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.

She’s been listening to all of our old story CDs and these I don’t mind. Her favorites last week were All Spirits Sing, which I can get behind despite the “Tise Old Wurtle” song because of the “Light Up the World” song and then The Seal Maiden, which is gorgeous with not one sour note throughout. But she wanted some new ones so I was going through a forgotten stash of Noah CDs and handed them to her. The one she’s ended up playing over and over and over is a mix CD of old rock and roll and motown that I made for Noah when he wanted to know who this Elvis person is and her favorite song is the first one: Chantilly Lace. And I’m pretty dang tired of hearing the Big Bopper go, “Hello-o-o-o-o Ba-by!”

Also she’s started saying, “I’m not going to cry anymore, Mommy, because big girls don’t cry.” So Frankie Avalon is totally undoing all the hard work of Free to Be You and Me who’s been telling her “It’s All Right to Cry” because crying takes the sad out of you.

Then yesterday she was running around the house singing about cuteness when she suddenly pointed her little finger at me, sitting innocently in the rocking chair trying to read a novel and said, “YOU’RE not cute because you are FAT!”

Well! I was, naturally, offended being to my own mind absolutely adorable as in “worthy of adoration.”

“Who says I can’t be cute AND fat?” I demanded, knowing she wasn’t sophisticated enough to answer, “The media!” so onward I went. “People can be cute and skinny, cute and short, cute and tall and they can be cute and fat.”

She looked doubtful.

“I may not be beautiful like a princess,” I said, acknowledging that there is nothing fancy about me and knowing her love of all things fancy. “But I am beautiful for my own self.” I added that many people who love me, not the least being Daddy, would argue pro-cuteness for me.

Contrite she came and kissed me and patted me and agreed that I am both beautiful and squishy, proving this by squishing me contentedly.

“Can you think of other people who are beautiful and fat?”

She thought awhile and named some people who are indeed beautiful and fat but then she said, “And Abby” only Abby isn’t fat not even by American media standards so then I realized she was using “fat” as a euphemism for “big” as in “grown” and that she brought this up because she’s been talking about things being little and cute like tiny toys, where she’ll go, “Oh that is CUTE!” So she’s not actually being size-ist so much as assuming the definition of “cute” includes “little.”

Still, seeing as how I feel fiercely protective of this girl-child’s self esteem I feel all right about coming out with both arms swinging. My girly is a paragon of beauty but the idiots who publish women’s magazines may not realize this; she’s going to need to be her own source of affirmation.

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.