Kindergarten, Day 3

As the bus pulled away, my kindergartener inside, melancholia ripened fast in my gut, which suddenly felt heavy and hard, a cantaloupe inside.

This is kindergarten, Day 3. I watch the bus strain up the hill and disappear, and then wait some long, quiet, empty minutes till it reappears and approaches our driveway, the bus driver, recognizing my look of lost-ness, waving at me as she and my son and who-knows-who-else behind those dark-tinted windows glide back past me down the hill.

I am surprised to feel gaspingly alone, and I think how quickly that time went—not the past three and a half years that have passed since we adopted our son, which have moved at times with glacial slowness as we have struggled to understand the baggage he brought with him and unloaded into our home, our psyches, our life, but how fast the moment of his departure passed.

We had been standing together holding hands at the side of our rural road wondering aloud if the bus would stop for him on its way up the hill this time or on its way back down, when it appeared and slowed to a stop, its flashing amber and then red lights turning on, its crossing arm and stop sign swinging open, its driver motioning us across the road. I knelt down and gave my son a kiss, and he kissed my cheek, but his eyes were already on the bus’s staircase, his feet fast following, onto his next adventure—for that is what a bus is to a kindergartener. He never looked back.

This is Day 3, remember. On Day 1, as my husband and I waved the bus away up the hill—that bus having transparent, non-tinted windows—we could see him framed in his window, waving back, serious. I had just enough time to burst into tears and collect myself again before the bus reappeared on its journey down the hill, and we saw our son, his bespectacled Elmo-eyes straining to see us from his seat on the far side of the bus, and we all waved farewell all over again.

By Day 3, though, my little one looked like a pro. The driver motioned me back across the road to where I belonged, and I obeyed. The door closed, the sign and arm swung shut, the lights turned off, and they were gone. Standing there alone, waving, not certain whether my son was waving back at me or not, I recalled the chorus of voices—friends, family, neighbors, strangers—that have been telling me how fast children grow up and how suddenly they are gone, out into the world, forever on their own. (Well, more or less, most of them.) I have repeatedly said that what they tell me is bull, because to me it seems that my son’s challenging childhood is aging me so quickly that years’ worth of concern are etching their wear around my mouth and eyes in weeks or maybe months, far faster than the calendar’s pages turn.

But that moment, that quick farewell that occurred about five minutes sooner than I had thought it would, gave me a glimpse of what those who have gone through these parenting stages before me have found: Our children fly when they are ready, or when life takes them, not when or exactly how we might imagine their leave-takings.

And though I had been waiting for months for school to begin, to give me some respite, to give me time to settle my nerves, to piece my life back together, in the moments after this third big farewell, it becomes unmistakably clear to me that with my son not here, a big piece of my life is now missing.

I will return to the house, grab my car keys and, still concerned that he might get lost between bus and classroom, I will track the bus into town and to the school, where I will wait till my son emerges from it smiling, arm and arm with a brand-new bus friend.

In that moment I will understand that where I have realized a precious part of my life is ending, his is beginning.

Maui for the faint of heart

I initially posted "Maui for the faint of heart" (below) on a separate blog -- http://fraidycatadventures.blogspot.com/ -- because I thought it had nothing to do with momming.

But that isn't true at all. If I were not a mom, I probably would not have thought to (strongly) suggest to my husband that we escape -- just the two of us -- to Hawaii to celebrate our 10th anniversary.

So thank you, little boy, for inspiring an awesome trip!

And many, many thanks to my parents-in-law for keeping our son happy, healthy and loved while we were away.

Maui for the faint of heart

My vision of Maui was a palm-tree studded island, sandy beaches lapped by calm waters, Mai Tais flowing from fountains. I pictured myself sitting on a beach beside my suddenly compliant, relaxed husband, four and a half days of toes in warm sand, good books on our laps, easy dips in a quiet sea.

 

Minus the waves, Ka'anapali Beach matched the vision.

But that was my fraidy-cat dream. This was my action-figure husband's and my 10^th anniversary trip, so I knew compromises were ahead.

Lucky for him, we found that Maui is a testosterone-addled extreme sports mecca. You can zipline over rainforests, bicycle down a volcano, take helicopter rides over as many islands as you care to see, learn to scuba, join a snorkeling trip, take up surfing, paddle a longboard, go charter fishing or parasail off the back of a motorboat.

Lucky for me, we were on a budget and had predetermined we would sign up for exactly two organized activities. After a hotel orientation our first morning on Maui, we decided on a snorkeling trip and a luau. (Only one of those activities sounds testosterone-addled, but the male dancers at that luau made dancing in grass skirts seem pretty extreme. It might have had something to do with the loincloths.)

One week home from our big adventure, I’m here to report that Maui is fabulous, perhaps even as friendly to fraidy-cats as to action figures.

Swimming with fishes
The thought of snorkeling gave me hives—literally. I kept thinking about the immensity of the Pacific Ocean and that it’s teeming with sharks and other mysteries. Plus snorkel tours go to the same places day after day … how could sharks and other nefarious sea creatures not treat them as smorgasbords?

We signed on for a morning snorkel tour to Molokini, a submerged crater and designated marine sanctuary 3 miles off the coast of Maui. Our guidebook (Maui Revealed, Wizard Publications, 2010) says visibility is usually 120 to 180 feet there (all the better to see oncoming sharks). It also says it’s so popular that a thousand snorkelers or more visit each day (excellent odds for me not getting Jaws-ed).

We set course at 7:30 our second morning on Maui, joined by at least 100 new friends on the Four Winds II, a power catamaran out of Ma'alaea. It took about an hour to get to Molokini, 10 miles away.



Molokini from the great wide wavy ocean

Here I offer my best advice: Dramamine. Only a few of us wished we had taken it, but oh, if I could have gone back in time! I am blessed with a strong stomach but cursed with wooziness. That means I get seasick and can’t hurl.

One of the deckhands, Bethany, encouraged me: “I’ll hold up a towel—no one will see!” “Barf over here—no one’s around. The fish will go crazy!” (A Chinese woman complied, and, sure enough, the fish cleaned up the situation with gusto.) She also suggested I visit the bar and request the seasick special—ice-cold ginger ale doctored with fresh ginger puree. It tasted fantastic and was a wee bit helpful.

Between seasickness and selachophobia, I was a less-than-enthusiastic snorkeler. As soon as our boat was moored at Molokini, my action figure and the rest of the bunch, probably ages 5 to 80, leaped into the bright blue water. I, a one-time lifeguard, stood on the ladder with a bright yellow flotation device wrapped around my middle. Finally a deckhand looked me up and down and asked, “Want a kickboard?”

Thus equipped, I jumped into the water and began paddling around. It was, in a word, gorgeous. Holding hands with my husband, I watched little schools of gray fish, bright yellow fish, bright yellow and black-patterned fish, iridescent fish that looked like rainbows and black fish. I saw coral in various colors and shapes, and sea urchins. It was like swimming in a giant aquarium. A very wavy aquarium.

Proof!

A fish like one we saw

Every now and then a bolt of terror would strike, and (as if I was everybody's lifeguard) I would scan the very clear blue water for sharks and their ilk. I never saw a one. (I had read that sharks like to sneak up on their prey and tend to attack in cloudy water. But come on! A couple hundred snorkelers in the same spot every day? I think they might make an exception.)

After lunch, barbecued by the crew at the back of the boat, the captain fired up the engines to take us back to Ma’alaea. Suddenly, after hours of staring at the land, trying not to be woozy, I felt fine—fine enough to eat the chicken burger, chips and shortbread cookies the sympathetic crew had saved for me, fine enough to check out the gentle-looking green sea turtles we motored past, fine enough to enjoy the sunlight sparkling off the waves, making the sea look like a sequined shirt worn by a dancing woman.

Bethany, my deckhand buddy, admonished me, "Next time, take your Dramamine." I will, Bethany. I will.

Or maybe I'll skip the boat altogether. A couple of days later, we rented snorkel gear at the hotel and swam off Kahekili Beach, just minutes south of our hotel. We saw coral and some fish similar to Molokini's, and my husband swam near some magnificent sea turtles. Not a shark in sight.

Menacing the pigs ... and others
The day after our snorkel tour, I celebrated my return to the top of the food chain at the Old Lahaina Luau. When we arrived, friendly Hawaiians placed leis around our necks and Mai Tais (at last, my Mai Tai!) in our hands and showed us to our table, which we promptly abandoned for the carnival-type atmosphere.

Sunset off Lahaina

Set against the sun setting over pink-dappled ocean waters, traditional craftsmen and women offered demonstrations and sold carvings, and a three-piece band played traditional Hawaiian music.

Getting decked out with flowers and luau spirit

Then, at precisely 5:50 (I swear “aloha time”—the islands’ purported casual attitude toward punctuality—is a myth), a couple of guys wearing what appeared to be towels dug up a pig from an underground oven. Grisly, yes, but dang it was tasty. (I still implausibly consider myself a lapsed vegetarian, especially averse to pork, so you know this had to be fabulous.)

One of the best arguments for giving up vegetarianism

After ordering more tropical drinks at the bar, including, of course, a Blue Hawai’i, we snaked through the long buffet, picking up Kalua Pua’a (pork), Laulau (pork wrapped in taro leaf), Ahi Poke (raw tuna), sweet potatoes, Mahimahi, Lomilomi Salmon (tomatoes, Maui onions and salted salmon), banana bread and probably a dozen dishes. We returned to our table and feasted while visiting with other couples, from Washington state, Pennsylvania and Illinois.

Hula at the luau

As our feeding frenzy slowed, the dancing, drumming and singing began. The grass skirts, the coconut bras (which, by the way, you can procure at Walmart in Kahului), the whole bit, worn by a mesmerizing troupe of women and men performing a variety of dances, some slow and thoughtful, others fast-paced and exciting, from an ancient dance telling a popular Hawaiian myth to a dance depicting the arrival of missionaries on the islands.

The whole luau—including watching a 3-year-old at a nearby table mimicking the dances—was lovely. And completely fraidy-cat friendly.

Checking out the neighborhood

We stayed on West Maui, north of Lahaina on Ka’anapali Beach, and explored our local area.

Hiking at ‘Iao Valley. A 45-minute drive from our hotel, this marked our furthest foray. Where the beach has a dry climate, the ‘Iao Valley is rainforest. The site of an 18^th-century massacre, today it is a lush, green place featuring the ‘Iao Needle, a rather phallic formation that bolts up out of the valley. The short hike through the park features an overlook of the plains below, which once grew taro and later sugar, a botanical garden growing bananas and papayas, and a rushing stream. Fraidy-cats welcome.

The 'Iao Needle (see what I mean?)

Walking the beaches. According to Maui Revealed, several of Maui's best beaches were minutes away from our hotel, the Aston Kaanapali Shores, and we spent a fair amount of time right there on Ka’anapali Beach. One evening as I sat reading on a lounge chair (living the dream), an enormous Hawaiian monk seal heaved itself out of the water and, sneezing, lurched up the beach nearby. Hotel security guards quickly cordoned off the area with knocked-over lawn chairs and yellow tape, explaining that this protected marine mammal needed its rest.

We also walked along Napili Beach, north of our hotel, but the real thrill there was eating at the Gazebo restaurant, overlooking Napili Bay. Banana white chocolate macadamia nut pancakes with coconut syrup. Heaven.

Exploring Makalua-puna Point above Kapalua Bay. Trying to reach Kapalua Beach north of Napili, we parked near a golf course and began walking along its edge toward the water. We ended up above the beach on cliffs at Makalua-puna Point, a sacred area with lava formations known as Dragon’s Teeth and a labyrinth, which the action figure and I both walked, one of us at twice the speed as the other.

Watching surfers from the cliffs above Honolua Bay. This was as close to truly extreme sports as we got. It was a beautiful drive north of Kapalua and a great show.

Doing a beach photo shoot.
Because it was our 10^th anniversary, I had thought it would be cool to get photos taken. Bill the photographer took hundreds of photos of us in the hotel’s garden area and along the beach as sunset approached. He warned us that we were going to get wet, and yes, the last few poses put us in the surf, getting our pockets (and other areas) filled with sand. It took several days to get sand-free, but we got some fun photos out of the deal.

Enduring a timeshare pitch. Why would we waste two Maui hours with a sales pitch? Long story short: When we booked our snorkel trip and luau through the Expedia Local Expert desk, the rep offered us a $100 discount for showing up for a timeshare presentation. Because my husband is a numbers guy, he figured we could take two hours to finance half our Molokini snorkel trip. (It was relatively painless ... and no, we are not now the proud owners of a Hawaiian timeshare.)

Getting there
We flew Hawaiian Airlines direct from Portland to Kahului Airport on Maui. We had good flights, but I didn’t get a big aloha vibe from the crew. (The passionfruit-guava juice was scrumptious though.)

Staying there
We stayed at the Aston Kaanapali Shores, a little north of Lahaina, in a one-bedroom partial oceanview room with a full kitchen. The luxuriant grounds included a garden pool and a beachside pool. It was perfect for us.

Aston Kaanapali Shores from the garden pool area

Sunrise from our balcony

Eating there
In addition to the luau, we ate out exactly once (at the Gazebo). After landing at Kahului and picking up our car, we stopped at Walmart in Kahului for staples and specialties, including guava jelly, Hawaiian shortbread cookies, Huli Huli sauce (a gingery soy sauce marinade) and Sam Choy's Creamy Oriental Dressing. (On our way back to the airport, we stopped in for more of the latter three items to bring home. So good!)

We later hit Safeway in Lahaina, a fish market near our hotel for just-caught ahi tuna and a roadside stand for super-fresh produce—rambutan, pineapple and papaya. Maybe it all tasted so good because my husband was on kitchen duty. Thanks, dear! 

Rambutan -- it's what's inside that counts

 

Getting to good morning

In my six years attending a Lutheran junior high and high school, I probably sat through 1,000 mandatory chapel services. They were presented by hundreds of different people: various campus pastors who came, endured our antics and left exhausted (I do hope Pastor Mattson, a.k.a. Master Pattson, regained his equilibrium in his subsequent incarnation); community pastors, activists and local leaders; students, alumni and their parents; and traveling musicians and groups of various ilk and aspiration.

Some offered testimonials of their faith, some brought calls to action, and others were clearly time-fillers. I remember the details of very few of them, but over the past month the message of one chapel service began niggling at me. I recalled the speaker encouraging us to wake each morning to a prayer of, “Good morning, Lord,” not the exclamation “Good Lord, it’s morning!”

At the time I think the suggestion made some sense to me. But this past month, probably 25 years later, I regarded it cynically, thinking that whatever head-in-the-clouds speaker preached that trite homily had never parented a 5-year-old boy through a medically necessary circumcision.

When Jon and I adopted our son from India at age 3, we thought nothing of the fact that he was uncircumcised. Flash-forward a little more than two and a half years to September, and it became the only thing we thought about.

First came the realization that something was wrong: Suddenly, our already busy, needy child began sobbing and moaning every time he peed. We visited a pediatrician, who tried to convince me that my son had high-centered himself on the monkey bars. He sent us to a pediatric urologist, who peeked at my son’s appendage (which by then I had taken to calling “the guy”), looked at me and observed, “Huh. You need me.” The nutshell: My son’s guy had all but sealed up. He very nearly could not pee. It was like watching an icicle drip. “How do you and your husband feel about circumcision?” the doctor asked. I told him we didn’t feel anything; we just wanted a happy, healthy son. The doctor prescribed surgery.

Someone, though, had feelings about surgery on the guy: our insurance company. After reading the urologist’s pre-authorization request, the powers that be in insurance-land folded it up and sent it on a slow boat to China, that is, to the company’s medical review committee. This faceless group of doctors and nurses, which had never sat through one of our son’s marathon hollering pee sessions (Jon actually began stashing old Valentine’s Day heart candies in the bathroom for bribery purposes.), would determine whether surgery on the guy was medically necessary. Meanwhile, our son’s behavior was regressing markedly in nearly every way, and we were beginning to feel as if the previous two years of intense parenting work were, ahem, going down the toilet. You think we woke up any one of those days thinking “Good morning, Lord”?

I got on the phone. Calls to our insurers shook loose some information. There was a backlog of preauthorization requests, and ours could easily take 30 days—30 days!—to clear. If it cleared. And the medical review committee would be determining whether this surgery was actually necessary or was being done for cosmetic purposes. Cosmetic purposes! I laughed until I realized I was furious and then tried to hang up the phone before I got the entire family forever blacklisted by our insurance company. I’m not sure what world those people live in, but no parent I know would wake up one day and decide that their little guy’s guy needs a bit of sculpting.

Finally an advocate at my husband’s workplace (through which we are insured) made some calls and determined that the best thing we could do was get our urologist to write a letter to the insurance company. We had to have her call back to find out where such a letter should even be sent; the customer service reps would not tell me. The doctor’s office seemed as befuddled as we were—they had never encountered such a pre-authorization situation—and they had no idea where to send such a missive either.

So I wrote a letter impersonating the doctor and explaining our special case: son adopted at age 3 from India, nearly three years of working with him on attachment and other behavioral issues, the sudden onset of this blockage, his sudden and swift behavioral regression, and the necessity of this surgery to restore him to health and (all of us) to sanity. The doctor signed the letter and sent it immediately.

Forty-eight hours later the insurance company authorized the surgery. Thank God. But of course that was only the beginning of the adventure, and I will let you imagine what it is like to bring home an extremely active, extremely challenging boy who has just suffered having a fair amount of skin peeled off his guy. Imagine no small measure of pain and gore, calls back to the doctor, runs to the drugstore and elsewhere, and lots of cajoling with popsicles and ice cream. There were times when the negotiations and freaking out that accompanied trying to pull his underwear up or down resembled in volume, cadence and anxiety level a swat team in a dramatic phase of dealing with a hostage situation. (“Good Lord, it’s morning! AGAIN!”)

I also will spare you the story of how, on day six of recovery, I took him to Safeway and in the interest of keeping him calm and safe had him sit in the grocery cart, and, while I was turned the other way, he grabbed a box of tofu I had put in the basket and dropped it on his up-till-then-recovering guy, leading to an almost pornographic series of moans that stopped only when I had handed him a box of hot cocoa packets. In retrospect I think he must have gone into some sort of short-lived mild shock at the pain, because as we were completing our checkout, with absolutely no notice, he came to, crawled down out of the cart and launched into a most glorious floor-wiping screaming tantrum. Meanwhile the credit card machine’s electronic pen had decided to give up its ghost as I was trying to sign for $105-worth of groceries and had to be replaced as glowering shoppers piled up behind us. Finally through that gauntlet, I hoisted crazy boy up under one arm and began pushing my fully loaded cart with the other (no checker or bagger offering any assistance, thank you), limped my way back to our car, unloaded the groceries, put our son in the basket, returned our cart to the cart corral like the ridiculously good citizen that I am, hauled him back to the car and then proceeded to sit, trapped in my own vehicle by a Tasmanian devil-child while he tantrummed loudly and vigorously, throwing his booster seat into the front seat and taking shots at me (child-locked in the back seat with him) for the next 45 minutes as shoppers pulled their cars in and out on either side of us. (Amazingly, no one called the police.) He finally calmed enough for me to retrieve his seat, put him in it and drive us home. When we arrived there and I took him to the bathroom, I saw the injury the tofu box had inflicted and forgave him everything.

What I will tell you, though, is that every morning—just as in the weeks pre-surgery—he was waking us between 4 and 6 (or earlier) with the moan, “I go pohhhhhhhhhhhhhty, Mommy. Daddy, I go pohhhhhhhhhhhty,” insisting that we accompany him to the sacred basin, where he would fight the one of us who was helping him pull down his PJs while the other was fetching his pain medicine, Tylenol with codeine, and crackers. And so would begin another day, by the end of which he would be so hopped up on codeine, of all things, that he would be running laps up and down the hall and I would come to believe he was going to wear a groove in our tile floors.

Now you might understand why I have come to believe that God does not always expect us to wake up with a gentle, “Good morning, Lord.” In fact I think it might make Him worry. In my head I had taken to mocking that long-ago chapel speaker, who I suspect was the tiny, pale, earnest single woman who survived serving as our campus pastor for a spell, each day that year closing chapel services with the hymn “Lift High the Cross,” probably as a pep talk to herself. (I still hate that hymn, and I bet I’m not alone.) What did she know of being awakened to this kind of chaos over and over? What did she know of the behavioral water torture that had taken over my life? What right did she have to prescribe a dose of “Good morning, Lord?” every blessed morning?

Some days post-surgery, I was so sleep-deprived, frustrated and rattled that I was pretty sure I would snap on my son. For whatever reason, I felt inspired to do something completely new. During lunch, I pulled out a pamphlet on embroidery and a book about Indian and Middle Eastern henna tattooing. In the tattoo book I found an Indian peacock design and adapted it, pencil on paper, for embroidery. After lunch I put my son, a little boat and some sea creatures in a tub full of bubbles, and I, sitting on my son’s bathroom counter, began stitching, bittersweet orange thread on indigo. We both breathed. We both mellowed. We both found ourselves unexpectedly and thoroughly soothed. My hands were too busy to be cruel. He had bubbles. Detente. Done.

It might have been early the next morning that I finally found my peace with that long-ago homily. I realized the message had been there all along, but the messenger had left out a few key words. Waking, I greeted that day my own way: “Lord, please help me make this a good morning.”

Tip of the week: Cat in the sink

If you ever need to treat an ear infection in a cat (and I hope you never do), you will need a way to contain said cat while rinsing and ointmenting her ears. I have found setting the cat in the bathroom sink to be helpful. (Send get well notes to Bella.)

I am the fish in the pot

The three of us were out on a hike in September, and I was growing more nervous by the minute.

Jon had promised a short jaunt and, as always, I had believed him. Soon we were crawling through blackberry brambles, wishing for a machete and heading for a mystery destination, some bluff that would supposedly overlook the valley below: “Just another couple hundred yards, Hun.”

Several hundred yards later I called his bluff. I was turning back.

It was not the exercise I minded. It was the dusk, the miles of blackberry bushes dripping with ripe purple berries, and the trail littered with big piles of purple poo. Surely the bears and cougars were lurking just out of sight, preparing to pounce.

I hated to be the anti-adventurer and tried to compensate by shifting into character. I brought out the raspy, high-pitched voice I use for the fish when I read Dr. Seuss’s “Cat in the Hat” to our son:

“We should not be here. We should not be about. We should not be here when the bears are out!”

Retracing our steps toward the distant road, I heard my guys laughing behind me. I turned around and saw something that made me laugh: a look of recognition in my son’s eyes. His Mommy really was the fish in the pot!

Then Jon broke in:

“Look at me! Look at me! Look at me NOW! It is fun to have fun but you have to know how.”

It was my turn to laugh and look at someone anew. This past decade, all those crazy adventures and mishaps … no wonder … I have been living with the Cat in the Hat.

Keeping up appearances

The first week of October was still early enough in the pre-school year that I held onto my fantasy of keeping up appearances. I say "fantasy," because our son, age 5, is active, strong-willed and sometimes defiant, a combination that keeps life interesting.

The school year had gotten off to a great start though. His teacher had called his efforts "awesome" and, after a particularly good day, had described him as "compassionate."  Plus she told me that she didn't even consider him one of her "busy guys." I did spend some time pondering the school vs. home duality of this child's personality but nearly busted with pride all the same. I even began to think I might stay off the crazy-parent radar screen for a little while longer.

Then came the second rollerskating party of the school year.

The venue, Vancouver's Golden Skate, was fabulous with its spacious hardwood floor and glittery mirrored disco ball hanging from the ceiling's center. It reminded me of Fargo's Skateland, where as a kid I attended those slightly dangerous-feeling skating parties, rolling with crowds of strangers under multi-colored mood lights to the boozy music of Blondie and the Bee Gees. Even Golden Skate's skates, those regulation fawn-colored boots with round orange brakes at the toe, were identical to the ones we wore clattering around Skateland's floor, doing the hokey-pokey and limbo, cracking the whip and shooting the duck.

Of course my Skateland forays were 30 years ago, and at the first Golden Skate party I noticed that some of the parents were wearing Rollerblades. How smart! The inline wheels are much easier to navigate and make the quick turns that are oh-so-necessary with 40-odd pre-schoolers unpredictably grabbing at your hands, then kneecaps, then ankles as they spill repeatedly and unpredictably to the floor. I had intended to consign my vintage 1995 Rollerblades last year but had never quite gotten around to it. How lucky!

The morning of the second skate party had started out rough at home, but after some cajoling and strong-arming I got my son out the door and into the car. I dashed into the man-cave (a.k.a. the shop), grabbed the bag that contained my inline skates off the nail on which it had been hanging, set it in the car and away we went.

At the rink, I got my son's and his buddy Louis's skates laced up and sent them on their knock-kneed way before sitting down myself to pull out my beautiful cornflower-blue Rollerblades. Ah, the memories. I had purchased them in Minneapolis on a trip home from Japan, where I had been teaching English in a rural area. When I returned to Japan, I strapped on those bad girls and whizzed down the rough country roads, startling bent-backed old women working in the rice paddies and making my students giggle and cover their mouths. Somehow my blades made me feel rebellious.

Now at Golden Skate I would don them once again and glide about this rink, confident and sure-footed. I eased my foot into the right skate. It felt good, a bit smaller than I remembered, but not problematically so. I couldn't wait to get on the floor. Then I pulled the left skate out of the bag. As I tipped it toward my waiting foot, a terrible thing happened. Little green pellets began to spill and skitter across the hardwood floor and onto the carpet of the shoe-changing area. I froze. It was d-CON -- mouse poison! My boot was full of it.

I hastily worked to isolate my quickly spreading mess while detouring meandering pre-schoolers, their shocked parents and drooling younger siblings around it. I called out for a broom and dustpan, and the grandpa-aged man managing the rink approached and silently began to sweep as I picked up errant pellets and apologized over and over. He never said a word. I overheard one mom explaining quietly to another (who I imagine then explained to another and another), "She brought her own skates, and they had d-CON in them!"

It was not until much later that it occurred to me that the other mothers watching my unfolding debacle might have had no experience with mouse-fighting. They had most likely not endured anything like the event my family knows as the Mousecapade of 2008, when we were slammed by an infestation in our home and I threatened to wave the white flag and abandon ship altogether.

That was when we threw away the live traps (what a joke) and brought in the death traps and d-CON. That was when we learned that mice prefer chocolate to peanut butter. That was when we learned not only that mice have no proper sense of boundaries but that they like to stash yummies in shoes.

We had found cat food kibbles stuffed into a shoe in our son's closet and then, later, d-CON stashed in my Sorel boot in the man-cave. In both cases, the shoes were at floor level. It had never occurred to me that a mouse would store provisions in a skate in a hanging bag.

It also had never occurred to me that this school year I would single-handedly establish my position on the crazy-parent radar screen while my son innocently clomped around a hardwood floor, learning how to skate.