Homework

Everyone is busying themselves with all kinds of work around here. It goes without saying that my husband is overwhelmed with research, writing assignments, study group meetings, and searching for a summer internship. We're beginning to resort to chat sessions over the internet to communicate. I'm actually relieved when I don't see him. I know he's more productive in the library than surrounded by the chaos and insanity that is our home.

The baby has been on a tear. In fact, she puts the tear in terror. On Saturday morning, she climbed up onto a kitchen stool, hoisted herself onto the kitchen table, pried the plastic wrap off my banana bread and helped herself to a chunk. We do feed this child, despite what you may be tempted to think. Later that morning, she pulled the tablecloth off the table and sent the cereal and milk flying everywhere. On Sunday, she was pulling books off the shelves and tearing the pages out. She was also climbing onto furniture to grab scissors, pencil sharpeners, and pens. This afternoon she scribbled all over the couch with a ballpoint pen.

My son, on the other hand, requires attention of a different sort. How's your homework coming along? Is my new mantra. "Oh, yeah, I forgot" is his. Have you gotten dressed yet? Have you brushed your teeth? Have you finished eating yet?

"Oh, yeah, I forgot."

Sunday mornings are his piano lessons, and if I may say so myself, we have a budding virtuoso in the works. We'll have to get over this focusing issue before we start our Carnegie Hall debut, but I am praying this spacey, dawdling, lost-in-la-la-land thing is just a passing phase. Two hours before the piano lesson began I gave him a friendly reminder: time to get dressed for piano! For the next two hours, I was at it again: are you dressed yet? Have you had breakfast yet? Have you brushed your teeth yet? Shoes and socks! Shoes, dear! Don't forget to brush! Ad nauseum. And despite the two hour allotment, and the constant reminders, we still had to rush out the door to get to his lesson on time.

My ballerina is in attention limbo in our house. She's caught between the baby who requires constant surveillance to prevent permanent damage to body and breakables, and the big brother who needs steady redirection to get anything done. For the most part, she manages well. She is content with a sheet of paper and crayons. However, on this particular Sunday, she was feeling deprived, and demanded a complete and in depth appraisal of each work of art she produced over the course of the day.

She produced several.

I would have loved to jog back and forth all day long pulling the baby off lighting fixtures, admiring the Jacksonesque quality of my daughter's "Still life with twistable crayons" series, and dragging my son back to his Hebrew homework, but, alas, Sunday is laundry day, and the mountain of discarded attire couldn't wait. Nor could the Shabbat dishes that had piled up.

With 15 degree temperatures outside, what else was I going to do? So, I did it all. Some of it I did simultaneously: holding the squirming demon child in one hand, admiring a fanciful doodle in the other hand, and helping correct Hebrew grammar with the other hand. I was super mom on Sunday.

Before you admire my multitasking abilities too greatly, I have to point out that I was not smiling. This was no June Cleaver moment. And I wasn't quiet about my displeasure, either. In my own, small way, I was contributing to the chaos in the house that was preventing my thoroughly stressed out husband from studying. I could tell that he was afraid to abandon me in my time of need, but at the same time, he had too much of his own work to do to help me in any meaningful way other than occasionally bellowing,

"Listen to your mother!"

In a rare moment of selflessness, I sent him to the library.

In times of great desperation, salvation comes in many different forms. My second grader had two weeks to write a whole book on a tree of his choice in Hebrew. I spent a year in Israel twenty years ago. My Hebrew is enough to get me into trouble, and almost good enough to get me out of it again. But it's not great. My son stumped me several times over the course of working on his assignment. I called my Israeli friends back home and left countless messages on their answering machines. No one answered and we were stumped. The word "place" in Hebrew is masculine, but when plural, it uses the feminine form. What about the adjectives used to describe it? And when using a color in its adjectival form in the plural, what vowels does one use? My son and I debated, and finally shrugged. We didn't know.

There was a knock on the front door. I peered through the peep hole. A man in a blue uniform with a clipboard stood admiring the Hebrew welcome sign my daughter had made in Nursery school. I opened the door a crack and he smiled.

"It's nice to see Hebrew in Chicago." I thought he was joking. This neighborhood has the largest concentration of Jews outside of New York and Los Angeles. Most people are relieved to see English around here.

The gentleman, an employee of the local gas company, came to sign us up for some gas company something or other, and serendipitously, to help us with Hebrew homework. He was just beginning to explain that he was born in Israel when my son came running across the room to ask another impossible question:

"Mevarchim brachot, so is it hu or hee?"

I looked at the gas man, he smiled at my son, and I signed away at the dotted line. Whatever it was he was selling, it was clear that he was sent by some higher power to bring much needed assistance.

Not all of our homework is so challenging or stressful. My daughter has begun to prepare in earnest for her ballet recital, and the teacher has asked me to practice with her at home. She's in the front row, so she has to have the routine down cold for the other girls to follow. Everyday we stand tall, arms akimbo, practicing our "shuffle step, shuffle step, sway, sway, sway, sway", or as my daughter calls it: "shovel step, shovel step, swaig, swaig, swaig, swaig." The baby is practicing, too. She has her "fuffle pep"s down, and her "wey, wey, wey"s are too cute to imagine. By June, the three of us are going to be ready for Broadway. Or at least, Sesame Street.

Sundays are when I really feel the distance from my family. Back home, the kids generally spent the day with their grandparents, and my husband and I got things done, or just relaxed. That reprieve that lasted anywhere from a couple of hours to a whole day was just what we needed to maintain a level of serenity in our lives.

But salvation comes in different forms, sometimes odd or unexpected, sometimes familiar. On Tuesday, my parents are coming for a visit. My sister and her husband are coming on Friday.

I'm already feeling more serene.