this woman’s work

We’re trying to rearrange my work space.

I work in an actual cubicle. It’s a metal and leaded glass affair more at home on the set of Mad Men than in our basement but it came with the house. There are three panels behind me and a panel to the right. My desk is in the corner made by one outside cinderblock wall and one inside cinderblock wall that separates the kid-friendly side of the basement from the less kid-friendly side of the basement. It gives me a small rectangle with an opening at one of the shorter ends about half the size of that end.

My cubicle is about the size of the one Brett used to work in. It holds my desk (corner desk), a filing cabinet, a bookshelf and two office chairs. It gets crowded. Right now the floor has a space heater (the cement floor gets COLD), a giant shredder, my trashcan, a box of already-reviewed books, a box of yet-to-review books, a small table with a second printer (because Brett hooked a second one for reasons known only to him) and an industrial-sized box of envelopes. Oh and the bass to my speakers.

It’s not an environment that is always conducive to work. Besides the clutter, the lighting sucks. But work I do because the work needs to get done whether my space invites it or not.

I work while the kids either watch television (used sparingly unless I’m on tight deadline and then we gorge) or play — the little one generally needs to be and wants to be on the same floor I’m on. The environment outside my office is usually trashed. Right outside my cubicle is one of those spongy streetmap rugs (the kind that come in giant puzzle pieces) where Madison plays with her cars and Little People houses. (These are the old Fisher-Price houses with the newer 1•2•3 Playmobil people. It’s a combination that works.) I usually step on at least one car when leaving my work area. Next to that rug is my elliptical trainer. Ahead of that is a very nice preschool-sized table (we bought it from a church sale and it’s sturdy as all get out. It was also five bucks). This is where Madison does her art. Needless to say, that’s an ongoing mess because she has several ongoing projects.

Ahead of THAT (we have a big basement — this is just the kids’ half) is a rug and a sort of a living room. Couch, television, shelves with more toys, shelves with lots of books. (My grown-up books are in a shelf next to the old elliptical trainer, which is right behind the new elliptical trainer. This puts the old elliptical trainer behind my cubicle.)

Ok. So. There are lots of things for the kids to do down here while I work — that’s the point, really. And Madison tends to do a lot and she tends to make a mess and on the last clean-up I realized she was doing things that perhaps I don’t want her to do. Like getting the playdough out and using it to make art even though playdough is expressly forbidden in the basement. And using glue to put together toys dismantled for the purpose of putting them together with glue. And unsorting all the carefully sorted toys to use them in new, interesting, against-the-instruction ways. (sigh)

This is hard for me, folks. I’ve told you before how Madison plays and that we want to encourage her creavity although without going insane if at all possible. If I had more time to clean and less work on my desk, it’d be a little easier but as it is, I can’t keep up with her messes. At this age, Noah was way ahead on putting toys away and sorting them out into the right place but my girly has the attention span of a fruitfly and helping her clean takes close supervision and constant redirection. If I’m in my cubicle, I can’t see her to redirect her.

We originally set up my office this way because 1) the cubicle walls are HEAVY and they were already here; 2) we wanted to give me some privacy to work. But I need to come out of my little hidey-hole now while still keeping things a little bit segregated just to discourage playdates and such from invading the office (and to remind the kids who live here not to touch Mommy’s piles of to-do notes).

Brett and I were down here tonight with Madison cleaning up and rediscovering more of her inventions (like most of her wooden alphabet stamps pressed into service as art, many glued to card stock and many others decorated with crayons). I was sighing and groaning and falling down aghast at the artistic destruction and Brett was equally dismayed. Madison was cheerful even when confronted with Duplos rendered unusable by having weird stuff shoved into the holes, happily tossing them into the trash.

Brett said, “Maybe we can pull the cubicle out just to widen your vantage point.” And we agreed on this and agreed to take action after he picks Noah up from Hebrew. Madison said, “Mommy, you could put your desk here, too.”

“I could,” I said. “Do you know why I want to move my desk out?”

“Why?”

“To keep an eye on you. And do you know why that might be?” (Mind you, we’ve just had several discussions about her messes and some of her less appropriate inventions.) “Do you know why I need to keep an eye on you?”

She answered, in all seriousness, “Because I have such a pretty face!”

And she does, too. That’s what saves her sometimes.

I have a cold and am hung over on generic Nyquil but I’m also on the mend so the hangover is worth it. Luckily caffeine is helping me come back to the land of the coginizant.

Pennie is coming over today. We’re driving her to the airport tomorrow to go visit her brother who is on his way back to Iraq for another tour of duty. She’ll be seeing her mom and little sister, too, so Madison is supposed to make art for them. Currently all of her art consists of letters and almost-letters. I think this is from hanging with Maya. She draws her E’s with about five lines but they’re still recognizably E’s. Also her new favorite television show is Electric Company. It almost makes me wish I believed in drilling with worksheets and flashcards so that I could force her to early achievement for my own twisted need for educational gratification! (I kid! I kid!)

So Madison is brilliant — we know that. You may remember that I’ve mentioned her ability to identify car makes and models from weird angles. One way she does it is by noticing hub caps. She can spot hub caps and say, “Hey! That’s the kind of wheels that Grandpa has! But that’s not his car!” The other day I saw an enormous gray minivan and thought it looked like ours and I said, “Hey, Madison! Isn’t that like our car?” She glanced up and said, “No, that’s a Caramel.” Sure enough, it was a Dodge Caravan.

I commented elsewhere that I was going to blog this. Madison’s maternal birth family has some interesting stuff going on. I won’t be specific in the interest of privacy but there’s some Asperger’s milling about and some ADHD and some giftedness and some left-handedness. (Pennie is left-handed and gifted.) I think all of these things are related. I think they’re all on the continuum.

Madison is left-handed, she has this weird car thing, she has a ridiculously good memory, has great verbal skills, has non-stop energy, walked before babies should ever learn to walk and she has some sensory stuff that doesn’t seem to hamper her. (She spins a lot without getting dizzy, basically. The more tired she is, the more she spins. She also has a tendency to make enormous sensory-seeking messes.)

Her sensory stuff is so much less obstructive than mine (or Noah’s). I have never had to sit with her while she had a mental breakdown over something seemingly minor the way I’ve had to with Noah. She’s much more willing to leap although she’s more cautious than I would have expected (because as a baby, she was prone to interesting adventures). Her curiosity and impulsivity does get her into trouble and I still can’t leave her alone in a room for more than ten minutes because she’s able to find tons of loopholes to our rules and discover new and improved ways to make a mess. Like I never had to stop Noah from writing on a table but I’ve had to stop her many times — a crayon, after all, is different than a marker or a pencil and she’s been curious about how all of them work on our formica tabletop.

The other day she was talking to me about something while she was holding a marker and as she was talking, I saw her eyes bore in on the back of the chair she was sitting in and then she leaned in and began to scribble. She startled when I stopped her. She just wasn’t thinking and that’s pretty typical for her.

Our Madison survival tactics are centered on finding things she CAN destroy in the interest of science. She started to put stickers on our hardwood floor to make them pretty and I stopped her and redirected her to her train table instead — stuff like that. Our train table is now beautiful with stickers. But she’s more clever than I am so I’m often too late to this stuff. It just wouldn’t occur to ME to unravel the toilet paper roll to get the cardboard inners and then unroll that and tear it into tiny pieces to see if they stick to the mirror while wet. See, I never made a rule about it because it never occurred to me.

(When I found her, she was standing with her pants still around her ankles, dreamily humming to herself while the water pooled all over the counter top and the mirror dripped with the soggy cardboard.)

Madison is always dismayed when she discovers that she’s done something wrong; her intentions are inevitably good. In fact, she’s so upset when reprimanded that I’ve had to reiterate that she’s two or three or four or whatever age she is when the mess/crisis happens and that she’ll be better about following rules as she gets older.

“I am here to remind you,” I tell her. “I get frustrated — that’s why I get mad. But I know you’re only two/three/four, too. Next time you’ll know not to do this.”

You know what else I think is interesting? She loves to mix stuff up — she loves to add water to everything. But she also likes to make stuff pretty (thus the wet cardboard on the mirror). And Pennie is, of course, studying to be a chef. I think when you take a scientist interested in art you very often get a chef. I wouldn’t be surprised if she followed in Pennie’s footsteps. (Truly her number one most favorite thing to do is help me bake.)

I’ve mentioned before that she likes to find new and bizarre ways to use regular toys. Last year I talked to someone I knew in early childhood education (ECE) about it because I wanted to know the roots of it. I mean, I wanted to know why she was more prone to look for weird ways to use stuff than Noah was. (Not that Noah lacked for imagination — he had a very complex imaginary narrative going on most times.) The ECE person just said she was old enough to start following rules and that I ought to come down on her more to keep puzzles in the puzzle boxes and quit swiping all the toilet paper to make blankets for her babies.

I disagree with that ECE expert. I’m more interested in helping her stick to exploring and also find ways to help her explore less destructively. I don’t really care how she plays with her own toys. I don’t care if her dolls have marker on their faces to make them “beautiful” or if she cuts open a stuffed animal to see what’s inside, provided it’s her own stuffed animal. I don’t care if she take the collection of dice in the game cupboard and dumps them into a plastic stewpot filled with water to make soup. Why not? Who says dice always have to be dice? So if I come into the family room and find all the family shoes turned into beds for her babies, who’s to say that this is the wrong way to play? Obviously I’m not thrilled when the puzzle pieces get steeped in water to make tea and come out too swollen to use ever again or when I discover all of the handsoap was used up in an experiment so yeah, we’re teaching limits but limits that work for both of us because her curiosity deserves respect, too.

That just seemed like weird advice coming from an ECE expert but then I figured most ECE people learned in preschool environments where you do have to keep chaos to a minimum and you’ve got to be a little more tightly reined in. (We had a little girl like Madison in my preschool program when I taught and she was the most interesting and most frustrating of all the kids. She was got extremely fed up with all of our rules and restrictions and kept us on our toes finding bizarre loopholes.)

I’m still interested in knowing how Madison’s mind works. She’s not that different from other preschoolers I have known but she’s just more. More active, more chatty, more everything. It’s hard to explain on blog because I can’t convey her prodigious energy. You’d have to meet her. (Ask Abby. Ask Kristen, too, because she got one of these “more” preschoolers in her own house.) My mom used to say I was exaggerating until she spent an afternoon babysitting. Now she sends her home with exhausted kudos to Brett and me. Madison is like preschooler squared.

But Madison is also more cheerful; she enjoys everything absolutely. Her reactions are big and bright and happy. She’s quick to yell, quick to whine but always orients back to happy. That’s just where her set point is, you know? She’s set somewhere on happy. (I think Pennie is similar. When we talk about the stuff I write about here — my adoption worries, my transracial parenting worries, Pennie is always laughing and telling me to relax, it’s ok.) Taking Madison to any event is always gratifying because she appreciates it so much. She’s the kind who squeals and cheers on the merry-go-round. (Noah was the kid with a very serious, very stern, very concentrated expression as he went around on his pony. Or the one who got to the exciting party and burst into tears. He never did sit on Santa’s lap.)

Way back when I said I wanted a daughter like Ramona the Pest and I think I have one. I feel very blessed and just a tiny bit tired.

And no one died, burst into tears (ok Madison did once but it’s because she saw a spider) or fell down the stairs. Yes, we survived the day without Brett. It wasn’t easy — I had to make my own coffee and the children had to suffer through my Mac & Cheese, which isn’t as good as Daddy’s — but we did it.

The kids and I cleaned 3/4 of the basement, which made a pretty big difference. I also moved the bright light downstairs, leaving the living room in near darkness. But it’s worth it to know my children aren’t squinting at their toys.

Madison is a lousy cleaner having no attention span and being easily distracted by every toy we unearthed. Noah spoiled me with his focused, attentive cleaning by age four, I guess. I finally quit nagging her and just set her up out of our way since she kept tipping over piles of stuff we’d just sorted. Now she’s very happily playing with, I think, her duplos. (”No,” she says. “PLAYMOBIL!” Sorry. Missed that.)

I’m grouching about a couple of late checks — both large-ish, one spectacularly late and one the same late it is every month. I dearly wish every client would pay in a timely manner instead of making me send repeated reminders. It’s part of freelancing that I really, really don’t like but there it is. I don’t know a freelancer in the world who doesn’t contend with it.

Madison plays with things weirdly. She takes things apart and uses them upside down. She uses half of something and leaves the other half alone. She takes dry things into water and finds ways to use water things on dry land. She unstrings necklaces. She uses hats as baby carriers. She puts a puzzle together once then uses the pieces as money for another game.

This is a far cry from Noah. With Noah we used to have to hide the boxes his toys came in because he’d take one look at the kid playing on the front and tell us that this was the only way to play it. The boat had to hook up to the car because, see? That’s how the picture did it. But Madison is always willing to find a brand new way to make her play fun.

I love this creativity in her. At least now I do. I had to practice not correcting her or bugging her to let me show her the “right” way to do something. I worried about missing pieces and the way her toys get put away in a system that only makes sense to her. But see, I believe that toys are all about playing, right? So who am I to say how she should play? If she’d rather use her puzzle pieces as coins when she goes “shopping” then what do I care if she’s not putting them away in the box and instead sticking them in her cash register? Isn’t that where puzzle pieces ought to go if they’re being used as coins?

The only place I set limits is that books are books. We don’t draw in them or use them as building blocks or rip out the pages. Fortunately Madison has never had to be told this past her babyhood because she has as much respect for her books as I do. But everything else is fair game. This means that she makes some of her things — like a particular doll now sporting ballpoint pen decoration — prettier with stickers and markers. It means that her memory card game became crackers that she served to me for tea.

Letting go of my kids’ play has been a lesson I’ve had to learn more than once. From Noah’s first gun to our dismantled preschool games courtesy of Madison, I’ve had to remind myself that play is children’s work and that my kids deserve the same respect for their work that I want for my own.