Pink Haze

We have lived fifteen minutes from the Adirondack Outlet Mall for nearly a year, yet I have not once set foot in that consumer mecca. Until today. With Gramma Genie visiting just weeks before Christmas, the holes in Eliot's wardrobe have became painfully evident. Hand-me-downs and Goodwill are adequate most of the time, but sometimes a kid needs snow pants and fleece in his size in December, not May. So, off to the madhouse we went.

A sale rack of snowsuits greeted us just inside the doors of Osh Kosh. Sixty percent off the already reasonable price. I started pawing through the colors. For boys, the choices were black, a blackish navy blue, and poop brown. For girls, I could choose salmon, magenta, or sherbert-colored psychedelic flowers. I sighed. No neutral green or sunny yellow or even plain old red. If I let Eliot see the rack, he would immediately go for the floral neon. So, I did not give him that option. Instead, I grabbed a brown and a magenta (could be purple, right?) and let him choose. "Purple," he said, barely glancing. Of course.

Mom tried to steer me gently towards the navy blue. Maybe if it were the blue of ocean or sky, Eliot would go for it. But this was the blue of discount office furniture. Dung beetles. Chemical spills. I tried again, offering Eliot the choices. He didn't even bother speaking. He just jutted his chin towards the magenta. "As if," his jut seemed to say, "the question is even worth asking."

We approached the checkout. The clerk chuckled as Eliot, posing before a display case, tried on a sequined tiara, pink sunglasses, and a fuschia patent-leather pocketbook. She rung up our clothing and it somehow came up that I was buying the snowsuit for Eliot. "This?" Her eyes grew wide. "Is for him?"

"My little princess," I laughed. The woman's lip curled. She dropped her gaze, but I could see her eyes rolling as she shoved the snowsuit in the bag. She may have kept her mouth shut, but she certainly did not keep her opinion to herself. I wanted to reach across the counter and smack that sneer of her face. What does it matter to anyone which color my little boy has chosen as his favorite? I can't quite grasp how Eliot tromping around the snow in magenta pants upsets the balance of the universe.

I thought we wanted our sons to learn that there is more to manhood than defending and providing, that there is great meaning in caring for their homes and the people inside them. Don't we want them to learn the value of tenderness? Our daughters can be pilots and firefighters, so it should be fine for our sons be dancers and divas. Doesn't Eliot's ability to plant a tulip bulb as well as he wields a hammer make him more of a boy, not less of one?

When we came home and dumped our purchases on the kitchen table. "Wow," said my mom. "That's really pink." She was right. The fluorescents at the store had fooled my eyes into seeing purple, but afternoon daylight told a different story. "Are you sure you don't want to consider exchanging it?"

"It's not like I'm dressing him in eyelet blouses," I said. "There's no glitter on it. It's just a color. Why can't pink be boy?"

"It can be," my mom said. "But why stop there? Why not ruffles and lace, if he likes them?"

She has a point. But it is going to be hard enough sending Eliot to preschool with a pink snowsuit for playground time. I worry as much about what people will think of me as a mother as the flak my son might get from his classmates. Am I a better parent if I caution him not to trust his preferences and desires? If I push him toward the choices everyone around him thinks he should make? The world is going to come down on him soon enough. Wouldn't it be nice if this little boy could have a few, sweet years to like what he likes?

Come to think of it, perhaps I will return the snowsuit. Take it back, tell that clerk I want to exchange it for the neon flowers. Let Eliot know I'm delighted with my wonderful little boy, just exactly as he is.

The African Queen

On this, the fourth day of my son's full-body rash, we have taken to ending every day with a gooey colloidal oatmeal marinade. Tonight, Eliot wanted to help sprinkle the packet of powder into his bathwater. We looked around for something to stir the big cauldron of comfort. A bubble wand was too flimsy, a mermaid doll too bendy. I poked around the bottomless kitchen utensil drawer until I happened up a thick wooden spoon with a flat bowl. I had forgotten I still had this monster, a stirring stick brought back from my travels in Zimbabwe 15 years ago.

"What's that?" Eliot asked.

"A mugoti," I replied. Stunned. From somewhere deep in the recesses of my brain, I had retained this piece of Shona vocabulary. During my stay with host families, I had used a mugoti several times. Poorly. Most nights, I watched my sisters and mother draw and slam the flat, round end against the increasing thickness of the sadza in the cooking pot. The mealy-meal sadza, a mash made from milled, white maize, boiled and popped menacingly as it approached the consistency of roofing spackle. Most Zimbabwean women could put a rhino in a headlock with their upper arms alone.

Eliot stepped into his bath and chased the chunks of oatmeal with his wooden baton, mashing them against the porcelain edge of the tub. "I like this mugoti," he said to me.

"You do?"

"Yes. But let's go to the store and get a pink one."

Quarantine

Sick, sick, sick. Around and around, up and down, all one, two, three of us.

This week, I figured I had contracted the dreaded hinny, and had Toby call his fabulous physician sister to find out if it is possible to get the killer flu without a fever. "Oh, not only possible. Totally likely." Great.

Fatigued and unable to get a breath on Sunday night, I cooked myself in the hottest shower I could stand till the tank ran dry. We had only one humidifier in the house. While I longed for the steam in my room, the motherly instincts nagged at me to bestow that singular comfort on my wheezing child. Toby suggested we all sleep together. Maternal, perhaps. Masochist? No. I plugged the bubbling wonder into Eliot's room and sank, into my own too-dry flannel sheets. I figured I would survive the night, and anyway, Toby knows how to run a hot shower and call 911.

Now, another humidifier happier, the pain in my chest has moved downward and my fear of a 2am visit to urgent care has abated. Eliot, true to his nature, has only grown more demanding and unstoppable as I have grown sleepier. Toby has been a saint. The past few mornings, he has risen at the now 6:00 wakeup time (preschoolers don't understand the concept of Daylight Savings Time) to entertain our energizer bunny while I grump and languish in steamy splendor behind a latched door. My dear husband has donated his lunch hour to the cause, running Eliot ragged around the backyard, leaping into piles of leaves and returning endless, errant pop flies. I have slept.

Today, a nausea-inducing dizziness gave my brain, as well as my sense of balance, a free ride on the tilt-a-whirl anytime I stood. When Eliot finally woke up from his nap, I was still horizontal on the couch, as I had been when he'd gone down two hours earlier. I decided to forgo the wheedling call to my husband to save me. I could tough out the afternoon on the couch.

I directed Eliot to get his doctor kit, and he did a full workup, testing my blood pressure, temperature, and reflexes, and finding something in my ears that shouldn't be there. "A kitty," the wise doctor concluded. He applied a bandage and declared me healed. Then he combed and trimmed my hair with play-doh scissors, provided a rousing round of karaoke on his battery-operated tape microphone ("Look at this stuff! Isn't it neat!"), and played several versions of Candy Land on my stomach. Somehow, we made it through till Toby's late return from the trenches without me ever having to rise from the sofa or summon our pal, Walt Disney, to take over.

Dinner consisted, as all meals have for several days, of things like jarred baby food, cold turkey, and sliced apples. Even while I slept through both breakfast and lunch today, Toby managed to feed himself and Eliot relatively healthy things ("He ate his broccoli, sweetie!"), wash up the dishes, wipe noses, and arrange magnificently expensive car repairs with the mechanic.

Maybe the bathroom sink is unrecognizable under a layer of old washcloths and toothpaste scuzz, and perhaps I haven't returned a phonecall or written my daily pages or set foot in the Y in days, but Eliot ate his broccoli. No one in the house is running a fever of 102. And my kid is managing to play his way through this bout of illness as if it is just an awesome game his mommy and daddy have worked out just for him.