Bridget Of Bensonhurst

Why would you want your Zumba teacher to be sane?  Mine isn’t.   Let me revise that. Bridget isn’t exactly insane— she’s just got a screw loose, the screw which holds back inhibition.

The over forty gram strides onto the mat Monday at noon, her green eyes naughty beneath blue shadow:  “Do you girls want hip scarves?”  We look at each other, the devotees of Bridget. “Sure,” I say.  Like a peddler in a Turkish baazar, she reaches into her duffel and pulls out chiffon teasers in primary colors. With bells. You’re jingling baby. “What color?” she asks.“Red,” I reply.

Are there other colors? I tie it on, and step through a beaded curtain into a hookah bar in Ankara.

Bridget sets our soft bellies on fire as she engages our abs with her undulating lead, vamping jazz hands over lunatic eyes— I can do that.  She pats her thighs assuredly to show which foot goes forward next. God I love those dumbed-down visual tips to keep me in the routine.  “You like eighties?” I nod, “Good, I’m an eighties girl myself,” and just like that, Bridget goes old school. We move from Turkish delight to Vanilla Ice. I haven’t had big fun like this since I was in skates with lightning bolts stitched over the ankles, and techno group Inner City was pumping through the English muffins over my ears as I traced figure eights in the asphalt in front of my house...

What’s really sane about exercise anyway? It’s a waste of energy when we should be focused on conservation. Aren’t we active enough moving those little playing pieces—named Theodore and William in my home—along the game board of life? Breakfast (rushed and largely uneaten) school drop-off, pick-up, after-school activity (piano/chess/tennis,) dinner, homework, fraternal fighting, brush, floss, gargle, books and bed.  Just getting to work too, that’s exertion enough: standing forty-five minutes from Midwood to midtown. Makes you want to put your feet up and eat a cream-filled, don’t it?

Yet exercise demonstrates one of life’s weird inversions—along with love, generosity and holiday cards—the more you give, the more you get back. Put out on the dance floor or the dinner table, scrawl or send out digital seasons greetings: guaranteed you’ll get killer energy, unmanageable leftovers and an inbox full of yule.

Beyond the power boost, there are those long-term bennies of raising your heart rate, you already know:

Why Women Over 40 Should Work Out:

• weight management
• heart health
• blood vessel health
• bone health
• joint health
• boob health

Terrific. But I’ll take the short-term perks too. The instant rewards for sweat and spasms in my seat cushion:

Why Women Over 40 Should Really Work Out:

• COSTCO
• Hauling spoiled six-year-olds
• High school reunions
• College reunions
• Running into old flames
• Running around in high heels
• Running around in skinny jeans
• Pencil skirts
• There’s less time ahead of you than behind: get more hours out of your day.
• Bonus: Endorphin rushes that beat back lukewarm depression and those occasional, gaping panic attacks that whisper you are alone in this world -- despite the mountain range of dirty laundry on the cellar floor to suggest otherwise.

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But Zumba only starts my week. What about the rest? Given little time and less money, here’s my solution to Tuesday-Saturday (God and I rest on Sundays. Sort of.): dated exercise tapes.  Last summer I rediscovered Tae Bo at the bottom of a tag sale box and I’ve been kicking back with Billy Blanks ever since. Passé push-up drills have their advantages. For one thing, there’s Bllly’s shorts.

Puts a smile on my face every time I pop in the DVD. Then there’s the seven-time World Martial Arts Champion getting deep, real deep, in the cool-down, in those shorts: “Tae Bo Cardio Workout is to do one thing. It’s to test your endurance. Get your heart pumping, get you moving, and bring life into yourself because remember your heart is the big muscle inside your chest that shows love, shows power, shows endurance, strength everything that God has given us, that heart shows. So if you keep that in shape you will have a long life...”

I’m also wearing out Chalene’s tape. No typo. It’s Chalene sans the “r,”  alpha bunny of Beach Body Turbo Jam. It’s a work out for the rods and cones just to manage the contrast between her teeth and her tan. Giggly Chalene likes to punch. Hard.  “Imagine there’s a guy on the floor.. Right there… BAM!!... Is that too violent?” Tee hee.  “No Chalene. Bring it on.”  Turbo Jam: Punch, Kick & Jam

Also worth mentioning, a fab friend recently gifted me with a couple of newer videos by celebrity fitness gurus:

Physique 57: Express 30 Minute Full Body Workout. Manhattan-based Tanya Becker gets it all done, head to tail, in a New York minute. Her hotties lead you through strange but effective reps with playground balls.

The Tracy Anderson Method Post-Pregnancy Workout

Tracy, Gwyneth’s girl, pushes you through a punishing post-preg workout,  swearing she can tighten up that belly baby flap.  Promises, promises, but I’m starting to see my navel again.

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It’s 12:55. I’m more than dewy. I smell like an Ankara goat.

“What do you think about me getting us some wrist cuffs and tiaras for next time? I can get those you know...”  Bridget’s serious. I am too. “Absolutely.”

Zumba with Bridget, gyrating out of control, and customizing her playlist to whoever’s in class: Mondays at Noon

Midwood Martial Arts and Family Fitness Center
1302 Avenue H
Brooklyn, New York 11230
718-258-KICK (5425)

More Insane Energy Tips...

Eat more of this:

• Oatmeal: In our home, only the dog and I eat oatmeal joyfully, but it stokes us both.
  
• Lentils/chick peas/split peas
  
• Chops: lamb, pork veal. Down to the bone.
  
• Fresh fruit by the bushel
  
• Greek Yogurt with granola (see recipe in blog post: “The Great Consolidator”)
  
• Okay, okay, let’s cop to coffee too..
  

And less of this:

• Kiddie carbs (pretzels, goldfish crackers, saltines)
  
• Grown-up carbs (baguettes, croissants, crêpes...Quel dommage!)
  

The Big Hill

“Nature is dangerous. No doubt about it. That’s one thing I know for sure.”  So says the ten-year-old.

It’s the second snowiest February. Snow is falling now. It’s slow going getting to the Big Hill. With each step we sink to our hipbones.  A goldfinch is at the feeder in shabby plumage. No sign of deer or wild turkey for days.

There are 3 hills for sledding on “4 Fields Farm,” ( an urbanites’ “farm,” where fields lie fallow and there are no domesticated animals, apart from a senior poodle. Granted, there is a squash and tomato patch come May.) The little hillock, not much more than a protuberance, lies just off the carport.  The kids can do this one on their own, if they are motivated to turn off glowing devices, layer up and heave-ho into the cold. Layering up is tedium in spades: undershirt, turtleneck, sweater (Nana insists on wool,) flannel-lined jeans, snow pants, socks (two pairs,) boots, double-knotted, down jacket, hats, gloves, scarf.

The medium slope on the west side of the farmhouse in the second field is long, but not steep. It’s well-suited to middle childhood. Sometimes we build a snow ramp towards the bottom, which really you need, to add a little oomph under your tailbone.  The gradual build-up of speed offers manageable thrills and spills.  We double up on my sled and give it a few good turns.  My eyes drift south to the third field...

At the southwest corner of the third field the Big Hill beckons, softly as snow descending, and just as relentlessly. Once you’ve done the Big Hill, you forget the others.  Two days earlier, skidding up Granddad’s driveway, plowed six times already this season, I look out over the unbroken whiteness and imagine my run. The Big Hill: best when the snow thaws slightly in the winter sun, then refreezes overnight—a 99 cents store plastic tablecloth of ice.  Like the medium hill, the approach starts leisurely, but then a sharp incline ends in a briar patch, full of juicy, buggy raspberries in July, now thorny canes piercing the ice—the razor wire of Attica or Leavenworth.

Ever since his freak camp accident at age 8, when he was made goalie—against his will—in a game of capture the flag, my son sees danger where others don’t.  A measured child by nature, he is unapologetically risk-averse today.  Score! The 17-year-old counselor slides into goal, taking my boy’s right ankle with him. Diagnosis and treatment:  an angulated fracture in two places requiring surgery, pins, and two settings in full-leg plaster casts to get it right.  A morphine drip in the recovery room doesn’t deliver relief. Another drug taps into the line to help the morphine kick in.   No wonder my boy shies away from reckless sporting. The little brother is the skeleton racer, this one is the curler.  But there’s more to life than curling, cycling and tennis…

“Turn right at the big oak,” I shout. (actually it’s a maple. Urbanite.)

“Mom, you’re going to die!”

“I am not going to die. I might get a little scratched up when I hit the raspberries, but I am NOT going to die.”

“You are going to DIE!! You are going to hit that tree and DIE!!”

“Theodore, there is no way I can hit that tree, there’s a bank of bushes that will stop me long before I reach that tree.”

One thing I know for sure:  I don’t know for sure how anything is going to turn out. I’ve sailed down the Big Hill, winter after winter.  Like snowflakes, no two rides are ever the same. This I also know: fearsome things usually haven’t  turn out as bad as expected, and things I assumed would go well, well, they didn’t.  

I also know going fast is fun. The left lane, the luge and red Ducati motorcycles.  When you take the middle hill, even if your Evel Knievel ramp is slick and sassy from repeated runs,  you are still in control. You are not flying. Icarus and the Wright Brothers were onto something.

Best to do the Big Hill quickly. Don’t over think it, and once you start picking up speed, don’t try to break your course by sticking a boot in the snow. Sure way to hurt yourself. Tuck your limbs in the toboggan, cross your hands over your face and head for the brambles.   It’s about being one with your sled.” Amen. I am one with Olympic bobsled pilot Elana Meyers.  And my boy is too, following in our silver-medal-earning run.

Alas, the Big Hill doesn’t offer big thrills today. The snow is too fresh. Then again, it’s just right for a maiden run by a boy with hang-ups.  

It’s a long haul back up to the house, the roaring wood stove, and cocoa, mostly undrunk, except for the marshmallows.  It’s a trek fraught with kid whining:

“MOM….MOM…..  I can’t do this. I need you, I need you, I NEED you…”

He collapses halfway. Send in the St. Bernards. I plant my sled straight up in the snow, backtrack and offer my hand.

He doesn’t take it. Gotcha! He leaps up, offers his snarky  smile,  and passes me, heading uphill.

“I don’t need you Mom.”  

I watch him, my son climbing above me, his form smaller and smaller, blurred by falling snow.

Madonna

When it comes to music, pick your lovers carefully, because the artists you fall in love with at 15, are on your Iphone at 50.

This recurring note—that genres of music take hold of your heart early on—has been ringing in my ears as I observe my son’s budding interest in The Beatles. Blimey, it’s the British Invasion in his fourth grade class!  Add to this the tugs of classical and pop on his tweenage heartstrings: week after week he plods through Minuet in G Minor for a piano teacher of limitless patience.  I know I should have light classical streaming at home, but instead, my little Troublemaker is moving to Olly Murs on the Wii World Dance Floor 2014, and his diva classmates are by his side, teaching him he has hips.

My reaction? My boy is ten.  I’ve got 5 years to work with. I better get in there and help him pick his musical life partners.  But what an “awesome” responsibility, to help him pick his type!  (By the way, that tired adjective, “awesome,” should be reserved for describing encounters with natural wonders or child-rearing, nothing else.)

It was 1981, 10th grade. We had our own riff on the British Invasion and I rode the New Wave with those cute surfers from Britain: Haircut One Hundred, A Flock of Seagulls, Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians, The Fine Young Cannibals.   I’m still listening to them—The Cure, The Smiths, The Talking Heads—this week, through one working ear bud.  There was also the friend from Flatlands into The Police, the frenemy from Brooklyn Heights into Dylan, and all of suburban Westchester into Meatloaf.  Then there was my big brother, coolest of the cool, into The Sex Pistols.  God Save the Queen!  I was definitely in the minority though, because Evelyn “Champagne” King made my Love Come Down just as well as David Byrne. I dug the smart lyrics of early hip-hop trio De La Soul and damn if Janet Jackson wasn’t In Control. And yes, I got Into the Groove with Madonna, still do. Two years ago, along with 111.3 million other viewers of the Super Bowl half-time show,  I passed my panties into the end zone to my enduring material girl.

So I’m sure I’ll be in the minority when I tell my son: “All music is good.”  If you look at music-making as an individual’s divine calling, his creative expression, her bliss, then there really is no mis-struck chord.  Behind every atonal musician is a mother, shaking a tambourine and baking brownies for the band.  If a song was born out of passion,  no matter how insipid the lyrics, who am I to say it stinks? I just don’t have to listen to it, and keep my lips zipped.   There were those ‘80s singers who didn’t make my cut then, and still don’t: no Hall and Oates, no Robert Palmer, no Cover Girls nor Debbie Gibson, and no Wham! (or anything smelling of George Michael.) But hey, if you want to Shake your Love with Miss Gibson, who the hell am I to tell you to shut it down?  

Both my sons spent an entire semester of first grade learning the difference between “fact” and “opinion.”  So why, as adults, do we blur this line, insisting that our view—“John Denver sucks”—is God’s truth?  I grew up sampling the 31 flavors of Baskin Robbins on dainty pink plastic spoons and there are even more Snapple options today.  We embrace this range of choice; so why are we so selective in what we allow to enter through the holes in the sides of our head?  Music shouldn’t have to “crossover.” If we could just  tumble in love with what touches us, not because it’s hip, or popular, or prestigious, not because it’s appropriate to our class, race, gender, demographics, or age, but just because it turns us on, wouldn’t that be something?   Nana could get down with Rihanna’s Where Have You Been.  After all, Nana does appreciate a beautiful alto.

So who will take responsibility for my son’s musical love affairs? He will, with a few tips from mom, who cares about the girl groups he brings home:

• Try everything

• Dare to like what you like

• Be prepared to be unpopular

• Don’t judge what others like

• Lyrics matter (but stupid lyrics, in moderation, do no real harm)

• Never be afraid to dance with girls

• Take musical advice from your uncle, still the coolest of the cool

• Check out Akala and The Gorillaz

• Start Mondays with The Clash

• and get into The Cure

Chore Boy

Let’s be clear.  This is not about getting the job done quickly or well. Contrary to what The Cure’s front man Robert Smith croons, boys do cry.  It’s Saturday morning.  The scrambled eggs are cold, half-eaten.  Sponge Bob has ended.  Time for chores. 

It’s a chore to come up with a list of chores that will give kids a sense of accomplishment, while also accomplishing more good than harm. Here’s mine, divided into subcategories:

Fill the Following:

• salt and grated cheese shakers
  
• olive oil bottles (EVOO and the cheap blend)
  
• dish soap, Windex, and napkin dispensers
  
• bird feeder
  
• honey pot
  
• sugar canisters
  
• pepper mill
  

Dust These:

• piano keys & bench
  
• coffee table
  
• banister spindles
  

Pet Care:

• Feed/water/brush/play with dog
  

Miscellaneous:

• Roll rugs
  
• Water plants
  
• Sharpen pencils
  
• Empty wastepaper baskets
  
• Pick up chess pieces from floor and reset board
  

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Outdoor chores stand apart from Saturday morning routine and command extra compensation. These include but are not limited to:

• Sweeping the sidewalk
• Shoveling snow
• Cleaning out the car
• Washing the car
• Picking up identifiable garbage

Sometimes I even make extra work just to give them work. I crumple Post-Its and drop them to the floor throughout the week. Come Saturday, the little one picks up these bits with purpose and adds them to the recycling bin.

The conversation starts something like this…

Me: “Time to do chores.”

Boy #1: (as if he’d taken one straight to the diaphragm): “Uuuugghhh!!”

Boy #2: “No, No, NO….”

Me:  “That’s the deal kids.”

Boy #2: “That’s NOT the deal and stop making fun of me! Mean Mommy!!”

…then it devolves into negotiation:

Boy #2: “I will only do the easiest chores in the world.”

Me: “Of course, easy-peezy lemon-squeezy.  Here, clean the piano.”

I hand him a dingy washcloth, a survivor from my eldest’s infancy, made soft by years of wiping both ends of babies.  He wraps the rag around his pointer and swipes down on each piano key, working from low to high, whining all the way up the scales. I place a reward at the last note: a strawberry Sour Power Straw. No chemical missing. (Cleaning the piano counts as practicing, btw.)

 My husband thinks it’s good moral training for children to clean their bedrooms, but picking up the personal space of a ten-year-old requires intense parental supervision.   I stick to overseeing the glug-glugging of oil pouring from 3-liter cans through funnels into narrow-necked bottles. 

“Pick up your room” my husband commands. Boy #1 jumps on his bed and starts flipping through a graphic novel. I step in: “C’mon, you know where everything goes: socks and underwear in the hamper, everything else on top. Check your pockets!” Laundry is a tyranny. I sniff over jeans, shirts, sweaters, hoping to get another wear out of everything that doesn’t touch genitals or toes.  Spot cleaning is the answer to tyrants.  He lifts the hamper lid, wads up his Hanes, and gets one off. 3 points. The socks miss.   We go through old homework, recycling everything except the most adorable. I point to the wadded Kleenex, dotting the rolling hills of his green bedspread, like dandelions in a summer meadow.  “I’m not touching your snot rags. In the can please.” 

Done dusting the piano and chewing on his reward, Boy #2 plants his flag on the living room rug and claims his turf: GIs, tanks, planes, Playmobil, Beyblades, Lego, chess men – “Go away Mommy, I want to play.” I do so gladly.   My husband also plants his flag: “Clean up your toys NOW.”  The expected reply follows: “Go away Daddy, I’m still playing with them.” All of them.  I’ve heard some disciplined parents have trained their kids to put one game away before the next is pulled out. My solution is to walk away, leaving this set-up for days, disturbing it only when company comes calling, and then not always. When I do eventually pick-up—to run the vac, for example—Boy #2 puts away exactly 3 Pokemon cards, two fighter jets and one knight. I get on all fours and scoop the rest, marching the Roman Legion, gladiators and hungry lions back to the Coliseum.  I do leave the Monopoly money strewn wantonly down the staircase. I enjoy the extravagance of it.

Why do we bother? I ask myself, cupping peppercorns on the kitchen table that missed the mill by a mile. Saturday morning chores are an agony we all endure, ending mercifully when parents dole out gold dollar coins, like Sochi medals, culled for this purpose from the metro card vending machine. Boy #2 runs for his piggy bank, dumps the contents onto the living room rug and starts counting, factoring in this inflow.  At this rate, Boy #1 reasons, he is light years away from possessing Play Station 4. He leaves the coin on the table.

Long ago I gave up preaching cooperation and working for the family good.  This is not a common goal.  A tidy household is my goal, moral toning, my husband’s.  These ideals just don’t wash with the boyz.  So that’s not why. I bother because this is a gender thing.  My husband does wash pots without prompting and gets into corners when he vacuums, but I’m the one the boys see from 3-9pm, in constant motion, unloading and reloading the dishwasher, shaking out rugs, and stooping over toilets, feeling sorry for myself:  “I hold the advanced degree in this family, why am I the only one who cleans toilets??  I’m hardly the worst offender here!!” Shoveling corn flakes and watching Tom & Jerry, the boys only seem oblivious to me washing down the walls of fridge. They get the message: moms and dads both clean, but moms clean more. And so long as mom jumps in to squirt toothpaste, and zip flys, little progress is made. And whose fault is that?

This is not the right model now and it will not be a sustainable arrangement with their gal pals when they reach manhood.  Many little girls do seem to carry the dominant pink glitter gene, but none are born with housekeeping chromosomes.  I was as bad as my boys when mom rolled out the Electrolux.  Flashback #1: me on the stairs, victimized as I vacuum the runner, one step at a time, with a cumbersome wand and a canister too large to fit on a step, dangling by its hose instead, 4 steps below. Flashback #2: I toss my clothes on the floor until I get my first apartment, my first job, my first suit and my first dry cleaning bill: $8 bucks, a fortune in 1989. I hang that sucker hounds tooth up after that.

It’s also about competency. I bother because my boys are knuckleheads and I want them to know the gift of self-confidence borne from a job well done. The tween is challenged to lace his chucker boots and cut his own T-bone. Last week he even topped himself, slipping from the classroom to the restroom soon after the Pledge. He’d put his jeans on backwards and needed to redress. How the hell do you do that and not notice?

It’s 10 o’clock. The chore boys have earned their golden dollars. The house is no worse for wear. I hope we have planted the seeds of self-reliance and respect for domestic drudgery, formerly-known-as-womens’ work. Time will tell.  In the meantime, we have delayed weekend video gaming for an hour.

Watering My Geraniums

Watering geraniums in my garden one September afternoon, tiger mosquitoes delving deep into exposed flesh, I look up to notice my two sons, through windows, sitting at their desks, doing homework. The younger is writing out his weekly spelling words, in the dining room, on a school desk with iron legs I’d found in the cellar upon moving in.  The older one is on the second floor, in his room, working at a rock maple desk from the ‘50s.  I had taken care to face both desks outwards, overlooking the garden, with its hanging geraniums, potted thyme, and pigeons, like feathered Rockettes, lined up on the rooftop of the apartment building behind our small yard.  

Bent over their desks in concentration, eager to finish up and earn time on the Kindle Fire, I turn the nozzle to jet and aim.  First the little one, straight on.  Startled, he opens his mouth in outrage as water hits glass, and taps his pencil forcefully to meet my stream.  Then I angle it upward and get the big one, then down again, then up. All three of us connect through this action, the surprise attack of mommy, the giggles of the younger, the smirk of the older. The water, an extension of my outstretched arm, hits the pane and splashes back at me. The boys, compartmentalized into two rooms separated by floorboards, and me outside, my sundress soaked and getting eating alive, we make three points of a triangle, held at a safe distance by glass, bricks and parquet.

It is a small, end-of-summer moment, but one in which I realize my connections and their limitations. The water cascades luxuriantly across the window.  My six-year-old delights in his drowning, just as he does on trips to the drive-through car wash. I angle the hose upwards once more.  At this moment, the nine-year-old—safe, cozy and dry—taunts me and I respond by opening the faucet full force to scare that tongue back in his mouth. I recognize the expression overtaking his face; I’ve seen it in the bathroom mirror.  It’s the joy of bathing in Mom’s expansive love and the reassurance of a barrier to deflect some of the full-on female force of motherhood.

The Great Consolidator

“Mary, You’re gonna go broke saving money!”  That’s what my Grandpa used to say to my Nana, ribbing her for that gallon jug of Breck shampoo in the corner of the shower stall.  But he was the one responsible for the cases of undrinkable, saccharine-sweetened No-Cal chocolate soda in the coat closet. And now this is what my own mother tells me, thrusting a jumbo jar of thyme in my face: “Maria, you’re gonna go broke saving money!  You know, spices lose their flavor when you hold onto them too long.”

The quart jar of thyme leaves is still ¾ full. So is the mustard powder.  Mustard powder, unlike prepared mustard, is sinus-clearing hot. I use it sparingly. I bought this jar six years ago at my favorite Pakistani deli. Maybe it’s lost some flavor, but it’s still hot as hell.

Our family has decided to split up for MLK weekend: Granddad and my older son to Texas to shoot at quail, my husband and my younger son to Georgia to pick pecans from the cousins’ tree, and Mom has come to stay with me.

Three days together. Wow.  I don’t get my nails done with mom. She doesn’t have nails; she works too hard. She is the least vain person I know. It was a big deal to get her to join me for a pedicure last summer, and for God’s sake, she has a pool and she’s barefoot from May to October. We think about visiting the historical rooms on the 4th floor of the Brooklyn Museum, but with her arthritic spine it’s hard for mom to get around art museums and antique shops these days. It’s turning cold too. We stay close to home, and do home projects.

It’s good domestic policy to line up projects for mom’s visits. My household invites her organizational aggression and if I fail to pile up structured tasks like sandbags, mom-the-tsunami will soon flood areas I’d like to keep off-limits.  She will plunder my catch-all drawer, purging it of corks, medicine droppers, twisty ties and duck sauce. Admittedly, this may be for my own good, but she will also toss scraps of paper with essential numbers and talk me into recycling my rusting tea kettle. I love the way it whistles. Worst of all, my mother will bleach my coffee mug.

So I’ve been collecting unmatched socks for months, and now I dump the basket on the dining room table before her.  In mom’s mind, people and socks should all find mates. Within ten minutes, the pile is reduced by half.  Now she’s stuck and turns accusatory: “You must have a lot of money to waste Maria.” “No mom, why?” She waves a lone cashmere knee-hi.  “Some of these are expensive socks. You better look under the beds and find the mates.”  So she’s got me looking under mattresses and running half-loads of laundry, on the off chance we may scare up a few stray socks and make more matches. 

Pairing up a riotous mob of argyles and tucking them deep into drawers, pleases her, but Mom’s real theatre of war is the pantry. She is boots on the ground in the snack shelf:  granola and fig bars squeezed into the same box, graham crackers and Rye Krisps, side by side in a vintage Saltines tin.  She dismantles the spice rack, and orders me to bring up baby food jars from the basement. She mashes cumin, Krazy Salt, paprika, clove, and yes, the mustard powder into a Mexican pork rub. She pours it into a palm-sized jar, and labels it with masking tape.

I was a teen when I dubbed her “the Great Consolidator.” She started in the pantry in the wee hours, where she secretly consolidated cereal boxes: Total and Special K, Corn Flakes and pillows of shredded wheat. You never knew what you were getting when you shook a box over your cereal bowl—but it was some Chex Party Mix, minus the peanuts. She graduated to syrups and dried fruits. You’d reach for a handful of raisins and get mostly cranberries, and instead of Grade A pure maple, you’d find yourself pouring out a fraudulent “pancake syrup” mixed from very little maple, some honey, and a lot of Karo corn syrup. 

 Nothing was as it appeared in the icebox either.  True fat content wasn’t reflected on milk cartons.  Mom thought nothing of combining quarts of skim, low-fat and whole, which annoyed waistline-watching Dad, and made creaming your coffee complicated

Today, deployed in a corner of my kitchen, a fortress of Barilla pasta boxes before her, I wonder “What does she get out of this?”  To be of joyful service to her children has always been her aim. Her crippled hands can’t open cans or peel potatoes anymore, but they can still top off the Aunt Jemima mix with a scant cup of Bisquik. They can reduce clutter and simplify my life—and that is something.

Suddenly, Mom’s eyes shine. “Let’s make soup,” she says, putting on my apron.  The Great Consolidator, the Kandinski of the Kitchen, the Seurat of the Stovetop. To anyone who cooks, you understand it’s a creative act, to throw wide the cupboard doors and make a meal from what you find… and mom is, above all, a supremely creative person.  Cooking from the pantry is a game with only one rule: you’re not allowed to run out and buy a missing ingredient.  Substitutions are the name of the game. Not only a colossus of consolidation, Mom is the world’s best at making do: powdered milk for fresh, green onions for red, til everything is used up. That’s how to win at this game: use it all up. “You’ve got a lot of black beans,” she says, pulling three cans from a lower shelf. Black bean soup it is.   Fifteen minutes later the stock pot bubbles, and mom adjusts the seasonings. Her caramel eyes flash:  “Got any open salsa in the fridge?” I rifle through the refrigerator door shelves. I do! A good 1/3 of a jar, medium heat. She dumps it in.  What else?”  I pull out a styrofoam clamshell of leftover basmati rice from the Gyro King. In it goes.

Tomorrow, after breakfast, I will set her up in front of her Sunday morning political shows and hop in the shower. She will grow restless with the roundtable on “Meet the Press” and when I return, I will find my kitchen sink full of brown peace lily leaves. She will have pruned all my houseplants.

For now though, I stand behind her, invigorated by black bean soup. I rub her neck while she plays solitaire. “Put the cards down mom, and just enjoy this.” She lays down her hand. “We were very productive today, weren’t we?” she says.  “Yes Mom, we were.” “Good enough to keep the Board of Health away for another day anyway.  We’ll hit that refrigerator tomorrow.”

Discover the Great Consolidator's recipes for black bean soup and granola.

The Maternal Instinct

“Instinct,” per dictionary.com, is: “an inborn pattern of activity or tendency to action common to a given biological species.”

 “Maternal” from my son’s Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate, with the red burlap cover, because I still love the heft of a real dictionary, is: “characteristic of a mother, motherly.” Okay, but let’s dig deeper. Back online to merriam-webster.com, “maternal” Scroll down to related words: “…feminine, womanish, womanlike, womanly; matriarchal, matronly (ouch,) caring, giving, nurturing.”

Put it together. Maternal Instinct:  “feminine, caring, giving, nurturing pattern of activity common to a given species.”

True. Motherhood, when you fold back the cozy, pilled blanket of unconditional love, is defined by patterns of repeated, life-affirming activities common to all moms: shaking Cheerios into breakfast bowls, clipping tiny toenails, washing scalps and wasting Band-Aides on imagined boo-boos to stop the tears.

But what happens when the uncommon happens?  When nurture gives way to darker nature? When the maternal instinct is usurped by self -interest?

When my mother plants a goodbye kiss full-on my son’s mouth after Thanksgiving excess, she uses the same closer she’s always used with me: “Theodore, what does Nana always say?”  No reply.  The first cousin, standing by, pipes up: “I know, I know Nana: you would kill for us and you would die for us.” Way to go Nana.  Melding love and violence in a new generation of young minds. “That’s right!” she triumphs, “Nana would kill for you and she would die for you.”

My torso tingles with distant memory:  Mom, driving Sandy, our beige Volkswagen, stops short at an intersection and shoots her right arm across my chest so I don’t go through the windshield.  Never mind seat belts to do this job.  Or that head cold, so bad all food tastes like stale sugar cones, mom rubs my chest with Vicks Mentholated, covers it with a flannel rag and tucks the bedspread up under my chin.

Yes, put to the test, no doubt Nana would turn the dagger outward to pedophiles and peeping Toms, or inward, towards her apron-covered heart, but I can’t ever imagine Nana letting me win at Scrabble.  Maternal instinct has no place at the game table. My mom is an ace who makes words like “BEVEL” while I grasp at straws with “PINDER,” “WOOLIE” and “FUNGU.”  Thanksgiving night she is cunning as she sips Red Zinger and picks the first tile to see who goes first: “D.”  “All herbal tea taste the same,” she sighs.  I pick “L.” My eighteen-year-old nephew picks “R.”  Nana goes first.  “Nana is old, and tired, and didn’t sleep well last night.” Her strategy, referring to herself in the 3rd person, is to inspire pity, to disarm me, but I don’t fall for it. I play my hardest and refer to cheat sheets which offer “J” and “X” words, and solutions for what to do with the letter “Q” when you have no “U” to follow it. I pray for a spate of senior moments for Nana. Not tonight. Not ever. Her tiles click into place: “ADZE.” “S--,“ I think, “she’s played her Z.” I remember she did once give into a cheat sheet for a troublesome “Z” and came up with “ORZO,” 33 points. “What the hell is that?” I ask. “A kind of tool,” she replies. “My father taught me that one. He was a tool and die maker.”  ADZE, 34 points. Occasionally I hold my own, but not tonight, two hours later, drinking coffee that has sat too long on the warming coil. My nephew dropped out long ago. I make “HAIR,” only 7 points, but I’m hoping I’ve foiled her plans for the triple word square, 2 spaces beyond where hair ends. “Well, you just f—me up, “ she says, “but that’s what you’re supposed to do.” Indeed. But I didn’t. She tacks a “C” on the front end, which also happens to be a triple word square: “CHAIR,” 21 points. I stare at a rack of 1-point letters. I push myself: “NASAL,” 12 points, but I’ve made a fatal miscalculation and opened another path to a triple word. She draws the last tile from the velvet sack and capitalizes on my error, “PAGAN,” and pulls ahead to victory with this 24-point finale.  Final score: 267 to 158. “I’ve slaughtered you,” she says, rubbing her arthritic thumb, “and I don’t like to do that to my child.” Bullshit.  “I got some good letters towards the end.” She throws me this bone, trying to rekindle her correct maternal instinct. She’s prancing inside, no arthritis there. I watch her, animated, not-at-all tired, as she cleans up the board. “Just be thankful I’m functioning this well at 76.” I’m not. In our family, the winner cleans up. At least I’ve got that. It’s our best rule. The winner lingers and relives the mauling as she scoops up tiles, or slips playing cards back in their sleeve, while the losers skulk off to lick their lacerations…

But I am really no different playing Monopoly with my own boys.  I turn down opportunities to buy utilities or railroads. I hold out for Boardwalk. The blue-bannered card in hand, my son soon lands on Park Place. I flash a gold $500 bill, plus two hundreds and a blue fifty. $750. Double the asking price. He accepts my offer and by my next move I’ve put hotels up on both properties.  My nephew, in this game too, is pissed. Hey, I admit it. I’m no different from mothers around the animal kingdom— a mama rat or polar bear, a hamster or wattled jacana – just another mom, who devours her young.

Face It. I fantasize about filial infanticide in the bright morning hours. In that briefest of weekday windows between breakfast’s end and out the door, my immovable six-year-old wears me down with “Mommy, you are so mean, so mean, sooooo mean!!!”  I’m getting absolutely nowhere cooing “Use your words honey, would you like mommy to put on your socks, or would you like to do that yourself?”  “GO AWAY MOMMY! YOU ARE SOOOO MEAN!!!!”  Forgetting to breathe, I surrender decorum and throw self-esteem out that same window: “THAT’S RIGHT, MOMMY’S MEAN, SHE’S SOOOO MEAN, IN FACT, SHE’S A BITCH, MOMMY’S A REAL BITCH! BUT YOU STILL HAVE TO GET DRESSED!!”   Hitting is never an option. Cursing is not really an option either (but it is better than hitting.) My revenge? Gaming.

“Snowball fight, Brooklyn style! Moms against kids!” Three moms hurl ice balls over dumpsters. Three kids return fire from behind wet mattresses, sitting curbside for days.  I take full advantage of my superior height. I know it won’t last.  The heat of the day approaches and the snow is packing well now. Show no mercy. In the end, moms rule and kids retreat, red, raw and squealing for mercy.

In my daily patterns of activity—of sharpening pencils, squeezing Sparkle Fun toothpaste, and soothing nightmares where spiders descend from ceilings along invisible threads—it’s freeing to break with habit, to refrain from putting my children’s needs before mine, to do something, some little thing, counter-instinctual, non-nurturing, and yes, even violent.

Try it.  Allow yourself to forget their feelings for an hour and play to win.  Your pleasure in winning will come at a cost. You will have to wipe a few tears and pick up pieces of formative ego along with the knights and pawns. But you will notch up your own self-esteem enough to face another day boldly.  You will wake reenergized to dress your six-year-old for school. Isn’t that worth it?

“I would kill for you and I would die for you.”  Yes, Nana, you would. I would too, but let’s hope it never comes to that. 

Game on!

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Ice Capades

You are connected.  Your kids’ former sitter, now a beauty editor at People, gifts you with swag bags of Product—capital P intentional—Chanel, Clarins, Clinique. Your old boss at the hospital still remembers you with all-day passes to the Presbyterian Parking Garage. Those have come in handy when birthing babies and repairing broken ankles.  And today, a neighbor who chairs the Environment Committee at Community Board 14, snags tickets for you and the boys to test the ice at the 26-Acre LeFrak Center at Lakeside, one evening before it opens to the unwashed masses.  

You are unprepared for the elegant, open air plan, flowing into a frozen lake. Two connecting rinks, one covered lightly, like a carport, the other exposed to the stars. Your teenage memory of the Wollman Rink is a painful one: a splinter working its way under your watch plaid skate skirt and lodging in your behind. That memorable piece of pine, requiring mom, tweezers and humiliation to remove.  Yes, the old Robert Moses-era rink—wooden benches chopped up into splinters by kids balancing their blades to lace up.  The simple cement ring, like a drained city pool, and a towering loudspeaker piping in Olivia Newton-John.

You are cheered by innovations in ice skates, 3 clicks and you’re in.  It’s been forever, and actually, you spent much more time on pavement than ice, but you dismiss misgivings as both boys step on the ice and promptly reach for your hand. Each tugging you outward in opposite directions, surprisingly, you remain upright as you complete your first lap.   It’s slow going and your arms ache so you nudge them out of the nest.  “Let go!” you shout to the elder. He shuffle steps straight to the wall like a castaway reaching for driftwood. That’s something else you remember from Wollman, repeated here: kids clinging to the rink walls like cat hairs on cashmere; that, and the watery, commercial cocoa. 

“The wall only gives you a false sense of security,” you scold.  “You’ll never learn that way.”  He pushes off cautiously. “Stop taking choppy, baby steps. You’re not walking anymore. “ He isn’t, and neither are you. You take off, pointing out the long strides of patrolling teens in red polos.  There are no visible loud speakers, still, the high notes of Mary J. Blige sparkle the night air. You swivel your hips and suddenly, you’re moving in reverse. I’m searching for the real love.. someone to set my heart free…  Your son smiles: “Do a figure eight.” You oblige. It’s coming back. The roller skates with the lightning bolts on the ankles, and the English muffins on your ears pumping in The Gap Band and Rick James. 

Ice skating suits you – maybe not your trick knee – but certainly your character.  Human connection is made easy on ice. Gliding into and out of personal space, you clock fifty new encounters in under an hour.  A wallflower in a tiger hat with ear flaps reaching down to her knees, a photographer on the sidelines, a father leading his daughter over the ice in her Christmas coat.  And your sons, off the wall now, taking short strides, but strides nonetheless.