, people. Read more

I’m 40-something years old. After teaching for sixteen years, I quit to stay home, get my life in order, and figure out what else I want to be when I grow up. After a few years of deliberation, I find that mostly what I want to be is drastically underemployed.