I go find Zuzu, who is happily playing with dolls on our bed. "Sweetie, do you know what you're bringing to school yet?"
"Uh huh," she says with a sharp nod, but in my head I give a slow count to five as I pretend to put away some clothes, and before I finish counting, she pops off the bed with just what I was expecting: "Actually, I need to get an animal." And off she heads to one of the two giant baskets of stuffed animals to choose today's lucky winner in the Who Will Accompany Zuzu On Her School Day sweepstakes.
A louder scream from the other bedroom, this time followed by crying. This one is my cue.
Cracking the door: "Are you okay, sweetie?"
She's crumpled on the floor, holding her shoulder. "I hit my arm!"
I crouch, rub it. "I'm so sorry, sweetie. What can I do to help?"
"None of them fit!" she cries. Her shirts, she means. You see, she's in between sizes, and while the hems still barely reach her waist and the sleeves just touch her wrists, this is not acceptable for her. "Look!" she says as she raises her arms over her head. I can see a sliver of her tummy. For Piper, this is unacceptable.
"Okay, let's think this through," I say. "Solve the problem." I'm keeping my calm even though I know now we'll be late to school. With Laura out of town, my goal each day is that when I kiss these girls goodbye, they're smiling. This is easily achievable with Zuzu, but Piper's takes more ... let's say finesse. At her closet door, I pick some sweater dresses. "How about this one?" I propose. "I've always loved this one. We'll find some leggings to go with it." I get a furious shake of the head.
I pick another. "You know, this one would even work with jeans underneath!" I have to admit that I'm stretching for this one: I'm remembering a girl I had a crush on in 1978, junior-high days. Jeans under a skirt were all the rage then. But this is thirty years later, so I get yelled at for this bizarre suggestion. "Honey, you don't need to speak to me that way," I say, lowering my pitch but still keeping it level. "I'm helping you here." Eventually, we find a shirt in a drawer that is acceptably long. We even walk away happy because in the process, we also discovered what she wants to wear tomorrow for Mom's homecoming. I push away the thought that she'll have changed her mind by tomorrow morning and choose to live happily for a few minutes in the fantasy of victory.
Laura is in southern states this week. Business trips like this are going to become more prevalent, and they seem to be especially hard on Piper. She broke down on the phone with Laura the other night, asking her why would she ever take a job where she has to leave her kids at home and listen to them cry on the phone. (Peach is perfecting her guilt-making skills.) Susannah, ever the calm breeze but also wanting to mimic the ways of her big sister, wrested the phone from Piper, summoned tears from her deepest soul, and bawled to her mom the same complaints (almost verbatim!) that Piper had said moments before. "On Friday," she sniffles, "every time the doorbell rings, I'll run to the door—even if we're in the middle of a TV show!" I wonder if Laura appreciates the level of that honor. The Woeful Child act continues for some fifteen minutes after we hung up ( "I hate that we're a broken-down family!" Piper exclaims at one point), but they still fall asleep in my bed remarkably quickly. I move them to their own beds later when I finally retire.
Our school mornings are nothing if not hectic, with both Laura and me handling a huge number of responsibilities. She primarily takes care of the hands-on kid duties while I handle all kitchen-related tasks, assisting on dressing and bed-making when possible. Picking up both tasks as a solo parent has meant rising earlier in the mornings and mentally preparing for the trick of getting the girls dressed and out the door. 8:10 a.m. is the goal; then we have a fighting chance of crossing the school's threshold by 8:29. We aced it the first two days. But yesterday, Piper lost it when I told her she couldn't wear the same thing she'd worn the day before—she'd been crawling all over the floor of a classroom in those clothes at a potluck the night before—and I let go of the concept of "being on-time" in favor of "being happy:" carefully working through the problem, complete with hugs and mopping up her tears. We were late, but that was okay.
And she's only 7. I can't wait to see what's in store in five or six years!
Susannah, meanwhile, skates through her morning once she gets past eating. Which, for some reason, she hates. I would eat breakfast three times a day, and I can't fathom why breakfast—heck, any meal!—is such an arduous task for her. But once we're past that, she joyously does the rest of her morning prep, and then she pretty much sets up somewhere in the house and observes the hot mess of a process getting her big sister to the door with backpack on.
At the door, girls wearing their jackets and backpacks, I check my iPod for the list of things I need to remember for today (prepared by Laura, natch): nothing on the docket but observing Piper's modern dance class tonight. Yay. No swimsuits or paperwork or library books to get to the correct destinations. I could badger PJ to feed the fish, but I decide to let that one go in the name of peace and feed them myself; she sees me doing it and pitches a fit that I'm doing her job. I hold my tongue, tempted to snap that I've already mentioned twice that she needed to do this. Susannah sings a song by Elbow.
We're ready to go, except that Piper has disappeared. I hear her scream in the bathroom. She's standing in front of the mirror, her hair mussed like a bird's nest.
"I hit my head with the brush!" she cries.
I wrap my arms around her. What's the quickest way to do this? I kiss the top of her head. "I'm sorry, honey. Would you li--"
"No, I mean I did it on purpose!"
I don't react on the outside. On the inside: Holy shit. Red flag!... We'll talk about this later, she and me. For now, I just say: "Everyone's hair looks horrible right now, honey. We're all getting haircuts on Saturday and then we'll all look great." I remember her phrase from the night before and say it to humor myself: "We'll look like a less broken-down family. Now, let's head out, you'll feel better when we play some music in the car." I don't know how, but this works. She hugs me and we're on our way.
Things do get better with a little Shantel, a little Natasha Bedingfield, a little Swell Season, all of them songs that I am more than sick of but the girls sing along, and we laugh at the trombone riff in "Disko Partizani," and by the time we're in the school parking lot, Piper is hopping out of the car, "walking as if on air," as one teacher described it in a progress report a couple years ago. When she heads upstairs to her classroom, she gives me a big kiss and a cheery "Bye, Dad!" And I feel as accomplished as I ever felt after completing anything else in my entire life.
A few minutes later, as I'm heading out of Zuzu's classroom, I hear her cry outside. A teacher is bringing her in: she pitched forward while running. Her hands are dirty, scraped. She buries her face in my shoulder, her sandy hands on the back of my neck. We gently wash them in the bathroom, I kiss them, and I carry her back outside. I do one of her favorite Daddy Tricks: I lift her higher and higher and tell her to stop it—she's floating away! She laughs and asks me to do it again and again and again. One more floating balloon and then it's time for sandwich hugs: Zuzu and her best friend Isabella trap me and squeeze until I play-choke to death.
I'm off to the car. As I sit in the car and watch her shooting across the monkey bars, I pull together my work to-do list. It's been a good week, but I can't wait to have Laura back tomorrow. And I certainly know I'm not the only one.
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