When I was growing up, my mother used to lose her keys
constantly. She would cry and say, “I’m such an idiot.” My father
was never very sympathetic about it. One night, when I was around seven
years old, my mother had a new gig directing a choir in town that was thirty
minutes away from our house. After dinner, she was getting ready to
leave, but she could not find her keys.
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| "Drink
me" plus keys |
“I’m such a stupid idiot,” she said.
“You have to learn to put them back in one place,” my father
said.
“Please can I borrow your keys?” she begged him.
“No,” he said. “You have to learn to keep them in one
place.”
My mother search the house some more. Soon she was
frantic, pulling out drawers and sliding books and other objects off of tables.
“Please!” she said to my father. “I’m going to be
late.”
“You have to learn to keep them in one place.”
“My mother started crying. In my family, the women,
they don’t cry softly. They wail. And the wailing is contagious.
Once my mother started wailing, my sister would join in. That night, my
mother and my sister wailed on one side of the living room while my dad stood
across from them, shaking his head. I sat a bit off to the side. I
did not contract the wailing until later in life. That evening, I did not wail
because I did not want my dad to think I was a stupid idiot. Instead I
clenched my jaw and bit my lip and scrunched up my face. My mother and my
sister were short and tiny, tinier than me even though I was the
youngest. They made up one team. The Tiny Wailers. My dad was
the other team, the Big Tall Mean Man. I was too large and too tall to be
part of the Tiny Wailers’ Team. But I wasn’t quite big enough to be part
of the Big Tall Mean Man team. Plus I didn’t think that my dad was that
mean. Not always.
A couple of weeks ago, I started working at a Montessori
school. I speak French to the three to six year old children while they
take activities off of wooden shelve and “do their work.” One of their
jobs is called “Locks and Keys.” There are three small padlocks and three
small keys of three different sizes. All the locks are closed when the
children take them out. The children have to match the keys with the
locks and unlock them. Then they can link the locks and the keys in the
chain and then unlock them again. They can do this for as long as they
want. They have to be careful not to drop the keys on the floor.
When they are done, they have to put the locks back where they found
them. In one place.
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| Locks
and Keys, for the Montessori Children |
Next to the three to six year old class, the toddlers take
things off of shelves and they do their work. Most of them are less than
two years old. They are terrible at putting things back in one
place. And they are too small to fit tiny keys into tiny locks. It
would be a choking hazard. My first day on the job, the toddler teacher
had a car problem, so I got to hang out with the almost two-year-olds.
They were very upset that their mothers were not there. One of them cried
so hard he threw up.
“Mama, Mama,” he wailed all morning. Just like in my
family, the wailing was contagious. Once one child started, another
joined in. Soon there were five almost-two-year olds wailing at the top
of their lungs. I was not Mama and so there was nothing I could do.
There was wailing all morning. At lunch time, my co-worker gave me the
keys to her car where she’d forgotten her tea. Now her head was pounding
from the wailing and the caffeine withdrawal. But the tea could not cure
the Mommy Withdrawal. Except for naptime, the children continued to
scream and cry and wail all day long.
At 5 PM, I ran out the door to catch my bus. I would
have to re-evaluate the effectiveness of the withdrawal method. There was no
way I could manage a two-year-old person for an entire year. A couple of
stops later, I saw that my co-worker had left a message on my phone. I
still had the keys to her car. They were in my pocket. I walked
back and another co-worker drove me home. As the days go by, I am growing
to really like my co-workers.
But that night I fell asleep to sound of children wailing.
And it has been a bad couple of weeks for keys. I can’t find one of
the keys to the yoga studio that I’m not teaching at much anymore. I have
the key to the door at the bottom of the stairs, but the not the top. Or
vice versa.
Part two and a half of the bad keys phase: On
Tuesday at 6:50 a.m., I radiated through the house getting ready to leave for
work. This jobs entails waking up around 4:15 for a 4:40ish start to yoga
practice. I leave the house around seven o’clock. As fate would
have it, I don't find it that difficult. It seems that I was made to wake up
early. Although by Friday, the truck of fatigue starts to hit me, most
mornings I am obnoxiously cheerful. The Boatman often makes fun of me as he
drools on his pillow.
“Bye babe, I love you,” I yelled on Tuesday morning as I
grabbed my keys. “I love you!” I repeated.
“Bye, love you” he mumbled.
At 11:30, we took the children outside for playtime.
That’s when I usually peak at my cell phone for the time and for text
messages. Four missed calls from the Boatman. “Did I have his
keys?” he’d asked. He’d looked everywhere. His dad had to drive him
to work. I looked in my pocket. I had two sets of keys.
Every time something happens with my keys, I remember that
night in the living room. My mother and my sister wailing on one side and
my father on the other. In the end, my father relented and lent my mother
her keys. But first he tied them to a frying pan with a piece of string.
I immediately called the Boatman’s keys, as the bigger kids
slid down the hills and the little kids wailed at my feet, calling for their
mothers.
“I’m so sorry babe,” I said to his voice mail. “I’ll
pick you up from work.” Probably he would never talk to me again.
I texted him with profuse apologies and the promise to pick
him up for work.
It’s okay, babe, he wrote back. I can get a
ride home.
And that was all. No frying pans. No wailing.
And when you pick the children up and point at the sky where the moon is
supposed to be, sometimes they stop screaming.
The End.
This post was supposed to have an Alice in Wonderland
reference, but it got cut. I love Alice in Wonderland. When Alice in
Wonderland gets to the bottom of the rabbit hole, she finds herself in a
curious corridor full of locked doors. She wants to go through a tiny
door behind a curtain that leads to a beautiful garden. On a glass table
in the curious hallway, she finds a key. The key opens the tiny door to the
garden, but Alice is too big to fit through. She closes the door and goes
back to the table where but the door is so tiny that she cannot fit
through. She is way too big. Back at the glass table she finds a
bottle labelled “Drink me.” Maybe she was thinking, “What the hell, it’s
wonderland.” In any case, whatever was in the bottle made her shrink so that
she could fit through the door to the garden. Too bad she’d left the key
on the glass table and the door was locked. Now she was back where she
started, but smaller. So she starts to cry a little before seeing a cake
that says “EAT ME” and eating it. Then she grows to nine feet tall and
she can reach the key again, but the door is nine feet below. So she
starts to cry a whole bunch and her tears make an ocean that all of the animals
swim in. I thought that this was interesting. Being the wrong size
to fit through the door and/or not being able to find your keys. Plus eating
and drinking things to solve your problems. I like that part.
Interesting. Curious.
End of abridged section.
