PATCHY-ASS LIFE

For a minute, it was a normal morning.

Two five-year-olds woke, each a shade of angry and disgruntled. They bashed their way down the stairs and stomped towards the kitchen, ululating about extremely important things they wanted with the undying passion of rat terriers, and then dished out tongue-lashing monologues for my deadbeat responses to why they couldn’t in fact have a hot air balloon or a silo full of chocolate milk just this moment.

In the weeks prior, my children had been to school maybe four days in total. The rest can be described as high fever plus internet television and swatting at each other from the careening hammock swing. We’d been going through their new school’s pathogenic circuitry like American Gladiators without helmets for over a month.

Their “behavior,” as such, at this point, after zero civilizing or socially/intellectually stimulating influence for an absurd aggregate of time, consisted mostly of yelling without syllables. My role at this point was firmly situated in the track of “poorly performing dogsbody to two angry despots.”

When they finally arrived in the kitchen, piecemeal, dragging blankets and very dirty “softie” familiars (an exhausted barn owl puppet and a rag so filthy it looks like it belongs on the floor of an auto mechanic shop) they sat down, naked and jostling each other on the cross-hatch of the heating vent to “make patterns on their butts,” while I hurried to locate any remaining clean underwear in the house and finish making the oatmeal they 100% would not be eating.

And that’s when I remembered it was museum field trip day. The blood drained from my face. These two contrary naked squirrels with clouds of impenetrable tangles affixed to their heads, still hot from deep and stubborn sleep, who presently had nothing but a fire-hose of grievance to offer the world, had twenty-six minutes until they faced their first excursion on a school bus—to an art museum.

Oscar nominees have nothing on me. “Oh, today you have a fun adventure,” I said, so nonchalantly that a garden toad could have understood I was transmitting that my soul itself was wearing sweatpants and chewing a wad of watermelon Bubblicious. I remained facing the sink, away from the disenchanted crosshatched elves; as long as they couldn’t see my face, I felt I might stand a chance of carrying this “easy tonality” forward just a few more yards.

“There’s a fun bus ride to the museum, where you’re going to see a quick play, and then go back to normal school.” I sniffed. It was but the momentary quiet before the conductor’s baton comes down. Then, from the audience itself, arose the lavish, blooming fury of the entire pit orchestra.

I DON’T WANT TO GO ON A BUSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS / WHAT IS A PLAYYYYYYYYYYY / THIS IS A VERY BAD PLANNNNNNNNNN / NO SCHOOL TODAYYYYYYYY / WE WILL STAY HOMMMMMMMMMME

I glanced nervously towards my coffee. The mug shrugged at me, as if to say “You finished me by 6am. What do you expect me to do for you now?”

I dished out the oatmeal into its pre-compost station in front of the children and explained that a play was just people pretending to be in a story while you watch.

THAT SOUNDS AWFUL said the troll with the shorter but more fiercely disarranged hair.

Well, you can stand in the back, maybe near a window, if you don’t like it, and watch the birds outside, I said.

TELL ME WHAT IS A PLAY it said, again, clearly hoping for a radically different answer.

It’s people being part of a story, having a little imagining fun, while you sit with friends and teachers and watch. For a very short time. Maybe just a few minutes, I said, hoping at this point that the play was indeed going to be world-record brief.

A BUS IS SCARY, said the gargoyle with longer hair, a few pink clips slipping down past its ears and neck within the haze of tangles.

Oh that? Let me tell you a secret, I said, wondering with terror what would come out of my mouth next. But that one loves secrets, so if I could produce one I might be able to recruit a valuable ally in the impending get-your-socks-and-shoes-on proceedings. It leaned in. A road sign that it historically loved to see flashed across my vision, and I took a chance. I bet you’ll take Route 79. If you do, you will see… the trucks-on-steep-hills sign.

It sat back a little, considering wonderment as a potential option.

AND I WILL SEE ITHACA FALLS, it as(k)serted. I nodded. Anything at this point. It quieted, provisionally. While I hadn’t won a staunch lieutenant, I had combatted the worst of its misgivings enough to make the wall of expert resistance standing between me and my first day with a few child-free hours since the Cretaceous semi-permeable.

The other gnome opened its mouth to issue a fresh hell of protest, and I pivoted as quickly as I could. I abandoned the easy positivity campaign for overt distraction, and leapt up to point and gesticulate about a VERY EXCITING bird I had “just seen” at the feeder, and issued a fervent prayer that one would show up within a few seconds.

It did. A red-bellied woodpecker answered my prayer, landing with satisfying awkwardness and ado, and then set about hammering at the suet, while the crowd of gremlins gathered round to oo and ahhh.

The monologue I delivered over the next fifteen minutes—while dumping the untouched oatmeal into its final resting place in the compost pot, locating socks and shoes and clothes and lunch boxes and school folders and backpacks, and taking a few swipes at the tangled heads with a pink drugstore hairbrush—was fragmented and nonsensical, but also taut, impassioned, and contained MANY FACTS. More facts than I was aware that I knew about woodpeckers. It was a little like Fred Rogers meets circus clown. Somehow we rode the unicycle of my will out to the car and got buckled.

By the time I delivered them to their classroom, there were beads of sweat on my forehead from maintaining the narrative— any narrative other than the bus and the play. That would have to be the teachers’ job, godhelpthem.

It was my desperate hope that the mass of other children moving towards school buses would somehow sweep my contrary little rodents into the fold and win them a few hours of exposure to the world, which, as feral creatures largely raised during a pandemic, they so desperately need, and which their mother struggles to deliver because at this point most of her internal organs have leaked out onto the carpet from exhaustion.

I kissed them and turned peremptorily back down the hall, squinching my eyes against whatever outburst I was about to hear from the pretty little pre-k classroom. I held my breath but heard nothing unusual for a moment, and started bustling even faster towards my car.

HEY — I heard the play defector shout, right as the main entrance door to the school swung shut behind me. It was in the hands of the teachers now, I repeated to myself. I pulled up my big girl pants and put all my focus on my coffee-shop writing meetup with a friend, turning my phone to high volume so that it would alert me when the apocalypse struck.

One hour into my meetup, I had heard no pings, so I checked the phone. Sure enough, forty-five minutes earlier the teacher had messaged me through the classroom app, when I was up at the counter purchasing drinks, to say that both children were very upset, did not want to go on the field trip, wanted to come home instead, but that the teachers were going to somehow try to make it possible for the kids to join the field trip.

My heart plummeted. My kids in distress, unsoothable by expert teachers, and me sitting there oblivious in a coffee shop. Their first chance at an excursion into the world without parents had been soured because I’d failed to prepare them adequately. My children, for some reason too deeply sensitive, complicated, fearful, and under-resourced to go on a simple field trip…

And then I saw the follow-up message, which the teacher had sent just a few minutes after the initial one:

“All good!” she had typed, mysteriously and without explanation. I gaped.

“OK, thanks, keep me posted,” I replied, as though I weren’t so confounded my eyes were crossing. How on earth had the teachers gotten my children, who have the willpower of male kangaroos on amphetamines, onto a vehicle they feared to go see a thing they feared?

It turns out I would never know.

“They are both happy and excited now!” the teacher ended the text thread, and my only clues thereafter would be the assortment of pictures in the classroom app— my kids on a bus (!), my kids sitting watching a play (!), my kids standing outside a museum smiling (!)— and a few disembodied, excited sentences from the field-trippers themselves about seeing tractors on Route 79. Oh, and the announcement that the paper “medals” around their necks at pick-up were “for winning.”

What did you win? I asked.

THE PLAY, the slighter of the leprechauns informed me. WE WON THE PLAY.

*

As my kids have made the transition to public school (a delightful, sunny, colorful pre-k classroom with wise, comfortable, grounded teachers who make my husband and me want to be students too— it feels vaguely spa-ish/zen-like), I’ve entered a sort of black-box situation. The teachers are friendly, transparent, informational, and forthright, but communications about your kid’s day necessarily get less granular in a public school setting than inside the small, swaddle-and-daub world of daycare/private preschool.

To be honest, I like it. It’s hilarious to try and piece together what the hell went on each day from the bits and pieces two five-year-olds are able, willing, and inspired to share from the back seat on the drive home. Half the time, when I ask what they had for lunch, I’m told they had “butts and frogs.”

A companion process to becoming slightly more removed from significant portions of my children’s days has been feeling that in some ways more than ever I’m “just patching things together,” that the materials of my daily life are somehow discontinuous, cobbled together, that they don’t and won’t ever cohere.

I feel like this sense of having to patch shit up echoes the patchiness of things around here in general— the cupboards have three layers of poorly applied paint; the landing has an old oriental rug stapled to it because underneath there is some horrifying astro-turf thing; the dangerously low-slung bunk-bed crammed into the kids’ tiny-attic-sized bedroom is itself a patch, a crossover between larval humans on wads of floor-mattress and the elementary schoolers we’ll soon have, whose legs will poke through the bunk rails.

What is a patch?

It is a material you had at hand, cut into a usable shape, and applied to a thing that lacked continuity.

It’s a place where you’ve placed what you had, what you could, to help something keep functioning, make it whole.

A patch is the interim.

A patch is a bridge between what happened and what is about to happen.

It’s the now, the thing that’s happening all the time.

A patch is the way you have applied yourself to the context.

A patch is the you in the thing.

So maybe in patching together my house, my children’s narratives, and the jeans I can’t bring myself to let go of, I’m not so much “making desperate and laughable efforts to fix a thing that was given to me” as I am actually creating a new thing— something I made in concert with what life offered me.

That sounds an awful lot like living.

I don’t even pull the loose threads off.

For those of you interested in other genres, I have a new poem, “Therapeutic Benefit,” out at Sixth Finch, the new issue of which went live yesterday (click on the image to enter the issue), in company with some awesome poets doing very cool stuff. Enjoy!