Saved by Gloria, or Dum Dums and Dumb Dumbs
<p class="">A few days ago I spent an extraordinary amount of time negotiating. The arguments on both sides were watertight. The caliber of reasoning, strong. The subject: how many dum dum pops is too many dum dum pops to have open at once.</p>
A few days ago I spent an extraordinary amount of time negotiating. The arguments on both sides were watertight. The caliber of reasoning, strong. The subject: how many dum dum pops is too many dum dum pops to have open at once.
For me the answer was “if you can’t hold them all, that’s too many.” Harry’s position: “there’s no such thing as too many open dum dum pops.”
The rest of my day was divided among watching the documentary Becoming on Netflix in three-minute increments; facilitating my 7-year-old’s end-of-school-year Microsoft Teams meeting (lol and !!! and sad face—because these are the times we live in); and getting kids into the pool and out again ten minutes later, thanks to an overabundance of minuscule but irritating insects known as thrips. (The internet says good luck you simply must wait for them to move on.)
Oh, and there was the secondary negotiation, Who Gets How Many Chicken Nuggets and Which Fries.
But just as the best candy bars are both sweet and salty, so too are my days. Yesterday’s nuggets of nougat: finding Oliver asleep on the couch first thing—he had gotten up, but just wasn’t ready to be awake thanks to an 11 pm, house-disrupting electricity flicker. Harry’s first words to me yesterday morning were “Where my daddy go? I want my daddy back.” It was Thursday, after all. Watching Ethan monitor Peanut bunny in the run Noah set up in a lush patch of clover next to the chicken coop. Teaching Harry how to pick blueberries (which he calls “boo die-ber-derrs”; strawberries are simply “die-ber-derrs”).
In the flurry of tracking the bigs’ schoolwork and managing the two-year-old who sorta kinda needs to still nap but when he does he won’t go to bed until 10 pm, I’ve remembered to check the city’s Instagram feed every single day for the Covid-19 updates (they aren’t good; cases are still going up every day, by dozens, since Phase 2 of reopening) but I’ve forgotten to register for my summer statistics class.
Gloria, a person whose face I’ll never see nor voice hear but to whom I am bearing my inadequacies via email, has gone above and beyond and gotten me registered for my course. And she was kind about it.
I get the confirmation email from Gloria—including a smiley emoji—and as I’m looking at the syllabus, all my children appear like moths to a flame—quick, mom is trying to concentrate! They all need to talk: about the bunny; about the new brand of cheese dip; about the fact that the littlest has just come from the bath and is “naked bum!”
At times like this, I think about The Legend of J.K. Rowling and how she wrote Harry Potter on scraps of napkins in her closet at midnight as a single mother (or something) and I sigh, but I know it’ll all be fine. I’ve never before felt like such a dum-dum as I do while navigating the prerequisites for a second bachelor’s degree via the internet. It’s not that I don’t have the cognitive ability or available neurons to learn something new. It’s that my attention is pulled so many ways now.
I’m learning to lean in, heavily—but not into ambition or whatever. I lean into the understanding of people like Gloria (does she have children?), to the reality that my reality is different during this educational experience. I’m used to being clever and capable in an academic setting rather than bumbling and harried. Harryed.
Once I begin the nursing program proper, Harry will be in kindergarten. I’ll no longer have multiple voices vying for my attention from 6 am-9 pm every single day. Until then, thank you, Gloria.