1.) John and I went to Charleston for John’s nephew’s wedding. Or maybe I should write for our nephew’s wedding? The truth is that I’m not really sure what to write because although the second choice is technically correct, it doesn’t feel true. The truth is that there are a total of twenty nieces and nephews between John and his siblings. I’ve only known John for nine years, so all but five of those nieces and nephews existed before I ever came into the picture.

Together with their Uncle John those nieces and nephews manufactured a lot of memories surrounding family trips, triumphs and tragedies. My arrival heralded a new dynamic in John’s relationship with his sister and brothers, his brother-in-law and sisters-in-law, and all those nieces and nephews. The brother and uncle everyone knew disappeared and was replaced with someone who had to consider his wife, and in short order his children, too, before he could carry out the sort of commitments he once did. Maybe this is why only some of John’s siblings’ children occasionally refer to me as their aunt, and I don’t have the type of relationship with them that their other aunts enjoy.

Whatever the case may be, the truth is that it took me a long time to feel comfortable around John’s family, and that eight years into our marriage and three children later I still don’t feel like a true part of the Moore family. That may be my own misinterpreation of our family’s relationship, I admit, but I’m just saying.

I’m telling you all of this as a round about way of explaining that while we enjoyed our weekend in Charleston with John’s family, it was still a weekend in Charleston with John’s family. And I hope I don’t get in trouble for saying that, although I suspect everyone who knows anything about it all would expect me to say exactly this kind of thing.

2.) My parents took Archie, Kit and Jack to Charlotte to spend the weekend with my brother, my sister-in-law, Camille, and my nephews Hayes and Rhys. If you click on that link you’ll see that my children enjoyed their weekend wholeheartedly. And because it was Hayes’s third birthday, Archie, Kit and Jack’s time with their cousins was extraordinarily special.

3.) When John and I got back to our hotel on Friday night after the rehearsal dinner, we rode the elevator up to the rooftop bar and holy cow was that place packed. We ordered a drink, found an open spot along the wrought-iron railing lining the roof’s perimeter, and enjoyed our stories-high view of downtown Charleston.

It didn’t take very long for John and I to agree that we felt old and out-of-place and entirely not cool enough to hang with the bar’s late-night crowd so we finished our drinks and called it a night. Before that happened, though, I had an opportunity to take a long, hard look at the Ravenel Bridge over the Cooper River, and from my spot on that roof I could finally see how damn steep the bridge’s incline really is. “I ran that mile in about eight minutes,” I reminded John, pointing to the steady climb on the Mt. Pleasant side of the bridge.

“That’s ’cause you rock,” my husband replied, and I’ll confess right now that it took a beat or two before any sort of self-depreciating thought crossed my mind.

4.) I think there’s something wrong with me because I still woke up at six o’clock Saturday morning even without my children there to coax me out of bed. I thought about walking down the hall to the coffee urns and plate of pastries I remembered the hotel staff sets up outside the elevator on each floor of the hotel, but decided against it when I realized I was still dressed in my pajamas.

So I turned on the television instead and discovered that TNT airs back-to-back episodes of Angel on Saturday mornings. You better believe I was all over that, and you ought to know, too, that when John woke up and saw what I was watching on television he rolled his eyes and moaned, “Oh, God. Don’t get obsessed with this again.”

5.) It took a little doing, but I convinced John to run with me Saturday morning. Before we left for Charleston he was all yeah-I’d-be-happy-to-run-with-you, but when it came right down to it John had a last minute freak-out and snipped at me for a while before I started to act like he had no choice and changed from my pajamas into my running clothes. That nearly backfired when I realized the bellhop had left my shoes, all wrapped up in a blue plastic BI-LO bag, in the back of our station wagon when he’d unloaded our car upon our arrival at the hotel.

6.) We did eventually get outside to run, John and I, and I promised John I’d run his pace, no matter what. So I did even if while doing so I longingly watched a pack of guys pass by us, headed in the opposite direction, running at what looked like my pace, and I managed to stay just a few steps in front of John even when another couple passed us on our left and I knew I could surpass them in no time at all if I could just take my foot of the breaks for a few blocks.

Once while we were running beside Battery Park I dropped back behind John, matching my stride to his cadence, and said, affecting my best brogue, “I don’t enjoy breathing like a pregnant walrus.” I was reciting a line from this commercial, and John knew it so he started to laugh which only made it more difficult for him to catch his breathe. That commercial is part of a joke John and I share so when I said it I knew what would come next.

7.) Later that morning I went to the bridal luncheon which was hosted at the home of a close friend of the bride’s family. The house was old but regal, situated at the end of an unpaved stretch of Coburg Road, lined on either side with live oaks. For a moment or two I wondered if Scarlet O’Hara would answer the door, but she didn’t, obviously, and before the luncheon was over I found myself seated to the right of a woman I didn’t know who was gossiping with the woman seated to her left. Maybe she didn’t see the place card marking my spot at the table, and maybe she didn’t care, but somehow she’d entwined my life with my sister-in-law’s, insisting that, “She adopted all those kids because, you know, she lost that Down’s baby…”

Um, no and not really, I thought about saying, but instead I lifted my chin way up high and smiled hugely at my sister-in-law seated across from me on the other side of the table. A few years ago I would have eaten that woman for dessert, but I’m happy to have finally learned who’s worth contradicting, and who is better off ignored.

8.) John and I spent the remainder of the afternoon visiting the shops along King Street. Before we went back to our room to get dressed for the seven o’clock wedding ceremony, John and I went to Magnolia’s on East Bay where we ordered appetizers and a drink, or two. We probably wouldn’t eat until late, John and I assumed, and if this wedding reception was like most Southern wedding receptions with seven hundred guests and appetizer-lined buffet tables we probably wouldn’t have much of an opportunity to eat anyway.

Our assumption was correct after all, but John and I wouldn’t know as much until after my husband squeezed my thigh, hard, during the wedding ceremony as the bride’s vows included the word obey, hot on the heels of at least two readings that asserted a husband’s dominance over his wife, and I breathed aloud, “Really?” Because, really?

9.) At the reception I ate two pieces of wedding cake, and danced to a big band with John whom I’m reminded each time we’re required to dance together learned a lot during his days in Cotillion and you have to believe me when I tell you that something about that always, always, always makes me laugh.

10.) My father answered my mother’s cell phone on Sunday morning when I called to check on Archie, Kit and Jack. My grandmother had died Saturday night, he explained.

When I talked to my mother Saturday morning she’d told me that Grandma had been transported from the nursing home to the hospital and that no one expected her to last much longer. John and I offered to come back early so Mom could catch a flight to Pennsylvania, but she asked us to leave when we got up on Sunday morning instead. I checked in with my mother a few times on Saturday, but her request remained the same.

Grandma turned ninety years old last week, but she didn’t look a day older than sixty at her funeral. They’d painted her face with make-up, and put her in a push-up bra, too, even though no one can remember Grandma wearing make-up or a any sort of supportive undergarments. Her daughters, my mother and her sisters, couldn’t believe how gorgeous Grandma looked. The priest called her stunning.

I bet she’s stunning now, too, wherever she is, wherever we go when we die. She was smart, and strong, and beautiful, and I will consider myself a fortunate woman if I am those three things myself when I’m ninety years old and leaving this place to find out what it is that comes next.

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Morning with the Moores

It is five o’clock in the morning and I am writing this while I’m waiting for John to get home from the gym. When he does I’ll surrender my watch of the three children upstairs, each of them swathed in blankets as they slumber on, and then I’ll leave the house to run three miles up the road one direction before I turn around and run those three miles home again, down the other side of the road.

I wanted to begin writing this post two days ago as I was waiting for the plumber to knock on our front door, but when I sat down to share my thoughts with you Kit and Jack announced that they were hungry and wanted a snack. The plumber arrived before I had an opportunity to sit down in front of this computer again, when I had to stand sentinel at the bathroom doors to keep my children out of his way as that plumber worked to fix our toilets, one upstairs and another downstairs, because it is always two things at a time that break around here.

And I wanted to begin writing this post on Monday afternoon as I was waiting for John to call me, to tell me it was time for Archie, Kit, Jack and I to pick him up from work. His car was in the shop and he’d need our help to pick it up, to bring it home.

We were driving around Friday night, John and I, scouting out the course for Saturday morning’s race when I told him I smelled something burning. I’d rolled down my window, my elbow resting on top of the glass, and the fiery smell was so acrid it filled the car before I was able to finish my sentence. “Whoever’s car that is, is gonna be in trouble!” John replied, nearly shouting.

By the time we pulled into our driveway there was smoke billowing out of the car’s right wheel well. A neighbor walked across the street to help us. John pulled the green garden hose from the side of our house, from underneath the blooming hydrangea bushes, and turned its water on the smoke.

I tried to write this post again yesterday, but I was tired and the kids were whiney and I had clothes to iron and Archie wanted to finger paint the Kraft-colored paper we’d bought earlier in the day to wrap my nephew’s birthday presents. So I did what I needed to do instead of what I wanted to do, and suddenly it was bedtime and I was tucking Archie, Kit and Jack into their beds, under their blankets, and I was done. I was done.

I know I won’t finish writing this by the time John gets home.

I hope I’ll find the time to finish it today.

Yesterday morning Rachel came over with Sophia. Our children played upstairs in the bonus room filled with toys and children’s books and all sorts of nonsense while Rachel and I huddled around the island in the middle of the kitchen and talked about all sorts of things. I tell Rachel things I’ve traditionally kept to myself, but she never balks so I just keep telling her. She’s my failsafe that way, offering her opinion when I need to hear it, setting me straight again.

The other day Rachel was talking about Sophia’s lose tooth, her first, and told me that her mother kept all the baby teeth belonging to Rachel’s siblings and herself in a jewelry box. I told her that I have Archie’s hospital identification bracelets in my jewelry box, every last one of them.

“They are treasures,” Rachel replied. She understood what I meant.

Encouragement often comes from friends, but sometimes it comes from unlikely places, too. On Friday the man who came to clean the rug underneath our kitchen table, the ottoman in our family room, talked to me about his uncle who has Down syndrome. Last week an older woman sitting on the front porch of her house, watching her cat leap through the tall grass from one side of her lawn to the other, pumped her fist in the air as I ran passed. “You go, girl!” she shouted as I waved back. I’ve never seen that woman before even though I cross in front of her house every time I run. I hope I see her again.

While we were cleaning up the dinner dishes on Saturday night John turned to me and said, “Happy anniversary.” I stared at him and blinked hard. A few beats passed as I ticked off all the important dates that bookend our lives together inside my head.

My bewilderment amused John, but he left me off the hook when he explained what he’d meant. “Remember when you said all you wanted for our anniversary was for me to run the 5K?” he offered. “I gave you more than you asked for, and you got your gift a little early, too.”

A few months ago I told John the best gift he could give me to celebrate our wedding anniversary in October was to prepare for and race in the three-miler at the Spinx Run Fest. He took my request to heart, found a beginner runners’ training program, and got himself up to speed in time for the Sunrise Run 8K last weekend. Along the way John improved his base fitness level, lost a significant amount of weight and discovered that he, too, really enjoys running. John’s success showed when he crossed the finish line in 51:49.

My parents kept Archie, Kit and Jack while I ran the race as well, crossing the finish line in 38:26. I was the 20th female finisher of 618 runners, and was the seventh fastest runner in my age group.

John’s run was one unexpected gift, but I have another one to tell you about, too. I was sitting with Archie one afternoon last week when he asked me to rub his hand. This is something we do, he and I. He asks me to rub his back, or leg, or neck as he cuddles into my lap, against my chest, and I always oblige.

If you know anything about Down syndrome, then you’re aware that there are a handful of physical characteristics common to children and adults with the diagnosis. One of these characteristics is a single, deep crease across the center of the palm of the hand. Only one of Archie’s palms has this crease, and that is the one he offered me on this particular afternoon last week.

I’d forgotten about Archie’s crease so it surprised me anew when I saw it again. “Oh, Archie! Your sweet hand!” I exclaimed as I traced that crease on Archie’s palm with my finger.

Jack was in the room, too, watching us and he wanted to know what I was talking about so I showed him Archie’s hand and told Jack about Archie’s special Down syndrome line. Jack insisted that he wanted one as well, a Down syndrome line, but I told Jack that the line was something unique to Archie that makes him extra special to us, and then I reminded Jack that he has characteristics that make him extra special to us, too. Jack went away then, and Archie, who’d already tired of our time together on the chair, followed his little brother out of the room.

A few days ago on our way home from dropping Archie off at school Jack announced, out of the blue, that Archie isn’t human, he’s Down syndrome, and then added that he wished he had a hand like Archie’s so he could be Down syndrome, too.

I corrected Jack’s syntax, as well as his reasoning, but that exchange Jack and I shared in the car on our way home has left me thinking these past few days, filled as they have been with chores and obligations and bills and realizations, that maybe we are doing something right around here after all.

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Morning with the Moores

John’s mother was a keeper of things. Although I never met her, I’ve learned about her from the houseful of furniture she left behind. When she died John’s father, Bill, sold their James Island house on Jim Isle Drive with the backyard dock on Ellis Creek and made his six children cleanout the home’s attic and bedrooms, kitchen and den, before he made them help him move into an apartment in a retirement community. That was how Bill was, always making everyone around him do things by the sheer force of his own will. I imagine John’s mother, Ann, was softer than her husband and more sentimental, too. Her legacy of leftover stuff tells me as much.

Last week John’s sister, Kate, rearranged the rooms in her house again. She lives in a ranch-style home behind her business on busy Haywood Road with her husband and six children. Kate needed to make more space for growing boys, she explained, so she had an auctioneer’s lot of family heirlooms that needed a new home and she wanted to know if anyone wanted anything. This is what the Moore’s do when they’re ready to part with a piece of that houseful of furniture Bill made them carry away; they offer it to each other first before they give it to someone else.

Nearly each piece of furniture has someone’s name written on a scrap of tablet paper taped to the back or bottom of it. John’s mother made the labels when she knew she was dying, and with them she took great care to divvy out her things to her children so they wouldn’t have to do it themselves. I’m not sure where Bill was while all this was happening, but I know he honored her decisions and left those scraps of paper on all of Ann’s things until their children came to take them away. We’ve done the same here in our home. Everything we have that belonged to Ann still has its label with John’s name written in her hand affixed to its bottom or backside or base.

So this time Kate’s rearranging brought us a small collection of things including an old clock John remembers from the fireplace mantle in the James Island house on Jim Isle Drive. Right now that clock is to my right, in the bookshelves in our office, and it’s tick-tick-ticking, tick-tick-ticking. John winds that clock with its tarnished brass key every morning, and even now after all these years it still keeps good time. Before it was his mother’s clock it came from a grandparent, or maybe one of the great aunts who lived on that farm in Wisconsin, and it smells a little like the musty plough mud lining the marshes of Ellis Creek, the same dark, soft stuff John and his siblings played in during the summers of their childhoods.

I listened to that clock as it marked this morning’s five o’clock hour with its old gears creak-creak-creaking before they softly ding-ding-dinged. I was drinking coffee while sitting on the floor with ice packs resting on my shins, all the while lacing up my running shoes and waiting for John to return from the gym. I was thinking of what I could do today with Archie, Kit and Jack, and I was remembering the fun my children had last night when they, dressed in underwear and white t-shirts splattered by dripping ice cream, stood on the slope behind our neighbors’ house and counted backwards from ten to one then jumped forward, down the slope, landing in the grass at the bottom of the hill on their hands and knees.

Lying in the grass at the bottom of the hill Archie, Kit and Jack would laugh and loll about, sharing their fun with Sophia and William. Sophia’s backyard is caddy-corner to our own, and William’s backyard sidles up to hers making these five friends neighbors, too. I was thinking this morning that watching all those kids have fun together last night reminded me of summer evenings when I was small, the ones when my brother and I played outside with our neighbors until bedtime had come and gone. I remembered how I was then, watching them last night, and it occurred to me how they may someday be. When Sophia’s father took a photo with his camera of the five kids on top of the hill I mused out loud, “Someday one of them will get married and that photo will be included in the collection displayed at the rehearsal dinner.”

By the time John and I collected our kids and brought them inside again the gears inside our new old clock were grinding into place, creak-creak-creak, and then the chimes ding-ding-dinged to mark the half-hour, one full hour passed Archie, Kit and Jack’s bedtime. I tossed a load of laundry into the washing machine downstairs as John took our children upstairs to give them a bath and put them to bed all soft and all warm just like the characters in one of Archie’s favorite storybooks.

The melting ice cream and the lolling in the grass, all that laughing while game-making-upping, those are the sorts of things Archie, Kit and Jack have been enjoying these first few weeks of summer. In the mornings Archie sits in the leather chair in our library and recites aloud a pile of storybooks with characters so familiar they feel like family while Kit paints with watercolors at the kitchen table while Jack stands sentinel at the window, waiting for the black birds to swoop into our vegetable garden, or perch atop our bird feeder. When they do Jack surprises them by banging on the glass and hollering through it, “Go away, black birds!” just like John taught him to do a few weekends ago.

In the afternoons Archie, Kit, Jack and I play something or play with someone or go to our neighborhood pool. They’re learning to love the water, these three children of mine, and I suspect this will be the year they begin to swim. When we get home from the pool I pick up around the house or mop the floor or fold the laundry while I listen to the clock in the office mark our hours in fifteen-minute increments. It seems silly to say as much, but this is the first summer I’ve spent with Archie, Kit and Jack that feels familiar to me, that seems like the ones I knew myself when I was young. Saying as much is the sort of admission that both surprises a parent and puts things into perspective at exactly the same time. My children are growing up.

Each time John and his siblings swap their mother’s furniture some sort of squabble transpires. Someone thinks it’s unfair that one sibling should get Helen’s table, or the drop leaf that belonged to Mary Mills. Someone else says another sibling shouldn’t be given both Gigi’s spindle-back rocker and that grandfather clock he made from the kit that one summer in the garage out back. Phone calls will be made, and e-mails will be written, and sooner or later everyone will agree that the furniture belongs with someone who will take care of it. This time, the one that brought us the old clock, Kate summed up the dialogue when she wrote an e-mail that read, “I think it is neat that the pieces keep traveling around, like Mom is visiting us all.”

Archie cried when I dropped him off at school today. He takes summer classes in the morning and then comes home to play with me, with Kit and Jack, in the afternoons. My boy who loves his teachers and classmates and school-time activities preferred he stay home instead. Kit sleeps late in the mornings and when she wakes she tells me that she’s tired from all the things we did the day before. Jack explodes in professions of adoration for me at least four times a day. He’s the kind of kid who does this when someone captures his attention with a novel activity, the kind of kid who loves you best when you’re engaging him and he mistakes it as getting his own way. Right now our days feel full and fun, but I know they’re fleeting, too.

These summer days that run together, the ones that leave my children drunk on the season’s humidity and heady with its absence of routines, their minutes are collected here in my office in creaks and dings. We carry on and an old clock marks our time together when someone remembers to wind it with its tarnished brass key.

Posted by: anne
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Morning with the Moores

Where was I?

It’s hard to remember, really, because it feels as if there’s no time now for reflective thoughts.  Archie, Kit and Jack are all finished with school and so far this summer vacation we’ve enjoyed picnics, and pool parties, and play dates.  It’s time consuming, all this fun, and our comings and goings have left me with little time to sit here, in front of the computer visiting with you.

On the last day of school Kit and Jack took bouquets of fresh cut flowers to their teachers, Katie and Melissa.  I tucked a gift certificate for a lunch date into those bouquets’ cello wrappers, too, and included a personal note to each teacher, written on pieces of paper folded in half that had been decorated by Kit.   “Last night as I was taking apart your bouquet so I could place all the flowers in water, Kit insisted I allow her to set up her paper and crayons right there, right next to the vase on the counter, so that she could draw what she saw,” I wrote in Katie’s note.  “I’m telling you this because when Kit and Jack started class with you and Melissa last fall she didn’t draw like this, and neither she nor Jack could write their names.”   

And then I continued, “But last night Kit drew your flowers in a vase, and beside it she colored the two plastic bowels I placed on the counter to hold the stem reservoirs until I needed them again this morning when I’d reassemble your bouquet.  She drew in the rectangular kitchen cabinets above the counter and the circular jars on the counter, in the corner, right behind the vase of flowers.  ‘This is for Katie,’ Kit told me when she finished, all proud and pleased with her work.” 

I wrote another paragraph in Katie’s note, too, one about how much I appreciated all she’d done for my children this year.  I did the same for Melissa as well, but tailored my notes’ introduction to the drawing Kit created specifically for her.

My note to Melissa began similarly, but I ended the second paragraph of the note like this: “Kit took great care to draw your flowers in a vase, each and every one of them, and then she printed her name in the upper right-hand corner of her picture.  ‘This one has good flowers and it’s for Melissa,’ Kit explained to me, and so it is.”  

Archie delivered hand-tied bouquets of pink roses and yellow gerbera daises to his teachers on his last day as well, and he also took Nardia, his classroom’s lead teacher who is getting married in a few weeks, a gift from her bridal registry.  Archie told me he wanted to give Nardia a Backyardigan toy, but I suspected she’d appreciate something of her own choosing that she could use for a long, long time and each time she did the piece may remind Nardia of her time in the classroom with Archie.

I didn’t write Nardia or the assistant teachers in Archie’s classroom a note of appreciation.  I’d just done as much a week ago as part of a thank-you note writing initiative celebrating staff appreciation day at Archie’s school.  I wrote those notes to Archie’s teachers and therapists and then Archie made them his own by signing each one with his distinctive letter “A.”  In those notes Archie and I thanked each staff member for her patience, and confidence, and love.

So school is over, our teacher gifts have been delivered, and we are home, the kids and I, and together we’re marking our days in little things like shared walks to the mailbox and big things like the one last Thursday that put my parents on an early flight to Pennsylvania Friday morning.  My eighty-nine year old grandmother had an awful day on Thursday that culminated in her being rushed to the hospital in an ambulance. My grandmother lives with my Aunt Peggy, and when she called for that ambulance my aunt wasn’t sure my grandmother was alive.  

Grandma is wearing out.  She knows this and she’s made peace with her place in this world, so she and her doctor wrote a living will with specific advance care directives not too long ago and what Grandma wrote and how she wrote it kept my aunt from calling for that ambulance until she finally did.  After she called the ambulance Aunt Peggy called my mother, who then called me.  When my mom called she was crying and our conversation that followed was a variation on a theme my friend Rachel and I discuss often, the one about us becoming grown-up’s who occasionally find ourselves in the position of parenting our own parents. 

In the case of my mother’s phone call the roll reversal felt right.  It felt like the normal turn of events, much like I’m sure it feels for my mother and aunt today in Pittsburg where they’re caring for my grandmother who yesterday was moved from the intensive care unit to her own room.  “Great Nana just sat in a wheelchair and rode up and down the hall,” my mother reported to me a few hours ago during a phone call.  “How about that?” 

The notes I wrote to my children’s teachers, they marked the passage of this past year.  That note my grandmother wrote with her doctor’s help, it marked the passage of her life.  My mother taught me to write, and her mother taught her to write.  Now my children are learning to write, too.  All this writing makes me think about what may come next, of what each of us may mark down this week, this month, this year. 

If my children become parents I hope they’ll write notes on behalf of their sons’ and daughters’, too.  My mother may write a note like my grandmother’s one day, and I may also do the same.  But whatever we write, all of us, I hope we won’t do it to benefit ourselves.  Instead I hope we do it for each other, in the interest of what is right, as an impetus for forward movement.  How about that?  

Posted by: anne
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Morning with the Moores

Maybe you’ve already seen it? If you live in the Southeastern part of the United States you may have. It was in your Wednesday newspaper, the local one, and it’s stacked in the circular stands right inside the front doors of every single BI-LO Supermarket. The dairy guy, and the produce guy, and the checkout lady, and the girl who works in the pharmacy all told me they’d already seen a pre-released copy when I dropped by the store on Verdae Boulevard after I left the gym on Monday, before I went about the business of picking my kids up from school.

“I saw my buddy Archie!” Albert hollered at me across the apples and oranges and tomatoes and sweet potatoes. “He’s famous!”

Albert is the produce manager at our grocery store, and when he called out to me he was talking about the BI-LO weekly circular that hit the newsstands this morning. Albert knows Archie as the little boy who once plucked his mother’s Venti-sized-Breve-Latte-with-one-shot-of-vanilla-please out of the cup holder on her cart and threw it on the floor, right in front of the peppers and prepackaged lettuce. Albert was the store employee who got a mop and bucket to clean up the spilled coffee after I took Archie by the hand and marched him to the front of the store to explain what he’d done, to apologize for the mess he’d made. I remember that Albert listened patiently to Archie’s explanation. I remember, too, that he allowed Archie the time he needed to find his words, and that Albert waited for me to interpret Archie’s stumbling sentences only after he tried a few times to do so himself. So that is why I smiled hugely when I replied to Albert, calling out back over the fruits and vegetables, “Or maybe infamous!”

This week, beginning on page seven, the supermarket chain’s circular celebrates the BI-LO Charity Classic, an annual charity golf tournament that has raised over $44 million in its twenty-five year history to benefit charitable organizations located in the South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee communities served by BI-LO grocery stores. I didn’t know Archie’s photo and story would be used for this advertising circular when I took him to that photo shoot in February, but I’m happy to tell you how surprised I was when John called me over to look at his laptop a few Friday evenings ago and showed me a rough draft of the circular, one a friend of his in the charity’s department had attached to an e-mail. The friend wanted our permission to run the ad, and John and I were so pleased and proud that we granted it immediately.

It turns out that Archie’s image is also being used on the tournament’s golf ball sleeves, and that the photo of Archie on the swing, in the park, was placed right up front in the player’s book alongside a quote from the Meyer Center’s executive director.

John was asked to have Archie and Kit, whose photo also appears in the publication, sign those player’s books that would be presented as keepsakes to a few very important people. So one evening not too long ago I sat at our kitchen table watching Kit effortlessly pen her name in each book next to her own photo, and then stood up to reach around Archie’s shoulders, to steady the page while he worked long and hard to mark his photo with a letter “A,” scribble-scrabble style.

When John came home from work the next day he told me a friend in the charity’s department told him one of those very important people got more than a little choked up when they saw Archie’s signature, right there on the page beside his photo. That touches me in a way I find difficult to explain here, but at least it reminds me that I’ve got company. The truth is that when I saw the rough draft of the ad circular on John’s laptop that Friday evening my throat felt full, too, and I had to put my hands against chest, right over my heart, to hold in all my joy.

I also wanted to write something about all of that joy here, before I close this post. You may remember that John and I attended the Charity Classic’s President’s party last year and that I shared with you how talking with Archie’s oncologist that night granted me an insight I hadn’t yet perceived. Turns out that Archie’s involvement with this year’s Charity Classic has offered me another opportunity to write a new definition for another frame of reference affecting my life.

I recently shared the news about the ad circular and Archie’s involvement in it with a friend. She wanted to know how I felt about Archie’s image and story being used this way. “Great!” I told her unabashedly. But she persisted, explaining that she wondered what it was like for a mother whose child is being used in an ad pertaining to disability and the necessity for aid. I stumbled over my own words trying to answer her question that day in the park, but what I should have said was this: It doesn’t bother me at all.

Archie is what he is, and his needs are what they are. I don’t want to live a life filled with denial. It’s true: Archie is disabled, but not unable. I believe that by acknowledging Archie’s strengths and weaknesses I’m ultimately empowering him. I believe that celebrating who Archie is grants him the confidence he needs to be his best self. I don’t define Archie by his diagnosis; rather I strive to accept it as an undeniable part of his identity.

I understand that each family of every child with a disability has their own outlook and that those outlooks differ greatly. I respect our different opinions and am happy for them. After all, we are all trying to do our best by our babies. In the end, through our own, individual efforts we’re only helping each other move forward one day at a time. And I guess that’s why in our home we’re so enthusiastic about this circular.

My oldest son, my first child, has Down syndrome and attends a special education program at a preschool for children with disabilities. For now, he rides the short bus. I’m not ashamed of that, and it doesn’t bother me like I feared it once would. I never expected to be glad for it either, and I never anticipated feeling as grateful as I do, every single day, for a school that celebrates Archie’s abilities but also works to help him overcome his disabilities, and for all the organizations and individuals who support his school.

He is my biggest boy and I’m so grateful for who he is, for who he’ll become, for each extra chromosome in his body.

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Categories:
Archie
Morning with the Moores

Posted by: anne
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Categories:
Archie
Jack
Kit
Morning with the Moores

Posted by: anne
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Categories:
Jack
Kit
Morning with the Moores

This news is week-old by now, but I wanted to chronicle it anyway. If you’re not interested in reading about my running exploits then you probably should skip this post and scroll down to the next one, something I wrote earlier today about Archie’s advances catching up with his appearance. But if you do like it when I write about running, or if you’re as amazed as I am how tied together we all are no matter where we are or what we’re doing then you should consider hanging in there for a few more paragraphs.

Last Friday night I ran the inaugural Greenville Hospital System’s Swamp Rabbit Trail 5K in Travelers Rest. This event was the first official race on the newly-paved trail, but I ran a few miles on the trail’s stretch through downtown Greenville when I competed in the Spinx Run Fest’s half-marathon last October.

The first thing you should know is that I haven’t run in the evening since I finished the Greenville 5K Candlelight Run last June. I train in the mornings, usually beginning my runs around 6 o’clock, and I prefer to compete in the mornings, too. That said I realized last Friday evening early on in the race that I hadn’t eaten or hydrated properly to ensure I was prepared for optimum performance. And then there’s the fact that caring for three little kids all day long drains a mother’s energy even if that mother is doing her best to “take it easy” before her evening race.

The other thing you should know is that nearly 2,000 people showed up for the race. That was a large number of people to funnel down a footpath. The race’s start was congested, and it took much longer than usual for the crowd to thin out as we made our way down the trail. Weaving was inevitable, and then there was this one turn when the girl two footfalls in front of me completely stopped in her tracks when she realized she’d cut the cone and had to double back to avoid being disqualified. I ran right into her back.

It didn’t help either that more than one runner pushing a double stroller positioned him or herself close to the starting line, in the middle of the six-minute milers. Sure, the corrals were informal, marked only by cardboard signs with handwritten titles like, “6-minute milers,” “7-minute milers,” and “8-minute milers,” but I’d hoped the race organizers would have at least asked the runners with strollers to move back, please.

So the first mile was congested, the second mile included a sharp, steep climb up a hill in Grandview Cemetery, and the third mile sent us runners back the way we came, down the same trail we’d already traveled and into the runners and walkers who were still working their way toward the cemetery. That made for a special kind of congestion, for sure.

My first mile split was 7:51. That wasn’t ideal, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. I did the best I could under the conditions. There was no two-mile marker so I didn’t get a split, and I don’t have a three-mile split either. I have ordered another Garmin, however, since my husband recently commandeered the one I bought last summer so I shouldn’t have these sort of record-keeping issues in the future. By mile three the heat and humidity was really bothering me, and I found myself repeating the lyrics from one of the Yo Gabba Gabba! song Archie likes so much, “Don’t stop, don’t give up. Keep trying, keep trying. Never stop, never give up.”

I finished the race in 24:10, which is the slowest I’ve run a 5K in a long time. There were no timing chips, though, and it was a gun-start race so who knows what my personal race time really was anyway. I did end up placing third in my age group, which is encouraging, and I finished 154th overall out of 1,606 runners who completed the course.

I also want to confess that this 5K was the first race I’ve ever run without earphones and music. I did so purposefully because I felt confident in my ability to cover the distance without needing the music’s distraction, and I’m glad I made the decision I did. The race took on a new dimension for me, and it was a true treat to hear the cadence simultaneous footfalls can keep when similarly paced runners find each other and hang together out there on the trail.

So there’s that, but then there’s this, too. I’d planned to forego the gym the morning before the race so when my alarm sounded I took a shower, dried my hair and dressed for the day. I chose something nice to wear, too, because I was expected at Kit and Jack’s school around lunchtime for a Mother’s Day celebration.

Most mornings I’m walking in the front door from a run before my children see me for the first time each day. I’m sweaty and smelly, and I’m wearing running clothes. I’ll exchange those clothes for another set of workout clothes before we leave for school, the kids and I. If all three kids have school I’ll go to the gym and workout with weights before I go home and shower. If only Archie has school I’ll wear my workout clothing until I have an opportunity to shower. I never know when it’ll come, that opportunity, since my day’s accomplishments are often dictated by my children’s play dates and appointments.

The Friday morning before the race I was emptying the dishwasher when Jack spoke up and wanted to know, “Where’s my other mommy?”

“What do you mean, your other mommy?” I asked in response even though I could anticipate Jack’s explanation.

Jack got embarrassed then and stumbled over his answer, stringing together words and mumbles that only halfway made sense but still I understood what he was trying to say.

“Do you want to know where your stinky mommy who wears old workout clothes and doesn’t comb her hair is? Do you wonder where this mommy who’s clean, and who’s wearing make-up, and who smells good came from?” I laughed as I spoke and Jack did, too, because what I said, that’s exactly what he’d meant.

I’ve been thinking of that conversation I shared with Jack in terms of what I’d write about here pertaining to last Friday’s race. We parents are all people will multiple interests. Some define us for our children, and some pass them by unnoticed. We find friends to compliment each of our life’s endeavors. It isn’t until our children are older that they can see how their parents parse out their personalities in so many ways. It takes a while for our children to learn that we’re the same person in all aspects of our lives, but yet we’re different, too. But some days, like last Friday, we get to show our children how we overlap.

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General

Archie woke up with dried gunk clogging his left ear canal this morning. He has tubes so leaky ears are commonplace for him. They mean that Archie’s so congested his ears are draining, too, or that he’s brewing an ear infection. Only time will tell what’s going on, but while we’re waiting for whatever comes next I know to clean away the gunk, to put three eardrops prescribed by Archie’s ENT doctor into his drippy ear three times a day. I’ve learned the drill.

When Archie was small I’d have to catch him before I could clean his ear with a warm washcloth, before I could put those prescribed drops into his ear. I tried to schedule the doses for times during the day when I knew I’d have another adult around to help me. One of us would have to hold Archie down while the other one made quick business of his treatment routine.

If I was alone I’d try to lay on top of Archie, or pin him between my legs while I finished what had to be done, but that never really worked because Archie, in spite of his muscles’ poor tone, would break free of my stronghold every, single time. It’s true: No matter what approach we used to administer Archie’s medicine, I’m sure we wasted more eardrops than we used. The whole process frustrated me, and it terrified Archie. During the days or weeks his ears were gunky, I’d often find myself standing in our kitchen and picking at my cuticles, wondering at the value of it all.

But this morning Archie came to me without complaint when I asked him to, when I told him it was time to clean his ear and do his drops. “My ear is gunky,” he told me, searching my eyes for confirmation.

When Archie looks at me that way, the one in which he locks his eyes onto my own with an intensity that seems nearly palpable, I always feel as if Archie is looking way down deep into the truest part of me for a sort of assurance he knows he’ll only find there. If I say it’s so he’ll believe it, no matter what. And I think I should admit right now that sometimes Archie’s unwavering trust feels like a heady sort of power, but that sometimes it feels like a heavy weight to bear.

“Yes, your ear is gunky,” I answered this morning when Archie inquired, and then I waited for what would come next. To my surprise Archie didn’t protest at all; instead he laid his head in my lap, turned to the right so that I could look down into his gunky ear. As I cleaned Archie’s ear he whined a little, but that was all. He whined a little more loudly when I put the drops in his ear, but he held his head still and didn’t fight against the weight of my hand against his shoulders, or the way I tugged his earlobe to encourage the drops that had pooled in the top of his canal to drain in towards his middle ear.

Yesterday afternoon I marveled at how big Archie looked as he walked toward me in my friend’s driveway. She and I were standing beside each other, watching our children play. He’s grown tall, my Archie, and I find that I’m regularly struck by what a boy he’s becoming when he, dressed in shorts that accentuate the length of his legs, ambles around outside with his siblings, his friends. When that happens I can see that Archie’s baby-self looks as if it’s long gone now. I can see that he’s growing up.

I write that, but then there’s this, too. Archie may always look like a big boy, but he doesn’t consistently act it. The comparison creates a cognitive dissonance, I know, and sometimes it’s challenging to determine how to strike a balance between Archie’s appearance and his actions. As his mother, I struggle to find a way to help Archie fit together all of his personal parallels.

But then time rolls on and suddenly, without pronouncement, there are mornings like today’s when Archie’s actions defy my expectations and I find myself encouraged and hopeful. My biggest boy is showing me that we’re moving forward. Here’s the proof, I acknowledge silently way down deep inside the truest part of myself. He’s closing the gap.

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Archie
Morning with the Moores

On mornings like this one the sun shines so brightly against the back of our house, right into the windows, and drowns our rooms in light that is so brilliant just seeing it is uplifting.

We just took Archie to school, Kit, Jack and I. While we were there we collected gift baskets from the PTA president, ones we’ll distribute tomorrow morning to the school’s teachers, therapists and staff in celebration of Teacher Appreciation Week a week late. It’s the thought that counts, I say, even when you think it a little late.

On our way home from school we stopped by the grocery store so I could buy myself more yogurt and so Jack could collect a hug from his friend David, one of the baggers. I mean it when I tell you that man is always, always, always pleased to see my children. When we’re missing a child, any of the three, David will always ask about their whereabouts if he doesn’t already know where the absent one is. “Is Archie at school today?” he asked this morning even though he already knew the answer. David has memorized our schedule, I’ve concluded, and there’s something comforting to my children and I in the intimacy that familiarity brings.

The twins rode their tricycles ’round and ’round the driveway when we got home from the grocery store. I was carrying the gift baskets from the back of my station wagon to our dining room table where right now all thirteen are lined up side by side, wrapped in clear cellophane. I’ve made little piles on my sideboard, too, of thank-you notes penned by parents. Each pile represents a department or classroom and it’s kind of sad, I think, that every therapist or teacher isn’t represented by at least one note. We’d asked all the parents to send in thank-you notes and they should have even if they didn’t.

As I type this I’m listening to Kit and Jack chatter, chatter, chatter. They’re sitting at the kitchen table, using markers and crayons to fill coloring books they remembered Santa brought them for Christmas. One of my favorite things to do these days is initiate an activity with Archie, Kit and Jack, to get all three children interested in something and started on a project, then disappear to eavesdrop on their conversation from a room a wall away.

When they’re coloring they talk about sharing crayons; when they’re playing with dolls Kit calls Jack the brother daddy and together she and he occasionally leave one particular baby in Archie’s care. He’s the babysitter, they say, and it’s gratifying to observe how thoroughly he cares for his charge.

Last weekend I found all three children sitting atop Archie’s bed. Kit and Jack were listening intently as Archie recited One Duck Stuck, word for word, page by page. I reveled in the twins’ attentiveness, and marveled at Archie’s careful annunciation of each pages’ animal sound.

Standing there in the doorway I felt like a single person split in two. Part of me, the analytical self who has sat through conferences with teachers and therapists and reviewed the research and dealt with the doctors and their diagnosis’s, wondered how it is Archie does that, why it is he can do that. The other part of me, the illogical self that is mostly a proud mother, felt sorry for my first self, the one that was searching for some sort of clinical explanation. The answer is simple, this second self wants to believe. It’s just because he’s smart.

Right now in the other room Kit has abandoned her crayons and is leaning against the couch, her two feet still on the ground, watching television. Jack, who is walking in circles, has a plastic yellow kazoo in one hand and a rubber chicken in the other hand. He’s mashing the chicken’s inflated belly with the kazoo and every time he does the chicken emits this asthmatic expiratory wheeze. It’s funny, really, to hear that bird’s comical squawk juxtaposed against Jack’s expressionless face.

Later today, after school, I may take Archie, Kit and Jack to the park. While we’re there we may play monster. When we do we four stumble around lock-kneed, rocking from one foot to the other, our arms stretched out in front of us affecting our best Frankenstein impersonations. Archie delights in this game and I can’t help but think that’s because he’s discovered this particular pretend play is one in which his success is predetermined. Archie has discovered that he’s chromosomally predisposed to move speedily on shaky legs, and he’s learned that this game is one that celebrates that tendency.

We’ll take it, of course, the twins and I, and all three of us will laugh and squeal at Archie’s impeccable impersonation until his feigned growls become rolling guffaws, the kind you only get to laugh when you really get it after all.

Posted by: anne
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Archie
Jack
Kit
Morning with the Moores

We nearly had an incident at the bookstore Saturday afternoon.

John and I had struck a deal with the kids: Good behavior in exchange for a new book of their choice. Archie, Kit and Jack had made good on their promise so it was John and my turn to uphold our own.

But when we arrived at the bookstore Archie was overwhelmed by the rows and rows of brightly-colored books, or the shoppers who got a little too close when they passed us by, or the low hum of voices bouncing off the stacks and shelves. He was overwhelmed and it was beginning to show so I decided not to stop Archie when he dove to the ground in front of the Step Into Reading book display and began pulling all the books with characters he recognized on their covers off the shelf, then stacking them in a pile between his legs.

I could see that Archie intended to hoard the books, to find comfort in their familiarity as he shuffled through the pile one book at a time, reciting aloud the titles he’d already memorized and asking me to help him learn the titles he didn’t yet know. Experience has taught me that this behavior of Archie’s, the repetitious stacking and shuffling of books, the way he insists that either he or I say it each time he picks up a new book with a new title, will at best allow him to alleviate his anxiety. At worst, I’ve learned, this self-stimulating behavior is just a precursor to an impending meltdown. So there at the bookstore I tolerated it because I was hoping the moment would pass, that Archie would find his equilibrium again and I wouldn’t end up dragging my oldest son out of the store as he carried on and on, turning heads as he and I made our way from one end of the building to the other.

While I was watching Archie’s constitution unravel before my eyes, a lady was sitting on the stage at one end of the children’s books section reading a copy of Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. There were parents and children sitting on the benches arranged in front of her, all of them pressed up against each other, and I knew they could hear Archie as he recited the books’ titles loudly and hemmed and hawed, but I hoped that they wouldn’t mind, that they’d understand I was doing what I could to help Archie over the hump.

I was thinking that when Archie saw them, too, and that’s when I knew it was all over. Just the other day my father took Archie for a haircut and when they got to the barbershop and walked through the door Dad and Archie found themselves in the middle of a crowd of waiting customers. My father said that Archie looked at the people on one side of the room, and then he looked at the people on the other side of the room. After he finished all that looking Archie took a few steps forward before he declared loudly and with authority, “I’m nnnnnneeeeeext!” He’s just that way, this oldest boy of mine. He thrives on spotlights and audiences and I can’t say I blame him for it because it isn’t as if that apple fell too far from this tree.

At the bookstore, in the children’s section, Archie collected his books and lurched, arms full, toward the stage. When he got there he sat down, front and center, then began shuffling through his stack. He looked at me and I held my finger to my lips to make a shushing face. Archie smiled and then, in deliberate defiance of my request, lifted a book over his head as he insisted loudly and with authority, “Momma, say it!” That’s when I excused my way through the crowd, grabbed Archie’s arm and then dragged him, kicking and hollering, from the stage.

I put Archie’s stack of books back on the shelf, and then I hollered to John that our time was up. He was with Kit and Jack and the three of them were just feet away from us in the opposite direction of the stage, but somehow that husband of mine was oblivious to Archie’s outburst. John what and how’d as he turned his head this way and then that way, blinking hard in both directions, before he shrugged his shoulders and acquiesced to my assessment.

At the front of the store, in the checkout line, Archie was still yeah-yeah-yeahing with one hand shoved all the way inside his mouth. He wasn’t kicking and hollering anymore, but his legs had gone wet-noodle and I was holding him up off the floor by his other hand, the one not stuffed between his teeth. That’s when I remembered that there was a magazine I wanted to buy so I lifted Archie onto John’s feet and deposited him there, all limp and floppy. “I’ll be right back,” I promised.

I could still hear Archie’s whining when I was standing in front of the magazine rack, scanning the titles for the one I wanted. He was loud, for sure, but his vocalizations were controlled, nearly rhythmic. What I mean is that by now the noise Archie was making really wasn’t that big of a deal and if it bothered the other people waiting in the check-out line they weren’t making their discomfort known. But the woman standing next to me in the periodicals section wearing rolled-up Capri jeans and talking to her daughter, she was.

“Do you hear that?” she asked her daughter who couldn’t have been any older than ten. “It’s soooooooo annoying! What an awful noise that child is making!”

When a child is acting out in a public place and we mothers look away, ignore the tantrum and forego passing judgment because we knew we’ve been there, too, that our own children have acted out like that before as well, that’s what my friend Rachel calls the mommy pass. I guess the woman wearing rolled-up Capri jeans knew as much about the mommy pass as she did fashion because it was obvious: She was judging the child; she was judging his parents.

I weighed my options as I listened to her complain. I don’t think the woman’s vantage point enabled her to see that Archie has Down syndrome. I’m not sure if knowing as much would have changed her mind about speaking out; I don’t know. I do know that she, up here at the front of the store, had no knowledge of the back story behind Archie’s whining, and I wondered if I could set her straight about it all without sounding as if I were making excuses. I was angry. I was hurt. My mind whirred and I thought of several things to say, but in the end I said nothing. I just walked away.

But I was upset enough when I got back to the counter at the end of the checkout line to loudly announce, “That woman over there near the magazine rack is saying rude things about Archie.” I wanted more people than just John to hear what I had to say.

John wanted to know if I’d said anything to her, to the woman filled with rude comments. I told him I hadn’t because I was too flustered and afraid of what may come out of my mouth. The cashier listened to all of this and then offered to say something to the woman, and I hope he did, too, after we left.

It has been a few days since we’ve been in the bookstore, but what happened there is still bothering me. I’m not entirely sure why, but this I do know: Once upon a time I was such critical person that my comments often earned a chastisement from my father to keep my opinions to myself unless they were kind. He’d warn me as much, and then he’d preach tolerance over and over again. But back then I rarely listened to him.

In the end it took an extra chromosome for me to understand the value of my father’s advice. Children change their parents, I know, but I’d be lying to you if I didn’t admit that Archie’s effect on my life is more profound, more pronounced, than any other influence I’ve ever known. I may have arrived at this place in my own good time, but for sure Archie hastened my pace.

And I guess that’s what bothers me the most about the woman standing next to me in the periodicals section wearing rolled-up Capri jeans, talking to her daughter. I hate knowing that I used to say things like she did, that once I thoughtlessly hurt people with my words as she hurt me the other day in the bookstore. I can’t change the past, I know, but I hope to change the future.

See, there are these three little kids I know and I’m not biased, or anything, but they’re the most receptive learners…

Posted by: anne
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Categories:
Archie
Jack
Kit
Morning with the Moores

“You didn’t tell me you were Anne Moore’s husband.”

That’s what Coach Dan said to my husband Tuesday night during John’s No Boundaries beginning runners’ clinic. When John shared his and Coach Dan’s exchange with me over his cell phone after the clinic was over, during John’s drive home from Cleveland Park, I was stunned. “How does he know me?” I wanted to know.

John replied that he’d asked Coach Dan that same question, and that Coach Dan had told him that he knew how I finished in my most recent race. “Really?” I asked my husband incredulously because, to be honest, I didn’t know anyone in our running community knew my name, or even really noticed me at all.

“Really,” John answered matter-of-factly.

I suspect Coach Dan may have made the connection between John and myself because I had stopped by the running store where the coach works weekends to pick up my age-group award earlier that day, and in doing so I did have to tell the store’s co-owner my name. That co-owner may have recognized my name as the girl who kinda-sorta accosted the other co-owner Saturday morning before the run when he was walking out of a door I was walking into and I stopped him, stumbling all over myself as I declared, “Hey, you ran Boston!” and then blurted out like some sort of groupie girl, “How’d it go?”

He wanted to know my name, that running store co-owner who ran this year’s Boston Marathon, which I told him before I explained that my husband ran with him up McDaniel Avenue during Coach Dan’s clinic that Thursday before the race. And then, later, I saw that this co-owner drew that connection again, the one between John and me, when I high-fived him after crossing the finishing line, before tearing off the bottom part of my bib to hand to the race officials at the end of the finisher’s shoot.

And maybe that co-owner saw me approach the finish line with D. J., who I heard took a client to the running store later that day to pick out a pair of shoes. Everybody at the running store knows D. J., and maybe Coach Dan was working that afternoon and someone said something to someone else and the connection was drawn again, from John to me, and then between the two of us and back again to D. J.

I don’t know how Coach Dan figured out who I am, or who I was in relation to John, but he did and he mentioned it and when he did he said my name as if I were someone and I’d be omitting an important part of this story if I didn’t admit that Coach Dan’s recognition made me feel at least a little important. Everyone at the Meyer Center, or the doctor’s offices, or the hospital may know me as Archie’s mom, and everyone at St. Mary Magdalene’s, or the park, or the reading group at the bookstore on Tuesday and Thursday mornings may know me as Kit and Jack’s mom, and there’s a whole other group of people who know me as John’s wife, and another group still who recognizes me as my parents’ daughter, but there aren’t many people left who acknowledge me for my own accomplishments anymore. I’m not sure where it’s gone or when exactly I lost sight of it, but sometimes my own identity feels so far off that I have to strain to see it again.

But now I’m going on and on.

So I’ll tell you that I’m thinking about all of this because today at the gym as I was on the parallel bars counting out twenty-one dips and the rest of my class was out the door, running a lap, my trainer Michael laughed and then said to me, “You’ll be a legend by the time I’m finished with you.” He was talking about how my knee bleed when I nicked it with my fingernail Friday while I was doing dead lifts, and how I didn’t notice the blood until he’d said something, and how he’s now exaggerating the whole story by telling everyone, including the rest of my class, that I lost a pint of blood. He was talking about that, but what he said makes me think of something else.

On Thursday I had an appointment at the hospital with a radiologist. The appointment had been scheduled for early in the morning, during my doctor’s rounds, and since it involved the x-ray department I knew I couldn’t bring Kit and Jack along with me. John would take Archie to school, we decided, and I would drop the twins off at my parent’s house where my mother agreed to watch them.

Because my parents live near an elementary school, I wanted to be sure I left our house early enough to avoid the traffic associated with the start of school. I’d have to pass the school on my way to my parent’s house, and then again on the way to the hospital, so I’d do well to err on the side of early, I estimated. This meant that Kit, Jack and I left our home an hour and a half before we usually do. The sun had risen by the time we walked outside, but the day was still brand new. When we left the house to get into my car, parked in our driveway, Jack asked, “What’s that smell?”

“It’s six eh-em,” I answered, just like that. It wasn’t until later, during the drive to my parents’ house, that I realized Kit and Jack had never been outside in this world so early in the morning. Their world during the six o’clock hour involves Mister Roger’s, breakfast bars and peanut butter, getting dressed and waiting for me to walk through the front door, fresh from a run. Until that day they didn’t know about all of this, the cars, the kids waiting at the bus stop, the runners along the side of the road, the scent of the climbing roses over our garage wafting like a perfume’s top note before it evaporates into the warm-weather musty smell of our lawn, the one that rises up from the roots way down deep underneath the thick, top thatch of our Bermuda grass.

Those runners we saw alongside the road, they made me think of this. Even from the front seat of my car I could tell that they were beginner runners, like John and his classmates in Coach Dan’s clinic, and seeing them reminded me that it’d been about a year ago that I started running with commitment. I didn’t run in high school, and I didn’t run in college, so everything I know now I’ve learned since then. I’ve learned so much, and those runners like John along the side of the road need to learn so much like I did, but still I have so much more to learn.

I thought about how much I still need to know, and I remembered how Kit and Jack sauntered to our car that morning, parked in the driveway. They don’t know a thing about being on time or being late, about sitting in traffic or avoiding the hassle altogether. I rush through my days, from task to task, minute to minute, and I forget that the little boy holding my hand and leaning into my legs so much so he slows my progress, thinks we have all the time in the world.

Someday that little boy may let his hair grow long or dye it black, and someday he and his brother and sister will probably wear clothing riddled with intentional holes. They’ll slam doors, all three of them, and each of them will probably tell me that they hate me during some argument we’ll share with such an intensity in their voices that I’ll be tempted to believe them. They’ll do all these things and I’ll wish them young again before they learned so much, before I learned so much, when there was still so much in front of all of us to learn.

That will come to pass, I know, but now Jack asks me to make little houses for him on our couch with throw pillows and baby blankets Kit takes from her dresser drawer while he watches his television shows, and Kit asks me to help her dress in her princess costumes in the afternoon after school and when I do she declares herself beautiful, and Archie runs down the upstairs hall in the morning from his room toward mine too early, before anyone’s bedside alarm has sounded, his arms thrown wide from side to side and he is nearly singing, Good morning, Momma! What are we going to do today?

And that is what I was thinking about when Michael mentioned my legendary status this morning. He was joking, but in a way he was right. I wonder where my identity’s gone, but really it’s right here in front of me. I am all of these things wrapped up together, a series of selves overlapping each other. A part of me can’t exist without the other, and all these parts tossed together make me who I am.

When my children are grown they’ll remember how we are together now, and it’ll shape who they’ll become then. They’ll know what people have said about me, and they’ll know what they’ve said, too. Somewhere in these years ahead of us a switch will flip and they’ll stop leaning on my legs and instead they’ll begin to push me in the right direction. I wonder when that will happen, when the little houses, and princess costumes, and carefree mornings will dissipate like the scent of those roses into the trodden ground, and I wonder what they’ll think of me then, what my legend will be after all?

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Morning with the Moores

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Kit

On Friday we were outside in the backyard, playing. Our neighbor Rachel and I were sitting at the table on the patio, talking about nothing in particular as we watched Kit and Jack work alongside Rachel’s daughter, Sophia, to fill the plastic bowls and cups we mothers had taken from our kitchen cupboards with water and dirt. Archie, who doesn’t particularly like hot sun and high temperatures, had endured the ten-minute trial period I’d required of him before he was permitted to chose if he wanted to stay outside, or excuse himself and go inside to look at his books, flip through his flashcards, watch television. Sooner or later I went inside, too, to check on Archie, to get something for someone, or to help someone else use the toilet. Somehow I ended up in the kitchen and Jack, through the screen covering the open window over the sink, asked me for a snack.

I took a dinner plate from the cupboard and filled it with fruit. I cut an apple into wedges, peeled an orange, grabbed a handful of blueberries, and pulled the last of the red, seedless grapes, all of them still stuck to a picked-over vine, out of the produce drawer in our refrigerator. When I carried that plate outside and placed it on the table top between Rachel and Jack my three-year-old son breathed, “Ahh, f*uck… I wanted Goldfish.”

I may have asked Rachel if Jack said what I thought I heard him say, or I may have asked Jack what he’d said. I can’t remember. But I do remember feeling embarrassed, and trying to hide my shocked expression from Jack, then resisting the urge to laugh because, really, Jack had uttered the phrase so appropriately and with such perfect diction that there was no denying he’s heard it used before, and often.

Since becoming a mother I have made a concerted effort to clean up my language. I really have. You should have heard the crap that regularly spouted out of my mouth in the dormitories, the cafeteria, the halls of the classroom buildings when I was an undergraduate, and then the colorful phrases I could string together when I was working and doing my best to describe the ridiculousness that occurred in my department to coworkers, or the nonsensicalities that happened everyday in our office to John when I came home from work at night. But I admit that even though my language has been sanitized, it still isn’t squeaky clean. There may be a thesaurus filled with more appropriate word choices, but sometimes the one that feels most satisfying is still a solid “f” bomb.

At least Jack said it in front of Rachel, who didn’t care. At least he didn’t say it in school, like my brother did when he was small and called another kid on the bus a little f*cker for one reason or another. We’d just come home from visiting our grandmother, my brother and I, and that’s where Patrick had learned to deftly employ that phrase. “He has this Aunt Rosie…” my mother tried to explain to the principal who had called her later to discuss the incident our bus driver had reported to him after she’d delivered us to school the next day.

Aunt Rosie wasn’t really my aunt. She was my grandmother’s sister, my father’s aunt, but we cousins called Rosie what our parents did as if she were our aunt, too. Our extended family was large in the way Catholic families were just a generation ago, so it helped to ignore the specifics and instead group people into categories. Not matter who she was in relation to me, Aunt Rosie could pepper a sentence with cuss words like no one’s business. And since she talked a lot, she had occasion to swear often.

I remember that if you had something to say and wanted to interrupt Aunt Rosie’s talking, talking, talking so you could say it, she’d turn a pointed finger on you, pause to take a drag from her cigarette, and then speak from a place way down deep inside her chest as she exhaled, “Okay-you-little-f*cker-you-have-one-minute-starting-right-now.” Because she was intimidating to begin with, and because you knew that Aunt Rosie just called you a bad word, I remember that it was often difficult to instantaneously recall what you’d wanted to say in the first place and that your allotted time would usually expire before you could manage to translate your thoughts into words.

Writing all this makes Aunt Rosie sound like a callous person, but she wasn’t. She was demonstrative and her warmth was infectious. I mean it when I say that Aunt Rosie was as quick to kiss a kid as she was to scold us scamps into silence. I miss her sitting at that cherry-wood dining room table too big for the room, covered in lace tablecloths too formal for my grandmother’s house. I miss them all. They would have loved my three children, even when they swear. Especially when they swear.

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Morning with the Moores

Can you believe it? I survived the week. I’d actually qualify my effort as more of a success than mere survival, really, because the kids and I? We played outside nearly every afternoon, at the park, in a neighbor’s yard, in a plastic pool a few feet away from our own patio. To be honest, I kind of felt like a good mom, a fun mom, not just one who’s going through the motions. Of course I’m still irritated and frustrated and aggravated at times throughout the day, but at least I’m beginning to get my head back in the right place again.

It seems as if being off my game at home has thrown me for a loop out on the road, too. Finding my stride while running has been mostly difficult, and sometimes even impossible. I mean it when I say that workouts have felt torturous. So now that a good run has suddenly become an elusive thing, I wasn’t sure what to expect this morning when I showed up for the Greer Earth Day Run 5K.

I was hoping for a PR, but I missed one by two-tenths of a second, finishing in 23:47. I will say, though, that my watch had me in at 23:33, and the race organizers did elect to go green and run a race without timing chips, so who knows. What I do know is this: I was the fifth female finisher in today’s 5K, and I won my age group by three minutes.

The appropriate, self-effacing thing to write here is that obviously the fast girls didn’t show up to run this morning. But I’ll also write that when the race announcer awarded the women’s first place finisher her award he commented that she was smokin’ out there on this hot, South Carolina morning. She only beat me by two minutes.

I’ll tell you, though, all that is well and good, but the best part of the morning had to be when D. J., my trainer who recently resigned his position at the gym to pursue more profitable endeavors, surprised me on the course somewhere along mile three and ran me into the finish. I was grateful for that, and flattered, too. He’s been telling me all along that I’d be a better runner if I had a rabbit to chase, and I know that’s true, especially if that rabbit was as encouraging as D. J. is.

After I crossed that finish line I called John to check on the kids. When I called, John was getting ready to take Archie and Kit to the doctor’s office. Turns out Archie was feverish and complaining that his neck hurt (he meant his throat), and Kit kept insisting that her ear hurt. She was up all night screaming, that Kit, so her complaint wasn’t that much of a shocker.

Two co-payments later and its true: Both Archie and Kit have Strep throat. Awesome.

Which means we missed out on a neighbor’s birthday party later this afternoon. Boo.

But those are the breaks, right? The highs and lows, the good and the bad, all of it mixed together to make up the constitution of our days.

What will come next?

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Morning with the Moores

So here’s the deal: I’ve got to get my shit together.

Its odd, really, that I’m admitting that to myself because I usually won’t until my shit has been gotten together, past-tense. It’s weirder still that I’m saying so publicly. Just the same the truth is that everything is humming along around here at its normal quick-clip pace, but I’m just not feeling it. Does that make sense? If it doesn’t then maybe this real-life explanation will.

As I type there’s a load of laundry in the dryer and another load in the washing machine. Both machines’ cycles finished a few minutes ago, their built-in alarms beeping aloud to signal as much. I know I need to fold the laundry in the dryer and I know I need to transfer the second load from the washing machine to the dryer, but I just don’t want to. At all. In fact, the idea that this task remains unfinished at this time irritates me. A lot. But that’s not motivation enough for me to actually finish the chore; in fact, my irritation, any irritation, only seems to mutate into frustration these days until that’s all I’ve got.

For example, Kit is sitting at the kitchen table, painting. She’s a pretty good artist, that Kit, and I’m sure what she’s putting down on paper is all kinds of nice, but all I can see when I look at my daughter sitting there, diligently dipping her brush in the little plastic tumbler filled with murky, gray water then dabbing that brush in the mucked-up tray of watercolors I set in front of her a few minutes ago, is the mess she’s going to leave for me to clean up in about twenty minutes. I know, I should make her clean up her own mess, and for the most part I do, but still. She’s three-years old and her idea of clean does not parallel my own.

Also, in the hour he’s been home from school Jack has peed all over himself and the powder room floor, spilled chocolate milk down the front of his shirt, and antagonized the dog into a frenzied butt-tucking frolic around the first floor of our house. Furthermore, that youngest boy of mine just came in here, placed one hand on the desk for balance and then used the other to pull off his underwear which he left on the floor beside me when he ran out of this room in pursuit of his sister who is headed upstairs, she tells me, to pull two blankets out of the dresser in her room. She and Jack are going to play picnic with her dolls, Kit says, and that’s wonderful and I’m tickled by their creative, imaginative play, but to be honest all I can think as I watch Kit and Jack spread those two blankets out across the floor is, Damn. More laundry.

And then there’s Archie who wants yogi milk, in a cup with a straw. The first time he approached me with this specific request of his I obliged. When I opened the refrigerator door to retrieve the milk with which to mix the packet of Carnation Instant Breakfast, vanilla please, I found a cup already filled with Archie’s favorite drink leftover from breakfast so I took that one out of the refrigerator and gave it to Archie instead of making a new drink. He protested initially, but then agreed to taste it after I convinced him to do so. After he did Archie clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth a few times before be looked at me and declared, “That’s peach. No peach.” Although I’m happy that Archie’s sense of taste is keen enough to ensure he’ll be a shoe-in as a sommelier one day, that observation of his was enough to set me off on one of my internal tirades aimed at John, who insists on mixing these yogurt drinks he got free last week at the grocery store with coupons he clipped from the paper into Archie’s yogi milk even though it’s obvious Archie prefers his drink shaken, not stirred, and just vanilla, please. Suffice it to say I told Archie he was out of luck and so he left that cup with the straw at the table, still full, and he’s already come in here to ask me for another drink about three times since I left the kitchen and each time he does my stress level ratchets itself up another notch and I’m here to tell you that, really, my head may explode by the end of the day. But still I keep telling Archie no, he cannot have a different yogi milk, but with all the whiney please-please-pleasing he’s doing I just may give in if he comes in here again. I’m gonna do a stellar job with the discipline this week, I can tell already.

And that’s the thing, really. If all this irritation, and frustration, and aggravation where limited to just this week I think I could be o. k. with that. But it’s not because I felt like this last week, too, and things felt so bad one night that during bath time I called a staff meeting.

John wasn’t home yet, and I had the three kids lined up in the tub in birth order from left to right when someone did something that made me want to scream. Instead of screaming, though, I sighed REALLY LOUD and said, “O. K., fine. That’s it. We’re having a brainstorming session.”

None of my kids understood what I meant by that of course so I explained, “When Daddy’s at work and things stop going well sometimes he has to go to brainstorm meetings to try to figure out how to make everything good again. So we’re gonna have one right now, a brainstorming session.”

That made Archie, Kit and Jack smile so I continued, encouraged by their enthusiasm. “I’m gonna give you all a chance to tell me how to make things better around here. All ideas are good; none are bad. Jack, you’re first. Go.”

Jack launched into this halfway articulate paragraph out of which I could glean the phrases makes me sad and call an ambulance. For the sake of clarification when he finished talking I asked Jack, “So if we make it through the day and we don’t have to call an ambulance than you’ll be happy, not sad?”

Jack smiled broadly then and enthusiastically nodded his agreement with my assessment. Which is good, I think, because surely I can measure up to this standard of excellence.

Kit, who was seated in the middle of the tub sandwiched between her brothers, was next. “Mommy, don’t be mad,” she implored while shaking a finger in my face.

“I try not to get mad, Kit.”

“And don’t do ’dat ting with your eyebrows,” she continued.

“What thing?”

Kit couldn’t explain with words, but she pushed against my brow with that pointing finger of hers. “’Dat ting,” she tried to demonstrate as she pushed my eyebrow up and then pulled it down.

“O. K., I’ll try,” I promised.

It was Archie’s turn to speak next. I looked at him and repeated my question, “What can I do to make things better around here?”

“Have big ideas,” he answered.

I repeated his sentence as I usually do. I like to think that doing so let’s Archie know I understood him, really heard what he said. And then I asked, “Like what?”

He stared at me for a long time in response and somewhere crickets chirped in the woods.

“Have big ideas like what?” I prompted again.

“Pinky-Dinky-Doo,” Archie answered finally.

“Have big ideas like Pinky-Dinky-Doo,” I repeated, then promised. “I don’t know if I can have big ideas all the time, but I’ll try.”

That tub talk happened last week and I’m still trying not to lose my patience, get mad, and then frown with my eyebrows even though I have since then and I still do. I may have had an idea or two since the kids and I had our conversation that qualifies as big, then again maybe I haven’t. I’ll have to ask Archie. But I’m sure I haven’t called an ambulance, not even once, so at least that means Jack won’t be sad. And that’s something, I guess.

Just the same I’m not feeling it. Kit is rolling around the floor by my desk right now, asking for a snack, and Archie wants me to read a book to him, one I’ve already read ten times today, and Jack is still running around without underwear. I haven’t started dinner, and the laundry remains undone. I’m frustrated, and irritated, and… hell, how do I fix this?

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Morning with the Moores

This family of mine, we’re all going to play hookey tomorrow. John’s not going to work, Kit and Jack aren’t going to school, and I’m skipping out on my Wednesday morning workout at the gym. My parents plan to join our fun, too, as Mom is bagging tennis and Dad’s taking a day away from the office.

“We won’t be here Wednesday,” I told Kit and Jack’s teachers yesterday morning during the class’s drop-off time.

“We’re going to the Special Oh-impics,” Jack injected, finishing my declaration for me.

And that’s exactly what we’re doing. All six of us will join Archie, his classmates and teachers tomorrow morning at Furman University for the Greenville County Recreation District’s Special Olympics of Greenville. Archie will participate in the games as a member of the Young Athletes Program, a Special Olympics initiative aimed at increasing children’s strength and coordination in preparation for sports participation.

When representatives of the Special Olympics participated in a PTA meeting at Archie’s school last fall, they explained to us that the Young Athlete’s Program is a great way to introduce children to group play, cooperation and awareness to rules, while also focusing on socialization, interaction and fun. I’ll admit now that I have no idea at all in what event Archie is scheduled to participate tomorrow, but I’ll tell you, too, that my ignorance does nothing to douse my enthusiasm for Archie’s involvement in the day’s activities.

That’s why we’re all making such a big deal out of Archie’s small part in this year’s games, I think. Because we enthusiastically support Archie and celebrate his abilities, because we want to share our confidence in Archie’s potential, as well as in the potential of his peers, with other people who believe in each of them, too.

As I was thinking of all this yesterday afternoon I realized that Archie doesn’t have a pair of tennis shoes that fit him. We just bought Archie new boat shoes, but the pair of tennis shoes lying on the floor of his bedroom closet are at least three sizes too small. So this morning Kit, Jack and I stopped by Target after we dropped Archie off at school to buy shoes appropriate for tomorrow’s activities.

I’ve mentioned before that every morning Archie insists I explain to him exactly what we’ll be doing during the day. When I told him this morning that his sister, brother and I would be going to the store while he was at school Archie asked me to extrapolate. “For… ?” he wanted to know.

“For shoes you can wear tomorrow to the Special Olympics.”

“Oh!” Archie declared enthusiastically, his eyes popping open wide as he spoke. “For Oh-limp-ick Shoes!”

Later at the store I asked Kit and Jack to pick out the tennis shoes we’d buy for Archie. “Should we get this pair, or this pair?” I asked them, holding a box in each hand.

“Those should be Archie’s Oh-impics shoes,” Kit answered, pointing to the box in my right hand. And so they are.

That’s the other thing, too. The biggest thing, really, at least this time around. Our whole family will attend the Special Olympics tomorrow morning because we believe in Archie’s efforts, but also because I want Kit and Jack to see us supporting Archie, supporting his peers. I want them to have the exposure necessary to understand. I want them to get it as small children in a way I didn’t even begin to comprehend as a teenaged volunteer at the Special Olympics in our high school’s stadium, in a way so many adults can’t understand even now. Because if our family’s enthusiasm can teach them this one thing… well then, that would be something, right?

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Morning with the Moores

Kit is pushing her baby doll around the house in its stroller. My daughter has pressed an entire sheet’s worth of stickers onto the doll’s sleeper with her lithe little girl fingers. Some of the stickers’ corners overlap, and other stickers seem strung together like stars in a constellation, serendipitously forming pictures that appear purposeful.

I asked Kit about the stickers decorating her doll’s sleeper when they came to me, Kit and her baby, as I was sitting on our powder room toilet. “Why does your baby have all those stickers?” I inquired of my daughter as casually as if we were comparing our days’ activities at the table over dinner. I’ve been a mother too long to feel embarrassed about excrement.

“My bay-bee got the stickers ’cause she was good at ahh grocery store,” Kit answered while she bent down to adjust the blanket she’d tucked into the stroller beside her doll.

When my three children are well-behaved at the grocery store, they’re usually awarded with PAID stickers, pressed against their small chests by baggers and cashiers who have made it their business to always remember Archie, Kit and Jack’s names. To my children those stickers feel like a fine reward, and I’ll tell you, too, that the sight of the word PAID in large print stuck to my children’s shirts like some sort of honor badge always makes me want to laugh a small, private kind of laugh because, yes, I agree. These three babies have been paid for, with sweat and tears and blood.

Today was the first day back to school after spring break. This year Archie, Kit, Jack and I spent our time together drawing and painting, reading books and watching t. v., taking trips to the store, the doctor’s office, to our own backyard. I admit I wished them back to school a few times, but mostly we four coexisted comfortably.

Three years ago on the Friday before Easter I stood in the checkout line at the grocery store, wondering why the lights above me seemed so bright, why all the stimuli surrounding me seemed to be coming in so slow but then stirred around inside my skull so fast, why nothing about this ordinary trip to the store on an ordinary day seemed very ordinary at all.

Archie had been home all week, and the twins were only one. I’d only meant to pick up a few things at the store and I was sure I could manage the trip alone, but the twins were crying and Archie was doing his wha-wha-wha-whining thing with half of his hand shoved into his mouth, and I was tired, and hungry, and oh-good-god-already I’ve had enough.

Later that afternoon John took me to the urgent treatment center because I was sure I was having a stroke and that’s where a patient doctor listened to me as I tried to find the words to describe what was happening inside my head. After I finished my nonsensical description that doctor explained to me that I was experiencing an anxiety attack, then he emptied a syringe of liquid into the fleshy part of my hip and instructed John to take me home and put me to bed. I slept like a woman without worry that night three years ago and I’ll say now that although I may not always manage Archie, Kit and Jack with aplomb, we four do better these days than we used to.

On Saturday afternoon John and I took the kids to the grocery store again. John loaded Kit and Jack into a racecar shopping cart, and I let Archie pick out a metal cart he could ride in while I pushed. A few aisles into our shopping trip Kit and Jack asked John if they could get out of the cart and walk beside it instead. “If you promise to behave and stay close,” John negotiated.

When Archie saw his father lift his brother and sister out of the cart he asked me if he could get down, too. “No,” I answered as I paid more attention to what was on the shelf beside me than to what the little boy in front of me was asking.

“Yes, I can,” Archie growled at me, the timber of his voice rising up inside his throat.

“No, you can’t,” I insisted thinking then of the boy who likes to empty shelves and laugh wholeheartedly at the ensuing mess.

Archie growled again, his tone as insistent as my own this time. “I can.”

That’s when I really heard my son. He can. And that’s when I heard what Archie was hearing in my answer, I say you can’t. The realization humbled me.

As I lifted Archie from the shopping cart I struck the same bargain with him as John had with Kit and Jack. “No funny business, buddy,” I concluded.

And there wasn’t any either. Archie walked beside me up and down the aisles. He held my hand. He could. He was right. Once Archie turned his face into my hand and kissed it. My chest felt full and I smiled at everyone we passed. Our steps were small, Archie-sized, but even tiny treads can complete a course.

Over coffee on Friday afternoon my friend and I talked about the trip we took to the museum with our children earlier that week. Jack was at the doctor’s office with John, Archie was watching Noggin’, and Kit and Sophia were seated at the kitchen table near Rachel and me. They were painting, and we were talking.

Rachel told me that she’d talked to her husband over dinner about the way other people at the museum looked at Archie, about the way they watched all of us. I told her that I’d noticed it as well, but that I usually notice people watching Archie, watching me and Kit and Jack and John with him, too, that I’ve learned to not notice their noticing.

Rachel and I agreed that many people smiled when we acknowledged them acknowledging us, but that some other people looked away, refusing to make eye contact with either she or me. “I always assume those people are thinking unkind things,” I confided to Rachel.

“I noticed people moving away from us, too,” Rachel said.

I hadn’t noticed that at the museum, but it’s happened before, I know. I told Rachel about the Gymboree classes I used to take Archie to when he was small, about how all the other babies progressed through the classes more quickly than Archie did, about how this meant we met a lot of new classmates whose mothers sometimes paused when it was my turn to introduce Archie, say his name and his age, and then stumble all over myself as I tried to explain his diagnosis and make excuses for his obvious delays.

I told Rachel that one day during class a mother pulled her baby away from Archie when he rolled across the mat to smile hugely at that other baby, to laugh and snort excitedly as he lay on his chest and pump his arms and legs in the air as if he were trying to swim or fly. I told Rachel how that woman and her gesture, intentional and unkind, destroyed me that day. I didn’t say anything to that other mother, and I didn’t cry right there on the mat, or leave the class either. Instead I reached out to retrieve my baby and later carried him and that woman’s calloused action home with me way down deep at the bottom of a pit inside my stomach.

“The momma bear in me wanted to come out at the museum,” Rachel confessed as she sat across from me at my kitchen table. She puffed up her chest when she said so, pulling her elbows tight against her sides, making fists with her hands. Her shoulders rose up around her neck. “We all have issues. He just wears his out here,” Rachel said then, waving her hand in front of her face.

I implicitly understood Rachel’s reaction. I’ve felt that way, too, at those Gymboree classes when Archie was small, and then again, and again. There are some days when looks or gestures bother me more than they do other days, but mostly I’ve learned to smile at anyone who may look at us a little too long. And when I smile I hope that my face says, I love him. I wish you would open your heart to him, too.

I’ve learned to wish, but not to force. I’m also learning to listen. To myself, to Archie, to Kit and Jack, too. And I have to say that writing these things right now makes me realize that my children aren’t the only ones who are growing up.

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Morning with the Moores

Maya found it first, but I’ll link to it here, too.

That link above will take you to an article that appeared in today’s New York Times. It was written by a mother whose son is autistic. The following quote from the article struck Maya as significant, and it impacted me in a similar way:

Annie Lubliner Lehmann writes, “[W]hen I look at him I can’t help wondering if the past years weren’t some heaven-directed scheme meant to humble us and teach us the value of acceptance. Understanding that we couldn’t change him had changed us.”

What would my answer be if I turned that musing of Lehmann’s back on myself? I know it, and I bet you readers do, too.

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So, hey, Charleston! It was great! I conquered the Bridge Run, finishing the 10K race in 47:36 and averaging a pace of 7:40 per mile. That’s a minute faster than my previous 10K personal record, and a whole nine minutes faster than I ran the same race last year.

Also, I was the 1,734th person to cross the finish line. That sounds like something to thumb your nose at, I know, but it’s not when you consider that approximately 39,000 people ran or walked the race. That’s a lot of race participants to pack into one place, don’t you think?

There’s a lot I could tell you about the run. I could write about how I blew out the first three miles, including the bridge’s ascent, in just 23 minutes. Or I could tell you about the amazingly quick fourth mile I ran, and then the subsequent fifth mile during which I wished for death so I could at least exit from the course gracefully. That’s when I swore I’d never run again, that I’d give this whole, insane pursuit up entirely if the race could be over-already-right-now, please.

But mentioning those things alone wouldn’t be telling the whole story because, for me, the true grit of a runner’s tale can be found in her final mile. That’s when I dug as deep as I could go, that’s when I turned the corners from Meeting Street to John Street, from John to King Street, from King to Wentworth Street, as fast as I could, and that’s where I let the bottom fall out, on Wentworth, when I sprinted that final length to the finish line.

After I finished, after John found me and I ate an orange and a banana and drank a bottle of water, we visited with John’s younger brother Lewis at the Knight’s of Columbus, then bounced around the streets downtown visiting one shop then another, waiting for the race to end so we could cross the street and get back to our car. Two or three hours would pass from the time I’d crossed the finish line before the race officials and law enforcement officers would open the race course to traffic again.

As soon the barricades were gone and we were able to cross the street, John and I began to pick our way toward our car. As I turned my head to look for oncoming cars down King Street, I saw her. She was holding onto the arm of an old man and she was slowly, carefully walking down the street to make that next-to-last turn toward the finish line.

She limped as she walked, as if she had Cerebral Palsy or had suffered a stroke. Two police officers road their motorcycles in front of her, their headlights on, indicating that she would be the last race participant to cross the finish line. We people strewn across the sides of the street paused as she neared. Everyone stopped talking, stopped hollering, and all you could hear was the hum of the cruisers’ engines, the sound of the street cleaner swooshing water across the pavement a block away.

Someone started to clap. I put down the things I was carrying in my hands so I could clap, too. John did the same. I think I was the first person to yell out to her, the last race participant, and as soon as I did other people began to whistle and cheer, too. We kept it up until she passed us, turning that next-to-last corner toward the finish line.

After she passed I bent over to pick up the things I’d laid down in front of me. People began to walk again, to talk again, and John and I turned away from King Street to make our way home. That’s when I felt like crying and I told John as much.

As soon as I’d found John after I finished running I had to hold onto his arm until my legs steadied themselves again. I’d given my best effort, and this woman on another man’s arm was, too. What I’d accomplished that morning was important to me, but what this woman was doing felt bigger. Her efforts belonged to her, but they seemed universal, too. It’s trite to say so, I know, but I’m thankful her triumph gave me that perspective this past Saturday morning in Charleston. I really am.

Posted by: anne
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Morning with the Moores

Today is Spread the Word to End the Word day, an initiative sponsored by the Special Olympics aimed at ending the use of the “R” word. This day of awareness encourages everyone to stop and think about their use of the word “retard,” “retarded,” or any derivative there of.

“Most people don’t think of this word as hate speech, but that’s exactly what it feels like to millions of people with intellectual disabilities, their families and friends,” writes Sean Carroll of the Special Olympics. “Using ‘retard’ as a term of derision is just as cruel and offensive as any other slur.”

I’m participating in this movement because… well, this is why…

When someone says the words “retard” or “retarded” in front of me I’m instantly transported back in time to that summer afternoon I stood in front of the kitchen sink in my parents house, holding my hands under the water running out of the faucet. I’d just received a call from the doctor who preformed my amniocentesis after he discovered an abnormality in my baby’s heart, one that the doctor explained was largely indicative of a diagnosis of Down syndrome.

He’d lied, that doctor, and told me that the geneticist hadn’t yet shared with him the results from my test, but that he’d like John and me to come see him in his office later that afternoon. John and I knew what the doctor meant to do, and we agreed that we’d feel more capable of handling the news coming our way if my parents accompanied us to that appointment. I’d leave work and John would do the same, we agreed, and we’d meet at my Mom and Dad’s house before driving the distance to the doctor’s office.

So I was standing in front of that kitchen sink when my dad walked in the door. He was grim-faced and his shoulders hung forward, and I remember how wounded his countenance made me feel. “Do you mind if we come along?” my father asked me then.

Why are you asking me this?, I remember thinking, frustrated and angered by my father’s politeness. We already told you we wanted you to be there! That’s what I said inside my own head, but instead I sighed aloud and then spit out, “No, you can come. But I don’t know why we all have to go to find out that our baby is retarded.”

When I said that word then I spoke out of the hurt inside my heart. When I think that word today it also originates from a place of tenderness, a place of vulnerability. When you say that word aloud in my presence it reminds me of the ignorance I once had regarding my son’s diagnosis, of the ignorance I fear will always influence society’s perception of my son.

You see, that day in front of the kitchen sink I didn’t expect Archie to change my view of intellectual disabilities as completely as he has. I didn’t know how bright my baby would be in spite of his diagnosis, in spite of all the medications he’s received that indicated possible cognitive impairment.

I didn’t know that one day my five-year-old son would be able to recite a pile of books, word for word, or count to 67 as I pushed him on the swing at the park one spring afternoon. I didn’t know then that one day he’d have a younger sister of whom he would implore, “Kit, let me see your hand,” when she sat at our family’s kitchen table one evening, frowning hugely and whining about her sore finger. I didn’t know either that this morning, just today, Archie would say to me, his speech still thick with sleep, “Mama, don’t go running. It’s still dark outside.”

All of this is why when you say the words “retard” or “retarded” to describe something stupid, dumb, or annoying your flippancy hurts me. You may not think that my son is retarded, and although I thank you for thinking so, you should know that your words still wound me in a way I struggle to describe aloud.

If what I’ve said effected you, or if you share a similar perspective and you’d like to join me in participating in the Special Olympic’s Spread the Word to End the Word campaign, you can do so in any of the following ways:

Go here and sign the pledge.

Write a post on your blog that describes why you should end the use of the “R” word.

As always, thanks for reading.

Posted by: anne
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Archie
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“What are we doing today?” That’s what Archie wants to know every morning, first thing.

My answer this morning sounded a lot like my answer yesterday morning, as well as my answer the morning before that. “First we’re going to eat breakfast. Then Daddy will help you get dressed. After that you can listen to the popcorn song. Then we’ll go to school.”

“Go to school to see Nardia!” Archie concurred excitedly, clapping his hands as he turned his eyes up toward the ceiling and jutted his chin way out. Nardia is Archie’s teacher and he likes her very much.

“Yes, you’ll go to school to see Nardia,” I repeated. Most days our shared language is of the call-and-response variety, Archie’s and mine.

Later in the car, on the way to school, Archie and I shared the exact same conversation except this one didn’t end when Archie became more interested in what I’d set in front of him at the kitchen table than what I had to say. And this second time around Archie told me he was going to school to see Nardia, then asked me, “And then we’ll…”

I was supposed to fill in the blank he left at the end of the sentence. “Don’t know,” I told him. “We’ll have to figure that out this afternoon.”

“Huh,” Archie grunted from the backseat of the car. He doesn’t like blank pages in the storybooks of his days, that boy of mine. I can’t say I blame him either. Routine breeds security, and direction feels purposeful. I know this, and I suppose I’m passing the knowledge along to my children, too.

Earlier this week the company John works for filed a voluntary Chapter 11 petition. We’d sensed this was coming for some time, John and I, and as John understands it the filing was a smart, business-savvy move. The good news is that BI-LO’s sales have risen significantly in the past few months and we believe that things will soon turn around in the company’s favor, but still. But still inside our own home it feels like we’re just going through the motions every day, planning for the worst, hoping for the best, and waiting to see what happens.

So I dropped Archie off at school this morning with a promise that we’d just hang out together this afternoon, he, his brother and sister, and I. Then I turned my car around and drove back the way I came, across town, toward Kit and Jack’s school. John had tossed a pile of clothing he wanted me to take to the dry cleaner’s today on the passenger seat in my car, so when I saw that I’d made it to Kit and Jack’s school early I passed it by and drove down the road just a mile more to drop off this load of dress shirts and pants and pick up another.

“It’s Dhanesh’s dad!” Jack proclaimed with enthusiasm when we pulled up to the drive-thru window. We’ve been going to the same dry cleaner’s for years, since before Archie was born. When we started going there we took my work clothing to be cleaned, too. Some days that revelation makes me laugh, especially when my car’s a cacophony filled with cranky kids.

When I was pregnant with Archie, after we’d learned of his diagnosis, John shared our news with the dry cleaner and he in turn shared his home phone number with my husband. The dry cleaner knew that John traveled a lot for work and he wanted to be sure I had someone to call at night if I needed anything. I remember that kind gesture made me cry then, back during those early days when my emotions rode high in my throat and I was learning to accept what I’d been given. Now all these years later, I don’t cry as much as I used to, John doesn’t travel much for work anymore, we have twins in addition to Archie, and one of the dry cleaner’s three sons, a twin himself, is in Kit and Jack’s classroom at school.

As I handed my debit card to the dry cleaner he handed a business card to Jack. I could see that there were numbers written on the back of the card in a child’s hand. “Give that to Dhanesh,” the dry cleaner instructed Jack. Then he handed another card with more numbers to Kit. “Here is one for you to give Dhanesh, too,” he told her.

“What is it?” she wanted to know.

“Dhanesh was practicing his writing. That card will let him know you came here before school and he’ll be excited about it,” the dry cleaner explained.

At school a few minutes later Kit and Jack ran down the hall toward their classroom, those cards tucked into the palms of their hands. As I watched them run ahead of me, looking for their friend, I marveled at the way time works. I used to think I had control over what comes next based on the decisions I make, but every day I believe a little more that time just is and circumstances just are.

After I left Kit and Jack’s school I went to the gym. Before I got on the elliptical to warm up before my workout began, I stooped to tie my shoes. When I get a new pair of trainers for running, I retire my old ones from the road and use them instead at the gym. But my most recent trainers are really, really road-worn so I’m trying to figure out now how to justify purchasing new gym shoes when I just bought new trainers.

Judy, one of the ladies with whom I work out, was watching me so I looked up at her from my place on the floor. “I need new shoes,” I offered.

“So go buy some,” she responded.

“But I feel guilty…” I began to reply, but Judy interrupted me there.

“A mother should never feel guilty,” she intoned. Judy has three adult daughters herself and buckets full of sage parenting advice hewn from her own experience. “I know shoes are expensive, but if John had to hire someone to do what you do every day he’d have to pay them one-hundred-grand.”

Since John and I had already agreed that I should buy another pair of shoes for the gym, and since Judy had encouraged me to do so, too, I sat down at this desk when I got home, in front of this computer, and ordered a new pair of racing flats I’ve coveted for a while now online. I decided to retire my old flats to the gym and instead wear the racing equivalent of my trainers next weekend in Charleston. I’m signed up for the Cooper River Bridge Run again this year except this time around I know what to expect and what to do, and I’ve earned a place in a faster heat.

Maybe I should feel remorseful for buying those shoes, but I don’t. There are things we know, I’ve learned, and things we can only guess at. I believe here in our home we’ll be going through the motions again next week, waiting to see what happens. But I know I’ll be in Charleston next Saturday morning, standing behind a starting gate swathed in dawn’s early light. And that’s something for which I can prepare myself, no matter what.

Posted by: anne
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Categories:
Archie
Jack
Kit
Morning with the Moores

On the way home from school Friday afternoon Jack saw an American flag hoisted high on a flagpole in a front lawn that pulled forward, long and far, so much so that it touched the road. “Look!” he hollered from the backseat. “It’s Barack Obama!”

I usually encourage Jack’s interest in the president, but I didn’t feel like enthusiastically discussing the administration during that drive home so I let Jack’s comment dissipate without debate. Jack, however, wasn’t satisfied by my silence. “Mommy, I saaaaiiiiid it’s Barack Obama!”

“No, Jack,” I sighed. Then I explained tersely, tightly, “It’s an American flag. Barack Obama is our president, not our flag.”

Jack didn’t reply, but Kit did. “Mommy, what’s wrong?” she asked. I looked at her reflection in the rearview mirror and saw that Kit was frowning, that she looked concerned.

“Nothing,” I lied.

“Mmmmmmooooommmmmyyyyy!” Kit and Jack yelled in unison and you should know that try as I may, I cannot lie to my children.

“I’m upset,” I answered, keeping my explanation straightforward, succinct.

“Why?” Kit pushed.

I weighed my options in the string of seconds that followed. Should I disregard my children’s concern and attempt to change the subject? Or should I turn my disappointment into an opportunity to teach my children about something they’ll surely experience themselves some day soon?

“My feelings are hurt,” I answered.

“Why?” the twins asked together.

“Because Barack Obama hurt my feelings,” I said plainly, making an effort to limit my response to a description Kit and Jack would understand. They believe I know the president personally, I’m sure, so I hoped this explanation would satiate their curiosity.

But still Kit pressed some more, “Why?” The tone in her voice alerted me that she was genuinely concerned.

That’s when I sensed it was time to lay all my cards on the table. “Because he made fun of Archie and his friends who are like him, and that disappointed me a lot and really hurt my feelings because I never expected the president to say something like that.”

“Oh,” Kit and Jack breathed at the same time. Kit stared downward, toward the floor, and Jack raised his hand to his mouth and stuck the tip of one fingernail between his teeth.

“My feelings are hurt, too,” Kit told me after she considered my explanation for a few beats. We three were silent then, our car passing a few more houses before Kit asked, “But why?”

“Why what?” I wondered aloud.

“Why did he say ‘dat?”

John and I have spoken to Kit and Jack before about Down syndrome, about what it means for Archie, what it means to us. When we did they’d asked questions, simple ones, and in turn we always tried to provide Kit and Jack with concise answers that addressed their questions precisely, honestly. It always felt like the fair thing to do, the right thing to do. And this occasion, driving home from school in the car, didn’t feel much different.

Again I looked at Kit’s reflection in the rearview mirror. She looked back and I knew she was hanging on my every word, waiting for an answer to her question.

“You know how Archie’s a little different than you guys?” We’ve covered this material before, Archie, Kit, Jack, John and I.

Both Kit and Jack nodded in response and answered, “Ah-huh.”

“And you know how Dad and I told you that Archie’s differences aren’t bad, that they just explain the way he is? Well, the president was making fun of that difference.”

Kit crinkled her nose as she thought. “Of Archie’s eyes?” she wanted to know and I’ll tell you now that I’ll never profess to understand the way in which a three-year-old’s mind works.

“Kind of,” I answered. “But really he was talking about the way Archie learns.”

“Oh,” said Kit.

That’s when Jack launched into a tirade. “Barack Obama, I say you’re a bad man! I say that you no make a-fun of my Archie! I think-a you need to go to a timeout!”

I didn’t know how to respond to Jack’s outburst other than to validate his feelings. “It’s o.k. to feel angry, Jack.” And then after we passed the gas station on the corner I added, “I’m angry, too.”

This afternoon I filled out a form Archie’s teacher sent home from school, an application for participation in the Special Olympics. In just a few weeks Archie will compete for the first time in these games as a member of the Young Athletes Program. Archie’s teacher reports that he’s been practicing for these Olympic games each week as part of his classroom learning activities. She says, too, that my oldest boy and his classmates will march in the opening ceremonies parade, and together they’ll participate in the traditional lighting of the Olympic torch.

As I worked my way down through the release form the teacher sent home, checking off the appropriate boxes that describe Archie’s complicated health history in short and snappy phrases, I wondered to myself how Special Olympics became associated with inability rather than ability.

I freely admit that Archie is no athlete, that in fact he can barely walk the distance from our parked car to a building’s entrance without succumbing to the urge to sit and rest a bit. I say that in one breathe, but in the next I’ll tell you of the baby who once lay in an isolette attached to a variety of beeping and undulating machines over whom his physicians would shake their heads, shrug their shoulders, then admit aloud, “Mrs. Moore, I just don’t understand what’s happening here.”

I tell you that Archie can barely land on his feet after jumping two inches across the floor, but I’ll tell you, too, of the toddler whose disease was so pronounced at diagnosis that his abdomen was hard and distended in a way that it prohibited me from fastening his pants before we’d left our home, panicked and disbelieving, to meet the cancer specialists waiting for us at the hospital.

I’ll write here that Archie can’t throw a small, big, nor medium-sized ball very far no matter how hard he tries, but that story wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t tell you the rest of it, the part during which Archie runs with all his might, his shoulders shaking with laughter the entire way across our backyard, when I pretend that I can’t field his pitch, when my pantomimed actions imply that maybe he can beat me to the ball lying still in the grass this time if he runs fast enough, if he tries hard enough.

He hopes, this boy of mine. He always has and in doing so he’s taught me how to hope, too, how to learn to believe. He’s changed me in a way that means I’ll never, ever utter a derogatory quip about people who are disabled again, nor laugh along when someone else does. I just can’t tolerate it, no matter who makes the joke.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

Posted by: anne
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Categories:
Archie
Jack
Kit
Morning with the Moores

Right now there are a handful of treat-filled cello bags sitting shotgun in my station wagon. Archie, Kit and Jack collected them at the two birthday parties they attended this weekend, one on Saturday morning and one late Sunday afternoon. It seems as if every time I turn around there’s another party invitation stuffed inside someone’s backpack, or placed in the newspaper delivery slot of our mailbox.

It won’t always be this way, I remind myself when I feel like complaining about it all. I’d rather do this than comfort my children when they discover they weren’t invited to this event, or another, I reason some more. Because those days will come, I know. This, too, the preschooler’s popularity fueled by coerced inclusion, shall pass. Until that happens, though, I’ll accompany Archie, Kit and Jack to all these parties even if it isn’t always convenient to do so, and I’ll try not to feel slighted when I spend more on birthday gifts for my children’s friends than I do updating my own wardrobe.

Saturday morning’s party was a pajama party. Our neighbor served donuts and other breakfast treats, and all the children wore pajamas. My mother suggested I wear them, too, and I did but I never would have thought to do so myself if she hadn’t suggested it first. But I’ll tell you that I didn’t look as fashionable as my children, especially Archie in his polyester plaid pajama bottoms and baby-blue bathrobe who John proclaimed looked just like Hugh Hefner (and he did).

Underneath Archie’s bathrobe he wore a Wonder Pets pajama top. When John helped Archie pull the shirt over his head on Saturday morning Archie belted out a line from the cartoon’s theme song, loudly and out-of-tune. “What’s gonna work?” he crooned and then paused to breathe. “Teeeeeeeeaaam work!” John and I laughed out loud when Archie finished drawing that “k” in “work” out to its last syllable, then this morning as I ran alongside the road in the dark I thought of John and my laughter, and of Archie’s singing, and then thought to myself that if our family had its own theme song we’d have to claim that lyrical line as our own.

Yesterday’s party was for one of Kit and Jack’s classmates. While we were eating birthday cake Jack asked the mother sitting beside me about her baby who was sleeping in the stroller parked next to her legs. A few beats later Jack told that other mother a joke pertaining to her baby, and so she responded with a silly question of her own. “Does your mommy have her own baby?” the mother asked even though she knew the answer to that question already.

“Noooooo,” Jack answered, laughing and shaking his head from side to side. “I’m my mommy’s baby.”

Kit was seated across the table from Jack, next to the other mother’s daughter. Both girls had been following along with the conversation, but Kit had nothing to say until then. “We don’t have a baby,” she explained. “We have ah Archie.”

Jack agreed. “Yes, we have ah Archie. He’s our sister.”

“Brother,” I corrected as I thought to myself how exactly right Kit was. Yes. We have an Archie.

Kit was still upstairs sleeping when I got back from my run this morning. Archie and Jack were at the kitchen table, Jack eating a blob of peanut butter with a spoon and Archie sipping his yogi milk from a straw cup. John had already set out Kit’s breakfast, packed the twins’ lunch boxes, and emptied the dishwasher so as the boys finished breakfast and I waited for the coffee to brew I folded the load of clean towels I’d tossed into the dryer before going upstairs to bed last night.

After I put the dishtowels, washrags and bibs away in the kitchen I climbed the steps with our bath towels and floor mats. I carried that armful into my bathroom, put the towels away in the linen closet and laid the mats on the floor in front of the tub, outside the shower door, then I walked down the hall to Kit’s room.

I had to shake Kit, my hand on her shoulder, a few times to wake her and when I finally did she wouldn’t open her eyes. “Mommy, I’m tired,” Kit told me, her eyes still closed. “Me ah no want to get up yet.”

“I know it,” I promised her. “I’m tired, too.”

That’s when Kit sat up in her bed, opened her eyes, and began to untangle herself from her covers. Archie, who had followed me up the stairs and into Kit’s room, hugged his sister. “It’s Kit,” he proclaimed. “Miss Kit!” When they’d finished hugging Archie grabbed onto one of Kit’s hands and I reached for her other hand. Together the three of us walked down the hall toward the top of the staircase. Archie let go of Kit’s hand and sat so he could slide down the steps on his bottom, but I continued to hold onto Kit’s hand until she and I reached the last step, the one at the foot of the stairs.

I ran back upstairs then, back to my bathroom again, to change out of my running clothes and into something dry. I washed my face and brushed my teeth, made the beds and collected a pile of dirty clothes, then went downstairs. Archie was reading a book in the living room, Jack was laying his train tracks across the family room floor, and Kit was at the kitchen table, licking the jelly and butter off her toast and staring out the French doors into our back yard.

It was drizzling outside and the rising sun wasn’t doing much to brighten the morning. “It’s a fuzzy day,” Kit observed.

“You mean foggy,” I corrected her without laughing, thinking then of that line from a John Updike story I read for a class in college in which a father comments that his daughter is “determined not to let language slip on her tongue and tumble her so that we laugh.”

Kit got that adjective wrong this morning, but just yesterday while seated at that same seat at this same table my daughter got something else exactly right.

On Sunday morning I fought Archie through breakfast. He wouldn’t eat, and I wouldn’t back down. He cried. I yelled. And then Archie flung his spoon to the ground in defiance and when he did his hand hit my face. That surprised him and stopped me short. As I got up from the table to get a washrag from the drawer beside the sink, I exhaled deeply and spoke aloud, clear and cold. “When you get like this, Archie, I just want to pick you up and throw you across the kitchen.”

I didn’t, and I wouldn’t, of course. But I was frustrated so I said as much. When I did John shot me a dirty look from his place in front of the toaster. I didn’t care.

But I did care when my daughter called out to me across the silence. “You can’t do dat, Mommy!” Kit chastised. “He’s our family!”

No one said anything more until I spoke again. I told Kit she was right, and I admitted I’d been wrong. I apologized, too, and then the entire incident dissipated into the corners of the room like family arguments often do. Archie decided to eat after all, the twins carried their dirty plates from the kitchen table to the sink, and John buttered his toast. All the while I leaned against the kitchen island, paging through the newspaper and drinking my coffee.

Our family. Yes, this is it.

Posted by: anne
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Categories:
Archie
Jack
Kit
Morning with the Moores

John says it’s unfair to write about running a race then not post a follow-up with my results. I assured him that no one really cares how I ran on Saturday morning, but he insisted. “People care, Anne,” he assured me. “Sometimes they just don’t know how to talk to you about stuff.”

That’s true, I know.

So I ran the 32nd Annual Reedy River 10K Saturday morning. For the uninitiated that’s 6.2 miles over downtown Greenville’s streets, trails and footbridges. I finished in 48:25 minutes, averaging a 7:50 mile. I bettered my previous 10K time by eight minutes, placed ninth in my age group, and finished 50th out of 645 female runners (official race results can be found here).

I set out to finish the race under 49 minutes, so I was pleased with how I performed. When I crossed the finish line I looked at John who was standing directly in front of me on the other side of the barricades separating the runners from the spectators and breathed, “I did it!” Because I had. And that felt awesome.

There’s a song on my iPod I listen to most mornings when I’m out on the road, running along the shoulder. It begins with a short, synthesized guitar riff and then Brandon Flowers intones, “I did my best to notice, when the call came down the line. Up to the platform of surrender, I was brought but I was kind.”

“And sometimes I get nervous when I see an open door,” he continues. “Close your eyes, clear your heart… Cut the cord.”

I’ve written before about the start of a race, and hearing this song again today made me think of Saturday morning on Main Street. It made me think about waking up Saturday, too, about when the alarm went off and I actually smiled before I slipped out of bed. I wanted to run the race; I was ready.

Not too long ago I used to approach the starting line with a rolling stomach, but now I stand there as if I’m utterly confident in myself, in what I’m doing. I’m not sure how that happened, but I’m glad it did. It’s as if I’ve given in to myself and this is the reward. To be honest, it feels like a kind of redemption, really, but I don’t know from what I thought I needed to be redeemed. I guess I’m still figuring that part out.

Posted by: anne
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Morning with the Moores

I was in the office yesterday when Kit came to me and announced, “Mommy, I want to tell you something.”

“Go for it,” I replied turning away from the computer screen to look at my daughter.

Kit put her hands behind her back and leaned against the wall beside the window before she started to talk. “Um, um, um, umm…,” Kit began and you should know in case you couldn’t figure it out by the way I wrote it that Kit sometimes stutters when she talks. “Ummm… Jackie Moore tried to go ah potty like, um, Daddy, but… um, um, um… he missed ah potty and, ahhhh… um, he make a big mess.”

“He did?” I asked with mock incredulity and Kit nodded in response. We’ve taught Jack to sit on a toilet to pee, to use his pointer finger to tuck himself down into the toilet bowel so he won’t pee on the seat. I know he uses the urinals in the lavatory at school like the other boys in his class, but until yesterday I had no idea Jack wanted to try standing in front of a toilet to pee at home.

“He’s in my bathroom,” she snitched.

Upstairs I found Jack standing against the wall in that small space between the toilet and the sink. His jeans and underwear were down around his ankles and he was holding his hands in fists against his lips. I could tell he was anxious about what my reaction to his attempt at peeing while standing may be.

“Kit said you tried to pee like Daddy,” I offered.

Jack launched into this rambling explanation about where he’d stood to pee, the trajectory his urine took, how he’d wanted it to go into the potty instead. I smiled as Jack talked and assured him he wasn’t in trouble when he finished speaking. “Hey, you tried,” I told him. “That’s what counts. Pull up your pants and I’ll go get a towel so we can clean this up.”

In truth, Jack didn’t make that much of a mess. There weren’t any puddles on the floor, and there were only a few drops of urine sprayed against the raised toilet lid. Honestly, I have to say that I was impressed.

In other liquid-related news, Kit and Jack recently developed an affinity for grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup. I used to feed them grilled cheese sandwiches when they were younger, the kind I grew up eating in Pennsylvania with butter slathered on the outside of each piece of bread, both sides of the sandwich grilled brown in a hot skillet on the stovetop, with two pieces of processed cheese melted in the middle, but I stopped for a while for whatever reason.

Sunday’s snow and Monday’s school cancellation reminded me of similar days from my own childhood when my mother would usher my brother and I inside from the cold and place this menu, grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup, on the kitchen table in front of us. So I made it, too, for my own children and ever since Kit’s asked for tomato soup and that bread with cheese sandwich for each meal.

Mostly I’ve indulged her request and each time I have she eats what I place in front of her with relish. Jack does, too, which is both refreshing and satisfying because that boy, he rarely eats. I was even able to talk Archie into tasting a few spoonfuls of soup the other day, into touching his tongue to the spoon, please, Archie, I’d appreciate it so very much. He did, and I did, and that was a new kind of something to celebrate as we four sat around the kitchen table, Archie and me smiling hugely and Kit and Jack clapping for their big brother.

So Kit was eating her sandwich and soup yesterday afternoon, polishing off her sixth request for this menu, when she paused, spoon in air, and then looked at me. “I’m fat,” she said.

“Are you kidding me?,” I wanted to holler in response. “This? Already? But you’re only freakin’ three years old and you’re small and willow-y and I think you’re built like me, like my grandfather all sinewy and solid, or your father’s grandmother who was all kinds of tiny, and that you probably won’t ever be fat even when you first go to college and gain the freshman fifteen!”

That is what I thought, sitting there at the kitchen table across from Kit, but instead I replied, “Do you mean you feel full?”

“No, um, I mean I’m um, um, um… fat,” Kit clarified.

My mind clicked and whirred, faster than fast. I was searching for the appropriate response, but I wasn’t sure what that was. I can’t remember the last time I commented aloud on my own weight. To be honest, I don’t think about my weight very much at all. I eat well; I exercise. I’m fortunate that the rest of the equation falls into place based on those two variables.

John doesn’t talk about his weight, or his diet, or even his appearance for that matter. He works out, too, and when we talk together about our time at the gym John and I don’t compare how many calories we burned, rather we talk about how difficult it was to finish today’s set of crazy eights, or step-up’s, or all those pull-up’s the trainer at the gym fit into the middle of today’s workout. But I don’t think we ever utter the word fat, neither to describe ourselves, or others.

I wanted to ask Kit so many things, but instead I just said, “You’re not fat, Kit,” then let it go at that.

Maybe this fat bit is just another little girl thing? Kit is more insightful than her brothers, and more concerned, too. There isn’t much she misses, and she’ll always ask John or I to explain or clarify those things that she doesn’t understand.

Just yesterday I sent Kit to our time-out spot on the bottom step of the staircase because she knocked Jack’s blocks down in frustration when he told her he’d rather she not help him build the road and bridges he was setting up across the family room floor. She kicked the blocks and sent them flying, then yelled out, and I swooped in and marched her off to serve her time on the stairs. “We don’t do mean things like that to our brothers,” I reprimanded. And then to Jack I suggested, “You should share your blocks with your sister. You’d have more fun building that road if she played with you, too.”

After Kit was released from time-out, after she’d apologized to Jack, after they played together with the blocks for a while, my girl came to me and wanted to know, “Mommy, do you still love me?”

“Of course I love you,” I confirmed. “What makes you think I wouldn’t?”

“Um, um… because I was bad and had to um, um, um go to ah time-out,” she explained.

My goodness.

This morning Archie awoke early again. He’s been doing this for days now, and when he does he wants me to get up with him, too. John’s gone to the gym that time of the morning and I’m usually preparing to leave the house to run as soon as John walks through the door, home again, so it isn’t such a big thing to get up with Archie, to bring him downstairs with me. So I do and together we cut into the darkness of the family room, me carrying my oldest boy down the stairs on my hip. These past few mornings we’ve sat together in darkness, Archie and I. He is tucked into my lap and I’m flipping through the channels on the television set.

When it snowed we lost our cable connection. John pulled an antenna out of the hall closet, hooked it up to the television set, and for a couple days we watched only the stations we could find in standard-definition. One morning while flipping through the channels I came upon an episode of Mister Roger’s Neighborhood. We’d watched the series last summer, Archie, Kit, Jack and I, but then the station that aired it altered it’s programming and Mister Roger’s was lost to us. We’re happy to have found it again, and on these early mornings when Archie joins me downstairs I use the television clicker to turn off our cable connection and together Archie and I sit in the dark, watching Mister Roger’s together.

I am racing tomorrow morning, so I’ve been tapering this week. That means I’ve skipped my morning runs since Wednesday and have been home for the end of the show when Mister Roger’s sings, “It’s a good feeling to know you’re alive…” Archie sings that song with Mister Roger’s, too, every word of it, and my god I can’t tell you how it makes me smile every time he does.

Do you know what else made me smile today? After I took Archie, Kit and Jack to school this morning I went downtown to pick up my race packet for tomorrow’s Reedy River 10K Run. It’s usually difficult to find a parking space along Main Street, but somehow, someway I was able to park in the first spot right outside the Poinsett Hotel where the run expo was located. There was a time when I would have acknowledged this as a sign of my impending greatness, but since I’ve become a mother and wised up about some very important things I’ve realized that I make my own luck, that I’m forging my own fate.

Before the half-marathon in Myrtle Beach I didn’t tell you that I’d been sick with some sort of upper-respiratory infection and that my right foot was giving me all sorts of problems. I imaged such an admission would only elicit an e-mail from my brother that read simply enough, “Making excuses already?” So I kept it to myself and pushed on.

After the run, after I was home again and still feeling washed out, I went to the doctor who diagnosed me with bronchitis and Achilles tendonitis. So I’ve been taking prescription medications for my cough, and I’ve been doing stretches for my foot, and things are better nearly all the way around. Which is good and makes me feel ready for tomorrow’s run. Which makes me smile, too, when I think of that parking space right in front of the hotel and the runner’s expo that made me feel for a moment that all these things that matter to me today are falling into place.

When I left the expo I dropped by the running shoe store where I like to shop. Clive was working again this morning, and he agreed to accept the trainers I wanted to return, the ones I wore that I suspect contributed to my Achilles tendonitis, in exchange for a new pair of my old favorite trainers, thank goodness.

In reality Clive and I talked shoes. I showed him the ones I’d brought back packed inside their box, and he took my name, my phone number and my shoe size so he could order the shoes I wanted.

But inside my head I was a better customer, one who reached to touch Clive’s elbow as he wrote my information on the store’s order form, one who explained that he fitted me for the shoes in which I ran my first half-marathon, the same ones I used again a few weekends ago to run my second. Inside my head I thanked Clive for helping me along the way to that place out on the race route where I found my confidence, to that instant in time that I made my mind my friend again.

So there’s all this, a whole, big mixed bag, but I just saw Kit and Jack walk past the office door on their way to the bathroom. I guess I better see what they’re doing, and clean up pee again if Jack wants to try to go like his Daddy, standing up in front of the toliet.

Posted by: anne
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Categories:
Archie
Jack
Kit
Morning with the Moores

I don’t mind these napless days as much as I anticipated. In fact, I’m actually enjoying them. It’s true that I don’t accomplish half of what I’d intended at the day’s start, but my full afternoons with Archie, Kit and Jack allot me opportunities to know them all in ways I didn’t know existed until last week.

We share conversations, real ones with actual subjects, beginnings, middles and ends. And we play games, made-up amusements that end in fits of laughter as well as structured exercises designed to teach preschool stuff like letters, and numbers, and colors, and shapes. Sure, Archie, Kit and Jack have nearly memorized all those things already, but the fun of it is watching them reveal in the realization of how much they already know.

You’re so smart, I tell each of them one hundred times a day. And I’m so proud of you. When they three are older and find themselves sitting in a desk in math class, not knowing how in the world their teacher is figuring the problem inked out on the transparency film set upon the overhead projector at the front of the class, I hope they remember how adamantly I believe in their ability to succeed.

While getting to share all these new intimacies with my children is reward enough for giving up naptime, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the beneficial effects our new schedule has had on bedtime. It’s earlier, for one thing. Archie, Kit and Jack actually ask to take a warm bath and then to go to bed now, please. And they mean that, too, the part about rushing off to bed with immediacy because once their father and I have tucked each of them into bed all three children are blissfully asleep in no time at all. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that alone is award enough for our long afternoons, one that’s all wrapped up in wonderment.

All the snow lying on the ground the past two evenings has reflected the day’s last light through our windows, brightening both bedtimes. Even still Kit and Jack insisted on keeping their bedside lamps lit as they are both determined never to sleep in a darkened room. Their older brother’s preference for nighttime ambiance is different, though. Archie likes the room dark, almost black. “Turn off the light, Momma,” he reminds me every night as if I’d somehow forgotten since I’d last tucked him into bed.

Last night I lay awake wondering if it meant something that the twins like to sleep swathed in light, that Archie likes to sleep steeped in shadows. I do this a lot, this seeking to assign meaning to hollow things. After all, how can all these things we do and don’t do not be related in some significant way? Shouldn’t it all be tied together, all these decisions we make, across the days and weeks and months?

So last night while I lay in bed I thought of Archie’s goodnights. That made me think of his goodbyes and then his hellos, and the way Archie introduces himself to everyone he meets and how he never forgets a name. When I pick Archie up at school he stops off in his therapists’ offices or their treatment rooms on our way down the hall, toward the door. He’ll wait in the doorways until those therapists turn to look at him, acknowledging his presence, and then Archie will stick his right arm way up high over his head and touch his thumb to his pointer finger, both digits stiffly fixed in space.

Bye, Chery, or Ashley, or Courtney, or Wendy, he’ll say, and then Archie will wait until they answer in turn. He says goodbye to all the students we encounter, too, Burke, and Mary Sullivan, and Melissa, and Nicholas. Sometimes Archie will stop to hug another child, and other times he’ll just walk passed them as if this hallway was in a high school somewhere and he, late for another class, only had time for a hurried hello, a smile and a nod. Always I follow behind Archie, allowing him to lead the way.

Outside the school’s administration offices Archie bids farewell to the executive director, development associate, assistant director and secretary. He doesn’t know what they do, but he knows their names. They know his, too, so they always stop what they’re doing to take the time to answer in turn, Goodbye, Archie. See you tomorrow, and their saying his name out loud makes me think of my grandfather, my father’s father, after whom Archie was named and how he once won a prize in a good citizenship class, a copy of Dale’s Carnegie’s How To Win Friends and Influence People, and how my father and aunts and uncle always laugh when they tell that story because if there was one thing their father knew how to do instinctively without any book’s help it was win friends and influence people. Last night as I lay thinking in bed I wondered if this was one of the ways in which Archie’s birthright transcends his birth defect.

Last week in the car on our way to school Jack was telling stories. “I saw the big, bad wolf,” he said, looking out the window at a bank of trees alongside the road.

“You did?” I asked Jack as I looked at him in the rearview mirror, sensing that he wanted me to say something.

My question gave Jack pause. “He’s a little, bitty dog. He’s not a very bad wolf.”

Everyone always says that Jack looks like John, but he doesn’t. He looks just like my own father did when he was Jack’s age, and in a way Jack is more my son than John’s. Sometimes I watch Jack assess a situation, picking at his cuticles as he takes it all in. When I go to him afterwards and he folds himself into my arms, jumping up and clinging to me with his legs squeezed tight, I know it’s true: Like me, Jack’s a fanatic, too.

I thought of Jack and his wolf last night, and I also thought of something Kit and I have been talking about. She says there are girls at school who don’t want to be her friend, and when she first mentioned it two weeks ago in the car on our way home from school her words made my breathe catch in my throat.

“I asked them if I could play with them and they said ‘no-sorry-bye,” Kit explained that afternoon in the car. Another day she said one girl wouldn’t eat the sugar cookies I sent in for an “S” week snack, but then last week Kit shared with me that the same girl told her she’d like to be friends after all. I’ve talked to Kit, and I’ve talked to her teachers. We four agree that all is satisfactory now, but still I can see Kit’s adolescent years lined up before me and I wish I didn’t know them so well.

Two weekends ago we had friends over for dinner. We served cake for dessert. Archie thought that meant it was someone’s birthday so he sat alone at the kids’ table long after the other children had finished eating, working on his own plateful and singing the birthday song again and again. After he finished his dessert, Archie made his way around the dinner table where we adults still lingered, our words falling in pieces around us, our sentences scattered about the floor. He touched each person’s back, naming them as he did. I sat at the head of the table and watched Archie do this and all the while I was grateful for him and for friends who choose to ignore the dessert plate Archie flung upon the floor just because he could, for friends who strive to see my oldest son as I do.

Last week John brought home a copy of the BI-LO Charity Classic golf tournament invitation. A photo of Archie on a swing in the park swallows up the booklet’s third page. Next to it is a quote from the Meyer Center’s executive director, the same one Archie bids farewell each day on his way out of school. In the quote she is talking about BI-LO Charities and what they’ve done for the Center, about what it feels like to see a child progress.

I’ve written before about the day that photo was taken, but what I didn’t tell you then was how the photographer commented at the end of our time together that he’d collected enough shots of Archie’s tongue. Half of me wanted to strike at the photographer for saying so, but the half of me who agreed with his comment wholeheartedly kept me from doing anything at all.

The advertising agency was taking another boy’s photo that day, too, for the same publication. He was a hired model, and Archie was a suggestion made by the charity director, the agency’s customer. That charity director is a fan of both Archie and his father, and she was excited to have the opportunity to showcase someone who has benefited from her work, someone whose life overlaps with her own.

The other boy at the park that day, the one who is a model, was dressed a little shabbily I’d thought then and again now after I’ve looked through the invitation in its entirety. In addition to outlining the weekend’s activities, the booklet also names the charities supported by the event’s proceeds. So there are other photos in it, too, of people representing different organizations, people from various walks of life. I looked through the booklet and thought of the photographer and how I suspected he preferred the model, the other boy who was neither disabled, nor underprivileged, nor a survivor of some acute illness, and I thought how that boy was dressed then I wondered last night as I lay in bed thinking what it all meant after all.

I remembered picking out clothing for Kit and Jack to wear to school last week. It was Tuesday night, and I knew they’d go to church the next day in celebration of Ash Wednesday. Their teachers and the parish priest would introduce them to the practice of placing ashes on the foreheads of the faithful. I haven’t been to church in one hundred years, but still I made sure to lie out dress outfits for my children to wear. I may have questioned my commitment to the religion I was taught long ago, but I know that once my children’s father, and their grandfather, uncles and cousins, too, were altar boys all, each of them serving mass every Sunday morning. And that felt like something significant last week when I picked the clothes Kit and Jack would wear to school.

When I got to Archie’s dresser drawers that evening I passed over a long-sleeved t-shirt with a robot printed on front. I knew Archie would not go to mass that next day so I didn’t need to choose dress clothing for him, and I was sure the shirt would match the sweatshirt I’d already laid atop the dresser, but still I didn’t fold back the corners of all the shirts stacked on top of it so that I could pull it free from the pile without rumpling what I left behind. The school district was testing Archie’s cognitive ability that week, an assessment devised to fulfill a state requirement, and that night in front of Archie’s dresser I was afraid the social worker would begin their time together by asking Archie what was on his shirt and that he wouldn’t know. I didn’t want to play into her preconceptions, I decided. I’d pick another shirt.

School was cancelled again today as a result of Sunday’s snow and the precipitous driving conditions it left behind. Archie wanted to take a shower with John before he left for work. There were no schedules to keep so John invited Archie in. Kit and Jack watched a children’s program on PBS as I went into their rooms, made their beds, turned out their table lamps and picked out their clothing for the day. Today I pulled the long-sleeved robot t-shirt from Archie’s dresser drawer and brought it with me back to my room.

When he finished showering with his father I rubbed Archie’s skin with handfuls of thick lotion, then helped him lie back so I could affix his diaper into place. After I pulled his sweatpants up around his waist, I slipped the shirt over Archie’s head. He looked at it and then exclaimed, “Oh! There’s a robot on my shirt!”

This evening I’ll write here that Archie sleeps in the dark comfortably because he knows his own heart, because he has what it takes to confidently pick his own way through it all. It turns out that Archie is everything I always hoped he would be both because of me and in spite of me. What luck. He’s raising me right, that boy of mine.

Posted by: anne
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Categories:
Archie
Jack
Kit
Morning with the Moores