Knox loves mommies

 

During Valentine's week, while signing his name on packets of heart-shaped gummies to give out to his classmates in preschool, Knox commented, “I don’t like girls.” To which I said, “But I’m a girl.” And thus he adjusted his statement to, “Unless the girls are mommies.” I loved this response. Perhaps I should have felt more special if he had said “except for you,” but it was made more enjoyable by him admitting that he likes mommies as a class of people. For example, my friend Erin, who dotes on him frequently and takes time to listen to his long drawn out stories when we’re leaving church or if he is over at her house playing with her sons’ toys. He really likes Erin, and probably knows her better than he knows his aunts based on how frequently he sees her. Knox also loves his preschool teacher, Miss Jen. The first time I took him over her house for a playdate with her son, Alex, who is his best friend in the class, I stayed for the first hour talking and hanging out, then made a quick run to Walmart to do my grocery shopping and was back in about an hour. She told me he stayed with her while I was gone, rather than joining Alex and his siblings in the basement where they were all playing. Kids are fun and all, but mommies never take the dinosaur you’re playing with out of your hands while you’re still using it.

I think Knox’s favorite part about mommies is that they read to him. He loves to be read to, and it was the only way for the preschool teachers (mommies) could get him to un-pry himself from my leg and submit to four and a half hours of preschool for the first six months of the school year. I’m sure he enjoys the parts of school where he gets to play with the toys or play group games like Duck, Duck, Goose and learning about nature and animals, but I think his absolute favorite part of school is when one of the teachers reaches out to him with “Knox, do you want to read a storybook?”

I keep bringing up his love of books as a reason for him to want to learn to read, an endeavor that he’s been making slow and steady process at, but treats like a terrible chore, the burden of being four and a half. Rye had letter recognition and letter sounds down by age two and a half, partially through natural ability and partially to being the firstborn who got lots of time for going over such things with me during our looooong days at home together. I remember thinking his preschool program, while considered quite vigorous, was still probably boring for him as he already had the letter sounds down. But since raising Knox, who tries and is interested but doesn’t have the same visual memory as Rye, I now see why preschool spends so much time on these basics. In the third quarter of his four-year-old preschool program, Knox was likely to get through a mixed up deck of flashcards and get 23 out of 26 letters right on the first try. It’s not always the same three that he will get wrong, but he still seems to get confused, or bored, or tired, and not get 100 percent yet. Sometimes it seems like there’s a sort of “Wheel of Fortune” disk with all the letter names and sounds spinning around in his head, and wherever that wheel stops spinning will get called out as the answer. (Rye is sort of like this with math problems.) Knox feels that if he keeps saying “R,” one of these times he’s bound to be right.

One day this winter, Knox came home from school and noticed I had a new handmade paper sign on the door, not the usual one that says “Shhh, nap time!” that I put up on a daily basis so that the neighborhood kids don’t disturb us between 1 and 3 p.m. Knox paused at the front door, staring at the sign, and read the top line out loud, “Rye will not.” At that point I got the door unlocked and pushed it open, and Knox was not curious enough to stay out in the cold and try to read the next two lines: “be home until 4 today.” Wanting to hurry him upstairs for his nap, I read the rest of the sign to him, but enthusiastically congratulated him for having read the first line himself. “See that buddy, when you use your sounding-out skills you can start reading signs for yourself!” He gave a big hearty Knox smile, threw his coat on the floor, and ran upstairs to his bed.

Rye had started reading on his own by wanting to know what signs said, as in road signs and yard signs and business signs and every other kind. We would have thought that was very strange except we had friends with a son a couple of years older than Rye who had used signs as his gateway to desiring to read as well. For Rye, his love of signs was sort of an obsession that ruled his brain for about three years, then it became just part of an overall obsession with “construction demarcation,” which also celebrates the usage of cones, traffic drums and traffic barriers as wordless ways to tell people what to do. And telling people what to do, the authority that comes with signs and traffic demarcation, is what we think Rye loves so much about it. Thankfully, now that he is eight, Rye is also branching out to an interest in castles and medieval history, landscaping and horticulture, and chess.

I’m glad that Knox loves mommies, and I hope he will continue to love mommies even after he learns to read on his own. And this mommy can’t wait until we cross over that developmental milestone!

So long, old friend

   It is with much sadness that I write that we had to let Pepper go today. I was “her person” for almost 18 years. She has lived in three apartments and one full house with us, enjoyed 10 years of peace and leisure with us before we had children, and then pleasantly adjusted and accepted our offspring (and our offspring only) to become not like a sister to our kids, but more of a cranky old aunt that lived with us. She will be much missed.

   Pepper’s twin sister, Pansy, had her health take a very sudden decline in December of 2019 and we had her put down at that time. Pepper’s health had still seemed quite good at that time, but she started to gradually decrease over the past two years. Frankly, I think she had geriatric depression. I hypothetically administered a psychiatric test on her, and she scored 14 out of 15 on the Geriatric Depression Scale. A score of 5 and up is considered a diagnosis of depression. She didn’t seem to be in acute pain, but she kept shrinking away from being a part of the family, so that this cat that was once always underfoot and talking to you was now difficult to find and easy to forget.

For example, she stopped coming upstairs from the basement in October. She was still capable of it, as she did come back upstairs twice in the past four months, enticed by the smell of a fresh tuna can opening, but she didn’t stay upstairs. We brought her up once in November to show her the first woodstove fire of the year, as laying on the little hearth rug had always been one of her favorite spots. She looked it, looked at us, and then went back downstairs to her then-hideout, the space under the drying rack in the laundry room. At Christmas time, we carried her up to the foyer to see the decorated tree and drink some Christmas juice--also known as tree water--which we had always considered to be her personal fountain of youth. She sat behind the tree for about three minutes, sniffed at the base and seemed to find the needles too pokey this year, and then slinked back down to the basement. 

Around that time, she moved her home base from under the drying rack to inside the walk-in shower in the basement bathroom. She even stopped visiting the laundry room, about 12 feet away, for food, so we moved her food and water into the shower with her. She still got up fine to use the litterbox outside the bathroom and just around the corner. Then in the middle of January, she moved from sleeping in the shower to curling up between the wall and the toilet. It was a depressing sight, but I received her message: she was preparing to die. Had she been an outdoor cat, she would be wondered off into the woods and looked for a sheltered and hidden place to die, but inside her comfy home, behind the toilet in the least-used bathroom in the house was what she had to work with.

She would still let me pick her up and she would sit on my lap and let me pet her in the evenings before we went to bed, but she kept shortening the amount of time she was willing to cuddle, from about 15 minutes to five minutes at the end. We were afraid of her jumping down from the couch, so we gently lifted her down before she could jump, and still she would limp away as if one of her back paws had fallen asleep.

   

    She was also nearly completely deaf. She wouldn’t come when you called, nor even feel your footsteps approaching. However she was quick to react if she noticed the level of light changed in a room — a sign that her vision was compensating for her loss of hearing.

 All this is to say that I have felt Pepper was drifting away from us for the past year or two. As a young cat, and even in her younger teen years, she was constantly aware of our family going-ons. If she heard me unlocking the front door, she would run over and give me a loud and angry meow. I always imagined her saying, “Where have you been, you know I can’t sleep without knowing that you are home and safe!” In a way she was almost like a dog with anxiety, although the only way her anxiety played out was her angry meowing and unrestful daytime naps. She never was a vengeful cat either. She never peed in anyone’s shoe or threw up on an important document or anything. I suppose she was quick to forgive us in all the ways that we disturbed her rest.

When it came to people outside of our household, she was extremely guarded in who she trusted or let her guard down with. (If you have touched Pepper, even if it was only one time, consider yourself to be a member of a very exclusive club.) I kind of loved how she wasn’t afraid of visitors, and never hid from them. Even when people would try to pick her up and she didn’t want them too, she would stand her ground, dodging just inches out of their grasp and look back over her shoulder as if to say, “How dare you!” How dare they, indeed. Once this guy Mark thought he was a cat whisperer and he just went and picked her up and held him to his chest. I remember thinking, “What in the world are you doing? You have to let a cat smell your hand just to have them LET you PET them!” She clawed into him with no mercy. I believe he may have bled through his shirt from those wounds. Josh and I had no sympathy. That might have been the one time that she ran and hid from someone after he put her down.

   We had Pepper so long that the friends who lived above us at the Westminster Avenue apartment in 2007 moved to Frederick, then Pittsburgh, then back to Carroll County, and had dinner at our house in 2019. As they were leaving, Kevin looked over and said, “Hello, cat.” And I responded with, “Kevin, that’s Pepper,” and his mind was blown. And do you remember the 17-year cicadas that came out in 2004, and have you heard how they’re going to resurface again this spring? Pepper was there for them last time. I remember catching a few and putting them in the back porch room with the cats (now my writing office), but she and Pansy were kind of terrified by their big bodies and strange, loud flying. At least I don’t have to feel bad that she will be missing out on their reappearance in May.

Josh says we’re never getting pets again, but I will never say never. Pepper was not the most loveable cat, but she was loyal and she was ours and she saw me through many a hard time in the past 17 years. Rye took the news very hard. I explained to him that in cat years, it was like she was 90 years old. Heck, in people years, she would be moving out to go to college in the fall! That made him laugh.

   Her passing is definitely the end of an era.

I'm sorry son, but right now I'm Mrs. Knauer

    At the beginning of school year, I noticed that Rye’s math class is scheduled from 12 to 12:40. 

   Huh, I thought. I’m leaving home at 12:45 to pick Knox up from preschool each school day. If Rye’s math teacher ever needed a substitute, I could do that without being very inconvenienced. Also, I will already be following along with second grade math as Rye’s personal tutor on our homeschool days. 

   Math is one of just two classes that the full-time second grade teacher doesn’t teach, probably because that’s when she can get her lunch break, I assumed. Mrs. P, the second grade math teacher, is another parent like me who teaches part time at the school. She had taken over the reins of coordinating the school’s math program this year, and whether by design or default, took on the second grade math students as well. 

   I know I feel super stressed about the times when I may need a substitute for the ninth grade English class that I teach at their school. One normally asks friends first for favors, and I’ve gotten to know the other English teachers better than most of the others. Unfortunately, they all teach at the same time as I do, ruling them out as potential subs. 

   On the flip side, I also get stressed when I see an email request for someone who needs a last-minute substitute teacher. I’m a scheduler, and while I may not have plans or commitments to someone else during my non-teaching times, I usually do have a specific plan for my time. When I see another teacher in need of a substitute, I feel like I should want to help more than I do, and then I either feel guilted into saying yes or guilty for saying no. 

   I would much prefer to operate with a sort of planned back-up system, and have someone who has been established as my back up who I can ask first when I need a substitute, and in return, I'd like to be someone else’s set back-up teacher. Feeling a little nudge from God, I decided to offer my noon hour availability to Mrs. P.

   As soon as I reached out to Mrs. P during the second week of school, she emailed right back: “That would be wonderful, are you available Sept. 28?” I was, and so I happily agreed to do it. The day went well and I got to put faces with names from Rye’s stories about his classmates. 

   Fast-forward to the end of Christmas break, when Mrs. P reached out to me again. She was out of state and had been for over a week, caring for her parents through some health concerns. Could I teach second grade math for Jan. 4 and 6? Yes! I responded, glad that I could help her out. It would have been nice to have those first two mornings to myself after the kids’ month off at home for a mental and emotional recharge, but if the shoe were on the other foot, I would hate to have my attention to my loved ones be distracted by worrying about a second grade math class.

   I looked at Rye’s math textbook and saw that they were starting a new unit on measurements, starting with grams and kilograms. Perfect, I thought. I can handle that, and it should be a nice break for the kids from the three digit subtraction with borrowing that they had been working on before the holiday break. I didn’t have the teacher’s manual, but I figured I could work off of Rye’s textbook. 

   That Monday morning, I was feeling pretty anxious. I was nervous about teaching my own English class, so facing a room of 13 hyperactive second graders after their recess, after a month off, was really intimidating. To counteract my nerves, I planned ahead, determined to make the lesson fun. That morning I scoured the house for fun things to measure that would be less than 100 grams. I grabbed a little plastic army man and tested it — 2 grams. Nice. I grabbed a Nerf mega dart — 3 grams. A miniature cone that came with an RC vehicle — 8 grams. A plastic shark that belongs to Knox — 68 grams. A plastic elephant of denser plastic — 80 grams. And for the piece de resistance: a metal Deere mini-digger that Rye had received from my parents for Christmas. When he opened it he gave a spirited, “This is my favorite toy, how did you know?” My parents had no idea, but it was already his favorite because he had one just like it. During the summer he had saved his allowance for it and purchased it on Amazon. It’s built to scale of a true Deere mini-digger, meant for a collector more than a child, but Rye is pretty careful with his things, and since I would only be letting one child at a time put the toys on the scale, I knew it would be safe. And honestly, he had two, so worst-case scenario, he would have a back-up!

   As I had expected, the class was immediately excited about the idea of weighing toys. I’d say they were hanging on the edges of their seats, but they weren’t really in their seats at all. Three-quarters of them had run up to the front of the room to see the scale’s display screen for themselves rather than waiting and listening for the student I had chosen to be the “verifier” to tell them what each toy weighed. The cone was the third object to come out of the bag, and immediately, Rye got a sort of nervous laughter edginess to him. “That’s my cone,” I heard him telling someone, but I believe it was the other parent helper in the class, not one of his peers. Within a few seconds he was up at the front of the room with most of the other students, but while they still gave me some distance, my son went straight to my plastic bag of toys to root through it and see what other toys of his I might have brought. He seized upon the mini-digger, held it up in my face, and he probably said something, but I was too distracted by the other students. I was trying to get them to back away from my little digital kitchen scale and stop weighing everything in sight, stacking things on top of each other on the scale, and testing how high they could get the numbers to go by pushing down on the scale with their little fists. I tried explaining to them that they were no longer measuring “mass,” a new word for the day, but “force,” but they didn’t care. It was just a scramble to see how high that little gram counter could climb. 

   I looked up again and saw my son talking to the other mom, showing her the digger, again, with that nervous smile on his face. The rest of the class and I were up to the toy elephant, the one that should have been before the grand finale of the mini-digger, but I saw the possessive obsession in Rye’s eyes and knew I wasn’t going to get that digger back. Then suddenly Rye was back in my face again, though no longer smiling. He was shaking with rage, as if he was addressing a bully who has picked on him for years and he had finally reached his tipping point and was about to let loose on his tormenter. “This is the worst math class ever,” he said in whispers of rage, clinging to my arm. I, not wanting to lose control of the whole class, chose not to engage. After all, we were done with the measuring portion of the class and now it was time to start talking about comparisons of weights and how you could find out the difference between the weight of two objects if you only knew their total and the weight of one of them. But Rye wouldn’t move on, and so his full time teacher came over and attempted to guide him back to his seat. At this point Rye shook her off and stepped toward me again. I wondered, what was he going to do, hit me?

   “Oh no, we’re not having this,” the teacher said as she grabbed him by both shoulders and led him out of the room. And I just kept moving on with the teaching. “OK class, now we’re on page 119.” 

   In between math problems, I kept looking to the door, expecting him to walk back in, either with his teacher or without, as she finally got to her lunch break. But the next 30 minutes went by and he didn’t return. “Where’s Rye?” several of the other boys asked me. I deflected with “he just needed some time to get settled down.” “If he went to the principal’s office, why isn’t he back yet?” I wondered the same myself. 

   By the end of that half hour, I had run out of material and was grateful to see the second grade teacher come back, though Rye wasn’t with her. “He’s not coming back into this room until you’re gone,” she said. I froze in place and another shot of adrenaline went down my spine. I realized he was still mad and not over his tantrum. Unbelievable, I thought. And how unfair — he had missed the entire lesson, and now I would be punished by having to teach it to him all over again at home. The teacher told me, “I told him people are more important than things,” and I smiled, because this is the same exact language we use at home when Rye gets mad at Knox for using, and sometimes maybe breaking, their toys. I was glad she had noticed the basis of his meltdown from her objective position in the same way that I see his possessive, hoarder-like tendencies.

   I packed up my scale and the toys Rye hadn’t confiscated from me, grabbed my puffy coat and headed for the door. Rye slipped in through the back door of the classroom. He avoided eye contact, but not in a penitent way. His was more of a “I will not acknowledge your existence” kind of way, often displayed by high schoolers. My heart was pounding again. I got out of there and wanted to call somebody, anybody, to plead my side of the case and get those “oh my word” responses I felt I deserved. But I had to take Knox home in 20 minutes, and I had to make photocopies of my English class handouts before I left, so I stayed in the copy room and waited my turn with the copier, making small talk about the holidays with the other teachers and volunteers who passed through. 

   At the end of the day, I walked to the elementary school exit and waited for Rye. He struggled to carry his heavy backpack while trying to keep a paper plate with the Rice Krispy treat castle they had built in class level. I took the plate from him and said, “I think there’s something we need to talk about.” And he quickly spit out, “I’m sorry I overreacted but you shouldn’t have taken my toys without asking.” All in one sentence, no comma, no pause, and no remorse at all. I took a deep breath and held my tongue. I wasn’t expecting this reaction, and I didn’t know how to react. Clearly he was not far enough away from the moment to be able to look at objectively. Or maybe seven year olds aren’t capable of that yet. I decided to bide my time and get Josh’s opinion on it. 

   “I think we need to take the digger away, give it to GoodWill or something,” Josh said after arriving at home, the kids already in bed, and finally getting to hear my full version of the story. Rye was already in a deep sleep, and it would have been easy to sneak into his room and grab the two mini diggers that I had noticed were sitting on the top of his bookshelf headboard at bedtime. The vengeful side of me wanted to do it, but I knew that Rye would see it for what it was, being spiteful — a characteristic I struggled with and see genetically wired in our children, which we are working hard to diffuse and train out of them. I considered taking the trucks and having him lose them for a week, but I realized he was also in shock, going back to his first day of school after such a long break. It had been a really long day, and it would have been exhausting for him even if his mom hadn’t been his math teacher and “taken his toys without asking.” The kid wakes up between 4 and 5 a.m. each day. By noon when math starts, he’s practically put in a full day of holding his emotions in check. In the end I decided Josh needed to talk to him about it, which he did via video message from work the next morning, and then Rye did officially apologize, with sentiment, and gave me a hug. 

   As for my long-term success as a substitute math teacher, I ended up teaching Rye’s class five times in those three weeks, and while we never had another meltdown, there was at least one other occasion where I had to say, “I'm your teacher right now, not your mom.”  

   And when I was Sunday school teacher last week and needed to bring in some props for the lesson, you can be sure I stuck to just Knox’s stuff.

The truck in question, posing on the rug Rye still
insists is his, even though we owned it before he
was born and moved it to the playroom 2 years ago.