Thank you for your service

People are usually surprised when they find out my husband Phil is a veteran. (A sergeant of the 4th infantry division, 4th brigade, to be exact.) I'm not sure if this is because Jewish boys from Queens don't generally join the military or if Phil and his hipster glasses and talent for building elaborate Magnatile structures don't give off a military-man vibe, or both.

People are even more surprised when they find out that Phil deployed to Iraq in 2003 as one of the first waves of American troops. On our second date, Phil charmed me by talking about the essential inflatable pillow he had packed for his tent. If you want to see Phil get animated about his service, ask him about (1) what it's like to shower in the Iraqi desert, (2) the time his fellow soldier wouldn't share her bread machine or (3) how conditions for deployed soldiers evolved since the early days (Phil thinks they got more "plush" because he and his guys were the ones who actually dug the holes).

I have a vivid memory of being in my sophomore dorm room at Brandeis in 2003 when the U.S. invaded Iraq. At our wedding, we played a slideshow of photographs from our childhoods that included the phrase "Phil went to Iraq...Rachel went to Brandeis."

I didn't know Phil while he was in the Army. In fact, Phil likes to say that he could have seen himself in a military career for life but that the reason he left the service was that he didn't think he'd be able to meet a nice Jewish girl.

Phil and I have been together for almost 12 years, which means I have spent almost 12 years trying to understand his motivation for joining the Army at age 18. I've landed somewhere between "he has a strong moral compass, unwavering commitment to duty and high tolerance for pain" and "he played with G.I. Joes a lot as a kid."

Every year on Veterans Day, Phil and his Army buddies go around changing their Facebook profile pictures to pictures of them in the service.

They also get told, "Thank you for your service," which is a phrase Phil has never liked. I asked him why and he said he finds it "patronizing."

"You can thank me for my service by giving veterans decent health care and support services," he said. "Go to a VA hospital and spend some time in the waiting room and then thank me for my service."

I wouldn't ordinarily say military guys are my "type," but that attitude is a total turn-on.

So if you want to thank Phil for his service this Veterans Day, consider making a donation to Team RWB or Hope for the Warriors.

Thanks for your service, Phil. Eli and I are proud of you.

(And if anyone has any connections to get Phil recognized by the Mets as the Welcome Back Veteran of the Game, which I have been trying to figure out how to do for years, please be in touch.)

Baruch dayan ha'emet

When Eli was small, every night at bedtime I'd sing him the Hashkiveinu prayer. Hashkiveinu is like a Jewish "Now I lay me down to sleep": Cause us to lie down in peace and raise us up to life renewed; spread the shelter of Your peace over us; guide us with Your counsel and save us for the sake of Your Name. Shield us from foe, plague, sword, famine and anguish. Remove wrongdoing from before us and behind us, and shelter us in the shadow of Your wings. For it is You, O God, Who protects and rescues us; it is You, O God, Who are our gracious and compassionate King. Safeguard our coming and our going, to life and to peace from now to eternity. Blessed are You, Adonai, Who spreads a shelter of peace over us.

There are lots of English translations of Hashkiveinu — the one we often sing at our temple goes, "Spread the shelter of Your peace over us; guide us in wisdom, compassion and trust; save us for the sake of Your name; shield us from hatred, sorrow and pain" — but the one I sang to Eli went, "O guide my steps and help me find my way; I need Your shelter now; rock me in Your arms and guide my steps, and help me make each day a song of praise to You."

(This is my temple's cantor!)

I thought of the Hashkiveinu when I heard about the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, and it went round and round in my head all day: Shield us from hatred, sorrow and pain.

I believe in telling the truth to my child. We've had hard conversations about racism, about Trump, about death. But when he heard me telling Phil that there would be a special service at the beginning of Hebrew school today for adults and older students only, I couldn't bring myself to tell him why. I didn't want him to know.

I thought: It's only a matter of time before someone I know dies in a mass shooting.

On the first Friday of every month we go to a family Shabbat service at our temple. Eli gets really snuggly at these services, and he often sits in my lap and wraps my arms around him like a blanket. I kiss him on the head while we listen to the children's choir, and I get teary-eyed when they sing:

Let there be love
And understanding among us
Let peace and friendship be our shelter from life's storms. 

I wish we didn't have to live this way. I wish we didn't have to die this way. 

Unicorns are for everyone (or, "My kid likes pink but he also likes the patriarchy," or "Women: we've been here the whole time")

On the way home from the doctor after the great nurse neglect of 2018, Eli turned to me and said conversationally, “Do you know what it’s called when a boy likes girl things? A sissy!”

I think I stopped dead in my tracks on the sidewalk.

“No!” I practically shouted. “Where did you hear that? No!”

It turned out Eli was giving me his very bad takeaway from the very good book “Oliver Button is a Sissy,” written in 1979 (!) by Tomie dePaola (who, Google taught me today, is gay), which his teacher had read to his class.

The gist: Oliver Button likes to tap dance; bullies graffiti the school wall to read “Oliver Button is a sissy”; Oliver Button tap dances with exuberance in the school talent show; bullies revise their graffiti to read “Oliver Button is a star!”

When Eli told me this last part — “Oliver Button is a STAR!” — his eyes shone. Eli likes to dance, too  — exuberantly and in public, and recently he tried to insert himself as a contestant in a dance battle at the Maker Faire and accused Phil of "crushing his dream" when Phil dragged him out of the competition.

Eli likes dancing, and sparkly colors, and nail polish, and rainbow face paint, and unicorns. This doesn’t make him a hero; frankly, I don’t think it even makes him any more enlightened than any other child.

It just means he likes cool shit!

But because we can’t have nice things, he’s been teased for some of this cool shit. Last year I wrote about buying him a pair of sparkly pink sneakers; in reality, he only wore them a few times. After our talk about “Oliver Button is a Sissy,” Eli told me, “Some kids at school make fun of me because I like My Little Pony, so I just don’t bring it up anymore.”

Because the truth is, Eli likes My Little Pony, but he also likes Pokemon, and if My Little Pony is going to get him teased and Pokemon isn’t, he’ll just stick with Pokemon. He’s not that brave. He’s not Oliver Button.

Can I be honest? Every time Eli tells me someone has teased him, it’s a girl who’s done the teasing. As someone who was once a girl myself, I have this pet theory as to why: It's because boys and men already have all the power, so girls who like "boy" things aren't much of a threat. If a girl wants to play football, eh, go ahead, we'll crush her. But girls are like: You guys get everyfuckingthing else, just let us have our fucking dolls and leave us alone. You have the presidency and both houses of Congress and now you want a pink shirt too?

On Monday Eli wore this H&M unicorn shirt to school.

Evidently some girl laughed at him and told him it was a girls' shirt. Eli says he told her that unicorns are "for everyone," because hello, everyone knows that unicorns possess superpowers and we also recommend the song "All Eight Unicorns" from the Story Pirates podcast.

"Girls can like boy things, but boys can't like girl things," he said sadly when he came home.

But paradoxically, even though what we do need is for some enlightened men to pave the way, I find something frustrating about the way enlightened men are discovering that this is an issue. Witness this Scary Mommy take on a Twitter thread from a dad whose 5-year-old son was teased for having a manicure: "Parents Are Applauding This Dad's Viral Thread on Toxic Masculinity." (Can you spot a familiar sparkly face? Ahem.)

Women have known for years about the problem of toxic masculinity. But suddenly a man — a straight white man — comes face to face with it and "parents are applauding." Just what we need: another man unearths the problem of the patriarchy. (But: Isn't this actually just what we need? You see my conundrum.)

And after sensitively boosting his tearful son's spirits, he — hold your breath! — paints his own nails too.

What a guy! Applause!

I can't explain why this irks me. Maybe because I can't help thinking: Is this what we need men to do? Get manicures or wear pink shirts? Didn't metrosexuals already solve this for us in the early '00s?

A few years ago, Runner's World published a special report called "Running While Female" about the experience of female runners who have been harassed or assaulted by running. The article was precipitated by a male editor who was shocked — shocked! — to learn from his female colleagues that this was a thing. And not a rare thing, but like a frequent occurrence that I would venture to say 100% of female runners have experienced at least once.

Once again, it took a man to "expose" (no pun intended) something that has never, ever been a secret to women.

A few weeks ago, Mommy Shorts posted an entry called "How to Teach Kids About Consent." The way she phrased the question in her Facebook group was actually about how we are raising our boys, and I think the post ended up being centered around consent because the great majority of the comments were about consent. No means no. Respect girls' bodies.

But here's my take: It's 2018, and "no means no" is honestly the least we can do. "Consent" is critical, but there is so much more we need to teach our children. Of course, duh, you don't touch someone who doesn't want to be touched. Ever since the Kavanaugh hearings, I see a lot of men on Twitter congratulating themselves essentially for...just not being rapists. But there's still a long way to go from being a not-rapist to being a true ally.

Does getting a manicure fall somewhere into that gulf? Maybe. But I think the conversations we need to have with our sons and our daughters perhaps start with "Unicorns are for everyone" and progress to "Why does there have to be a boys' team and a girls' team when you're playing tag?" and end somewhere in the realm of "Speak up about daily microaggressions against girls and women and use your inherent power as a white male to change them."

Because here's the thing: Sure, my kid likes pink, but that doesn't mean he's ready to tackle the patriarchy. He's still a white boy in a world that was frankly designed for the bidding of white men. He still moves through the world as a white boy and reaps the rewards that go along with that. When we're out in public and he interrupts an adult who's explaining something, he gets forgiven because he's cute and enthusiastic. When he's older and he gets rowdy at the playground, no one will call the police.

He thinks in general daddies do all the cooking ("But Mommy, you don't know how to work the stove!" he once said, aghast, when I promised I'd make him some eggs in Phil's absence) and mommies do all the driving, so score for our family on that point. (We're reading the first Boxcar Children book, which was published in 1924, and it makes me absolutely crazy how the girls do all the housekeeping.)

But I know in my bones that despite the way he rocks a pink unicorn shirt, he still thinks boys are stronger than girls, that boys are more powerful, because that's still what he sees in the world around him: powerful men wielding their power. Some of them are wielding it to deny women control over their own bodies and voices, and some of them are using it to show off their manicures on Twitter.

Remember when Jason Chaffetz said he couldn't support Trump and look his daughters in the eye? (And then he supported Trump anyway?) I guess in some way I see that and the Twitter manicure thread as two sides of the same terrible coin: men who have come to enlightenment because of their children, because some wrong has been perpetrated against them, or because they're surprised they think differently about the world now that their children are in it.

There seems to be a whole world of enlightened men (and sure, women too) whose thinking goes something like: "Now that I have a daughter, I have to start thinking about how to raise a strong feminist." Or "Now that I have a son, who in the grand tradition of men everywhere feels entitled to enjoy whatever he wants because the world is his oyster, I recognize how small-minded it is to distinguish hobbies on the basis of sex, although when I was a child I wouldn't have been caught dead with a manicure."

What I'd really like to see is for a man to say not "My children taught me that women deserve better," but "My mother taught me" or "My kickass colleague taught me" or even "Dana Scully taught me." Women: We've been here the whole time.

I love you all the time

"I'm going to punch you!"

The first time my 3-year-old says these words to me, I silently lift him up, carry him into his room and deposit him on his bed, ordering him to sit there for three minutes — a classic time-out.

When the three-minute timer beeps, my boy emerges wet-eyed and tear-streaked, wounded. He has said the worst thing he could think of, and in return his worst fears have been realized: He's been exiled, banished. For a child as sociable as he is, as craving of interaction, it must surely have been torture for him, those three minutes. He's solemn as he declares he will never, ever say that again.

Never is a long time for a 3-year-old. Too long, because the next day I hear it again: those ugly words, flung like a dare. Punish me. Make me cry. In response I promptly burst into tears of my own — not fake, I'm-trying-to-get-you-to-empathize tears but real, frustrated, raw tears, the tears of a woman who doesn't understand where her sweet boy has gone.

"Mommy? Why are you crying?" he asks tentatively.

"Because you keep saying you want to punch me and it makes me so sad!" I say. His lip quivers and soon he is crying too as if he's the wronged party, as if he's the one who's been betrayed.

"Now I'm sad like you!" he cries. "We're both sad!"

We're both sad. I think of all those times he cried as a baby and my job as a mother was just to make him happy again: dry, warm, fed, loved. How much simpler it was — happy, or sad? — before I had to worry about guilt, shame, fear.

Later that day, knowing I've handled it poorly, I turn to the Internet for advice. I can't be the first mom whose son has said he wants to hurt her. The Internet has answers for me, as it always does, about how I should have reacted, the mom I should have been in that moment; the mom who's composed, who doesn't want to say hurtful things back, who can love her child unconditionally even when he's angry.

When he was younger, when there was just happy, or sad, I'd sing a song to comfort him when he was upset about going to daycare. I love you all the time, I'd sing, to the tune of "The Farmer in the Dell." I love you all the time, I love you all the time, even when I'm not with you I love you all the time.

The next time he explodes with anger I am ready for it with deep breaths to drown out the blood pounding in my ears. I move myself out of kicking range. "I love you," I say loudly over his tantrum. "I love you all the time."

It feels hokey. It feels insufficient. It feels unjust — how can I let him say these things to me? But I force myself to look at him — my boy, his chest heaving, his feelings too big for his body. I tell myself, It's not about you.

That night, we are coiled into his small bed together, our foreheads touching. He asks me to stay. I stroke his forehead, the way I did when he was a small baby going to sleep.

"I love you all the time," I tell him. "I love you even when you're sad, I love you even when you're mad. I love you all the time."

He shuts his eyes, tightly. He nods along.

"I love you all the time," I say. "I love you even when you're grumpy, I love you even when you're silly, I love you all the time."

His eyes slide open and he smiles — the smile I remember, the smile I adore.

"You love me," he whispers, his breath filling the space between us. "Even — " He pauses. "Say the words all again."

And I do.

Human credentials

Last week I walked down the hall from my office to celebrate a co-worker's retirement. I ate half a piece of cake with some kind of tasty cannoli filling and then decided I would save the other half for after I finished my lunch salad.

But when I got back to my office, I had a missed call from the most dreaded contact I have saved in my phone: "PS 196 Nurse."

The call was one hour old. Nurse Annette had also called my office phone and then resorted to sending me an email. I was officially The Worst Working Mother of All Time.

When I finally got to school to pick up Eli, he deployed that time-honored weapon of our people: guilt. "Why didn't you answer your phone?" he asked in a small, sad voice. "I cried in the nurse's office."

The way that I can tell that Eli is genuinely not feeling well is that he's always really sweet to me when he's sick. "Thank you for coming to get me," he continued as we left school with a citation from the nurse that read CHILD MAY NOT RETURN TO SCHOOL UNTIL FEVER-FREE FOR 24 HOURS in prominent highlighted capital letters. He slipped his hand into mine.

"I care about you so much," he said. "I would do anything for you."

So much of parenting is about sacrifice, about the sleep and sanity you give up for your children's sake. Lately I've been thinking a lot about the things we give up for the people we love. (My pre-parenting-sized clothes, exhibit A.) Should I cope with a lengthier commute so Eli can live in a house with a yard? How much of my hard-earned paycheck is appropriate to part with for summer camp? And so many of the best parenting stories are about those sacrifices, about parents who gave up time and opportunities and endured hardships so their children could be successful at their dreams.

There are so many times as a parent that I think I haven't sacrificed enough, that I haven't given up enough for Eli to have the kind of childhood I dream about for him. But when we have incidents like the Great Nurse's Office Neglect of 2018, I'm reminded that so much of parenting is also inherently selfish: I created this child, and now his soul is designed to love me and forgive me even when I let him down.

I think I live a small life: I go to work, I ride the subway back and forth, I go to the gym or out for a run, I listen to podcasts, I go to book club, I watch Bravo, I sometimes walk to the dog (but mostly Phil walks the dog, and I'm always promising I'll commit to walking the dog more often; you get the idea).

But when something awful happens in the world, I find myself tiptoeing in to Eli's room at night to watch him sleep, and I think, You. You are the best thing I've ever done. 

I mean, who wouldn't feel pretty good about themselves for creating this face?

What could be more selfish than that?

Every so often I think about something David Duchovny said about playing Fox Mulder on "The X-Files" (you didn't know I was going to bring "The X-Files" into this thoughtful parenting blog, did you?): that Scully was Mulder's "human credential," the tangible evidence of his humanity in the world.

Sometimes I think of Eli as my own human credential. He is bolder and more audacious than I have ever been; he's my id, unleashed. He's — to borrow an expression from my other great pop culture obsession — some notes at the beginning of a song someone will sing for me, my great unfinished symphony.

Because if being a parent makes you think about all the things you give up, it also makes you think about everything you'll leave behind. This morning on the subway, I read about the UN's dire new climate change report that says the planet is facing catastrophe by 2040. Eli won't even be 30 years old. Part of the selfishness of becoming a parent is the promise of immortality (another deep thought from "The X-Files" goes "Something lives only as long as the last person who remembers it" — see also "Coco," 2017), but increasingly I find myself in despair over the kind of world we might be leaving for our children and grandchildren.

In "The Shawshank Redemption" (you didn't know I was going to bring "The Shawshank Redemption into this thoughtful parenting blog, did you?), Red teaches us that geology is the study of pressure and time. Something tells me that the same is true for parenting: pressure, and time.

I think we all have dreams that we make sacrifices so we can create a better world for our children, but we also dream that our children might be the ones who save us: Last week I watched too many hours of the Kavanaugh hearing, and after Eli demanded an iPad and milk with his breakfast I ended up lecturing him about his sense of white male entitlement. Because what I really meant wasn't just "It's rude when you don't show courtesy"; it was: Please grow up to be a Barack Obama, not a Brett Kavanaugh. Be as kind and sweet as you are when I screw up. Be someone's human credential.

Now we are six

Dear Eli,

Six!

I have a confession: This is the very first year of your life where your birthday has seemed like a natural and inevitable scenario rather than an astonishing and unbelievable occurrence, the way it seemed when you turned One! Two! Three! Four! Five! This year I'm cool and casual about your swift and inexorable progression toward old age, just the mom of a 1st-grader, NBD.

You have so much to be proud of. Despite your misgivings about kindergarten ("Are we going to have time to play or is it just going to be all reading and writing and BORING STUFF?" you asked suspiciously at the end of pre-K), you rocked it. Your teacher tells us you have a "math brain" (which we all know you get from me! This is a lie. Thanks Daddy), but from my perspective the coolest thing you learned in kindergarten was how to read. Eli, I like to think I keep a pretty cool head about your accomplishments, but every time I see you reading my inner Jewish mother takes over and I just want to start bragging at the top of my voice to everyone in the vicinity: "This is my son WHO CAN READ! Here he is READING! Would you perhaps like to know more about Batman's role in stopping the crime wave? Because he can READ IT TO YOU!"

Speaking of uncool heads, you also learned how to ride a bike this year. Eli, if you ever want to see something amazing, get yourself a baby who can't even hold its own wobbly head up and then keep it alive for five or so years and then watch it balance precariously atop a narrow saddle and pedal away from you. (I know that seems pretty labor-intensive when you could just, like, visit Niagara Falls, which I hear is also amazing, but I'm pretty sure parenting a bike rider is equally satisfying.)

As your mother, I know I'm supposed to think the world of you, but the truth is that I don't always assume the best about you, and for that I'm sorry. Twice this summer, your camp counselor called, and both times when the phone rang I immediately thought "WHAT DID HE DO?" and both times she was actually calling to tell me that you were the victim and not the aggressor.

In fact, your camp counselors have been writing such over-the-top effusive praise of you that if you had better handwriting, I'd be suspicious. They say you are a "fun, energetic and loving camper," "a genuine good kid," "such a sweetheart," "always the loudest and most excited volunteer" and — this is where it gets really unbelievable — "such a good listener and extremely well behaved" (are you sure you're not paying them off in Pokemon cards?).

You continue to have what can be charitably called a "strong personality," to which you add an independent streak and some very definite ideas. But you also continue to have the softest cheeks I've ever felt and give the sweetest, gentlest kisses. Sometimes it seems fair to say that our relationship consists mostly of shouting and snuggling — sometimes the ratio is 90% shouting, 10% snuggling, but other days we can bring it closer to a 50/50 balance.

Recently at night you've been listening to the audiobook of "Fantastic Mr. Fox," by Roald Dahl — you know it so well that when we were on vacation you'd recite it out loud yourself, and a few weeks ago we had a Fantastic Mr. Fox party, where we drank apple cider and ate chicken and pretended to be the farmers Boggis, Bunce and Bean, out to get the fox.

Eli, the most fabulous thing about being your mama is getting to watch you take on the world with such gusto, like it's a big juicy peach that you're taking a bite out of. Last weekend we went to a "silent disco" party at the Unisphere, where they gave us wireless headphones that could be switched to three different channels of music played by live DJs. I was watching you dance your heart out and realized I'd never seen you so enthused about, say, trying out a new sport for the first time. Maybe sports are not Eli's thing, I thought. Maybe dancing is his thing!

Because I do want you to find your "thing" that you're passionate about (besides video games), and what's most exciting about being 6 is the possibilities that are available to you. This year I'm signing you up for origami and dance in afterschool; you might try fencing; you've been asking all summer when we'll go back to the pool we usually swim in every Sunday after Hebrew school.

You love to laugh and be read to; you love soft blankets and sequin flip shirts; you love video games and candy.

Life is a door that you're just flinging open. I can't wait to walk through it with you.

Happy birthday, my sweetest pea.

Love,
Mama

America is a promise

I don't think I've ever thought more about what America means and what it means to be American than I have this Fourth of July. This week, after I read this Washington Post article about an ICE raid in Ohio that left children virtually abandoned, I had the dismal thought that celebrating July 4 seemed almost obscene.

Then Eli and I read this library book:

Synopsis: White boy and his nuclear family go to their small-town park for a pet parade, popcorn and pizza at the Pee Wee Football booth, raffle tickets for the American Legion, antique cars, a bandstand, Kiwanis, firemen showing off water battles, the Knights of Columbus, a BBQ, a concert under the stars, Yankee Doodle, Stars and Stripes Forever, the Cub Scouts, a reading of the Declaration of Independence, the Star-Spangled Banner and fireworks.

Which is all fine, I guess, but it isn't like any Fourth of July I've ever had, and no one even says anything about freedom or democracy or independence or even the Coney Island hot dog eating contest, which let's face it is as American as it gets.

If Eli cared to listen, here's what I'd want him to know about America this Fourth of July:

America is an experiment.
242 years ago, democracy hadn't been tried before. It was Thomas Jefferson who wrote, "No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth." Especially now, it can seem like the American experiment is failing. But...

America is a contradiction.
We inadvertently left NY1 on during a report about a woman from Ecuador who was reunited with the child who was taken away from her at the border and then had to explain the Trump administration's border policy to Eli, who confidently declared, "If George Washington was still president he'd let the families stay together"...except, I gently reminded him, we've been to Washington's house and seen his slave quarters. Washington, who once wrote, "There is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see some plan adopted for the abolition of slavery," owned more than 200 slaves. America is the sanctity of life for fetuses and thousands of gun deaths a year. America is liberal snowflakes and conservatives who think union dues violate their free speech. America is opportunity for all and unaffordable health insurance.

But most of all, America is a promise.
America is a "skinny kid with a funny name" who grew up to be president. America is a dog who saved its owner from a rattlesnake. America is black and Latino kids in Queens learning to swim and then becoming lifeguards. America is an 18-year-old kid going to college even as his undocumented father is deported. America is Pee Wee football and the Knights of Columbus but also cricket in Flushing Meadows Park and the Guardian Angels. America can do better and must do better. America is a promise that it's up to us to keep.

No small hand will go unheld

In the morning I walk Eli to school. When we get within sight of the front door, as is his custom, Eli bursts into a sprint as if I've pushed his 'on' button. "Love you!" he calls over his shoulder without looking back, and then he is gone.

On the subway I pull my purple headphones over my ears and turn on The Daily, a New York Times podcast. The episode is about families of children murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School who are suing Alex Jones for perpetuating and profiting off the lie that they are actors, that their children's murder was a hoax. The host interviews a reporter who interviewed the father of a 6-year-old boy named Jesse Lewis.

"He remembers that day in such excruciating detail," she says: breakfast, a conversation about gingerbread houses, the moment when his son said "Love you" and darted around a corner for the last time.

That night after Eli is asleep I slip into his room. It's a stuffy, humid evening, maybe the first hot night of the season, and Eli's blanket is tangled into bunches on top of his face; all four of his limbs are tossed carelessly out to its sides, like he's an overripe fruit that's burst open in the heat.

He takes up so much space in the world that it's impossible to think of him not being in it any longer. Sometimes — here is a ghoulish confession — I try to imagine it in a clinical way, probing the void the way a tongue pokes at a rotting tooth. But it's like they say: There's literally no word in our language for a parent who has lost a child.

On his next birthday, I think, Eli will be the same age as Jesse and as Charlotte, Olivia, Dylan, Madeleine, Catherine, Ana, James, Emilie, Jack, Noah, Caroline, Jessica, Avielle, Benjamin and Allison. And then, in the next year, one by one, he will almost certainly outlive them.

Almost — that caveat upon which the world hangs. I used to tiptoe into Eli's room at night just to watch his chest rise and fall, just to assure myself I'd see him in the morning. Now I stand outside the gate at school and follow him with my eyes as he scrambles inside. Please come back to me, I think, and then he is gone.

There are the fields we’ll walk across
In the snow lightly falling.
In the snow lightly falling,
There are the fields we’ll walk across.

There are the houses we’ll walk toward
In the snow lightly falling.
In the snow lightly falling,
There are the houses we’ll walk toward.

There are the faces we once kissed
In the snow lightly falling.
In the snow lightly falling,
There are the faces we once kissed.

Incredible how we laughed and cried
In the snow lightly falling.
In the snow lightly falling,
Incredible how we laughed and cried.

Incredible how we’ll meet again
In the snow lightly falling.
In the snow lightly falling,
Incredible how we’ll meet again.

No small hand will go unheld
In the snow lightly falling.
In the snow lightly falling,
No small hand will go unheld.

No voice once heard is ever lost
In the snow lightly falling.
In the snow lightly falling,
No voice once heard is ever lost.

—Dick Allen, "Solace," Newtown, CT, December 2012

Try everything

At night Eli’s bed is a cocoon. Clad only in underwear, no matter what the season, he burrows himself deep inside a web of blankets, balancing emoji pillows and Super Mario Bros. stuffed figures precariously on top.

“Listen,” I say seriously, snuggling in beside him, “the Tooth Fairy is going to come tonight, but after this I’ve decided you’re not allowed to lose any more teeth.”

He giggles, his tongue poking through the new hole in his lower gums. This time he lost the tooth in school and managed to save it, and I couldn’t believe how small it looked inside the Ziploc baggie, how it curved at one end like a question mark where it had once been secured inside his gums.

“You’re not allowed to grow any more either,” I continue. “You’re just going to stay 5.”

He giggles again. “I am going to get older,” he says, almost patiently; Mama, we’ve been through this. “I’m going to turn 6 and then 7 and then 9 and then when I’m 10 I’m going to get a phone and then I’ll go to college and get a job and be 30 and 40 and 50 and 60” — in one breath, in typical Eli fashion, he’s aged himself past me.

It’s the day of his kindergarten “moving up” ceremony (although this particular moving up is a metaphor, as the last day of school is still more than a month away), and I’m in a reflective mood. The kindergarten teachers who wrote the show took all my usual wild unsentimentality about school functions — I hate the pageantry, the pressure to get a good seat and a good photograph, the parent paparazzi — and tossed it right into my face. The script featured lines about how our babies are going to grow up and go to college. Eli and his friends confidently stepped up to the microphone and told the whole audience about the “roller coaster of kindergarten.” And then, after a nearly 6-year track record of dry eyes at kid ceremonies, my resolve crumpled when the stage full of kindergarteners in matching emoji shirts belted out that Shakira song from “Zootopia”:

I won't give up, no I won't give in 
Till I reach the end 
And then I'll start again 
No I won't leave 
I wanna try everything 
I wanna try even though I could fail 
Try everything!
Try everything!

Can you spot Eli? You can't. Because I couldn't see him from my seat. #momfail

(Trivia: Eli is the one who told me the song is from “Zootopia.” Eli also told me that instead of singing “Fight Song” they were originally supposed to sing “7 Years” and I’m pretty glad they didn’t because I think I really would have lost it weeping.)

Look how far you've come, you filled your heart with love (goddammit Shakira)

There was just something so wonderful about watching them all march down the aisles of the auditorium in their “Many Faces of Kindergarten” shirts, waving their arms in the air. They looked so pleased with themselves, like they had been keeping this secret they were finally ready to show off: We had wanted them to become big kids, had hoped and prayed for them to grow older, and now they had done it. Well done, kindergarten class of 2018.

I truly love this shirt. 

There's that expression, Time is a thief, but I disagree: Time is a gift. Five years ago this June I brought a bewildered Eli to Pickwick School with a bag full of baby bottles and a pacifier clipped on to him, and just yesterday he ran offstage in the auditorium, kissed me gently on the cheek and then skipped off, waving and calling gaily, "Thank you! Bye!" That kiss was time's gift to me, I think; time's way of telling me that the moments I ache to slow down are the moments where it's sweetest to keep moving forward.

Timing is everything

In parenting, as in comedy, timing is everything. When you have a brand-new, breathtakingly mysterious infant, it’s all about the moment-to-moment increments — generally, some variation on the question of What will keep this creature quiet and peaceful for the next minute? Parenting advice columns try to teach you how to stretch out the time between his feedings or how to prolong her nap.

Gradually, you start measuring time in weeks and months — when I signed my name on emails to my “June through December 2012 Forest Hills parents” Google group, I’d type “Rachel (Eli, 18 weeks).” Every month on the 16th, when I look at my Timehop app, it’s filled with pictures of baby Eli wearing his special onesie that proclaimed how many months old he was.

You’ve all seen similar pictures in your own Facebook feed, and some of them are invariably accompanied by shameful confessions about how they are “a few dates/weeks/months late, oops!” Because in parenting, as in comedy, it’s hard to get the timing right: You’re always either too early or too late.

Before I was a parent, I prided myself on my unfailing punctuality. As a parent, I’m either punctual alongside a whiny 5-year-old who’s irritated that he didn’t get a chance to gather as many Skylanders as he liked before I hustled him out the door and who’s growing increasingly antsty that the event isn’t starting on time, or I’m late.

Because I have a pathological fear of being late, I make sure to build in oceans of extra time when I’m going somewhere with Eli. The problem is that Eli thinks all that extra time is for negotiating about whether he can bring toys to school and for pretending he doesn’t know how to put his own socks and shoes on and desperately requires assistance. So I always feel like I’m rushing him out the door, even though we are on time, which is actually early.

“Are we late?” he’ll ask, bewildered by my frenzied exhortations to move faster as he saunters casually to the elevator.

“No! Are we ever late?!” I will retort, even the mention of the word “late” striking terror into my prompt heart.

In our apartment, beginning at 6 a.m., Eli is a tornado of activity, streaking through the living room in only his underwear and speeding from room to room. But once outside, he becomes slothlike, with nearby distractions slowing him to a crawl and a seeming inability to walk and talk at the same time. He frequently halts to gesticulate while expounding on an important point of clarification, and he also likes to take what he calls “shortcuts,” i.e., unnecessary diversions through ramps and staircases outside other buildings on the way to school.

When the weather is nice, I’m game for a good stroll on the way to school. But now that it’s cold, I frequently find myself several paces ahead of him, glancing back, because I’ve learned that if I pause to wait up for him, he’ll slow to a halt too.

But after we cross the last street, somewhere between a full block and half a block before the school building, he’ll suddenly yell, “Love you! Bye!” and take off like he’s been jet-propelled. I watch the flaps of his hat blowing in the breeze as he shrugs his backpack in closer to his body to make himself more aerodynamic, tucking his head low like he’s a football player weaving in and out of other pedestrians. If I’m lucky, he pauses just before the school gate to send me air kisses and “air hugs,” and I shout, “Be kind! Learn stuff! Have fun!”

And then he’s gone. He’s started the walk as the turtle and ended as the hare. Then suddenly all the time I’ve saved up getting us to school early is more time for me to miss him, the way I do when he finally falls asleep after popping out of his room six times, or when I find myself in the presence of other children who are cute and all, but not Eli.

Somehow, even after all the sturm und drang of the morning — the requests for additional breakfast foods, the board games he sets up for the two of us to play, the seven times I ask him to get dressed before he does it, the standoff when he tries to sneak a toy into his backpack and I catch him, the groaning over which jacket I hand him to wear and how heavy his backpack is — it’s always that last part that sticks with me as I walk alone to the subway: the way he looks when he’s no longer with me, the way he holds his body apart and his eyes are somewhere else, his own country.

I think that’s how timing so often goes in parenting: interminably, and then suddenly; slowly, and then all at once. You want them to go away so you can miss them, and then they do and then you do. Timing is everything.

An extroverted thinking child and an introverted feeling mama walk into a room

Last week, I set out to understand my son.

We had had a rough Friday evening. You know those cliches about “slippery slopes” and how “if you give them an inch, they’ll take a mile”? Those cliches were constructed for Eli. Eli was born on a slippery slope.

All too frequently, Eli approaches me with a tentative, hopeful expression and launches one of these self-contradictory conversation starters before proceeding to ask for something to which he knows I’m going to object:

“I know you’re not going to like this, but…”
“I know you’re not going to let me, but…”
“I know you’re going to be mad, but…”

 Sometimes I think, Ah, young hope springs eternal. But sometimes I think he does it just so he can give himself cover for the tantrum he’s itching to throw.

Anyway, on this particular Friday — after a day at school, after Lego and Wii games after school, after stuffing his face with Shabbat challah and butter and washing it down with grape juice — Phil let Eli stay up late to play with his Skylanders on the Wii.

(An aside: Skylanders are Eli’s newest obsession. They are some kind of action figures that interact with the Wii game system through means of a “portal,” i.e. a glowing plastic orb that I keep tripping over in my living room, and because they were introduced in 2011 they have apparently become obsolete, which allowed Phil to purchase an obscene number of them on eBay for $40, so basically keep in mind that anytime you see me these days I have recently stepped on a Skylander, accidentally kicked a Skylander across the room or have been instructed to battle with a Skylander by detaching half its body and magnetically attaching it to another half Skylander.)

Skylanders in their natural habitat: on a magnatile "chess board" on our living room floor.

So Phil told Eli there were three more minutes of Skylanders until it was time to brush his teeth. And then three minutes went by. This presented a problem for Eli because he insisted that it had not been three minutes, it had been much less than three minutes, possibly even less than seconds, and it wasn’t fair and he didn’t get enough time to play and and we were mean parents and we didn’t even care about him (because when parents really want to stick it to you, they buy you 80 Skylanders and let you stay up late to play with them after cramming you with more challah and butter than is probably appropriate).

The tantrum that followed was pretty epic and culminated in me dumping all the Skylanders into a plastic bin and hauling them out of Eli’s room while he wailed (I almost said “inconsolably” in an attempt to be fancy and then realized that no one was trying to console him).

Eventually he went to sleep and I did what I always do when I’m confronted with a problem: I turned to research. I dug out my copy of Kids, Parents and Power Struggles (purchased at a yard sale for 50 cents) and read it aloud to Phil in an increasingly hysterical tone:

“How persistent is your child?

• Finds it difficult to let go of an activity that he has chosen 
• Refuses to accept no for an answer 
• Wakes up with plans of his own 
• Asks the same question over and over if he doesn’t like your answer” 

I took all the quizzes classifying Eli’s temperament. My studies revealed that Eli is a “thinker” and I am a “feeler,” and Eli is extroverted and I am introverted, and we are basically doomed to be at odds for the rest of our natural lives.

But...I already knew that. Because isn’t that at least a small percentage of what it means to be somebody’s mother? I was classically well-behaved and academically inclined as a child, and my mother and I still managed to have screaming fights over the unkept state of my room because it was basically the other thing we had at our disposal to argue about. (And also she didn’t approve of my watching The X-Files so much.)

On the one hand, I learned tips that will help me be proactive in preventing future meltdowns and teaching Eli some coping mechanisms. (I am supposed to teach him to say, "I have strong opinions!") But on the other hand, I realized that I can’t treat motherhood like a college course that I can ace if I highlight enough passages.

Will this be on the midterm?

I think that no matter what kind of parent you are and what kind of kid you have, your child will always find a way to surprise you. This week I had dinner with a friend who told me that her 3-year-old daughter is such a rule-follower in preschool that her teacher is constantly saying to other kids, “Why can’t you behave more like Franny?” As parents, they think she needs to be more rebellious.

I just gaped at her and thought about how the last contact I had with my child’s teacher was her email informing me that Eli had mischievously crawled between bathroom stalls and consequently someone had peed on his arm. (“He thoroughly washed his lower arm,” the email assured me while I giggled.)

I've written before about how I used to feel this kind of existential dismay when I'd realize how different Eli is from me or from the kind of child I expected to have. But I am slowly learning to see it as a point of pride, a tiny surprise I get to unwrap every day. For every battle we have because I think he's too headstrong or too combative, there's the time he tried to teach all the kids in the Hall of Science crooked house exhibit to play chess by yelling, "GUYS GUYS GUYS! THE PISHOP MOVES DIAGONALLY!" (He says "pishop" instead of "bishop." It's adorable.)

He is zesty and spunky and sometimes a little bit prickly in ways that get my hackles up probably more than anyone else because...I'm his mother. So on Friday night, when I set out to understand him — all his hopes, dreams, fears and what motivates him at times to act like an absolute asshole — I didn't get very far, but I got a little bit closer. And on Saturday morning, when he slipped quietly into the bedroom and snuggled up to me under the covers, I know you, I thought sleepily. I would know you anywhere. 

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
—Kahlil Gibran, "On Children"