HERE BE DRAGONS

The mammals in the box are beginning to scratch each other’s faces.

They break things: there are no more carboard containers left in the recycling pile in which to shuttle shards.

The mammals in the box make loud syllables and sometimes throw whatever is at hand. They draw on the walls: many graphite swoops. The mammals have begun to kick the walls of the box—bambambambambambam— because the walls are there.

This is all to say it is December, and we have now been mostly inside our house for a thousand years, with bodies that would happily strangle you where you stand, if it meant they could MOVE FREELY FOR A FEW HOURS. And yet we are bound to these minds, these chirpy entities of reminder, which keep coughing up that stupid song, the one that goes there’s no dessert for murderers¹.

So I look at my husband, while the heathens mill about beneath our table, for they will not sit in chairs, and I am told that tying children to chairs is anathema to some things I’m supposed to remember. I look at him and I say, “how do you feel about martial arts?”

Backstory: my husband is an airline pilot and we have never traveled with our children. The farthest we’ve taken them is to Buffalo, in a car, and that one took three years off my life. It involved a several-hour, worship-and-rage session in the front yard of a market store that had PARKED AN ANTIQUE TRACTOR EXACTLY WHERE MY SON COULD SEE IT from the driveway of my husband’s childhood friend’s house. Plus there was some other stuff with theft and injury.

Anyway for similar reasons we have never enrolled our children in any organized learning outside of school. That they didn’t gnaw through the seat belts on their school bus on the first day of kindergarten has been impressive enough.

No classes. No music lessons, no dance class, no little tykes soccer explosion, no mommy-and-me torture rituals. The bulk of their learning to date has been extracted from dropping the bricks they pried up from the back walkway onto their unprotected toes.

So. When I look up at my husband from whatever I am pretending to be able to focus on —the bambambambambambam from under the table displacing both our torsos in little jolts— and say, “How do you feel about martial arts?” and he replies, “GREAT,” the brevity of this interaction is a direct measure of the waning oxygen in the mammal box.

The children are signed up to try Little Dragons class within about three and a half minutes.

Getting there is a different story. For all of their homicidal tendencies, our children are painfully conservative when it comes to things like, say, using a different band-aid, or sitting on the other couch in the mammal box.

So going to a new place, to do a new thing, with new people, is like asking these particular five-year-olds to finish their applesauce and do an Ironman.

Further complicating the preparations is that one of the specimens is hypoglycemic and powerfully against the consumption of food. Psy-Ops are required in order for it to consume the calories it needs to function, let alone to stop plotting criminal acts. (It also arrives home from school on Empty because it is TOO BUSY at school to touch the food I send with it in a bag.) Therefore, between school and Little Dragons class, we must enter some wormhole in which the specimen ingests calories.

We drive to the school (we: Thursdays are usually my turn for after-school programming, but we know in our marrow, though we never say aloud, that this is not going to be a one-parent job) to pick them up at dismissal. We “cheerfully” buckle them into their bumper seats and “offhandedly” remind them that we are going to Little Dragons class today! Yay!

The yelling starts.

I DONT WANT TO GO

I AM NOT DOING THAT

I WILL NEVER TALK TO YOU AGAIN

etc.

There is just over an hour to fill between school pick-up and our New Frontier of Life, and we cannot go home.

If we go home, the lamprey teeth will sink into the couch and anchor. So we take them to the antique store, because it’s on the way, they love antiques, and we’re hoping they will find some small piece of junk we can excuse the placating purchase of because it costs less than a dollar.

One of them selects a not-quite-hideous $3 Christmas ornament, happily, with signature wonder and appreciation, and the other, who has yet to consume the wormhole calories, selects an $85 toy dump truck that is a replica of one we have at home.

He begins to sing what I call “the melatonic scale,” which is the rising death aria of bedtime, but can double in a pinch as Tantrum Anthem.

His father starts The Shutdown, that wide-eyed, abstracted, exit-finding trajectory which communicates, by the set of the shoulders and the perfunctory quality of the glazed eyes, imminent departure.

But his mother is less inclined to give up this last chance at finding enough equilibrium to help find the entry to the calories wormhole.

She tries Distraction first. She mentions Santa, offhandedly. She points to a few cool, cheap items. Then, as the melatonic scale rises in pitch and volume, she dabbles, briefly, in the twin futilities of Rationality (the deal was that they could each select one small item, and this is not small) and Delay (maybe Santa can hear us).

All of this playing out as clearly for naught, she resorts to the Prayer of the Body, which is to move, in any direction, with conviction, and simply hope that the singer will follow, and the channel will miraculously change.

She takes a few steps towards— where? She doesn’t know, and it doesn’t matter. She takes a few more, moving through the bright rows of mothball-smelling clothes on racks. She holds her breath, for lo— the singer has lost some small degree of tonal conviction. The melody is breaking up.

Her body gains purpose; she is standing up straighter and striding as if towards something. The singer dwindles, measurably, and begins to follow her. And then it happens.

He suddenly spots some kind of copper kitchen shebang on a low table in the last vendor stall before the exit. He moves to it, magnetically, already shouting at its perfection: for it is a tiny gravy-warming gizmo: a diminutive copper pouring-pot that sits on a three-legged frame above a little notch where a tea-light candle goes.

This child, reader, has been [spoiler alert] making candles for people for Christmas— but on a deeply jerry-rigged setup made out of a mason jar, a garlic press, a sacrificial quarter-cup measure, and a mangled dinner candle. THIS copper dealie, however, THIS one will will put him IN BUSINESS, and he knows it.

His mother holds her breath as she approaches to locate the price tag. She spots it, exhales. It is only eight dollars. Fine. The price of New Horizons.

Everyone congregates at the check-out register, sort of trying not to drop their loot. We buy the coveted items, children shoving each other and crowing and grabbing, while two young women coo over how beautiful they are. I smile drily, my winter lips cracking and bleeding with the motion.

We get back in the car, hurting our already injured backs trying to answer the tangle of seatbelts and water bottles and trampled snacks and demands for IMMEDIATE extraction of the new antique items from their snazzy paper bags.

We are now in full-on let-it-slide mode, this close to the Little Dragons parking lot (it’s only about another half mile down the road).

When we get there, we are fifteen minutes early. We park in the lot praying for the entrance to the wormhole to show up. With or without caloric fortification, at this point, we are going to have to breach the subject of changing clothes.

Both children are wearing button-down flannels and jeans, and must change into cotton T-shirts and loose-fitting pants for class. We say, super low-key, “Oh yeah, you’ll need to take off your jackets and clothes and put these on.”

WHAAAAAT

NOOOOOOO

etc.

The new antiques fall to the floor of the car while the new wave of protest erupts. Dad keeps his calm. He whips out his phone. It is time to go nuclear. In a moment of genius so profound I gasp even recalling it, he pulls up a youtube clip from the Matrix.

“Hey,” he says, wielding the screen. Their heads snap to attention and the wails truncate. With the other hand, Dad tosses one of the cotton T-shirts to the back seat. “Do you wanna SEE some kung fu??”

YEAHHHHHH

“OK, put those shirts on and then we can watch.”

Coats start to come off. Half a T-shirt goes on. Here a shoe, there a pant leg. Something is happening. Then the clip ends. Activity slows.

A trembling voice rises from a mostly-dressed child. The one with no calories to his name. In a slight, quiet quaver, he reveals what has apparently been the problem:

“But… I don’t want to go in the water.”

Somehow, in his little glycogen-starved brain, this whole episode has been conflated with the only other institution he’s ever been to, the YMCA, where The Big Pool is considerable cause for concern. The Big Pool has somehow been imported here as what must be the cause of The Threatening Feeling regarding this New Horizon.

“Sweetheart, there’s no water,” I say, evenly. “No pool. Just a big fun room to run around in, like a gymnasium.”

A blank look. The entrance to the wormhole abruptly drives up and skids to a stop next to his vulnerable little body.

The child reaches abstractedly for the Special Snax that have been laid out on the altar of the back seat between the two bumper seats. He picks up a bag of barbecue chips and puts a fistful in his mouth. He munches, thinking.

“Can we see the video?” he asks.

SURE, his parents SMILE, and Dad pulls up the Matrix clip while Mom hands back the last of the socks and pants, pointing to the body parts where they go. When no one does anything with the clothing items, she holds each one near the part it goes to and taps that body part until it moves towards some kind of cooperative gesture.

One full snack-bag of barbecue chips later, it is ten minutes to class start time. We unload them from the car and head in, parents suddenly officially more frightened than the children.

The sheer effort it takes to shepherd these psychological pinballs through the absurd maze of our culture leaves us forgetful that in general, nowadays, both of our offspring can pretty much manage at least an 80% compliance rate with Friendly and Effective Strangers in Positions of Authority, when fully fueled and rested. Full-fledged disaster is not actually quite as likely as the fight-or-flight portions of our parental psyches are telling us.

But it does feel that way— like imminent disaster— up until the very moment we see, with our own eyes, both of our children responding to the command “everyone line up.”

In a feat of alacrity that stuns their mother’s jaw open, they look around, see what the other kids are doing, and… they… um…

Well, they do it.

In short, they do beautifully. The whole time.

They smile, they listen, they ask questions, they participate, they cooperate, they get creative when asked to (my daughter invents something called “the donkey kick” and performs it with surprising gusto).

And …they are moving their winter mammals. Vigorously. For almost the whole forty minutes. It is glorious.

No one gnaws through a wall and there are no homicides. The teacher is calm, responsive, insightful, encouraging, and expectant of their attention and cooperation. They respond. Mom could piss herself with gratitude.

As she watches her children inhabit their bodies in a thoughtful, joyful way, she’s reminded of the martial arts she used to do, in high school. How those classes were the only place where, doing endless sit-ups and breaking boards with a fist and sparring with higher-ranked partners, she felt the exhilaration of being… miraculously, the sole possessor of her own body.

That power, that poise, that extraordinary potential of motion— all of which could only be accessed if she first showed up. In a body. Which is, of course, the place where everything begins.

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1. To the tune of “I’ve Never Been in Love Before”