I woke this morning at 4:00am to the voices of war vets in my ear. It’s an occupational hazard, particularly when you work up until bedtime. Ask any journalist and he will tell you, the worst part of the writing process is transcribing hours and hours of recorded interviews – typing word for word the conversations you had with sources. Many see the process as mundane and tedious at best, and I’m no exception. There’s nothing worse than knowing you’ve got a deadline, and ten hours of redundant busywork stands between you and the fun writing part.

But I have to admit, something sort of magical starts to happen with transcription. Inevitably, sometimes during the process but often a few hours afterward, the story starts to write itself. Much like watching a movie for a second time, or re-reading a book, you begin to see and hear things differently. After hours spent carefully listening to, rewinding and playing back as needed, each measured pause and hum whispered into your headphones, you begin to feel like you know a guy. Your brain starts to think the way he might think, your inner voice starts speaking the way he might speak. You start to hear different subtleties in his voice, or you catch meanings you didn’t infer the first time through. You start to feel like you’ve finally earned the authority to speak for him, to tell his story. It’s at that point, and only that point, that the story starts flowing from your fingertips. You almost can’t hold it in.

Problem is, if it’s the middle of the night and the voices have been percolating in the mysterious recesses of your brain for several hours, those guys will wake you up. Especially if they’re military types (she says, winking.)

Because I was awake, I heard Emma crying downstairs at 4:15am. My two-year-old champion rock-solid sleeper never cries in the night, so I knew we were in for it. Full body rash, barking cough, fever, stomach pain… The symptoms actually started last night, and our saint of a neighbor (who also happens to be a physician’s assistant) made a house call to examine her; She guesses it’s this powerful new strain of Strep that’s going around her clinic.

Dave took her to urgent care first thing this morning, so I could sit here and wrestle with the voices. Give these guys their due. Shut them up. All I really want to do is cuddle with her, though, the privilege of which I’ll have in about thirty minutes anyway. Better get typing.

Should be an interesting day.

****
addendum, 9:16am.

It’s not strep, it’s a virus. Liquids and cuddling, doctor’s orders.

The patient

[Today, in the car, on the way to Chicago.]

Gretta (age 7): This song is stupid.

Emma (age 2) whipping around to face Gretta: We don’t say stupid. [then, turning back to look out her window and sighing very deeply:] My sistaw so annoywing.

Me (age 32): We don’t say annoying.

Gretta: Mom, turn down the music, I need to read you something… “The pinkish gray Goblin Shark is as pale as a ghost. It has tiny eyes and a long flat pointed snout. Some people say it’s the world’s ugliest shark.”

Emma: We don’t say ugwy.

Gretta, continuing: “In the wild, dolphins and sharks usually leave one another alone….” Maaahm, are you LISTENING to me?

Me: Yes. Dolphins and sharks don’t kill each other.

Emma: I’M dead!

Me: Emma, we don’t say – don’t even joke. [then I catch a glimpse of her in the rearview mirror, eyes closed, tongue out.] Emma, knock it off. You’re not dead.

Emma: Yeeeaah, I IS!

Gretta, throwing down the book: Maybe we need some ice cream.

Emma: ICE CWEAM! ICE CWEAM!

Gretta: I want strawberry.

Emma: I want stupid wif cherrwies on it.

Me: EMMA!

Emma, giggling: And nuts.

Me: Oh. My. Gawd. Gretta, pick up your book and read that part back to me slowly. SLOWER!! I’m writing….

Just got this email from Dave’s stepmom detailing two conversations with my youngest last night.

to Maggie xxxxxxdate December 1, 2007, 7:57AM

subject Conversation with Emma

Me: So Emma, what do you want for Christmas?

Emma: Tandy Beor

Me: Oh, a Teddy Bear!
Emma: NO – a Tandy Beor
Me: OH – a Candy Bar – you want a candy bar for Christmas.
Emma: NO – a Teddy Bear wiff a Tandy Bar
Me: Got it.

While Davey was at the salad bar:
Me: Emma, how did you get that scratch above your eye?
Emma: A Dick at cool
Me: What? Rick at school did that to you?
Emma: No – a Dick at cool.
Me: Some boy named Dick did that to you?
Emma: Nooooooo – A Dick thticked me.
Me: Excuse me – I have to go talk to your daddy a second.

No worries – Dad assured me that it was unnecessary for him to go all Rambo on some little dick at school – as Emma had injured herself with a STICK at SCHOOL. Apparently SSSSS’s are more important than I thought.

Thank goodness someone else is looking out for my blog, huh?

In the last post I said of Dave,

” Funny thing is, despite his puppy-like devotion, he remained incredibly cocky. He literally swaggered. He was quite possibly the most self-assured person I’d ever met.”

I feel compelled to tell you what he said upon reading that post (and leaving an actual comment, be still my shell-shocked heart).

Without a hint of humor, I swear, he said, and I quote (hence the quotation marks), “I predict that entry will get you more comments than anything you’ve ever written before.”

TOLD YA.

Oh, and on a completely unrelated note: Just in case you think we don’t know how to get down out here in BFE *, here’s some photographic evidence for you on this fine, frigid Sunday morning. You’ll have to pipe in Snoop Dogg’s “Drop it like it’s hawt” in your imagination, but I think you get the idea. Peace out.

* Dad: BFE, like BFH, is another one of those popular idioms favored by the Crazy Kids These Days. It’s similar to “Big Fucking Hammer”, but has more to do with living in the boonies, and a country in northeast Africa. Call me if you still don’t get it, I know how important these things are to you.

*** That yummy creature watching Emma is my BFF’s kiddo. To protect her anonymity I would not have said anything at all, except I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to say BFH, BFE, and BFF all in one post. You understand.

Annie Ruth Brown grew up in a slave shack on the Blue Lake Plantation beneath the whithering Mississippi sun. She and her children worked the surrounding fields for little to no pay, sometimes to the point of passing out, from 1964 til 1994 — an era when slavery had supposedly been illegal for more than one hundred years.

Annie has since moved to Itta Bena, a tiny town a couple miles from that four-room shack. She helms a comfortable home with a revolving screen door of kids, grandkids, neighbor kids, and strays, a loving swirl of chaos eddying around its matriarchal island. Annie has stories like you wouldn’t believe, as you can imagine, but I started thinking about her today for one story in particular. It flashed suddenly to my mind this morning when I had to physically restrain myself from hitting my child.

I’ve only met Annie once. I sat in an uncomfortable concave hole in her threadbare couch one March morning last year, and listened as she told me things I will never be able to scrape from my memory. Indignities and violence suffered on a daily basis simply for being born the color of lovingly shined mahogany. She testified her life story to me that day, spoke things that had me shedding torrents of silent tears, had me terrified I’d be unable to survive the hearing. But she told me a story that made me laugh, too. It was about the time her new neighbors called the police when they saw her take a belt to her grandson. The local officer approached her front door cowering. He was the age of her children, and he’d known her all his life. He knew she wasn’t abusive. He believed she’d had a good reason to do what she’d done. That grown officer of the law, armed with a gun and strong as an ox, respectfully shrunk in the presence of that proud southern mama. He slinked inside her house, saying, “I’m so sorry to bother you, Mrs. Brown. It won’t happen again.”

In Wisconsin, in the gorgeous pocket I live in, we don’t have a whole lot of heartache. That’s not to say we don’t suffer the same horrific car accidents, the same percentage of domestic abuse, the same incidences of random violence, it’s just to say that our level of basic economic comfort is higher than many. The poorest of the poor kids don’t go hungry or naked, and there’s not a single homeless person on the streets of our town. And around here? You don’t hit your kids. You don’t spank them, let alone take them behind the woodshed. If you do? If a cop responds to a call at your house? He’s not cowering.

I don’t know what my life would be like if I’d been raised in a different setting, among different cultural mores and norms, but in this life, I don’t hit my kids. The rare gentle swats to the behind have come in moments of grave danger, or in play. My husband doesn’t hit my kids, we don’t believe in hitting our kids, and I cringe when I see others do it. It doesn’t escape my attention, though, that every single one of the children that ran past Annie Ruth Brown that day called her “ma’am” as they stopped to quickly snuggle with her. These were not abused children.

Emma is the challenge that Gretta never was. She has the ability to boil my blood to a temperature I never knew it could reach. I even wonder, sometimes, if it’s more than the normal tantrums of her age group, if there’s some underlying psychosis driving the worst of her behavior. If I put her left sock on before her right sock, she will have a full-on meltdown. If I lift her out of bed from the left side instead of the right, she will work herself up into such a froth it takes hours to come down. To be clear to my social worker readers, it’s not the order of things per say, it’s that I’m not doing it exactly as she demanded. It’s beyond being bossy, though — she is utterly unable to control her emotions in these moments. She always, always apologizes later. “I’m sowwy I fweaked out, mom. I’m so sowwy.” And each time we go through this, at least daily, I feel more and more helpless. And so angry, so angry in these moments, I hate myself. I shrink beneath the weight of my own self-control, and the horror I feel that I need to work so hard to use it.

I know I’m not the only one that goes through this. I also know that child abuse is a very real issue, and that’s not really what I’m talking about here. I’m sitting here this morning, coffee gone cold, wiped out from another episode that made us 20 minutes late to school this morning. I’m thinking about Annie, and I’m thinking about Emma’s uncontrollable rages, and I’m swallowing down a bitterness born from more than just dime store java. I’m asking myself hard questions, the least of not being this one:

Am I doing it all wrong?