Kelly Poe Wilson

When I first told my mother that we had decided on the name “Clementine” for our first child, her response was immediate: “Oh, no,” she said. “You can’t name her Clementine: when I was growing up we had an ironing lady named Clementine, and one time we caught her in the kitchen drinking Scotch and milk.” As you probably know by now, I didn’t take my mother’s advice; if anything, her story made me more determined than ever to name my daughter Clementine, or, as I told my mother, “You had me at Scotch.”

However, even though the Scotch and milk part has proven to be the most interesting part of the story, it has not (of yet) been the part that has been the most relevant; as enchanting as the whole idea of Scotch and milk is, the part that mattered was the ironing, because that is the part of the Clementine legacy that has come to haunt me.

I am not the ironing sort: so far I have never owned an iron in my life (unless of course you want to count the hot pink crimping iron I owned back in the eighties, but since that comes from the same era as Hairstyles-of-Which-We-Must-Not-Speak, I really don’t think it would be quite sporting of you to count it). I had hoped to never own one in the future, as well–but then Clementine joined he Girl Scouts.

Being a Girl Scout involves lots of things: learning fun, new skills; completing exciting projects; and going on interesting field trips–all of which, it seems, entitle the girl in question to a patch. An iron-on patch. At first it didn’t seem so bad: a patch here, a patch there–I just put them aside into a “to be done later” pile while I continued to encourage Clementine in her patch-earning spree; after all, earning patches is fun, isn’t it?

Eventually, however, Clementine began to notice that as the other girls’ vests started filling up with patch after patch, hers was still a barren wasteland frequented only by her lone (pin-on)star. After a meeting where the other mothers began to talk about ordering bigger vests so that they would have room for all of the patches, and where Clementine looked like a Quaker in a room full of Las Vegas showgirls, I finally decided it was time for me to bite the bullet: it was time for me to iron.

At this point, some people would have decided to buy an iron; I, on the other hand, decided to call up one of my friends with a real job: I figured that the same friend I had gone to for help in tying Clementine’s Gryffindor tie for her Hermione costume would probably also be the one most likely to own an iron. My theory was that while some of the boys were taken aside and shown how to get the motor oil out from underneath their fingernails with a pen knife, others (like my friend) were shown the dual arts of ironing and tie tying.

It turns out that I was correct. Unfortunately, however, I took the third career track: hanging out with the English teachers in the break room. This gave me no usable skills whatsoever–not mechanical, and not professional, which would explain how I managed to kill the iron.

Well, kind of explains it: it is a little hard to come up with a plausible explanation for someone with two degrees attempting to iron something sticky side up. The two degrees did, however, come in handy for figuring out that this was 1) not going to work and 2)was very, very bad for both irons and friendships.

Perhaps the Girl Scouts could update their friendship song to reflect this: “Make new friends, but keep the old–and don’t let Kelly Poe borrow your iron under any circumstances.”

The other day I was at the pool with both my own children and several of the “spares” we always seem to collect, when one of the spares came up to me holding what I consider to be one of the most sinister items you can find at the pool: a pair of swim goggles.

“Would you fix my goggles?” he asked me.

Recoiling slightly from the proffered pair, I hissed: “I don’t do goggles,” as nicely as I could–which wasn’t very, considering that I was refusing to do something that every other mother at the pool had probably already done twenty times each that morning. This fact was not wasted on the child in front of me: looking around at all of the other goggle-fixing mothers, he gave me a baleful stare and again thrust the goggles under my nose, at which point I shrugged my shoulders and made a face as if to say “no-speaka-da-lingo” until he finally went away. This, of course, was all a lie: I know perfectly well what goggles are; if I didn’t, how could I hate them so thoroughly?

Well, that’s not exactly true, either: I don’t hate them; in fact, I even have my own pair that I use for lap swimming. What I hate, though, is everything that accompanies a pair of goggles: the constant losing, finding, fixing, adjusting, putting on and removing that is part and parcel of any pair of child’s goggles. In fact, each pair that is sold should come with a warning label that reads in part: Caution–please note that these goggles will consume at least thirty percent of your available time at the pool. Since there will be a further thirty percent lost to the application and reapplication of sun screen, as well as thirty percent dedicated solely to the inflation and retrieval of pool toys, and twenty percent spent in escorting children to and from the bathroom (and since these numbers add up one hundred and ten percent of your available time), we highly recommend that you also purchase one of our other fine products, such as extra strength aspirin, to compliment them.

Of course, it’s not as if goggles are unique in the world of children’s play equipment for their time-consuming qualities: nearly every piece of equipment (or, as I like to think of it, effluent), that accompanies a child’s activities requires constant adjustment and upkeep on the part of the parent to keep it in working order. The space shuttle itself doesn’t require as much maintenance and inspection as your average pair of shin guards.

First, the item in question must be watched constantly, lest it slip from this plane of existence the very morning it is needed. Next, it must be tied, strapped, hooked or hung on the appropriate child, a task only slightly more difficult than putting a dress on a greased pig. Finally, the fit must be continually adjusted to assure that it is not too tight, too loose, too dangly, too bulky, too uncomfortable–in short, so that it feels as if it does not actually exist. This is true whether the item is a pair of shin guards, a violin shoulder rest, a baseball hat or the belt of a karate ghi.

There is a difference, however, between all of the above mentioned pieces of equipment and a pair of swim goggles: the swim goggles are optional. And so, I opt out. I don’t do goggles. As far as I’m concerned, whatever goes on between a child and their private pair of goggles–hair-pulling, lens fogging, strap breaking, even abandonment–is their own business; I would no sooner get between a child and a pair of goggles than I would between Paris Hilton and a video camera.

Now there’s someone who could use her goggles adjusted.

Driving past Harkins a few weeks ago, I saw a woman standing on the sidewalk holding up a homemade sign that proclaimed: “Jesus would not approve.” Well of course he wouldn’t approve I thought to myself, who would approve of them remaking the greatest big-ship-gets-flipped-over-by-rogue-wave story ever told? After all, once you’ve witnessed the immortal Ernest Borgnine holding back tears as Shelly Winters’ lifeless body floats past the porthole, where is there to go but down? And then, unfortunately, it dawned on me: the lone Harkins protester probably wasn’t protesting the remake of The Poseidon Adventure; she was protesting The Da Vinci Code. I say unfortunately, because her protest meant that I now felt obligated to go see it, and there are few movies that I would less rather see: remember, we’re talking about a movie here that is based on a book that has been described by some critics as being like “eavesdropping on a conversation between two drunk sorority girls”. But no matter: once I saw that Jesus sign I just had to go: it’s an atheist thing.

I’ve been an atheist since I was eleven. And, before you ask, it wasn’t anything traumatic that happened to me at age 11 that inspired my atheism: it was a chance encounter with a volume of works by Voltaire that did it. Well, actually it was a not-so-chance encounter, seeing as how this particular book was just one of the many books my grandfather would often slip me on my way out of his door. (His habit of slipping me books by authors as diverse as Voltaire, P.G. Wodehouse and Edgar Rice Burroughs taught me more than all the lectures he could have ever delivered: he could literally speak volumes without ever saying a word).

One book I’m sure that he never would have slipped me, however (even if it had been written at the time) was The Da Vinci Code; as a scientist he would have been appalled by both the tenuous connections Dan Brown makes and his overt use of religious symbolism. Not to mention the fact that as an avid reader he would have been appalled at the cheesy writing. On second thought, however, maybe The Da Vinci Code is exactly the kind of book he would’ve slipped me: if killer albino monks aren’t enough to put you off your religion, than I don’t know what is. Not that I think he was trying to put me off of religion when he slipped me the Voltaire; he was just trying to open my eyes to other possibilities, which is exactly what he did.

This is something I have been trying to keep in mind lately as I watch Clementine on her spin through the worlds’ religions. So far, she has been a Buddhist, a Hindu and, judging from the state of her hair, a Rastafarian. She has also been through a Christian phase whereby she would drop to her knees and pray over dead animals, plants and bugs. (I tell myself it was Christian only because I like to ignore the fact that the over-the-top melodrama of it all clearly screamed “Scientologist”).

Recently she has begun to claim that she, too, is an atheist, but somehow I still doubt it: her love of ghost stories alone places her commitment to a supernatural-free lifestyle in question. If anything, she is (shudder) an agnostic. Truthfully, though, whatever belief system she eventually arrives at will be ok with me–even something as wishy-washy as agnosticism–as long as it makes her happy and allows her unfettered access to her dreams. Of course, hopefully her dreams won’t involve standing outside of movie theaters holding up cardboard signs protesting the latest Tom Hanks movie. Unless he is doing a remake of The Towering Inferno. Then I’m with her all the way.

When I was a child we used to talk about the worst form of torture we had ever heard of: the Chinese Water Torture (they mentioned it once on an episode of Wild, Wild West, which I watched religiously every day after school; I was enamored of the sidekick, Artemus Gordon. I always went for the sidekicks; they just seemed like they would be so grateful). Anyway, even though this torture was reputed to be the most heinous torture in all the world, I’ll admit that even after hearing it described so evocatively by none other than Artemus himself it never really sounded all that impressive to me. (Although this could be because I grew up in Phoenix, and therefore found it almost impossible to conceive of anything unpleasant about having some lovely, cool water dripping on your head.) I mean, really, what would be so bad about a little water dripping somewhere, even if that somewhere was your forehead? Surely you could just ignore it and concentrate on something else, like maybe learning enough Chinese to ask your torturers to please knock it off? Then I had kids and discovered that when it comes to the truly most heinous torture in all the world, the Chinese Water Torture isn’t even in the running. The truth is, nothing beats the Childhood Nasal Torture.

This is the torture everyone must endure who is within hearing distance of a child with a runny nose. It is also known as the Snuffleufugus Effect. You hear it in the middle of the night. Sniff. Sniff. You hear it while they’re watching TV. Sniff. Sniff. You hear it at the dinner table, from inside the bathroom, from outside on the swings. Sniff. Sniff. Finally, when you can’t stand to hear it anymore, you explode into a frenzy of “Oh, for the love of God! Please just go and blow your nose!” Which they do. Weakly. Feebly. As if the Kleenex contained some tiny and beautifully precious little city that they must not, under any circumstances, disturb. Pfiffle goes their pathetic little blow, and then maybe 30 seconds pass in peace before it begins again. Sniff. Sniff.

When this trait first emerged in my children I blamed my husband. This, after all, is a man who is so fastidious about his own nose that he refuses to even pick it: if I point out a small extrusion he will flutter at it ineffectively with his knuckles or shake his head about like a horse trying to catch the bit, but under no circumstances will he get in there and get to work. I, on the other hand, am so enamored with picking my nose that I once even let it get in the way of fashion–I removed not one but two nose rings in the early 90s because I didn’t like how they interfered with “the work”.

Of course, it may be my very fascination with all things nasal that has put the fear of nose blowing into my children in the first place. I’m sure that one of their earliest memories (if not the earliest) is of our trusty old big blue bulb syringe swooping down on them in the middle of the night like some kind of alien probe, eagerly sucking up all of that mucus they had worked so hard to create. (Just as I’m also sure that one of my husband’s most disturbing memories is being chased through our house by a demented woman holding a bulb full of snot and shouting “Look at it! Just look at it! Can you believe that all that came from her? I mean, look at it: it’s like half the size of her head!”).

Which leads me to what must really be the most heinous form of torture (for my husband, at least): spousal snot fixation. Sniff. Sniff.

When Dick Cheney shot a fellow hunter in the face recently, Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show” commented that it was times like those that made him feel guilty for cashing his paycheck–his job was that easy. As I walked out of our kitchen the other day, suddenly I knew exactly how he felt: standing there before me was my very own gift to column writing, my daughter, Clementine. Or perhaps I should say a reasonable facsimile of my daughter, Clementine, as the person standing before me had absolutely no eyebrows, and I was certain that the last time I had checked, my daughter did. Quite nice ones, too.

It was like stepping into a re-enactment of Pink Floyd’s The Wall: I half expected her to start singing, “Are there any queers in the audience tonight? Get them up against the wall!” When she didn’t, I went ahead and asked the question that I already knew had no answer: “Why?” As I had suspected, the answer was a shrug and a “I dunno”.

I could accept this, perhaps because as a fellow female, I, too, have made more than my share of bad fashion choices over the years: everything from fluorescent pink leg warmers, to shaving my arms, to the dreaded 1980s “schlong” haircut (short on top, long on the sides). My husband, on the other hand, was not so understanding: he seemed to take it as a personal affront. (He also failed to appreciate that, by Clementine cutting off her own eyebrows we had dodged a bullet: usually when unauthorized eyebrow excisement takes place it takes place on the faces of younger, gullible siblings–and frequently involves not just the eyebrows, but every single hair on the head. The thought that it could be a bald-headed Clyde standing before us, however, failed to mollify him).

“Why would she do that? Why?” he kept asking. I’m not sure if he was more upset with her shrugged “I dunno” or my unconcerned, “I’m sure it seemed like a good idea at the time–maybe she was hot, like Pedro from Napoleon Dynamite.”

Whether or not it was the heat that made her do it, in one sense she was like Pedro–it wasn’t long before she regretted what she had done. She didn’t exactly say this, but I got the idea when she came out of her room the next morning with a brand new set of eyebrows drawn onto her face. You’d think that, as upset as my husband had been by the eyebrow removal, he would have been happier about their reappearance, but this just wasn’t the case–if anything, he was more upset than ever. Of course, this might have had something to do with the fact that, in her enthusiasm, Clementine had given herself more than Nature had intended–much more. Now she no longer looked like Bob Geldof; she looked like Groucho Marx. Again I expected her to start quoting movie lines, only now something along the lines of: “I once shot an elephant in my pajamas. What he was doing in my pajamas I’ll never know.”

Of course, the nice thing is that it doesn’t really matter which model she follows: the Bob Geldof or the Groucho one, since both of them turned out pretty well. Geldof even managed to get himself knighted for his work with Live Aid, and although Groucho did develop some strange habits in his old age–including hanging out with Alice Cooper–at least he kept his sense of humor until the end.

Which is what, eventually, my husband regained as well–right after he saw how it looked when Clementine combined her three inches of ballpoint eyebrows with a pair of dark glasses to hide behind.

In fact, he was laughing so hard he could hardly hear her answer to his gasped out: “Why?” Maybe I dunno really was the “secret woid”.

This summer, a friend and I are planning to split childcare: I’ll take them in the morning; he’ll have them in the afternoon. Even though we have very different parenting styles (and both think that the other one is completely wrong), I was actually thinking that everything was going to work out just fine–that is, until we got on to the subject of playing, and the fact that, I don’t.

It all came up when we were discussing strategies for what to do during swimming lessons: because the children are all at different levels, their lessons will be at different times throughout the morning. The question that arose was: what to do with the non-swimming children while the swimmers are in the pool?

My answer was: nothing. There is a perfectly lovely playground on one side of the pool; even better, there’s a perfectly unlovely ditch on the other side of it, full of all sorts of broken glass, dead animals and flood-mangled garbage; in short, child heaven. His answer, on the other hand, was that I should bring a ball. “A ball? What for?” I asked, thinking that the only possible use for a ball would be as a weapon to drive the children back into the playground/ditch whenever they came out chanting their “I’m bored” mantra, and, realistically, to repel a revolt like that I would need a whole lot more than just one lousy ball (luckily, this ditch also comes well-supplied with rocks).

He, however, was obviously thinking something completely different:“To play with them,” he said. “Otherwise, what’s the point of having you watch them?” I considered telling him that the point was for me to make sure that they only lit one M-60 at a time, didn’t run with my good scissors, and didn’t get ripped off too badly by the local drug dealers (“You paid what? For that?”), but instead I confined myself to one raised eyebrow, my best “have we met?” look, and a clearly enunciated, “I-don’t-play.” The problem with that answer, though, was that technically it was not strictly true: I do play, but only on my own terms.

For example: I love playing board games that don’t involve the Gumdrop Forest; croquet when the main objective is to knock everyone else’s ball off of the field; and even a nice game of “horse” on the basketball court (it gives me a chance to show off my deadly “reverse granny” shot). However, my love for all those games is confined to the times when I am the one who actually wants to play them, and not when they are demanded of me by some child complaining about being bored.

I think that boredom is underrated. As adults we sometimes lose sight of this, perhaps because we confuse it with tedium, a condition we encounter so often either in our jobs or in unfulfilling tasks such as standing in line at the DMV. It is tedium, therefore, that we think we are rescuing our children from whenever we answer their complaints of boredom with x-boxes and playdates, which is really too bad, because true boredom is as rare as it is wonderful. It is the catalyst that is needed to invent all the truly great games of childhood, the ones that send you limping into the house at the end of the day with mysterious bruises and sworn blood oaths “not to tell”; the games that can only exist in the vacuum of adult interference and structured “play activities” (unless, of course, the adult who is structuring these activities happens to be Courteney Love).

It is boredom that leads to the kind of games that are dangerous, shocking, and profane, the ones that test their participants to their utmost limits. In other words, the very best possible sort. Good luck getting all that out of a ball.

It starts in the afternoon.

“I’m starving” says Clementine. “When’s dinner?”

“Dinner?” I reply. “It’s 4:30 in the afternoon–what are you, ninety?”

“No–I’m starving.”

“Have an apple.”

Clementine eyes the proffered apple with a suspicion not seen since the Garden of Eden, and responds with, “No, I want something that tastes good.”

“Then you’re certainly not starving; you’re not even hungry. Go away.”

“But I am hungry; I’m starving.”

And suddenly I find myself in a dilemma: the part of me that is a mother is annoyed that Clementine is pestering me for dinner at 4:30 in the afternoon; the part of me that is a writer, however, is annoyed at her poor word choice. Couldn’t she have found a word with a little more pizzaz than starving? For a word like famished I might have gotten out of my seat; peckish would have probably sent me all the way to the kitchen. But starving? What a bore.

For a brief moment the writer and the mother tussle over who has jurisdiction, then decide to compromise on a joint lecture involving the proper use of the word starving and the proper appreciation for the food we have. Both sides agree to make it a long, tedious discussion involving the unfortunate Donner party, South American soccer teams, and eating your own shoes; there will also be brief segues into leather versus manmade materials and the inadvisability of either taking shortcuts on the advice of strange men in Salt Lake City or picking your charter pilot based on price alone. This means that by the time I am finished it actually is time to start dinner, which is good, because all of my lecturing about cannibalism seems to have had an unforeseen effect: Clementine is looking at me as if maybe the idea of eating people isn’t so bad after all–at least then I would no longer be able to give lectures on the proper use of starving–or worse yet, on my other bugaboo: there’s nothing to eat.

Of the two, I must say that the there’s nothing to eat whine is the slightly more annoying: whereas I’m starving usually just follows a bit of vaguely entertaining melodrama of the sort perfected by listless 19th century consumptive heroines, there’s nothing to eat usually follows an exhaustive, yet maddeningly fruitless search through the cupboard and fridge. (Maddening because we’re not talking about the cupboard and fridge of some crack house here, where the only things to be found are the canned candied yams left over from the Thanksgiving food box and half a pack of AAA pager batteries, but my cupboard and fridge, both of which are usually so overstocked with food that it’s sometimes hard to get the doors to close.)

I once read a story about a little girl left home alone for days who somehow survived by eating the condiments out of the fridge: heaven forbid anything similar should happen at my house; not only do I not think my picky children would survive, I have serious reservations about my husband’s ability to pull through as well–he is as guilty as all of the rest of standing in front of a bulging cupboard and chanting the there’s nothing to eat mantra. (By eat, of course, they are all referring to something that can go from cabinet to mouth in under three seconds.)

Maybe I should make it easy for them and start stocking the fridge with nothing but old shoes and Uruguayan soccer players–at least then when they say they’re starving and there’s nothing to eat they’ll be right on both counts.

Of all the things I complain about in the world of housekeeping, laundry has never been one of them. In this I know that I am slightly unusual–cavils about the horrors of the laundry pile; husbands never leaving the couch; and never having enough time in the day are all supposed to be staples of “domestic wit”. The truth is, though, there’s always enough time for the things we really want to do (how many time-starved individuals do you know who can still give you an up-to-date recap of the latest installation of Lost or 24?); the husband-on-the-couch bit hasn’t been funny since Dagwood was a boy; and any laundry day that doesn’t involve loading the laundry onto a car/bike/backpack and schlepping it, along with several bored children, down to the local Laundromat (where, inevitably you will arrive just after either the woman who has come in from the reservation with a literal truckload of her family’s wash, or a college freshman with such highly advanced OCD that he must–must!–dry all of his clothes separately in individual dryers before folding them with military precision) qualifies as a good laundry day.

As you can see, the horrors of the Laundromat are still fresh enough for me that, far from being overwhelmed by laundry duty these days, I treat it as another chance to give my beloved washing machine a little love pat and reflect on all of those poor people sitting on hard plastic chairs watching their clothes spin ‘round and ‘round.

However, having said all that, I must admit that there is one aspect of laundry duty that I despise, and one that, until I had children, I didn’t even know existed: the concept of laundry as maid service. This is the phenomenon whereby, instead of either: hanging up the clothes that have managed to slither off of their hangers; re-stowing the ones that have inadvertently “sprung free” of their drawer or even putting away that pile of freshly laundered, neatly folded clothes your mother just handed you, you instead simply dump all of the aforementioned clothes back into the laundry basket, thereby affording yourself a few days grace before those particular items must be faced again. (The best part of this trick is that it can be performed over and over–or at least until your mother finally catches on–whichever comes first.)

It took me a long time to figure this one out; sure, I noticed that I was washing the same clothes over and over again every week, but since I’m the type of person who gets a favorite pair of pants and then literally “wears them out”, this didn’t seem so peculiar to me. It was only when I noticed that none of the clothes I was washing ever seemed to make an appearance on the child in question that I got suspicious; that and the fact that Clementine slipped up once and forgot to throw the clothes on her floor and trample them first: even I will notice a pile of folded clothes in the laundry. The clincher, though, came when I pulled a pair of pants out of the dryer that still had their price tag attached.

I’m not saying that my Clementine is above pulling her own “Minnie Pearl”; however, considering that this is the same child who once refused to wear any t-shirts from which the label hadn’t been meticulously removed, I think the chances of her actually wearing a pair of pants with a tiny plastic spear in the waistband are slim to none.

Of course, after I found the incriminating pants I was tempted to make her wear them that way all the time as a lesson, but then I decided on a better method: next laundry day I think I’ll let her do the honors–at a Laundromat conveniently located halfway between the university and the reservation.

I never thought that I would end up as a soccer Mom: not only do I have a hatred of driving that borders on the pathological (hence, no minivan), I also am incapable of providing anyone–let alone my children–with a pair of matching socks, something which, in the soccer world they seem to be particularly insistent upon; not only do they want matching socks, but matching soccer socks to boot. (Personally, I consider any day that my kids show up for school and/or day care with their feet encased in something other than duct tape and brown paper bags to be a roaring success.) However, mini-vans and matching socks notwithstanding; the truth is that once my kids got old enough to make the request, we, too, joined the hordes at the local soccer field. Which is where I first realized that the thing I should really have been worrying about all along was not the socks, but the snacks.

It wasn’t long after Clementine first started playing that I discovered Micro Soccer’s dirty little secret: the whole thing is actually a front set up by the juice box and cereal bar companies to move more product. It’s true, and although I’ve never actually seen the head of Micro driving around in a new car courtesy of Capri-Sun, such a sight wouldn’t surprise me in the least, just like it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that the entire Micro Soccer staff had just returned from an all-expenses paid junket “touring” the granola bar producing regions of southern France.

Luckily, with Clementine, we were able to get off the wheel of snack destiny by promising her that if she quit Micro we would buy her all the juice boxes she could ever drink, and then using our parental perquisites to renege on the deal. (Oh, come on–it’s not like she was enjoying it: she spent every game rolling around on the sidelines crying at the mere thought of having to touch the ball–until snack time, that is, when she would be magically revived). With her little brother Clyde, however, this is no longer an option: he actually likes to play.

Not that that precludes him from thinking constantly about the snacks, a trait he seems to share with every other member of his team: during an average thirty minute game the parent who has brought snack may have to hear “What’s for snack?” at least 130 million times before the end. In fact, the last time I was the “Snack Mom” I finally snapped and began responding with: “Pickled pig’s feet and Clamato, alright?” Unfortunately, very few five-year-olds have spent enough time in seedy bars to fully grasp the true horror of what I was saying, and so continued to pester me about their “pig snack”.

Clearly, though, the other Moms had (spent enough time in seedy bars), and no doubt began to wonder whether or not I was seriously going to poison their children. This gave me a great idea: what would happen if you brought a snack so horrible that no one would eat it? Would you be released from bringing snack for life, or would your turn repeat over and over again until you “got it right”? (Kind of like the Buddhist idea of returning over and over again to the wheel of suffering until you have learned life’s lessons).

And even assuming that banishment really was an option, how bad would the snack have to be? Although I have heard of teams that have forbidden a mother from bringing snack after she brought organic apple slices instead of Cheetos, I have a feeling that the mothers on Clyde’s team wouldn’t give me a pass for anything short of Skoal Bandits and double short shot macchiatos.

And I’ve heard that nothing will get tobacco stains out of a pair of soccer socks.

Not too long ago I had the chance to appreciate my family from afar, which, as anybody who has ever had to share a bed with an incontinent four-year-old can tell you, is the best possible way to appreciate them. One night, after I had been gone for several days, I was talking to my daughter, Clementine, on the phone. I don’t know what I was expecting from her–maybe: “I miss you”; “When are you coming home?”; or even, “Don’t forget to bring me a present”–instead, what I got (as my husband held the phone to her ear and tried to block her view of America’s Next Top Model long enough for her speak to me) was: “Could you, the next time you go to the store, get me some sunflower seeds? Thanks.”

At first I was confused: did she think I had gone to Kansas, or that maybe I was off trying out for the major leagues? She couldn’t really be burning up the long distance lines with her snack requests–could she? As it turns out, yes, she could; any doubts I may have had on that score were removed after I gently reminded her that at that moment I was approximately 1400 miles away from our local Bashas’ and she replied with: “Yeah, get the ones out of the shell.” And then she hung up.

I don’t know why it was surprising to me that I could be gone from the house for three days without her noticing my absence; after all, as far as I can tell she has never fully recognized my presence. Although, it’s not so much that she doesn’t recognize my existence: the sunflower seed request proves that she is aware, at least on some level, of that. What is, in fact, in doubt is my visibility: to Clementine I am largely invisible. (Yes, I realize that in this she is no different from any other nine-year-old, but being completely normal doesn’t take away from invisibility’s sting.)

I can’t say for sure when exactly it was that I turned invisible (although I know that if Clementine was asked she would insist it happened that time I was driving her and her friends to the movies and started singing along to Prince’s “Kiss”–complete with all the kissing sound effects). I was fairly sure, however, that my status was somewhat in limbo after the third time she changed the channel from Law & Order to Ugly Duckling without even an “oh, were you watching that?”; or maybe it was after the fifth time she set her empty cereal bowl down on top of the paper I was trying to read. By the time she led her first group tour through the bathroom while I was still on the toilet, my position as a non-entity was confirmed.

Not that my life on an alternate plane of existence is all bad: sometimes my invisibility pays off, like when I’m driving her and her friends somewhere and I hear her talking from the backseat. “Remember how we broke all of those dishes last night and then blamed my brother, and my mom believed us and punished him instead? That was great.” Or when she tries to sneak contraband cheetos past me and into her room while I’m sitting two feet away on the couch.

In my more romantic moments I could feel like I’m the Patrick Swayze character in Ghost, always lovingly present but never seen. In my less romantic moments I still feel like a character in Ghost, only it’s the annoying one played by Whoopi Goldberg. The one who Demi Moore, by dint of sheer willpower, manages to ignore for most of the movie; except maybe for those times when Demi needs someone to run out to the store to pick up some sunflower seeds–the ones out of the shell.