Sunflowers, worms, and other (potentially) dead things

I gasped in horror at the window ledge. Oh, god, not the sunflowers.

I had checked on them Monday night as I worked on the dishes. At that time there were three perky sprouts bobbing happily in the kitchen window.

And then disaster struck Tuesday morning.

There they were, hanging limply over the edge of the peat pot like the scraggly turnip greens in the bottom drawer of my vegetable crisper. I didn't want to look too closely, fearing that the cats had taken down another innocent victim. My cats, you see, rule at destroying all things of value in our household--our leather couch, our dining room table, our wooden blinds, our carpet, our sanity. It made sense that the little innocent seeds that Lilly admires on a daily basis would be the next tragedy to add to their growing rap sheet.

I couldn't help but survey the damage that my furry felons had obviously causes (and plot how to best get back at the cats for killing my daughter’s green joys). And, to my shock, the delicate stems were unsnapped, the leaves unmunched.

As I stood back from my close inspection, I realized what it meant. We'd forgotten to water the seeds. WE HAD KILLED LILLY'S PLANTS! I quickly doused them with water in the hopes that I could still revive them, and placed them back on the windowsill. Maybe they would perk up quickly before Lilly had a chance to notice.

"Plant broke?" I heard behind me. Lilly toddled into the kitchen and followed my gaze to the kitchen windowsill. "Plant broke?" she said again, concern knotting her brows."Plant? Plant!"

I picked her up and showed her the wilted seedlings: "I'm sorry, sweetie. The plants got too thirsty and fell over. Maybe they're not dead."

This was the second time in less than 24 hours that I had to talk with my daughter about death. Okay, so it's not like her cats got run over (though at times I secretly hope they escape and get eaten by coyotes, particularly after they do something extraordinarily heinous, like crapping on the floor just outside their perfectly clean litter box). We were just walking home from school. The weather had turned sunny and dry for a whopping two days (is that a record for western Oregon in April?), and in the gutter just off the sidewalk lay a dehydrated and crispy worm.

Worms are probably tied with cows and lions as Lilly's favorite animal. Ever since I took her out in the driveway during a rainstorm to look at them wiggling across the driveway, she's been looking for them every time we go outside. Since our front yard looks like we are recreating the landscape of Europe during WWI, complete with trenches and foxholes, there are plenty of opportunities to see the slimy pink creatures lurking in the earth.

Despite looking like a RonCo food dehydrator experiment gone wrong, the worm in the gutter still caught Lilly's eye, and over she went, bending down to try and pick it up. It crumbled like a mummy at her first touch before I could haul her back onto the sidewalk.

"Worm?" she asked, sounding somewhat puzzled.

"Yes, sweetie, that's a worm. But he's dead." Those words kind of caught in my throat. Dead. I was talking with my toddler about death. She's nineteen-months old, for goodness sake. Granted, it was just the death of a worm. But even as an adult who understands that death is a natural part of life, this kind of choked me up. That worm could have been Lilly's buddy. For her, a worm is a friend, something to be cherished, and admired, and greeted whenever she sees one. And that worm was never coming back from from its blacktop tomb.

Yet there it lay. And here I was, trying to figure out on the fly what to say to my little one about the shriveled carcass lying in front of us. I know that even if I had explained what "dead" meant she wouldn't have understood, but somehow, that conversation seemed too mature, too difficult, to real to have on the sidewalk on a warm April day. But I didn't want to lie either, to cop out and tell her the worm was sleeping (the crispy sleep of a deep-fried raisin), to sugarcoat what was lying there in the road (yuck, makes me never really want to eat a sour gummy worm again).

So I took a breath and said the only thing I could come up with at the moment: "We don't touch dead things. They're icky."

"Worm icky" she repeated several times, and as we walked away, she twice looked over her shoulder and into the gutter.

And while teaching my child that we shouldn't touch dead things isn't a bad idea (gotta teach that personal hygiene before they contract e-bola from poking a pickled rat gizzard with their big toe), it felt like the easy way out.

So when the sunflowers presented themselves in a similarly compromised state, rather than cover up the truth, I, at least, said the "d" word tempered with the optimism that Mommy could make it right. And make it right I did. By the time we arrived home on Tuesday afternoon, the seedlings were standing upright and leaning toward the afternoon sun (or at least in the direction where the sun would have been if it had not been for those dastardly rainclouds).

Yet sometime in the near future, she'll be big enough, old enough, smart enough to know that Mommy can't always work miracles. Then I'll have to find the courage to say more than "dead things are icky," or "maybe they're not dead," or “the kitty must have run away" (or, for you Oh, Brother Where Art Thou? fans, "r-u-n-n-o-f-t") . And while I could just stick in a VHS copy of The Lion King and have Timone and Pumba help explain the circle of life ('cause I don't think that South Park is really going to work on this one, especially since that damn Kenny keeps getting killed and rises again in the next episode), I know that too will not work. It's a conversation that, I must admit, I am not really looking forward to—it’s probably in the top 10 discussions I'd rather not have with my daughter but must unless I want her to grow up sheltered, diseased, maladjusted, or knocked up.

But as long as I can remember to water those seeds, maybe it's a conversation I can put on hold for another few weeks, right?

What's in a name?

By the time my husband walked in the door last night, I'd been at it for hours. Not folding laundry (it was still in the basket, growing cold and wrinkly). Not doing dishes (which I absolutely could and should have been doing for hours). Not sleeping (which is the much treasured pastime of parents of toddlers everywhere).

Nope. I was here, on the couch, trying desperately to come up with a name for this blog. Seriously.

I'd created a short and very odd list of possible names. Mommagami. Bite Reality Back. Done Got Edumacated.

What was I thinking?

No much of value, obviously, becauce the truth of the matter was that they all sucked, and I knew it. I wanted something that came as close to being me as any short sequence of words can be. But trying to define your entire self in words that some other equally unoriginal blogger hasn't used is a nearly-impossible task. I was just about ready to give up, despite the prompting of my friends and fellow bloggers who promised me that I might have something to say that was worth reading.

I wish I could say that it was when I was mucking around in the darkness for a title that inspiration slapped me upside the head. But I can't even take full credit for the title. Okay, I can only take credit for the "red pen" part (2/5ths of the title if we really want to be mathematically accurate). I had something lame like Save the Red Pen on my list when Corey got home from his class, and it was he that found the words that finally worked. I'm not sure he knew it at the time, but OH MY GOSH does that title work. Want proof? First, the obvious reasons:

1). In my TV watching days--which I think are basically behind me with the exception of Jaime Oliver's Food Revolution and The Vampire Diaries (sad, but true)--I used to adore The Young and the Restless (a fact that is even more depressing than my ongoing obsession with the vampire smut genre). Where the Red Pen Bleeds sounds like some ridiculously trampy daytime drama set in a small Midwestern city where the major characters own competing newspapers that constantly write libelous trash. And, some days, my teenage-wrangling, union-thumping, mommy-hairpulling sounds, if not trampy, at least dramatic.

2). It references literature--depressing dog literature. Not exactly my favorite book of all time, but I read it back in junior high, so there's no accounting to taste. But at least it speaks to my love of reading. At the moment, I'd much rather cozy up with a Michael Pollan book about the garbage we ingest on a daily basis (otherwise known as food substitute), a novel of young-adult fiction, or (once again) vamp lit.

3). I'm an English teacher. I like red pens. I make papers (literally) and students (figuratively) bleed.

It's the reference to the work that English teachers do with their mortal instruments that makes the title really work, though (not bleeding papers and students dry...though that sounds like something a vampire English teacher would do). Think about it. We English teachers spend our days, and nights, and weekends marking up student papers. Our comments, our thoughts, our insights are marginalized, crammed into the one-inch MLA-issued margins or squeezed into the spaces between double-spaced lines. The white space of students’ papers is no place to really write, or think, or engage with the real stuff of our lives.

So, I am taking this blog as an invitation to move beyond the margins; to say what it is that I often do not; and write about what it means to be a vampire-loving, organically fanatical, sleep-deprived, bookishly obsessive mother/teacher/wife/me.