The Broken Wheel

I'm putting the last of the laundry away and I hear sniffles. Turner is just waking up from his nap. His allergies are wild after a day at the swimming pool. I wait at the top of the stairs for a few minutes and sneak forward while he sniffles around his room making his way out of the bed. When he sees me lurking at the corner of his bedroom door he sweeps his hand around the back of my legs as he walks beside me toward the stairs. He asks me a question that I cannot recall and I say no. I pick up the pillows on the floor and put them in the closet while Turner remembers he needs to use the bathroom. From the toilet he senses my approach to the stairs and calls out, "Come watch me poop Mom."

I go to the bedroom and sit on the corner of the bed for a few minutes trying to ascertain why Turner thinks I want to watch him. I go in the bathroom and start plucking my eyebrows while he entertains me with conversation for the next fifteen minutes. Finally he is finished and sits on the floor to put on his underwear. He tells me, "There was a guy falling in the toilet."

"Really? Who?" (I wondered if my sister was sending him brainwaves about the time I fell in the toilet).

"Some guy. It was on T.V."

"Oh. Really? I'll have to ask Dad about that one."

We are at the sink by this time, washing our hands. "I'm so sorry about one of the wheels."

"What wheels?"

"The broken one."

"On TV?" I'm thinking the T.V. conversation continues.

"No." He's emphatic. "One of our wheels."

My mind rewinds to this morning when Turner stood between my feet as I slopped a rag around the kitchen floor on all fours. As I mopped I found a broken wheel under the table. Who knew how long it had been there? I put it on the table and continued mopping. Turner asked what it was. I told him it was a broken wheel to the table. He asked how it got broken. I handed it to him, told him I didn't know, and asked him to go upstairs and ask Dad if he knew what happened. It was a sloppy attempt to get Turner out from between my feet so I could finish mopping. Now my mind connects the wheel from this morning to Turner's apology about it.

"On the table? In the kitchen?"

His eyes drop to his hands as he continues to rub them under the water. "Yeah."

"Do you know how that wheel broke?"

"Yes."

"You do?"

"No."

"Did something run into the wheel?"

"Yeah. My car."

"And then the wheel broke?"

"Yeah." He climbs down from his stool. "I'm so sorry I broke your wheel." I tell him it is OK. We walk into the office, I grab the computer to take downstairs so I can write this blog. The wheel is on the desk next to the laptop (from where Turner brought it upstairs to Andy earlier). Turner points to it, "There it is Mommy. There is that wheel."

"Yeah. Do you want to carry it downstairs?"
"Oh no. Oh no. I don't want to touch that wheel at all."

The picture is the side effect of writing this blog! Shortly after the conversation we shared, Turner tells me we are going outside to play with his new nerf gun, and I absently agree. While I continue to type, he gets "ready" to go.

Language Socialization

Warning: I'm in the middle of writing seminar papers and my brain is full of things I want to write but can't seem to get it on the page coherently. Writing a blog is a momentary break from the scholarly, but I fear the topic of this blog will encourage my nerdy-ness to emerge between the lines.

I'm writing two papers. One is on affirmative action rhetoric and the colorblind racism that contributes to such comments as, "Affirmative action is reverse racism because it dimishes the chances for white men." Um, you can't discount the continuing effects of historical inequities of white/nonwhite on social, political, and institutional levels. My other paper is about my ethnographic study on how racial scripts (the ways of talking about race that we are socialized in through our folks and teachers in childhood) inform our sense of positive/negative white racial identity formation. Basically, everything said around a child is formative. It shapes the way he makes meaning of the world and those within the world. It teaches him how to empathize, sympathize, understand, love, fight, care. Through our rhetoric children learn what we value and what we do not value, even if they are not privy to the why part of that value system. OK, so that is the context for the story to follow.

Turner and I walk out of school this afternoon. As we approach the truck the sprinkler system fires up on the lawn in front of Catalina. Turner's eyes dart to mine and before he asks I know what is to come. I know his moods, his quirks, his expressions, and can, with some accuracy, use these things to predict his next move. "Yes, Turner, you may run through the sprinkler." It was a day of good news and happiness and hard work on my paper. It was hot outside. It was the perfect opportunity to do something that my mom (and most others I know) never would have let me do. We grabbed hands and ran through the front yard of his school giggling and squealing as water soaked us both. People were coming out of the library across the street, tired parents were securing their children in car seats, and some of the faculty from Turner's school were scooting into their cars thankful it was Friday. And there I stood on the sidewalk, water puddling below my feet as I watched Turner full of delight and laughter running with his arms wide open, head thrown back, mouth hanging open. Most of the onlookers found our laughter contagious; what more could one ask for? I never would have done this in Lexington. I would have been afraid of someone seeing me or worried about what kind of crazy they might consider me to be. This afternoon, however, crazy seemed relative and our experiences have taught me that people here are inundated with difference such that they appreciate difference as simply different, rather than difference being not normal (or considered bad). When we got in the car and were heading home, I began to wonder what memory Turner would pull from this event and how that memory would encourage or discourage him in the future to be less cautious and more full of life.

Later at home, Turner and I sit down to our picnic dinner. He has a bite. I have a bite. I smile at him. He closes his eyes in that dramatic fashion and says, "Mom. Thank you for cooking such a delicious dinner." (It was scrambled eggs and vegetarian sausage...fried). I smiled very big and realized that Turner, in the absence of Andy, always compliments my cooking. Sitting at the dinner table with his two parents, listening to one compliment the other, has socialized him to see this as appropriate, perhaps even necessary, first-of-dinner conversation. After we got the cordials out of the way, Turner and I moved into our next discourse of what did you do today and what did you learn today, where we both share our experiences. This process is more than a habit. It is an exchange that Turner has learned and will replicate at other dinner tables because it will seem "normal" to him. We have socialized him to expect more from the dinner table than just dinner, and I am SO grateful to share in that each night. More so, I am very grateful for the happiness it will extend into his family someday when he has one. The favorite times of my childhood are sitting at the lake eating semi-soggy sandwiches, munching potato chips and hearing my dad say to my mom, "Good lunch Mom." Come to think of it, there were many dinners where the women talked and my dad said little more than "Good dinner Mom" as he pushed his plate to the center of the table. The dinner conversation of our (Andy and I) table blends nicely that disourse of the Klapheke household and the Wray household. I figure there was a lot of talk across the Klapheke table about things that may have seemed grown up (politics, for example) where adults and kids shared their days with one another. My childhood table was filled with family news (who had died, who had what in their garden, what girl drama I had to look forward to in eight years) and compliments about good food. Turner benefits equally from these legacies, and I am silenced by the amount of things Andy and I know, understand, and believe that no one ever explicitly taught us; we just came into knowing these things based upon the language that filled our ears as kids. I can only hope that Turner is able to decipher the good from the bad, omitting that which we did not intend and clinging to that which is inclusive, sympathetic, and beneficial.

I wanna go there...

Everyday we pass McDonald's on our way home from school. It sits very inconspicuously (at least for me) at the corner of Alvernon and Speedway. For Turner, however, it is this huge, bright yellow box beckoning him to come in and enjoy the elaborate jungle gym like contraption that makes up the storefront. "I wanna go in there." He points, he waits patiently, and he nevers scoffs at my reply, "Why?" He rarely says more than, "Because." On one rare occasion he said that it looked fun or because he "really, really" finds yellow to be "special to my heart." A week ago yesterday, he told me he wanted to go in there and I smiled.
"Why?"
"I don't know."
"Well what do you think they have in there?"
"Stuff. Yeah, they have stuff for kids."
"You're correct, they do. What else is in there?"
"I don't know."
"They have food in there."
"Yeah, they do." The light turns green and we move on down Speedway. "I don't like their food."
"Whose food do you not like?"
"That place. The yellow place."
"Why? Why don't you like their food?"
"I don't know."
"Well, then how do you know you don't like it?"
"Cuz last time Chair-a took me I didn't eat my food."
"Yeah? What did you do with it?"
"I took a little bite, but I didn't like it, yeah, and then I put it away. Chair-a threw it away."
"Oh. So then why do you want to go back there?"
"I don't know."

Tonight we are taking Turner to Chick Fil A - They have a jungle gym thing and, hopefully, their food is less likely to cause major coronary before we leave the parking lot. At the very least, we all LOVE their waffle fries because we've shared those before.

Funny things from Turner the amazing birthday boy!

Turner and I are leaving the gas station. I just pulled from the pump (an uncomfortable economic exchange as you all know...republicans and their war!) and I stop at the stop sign in the Fry's (a.k.a. Kroger) parking lot. An older man in a motorized wheelchair slash scooter-thing is stopped at the sign across from me. As soon as I see him I think to myself, "What is this guy doing? A scooter as a car?" He gets the machine going and, to my astonishment, safely crosses through the intersection. I smile at him through a desert, dusty windshield as he putters past. Just as the round-in-the-middle-with-a-Texas-size-belt-buckle-an-inch-form-his-armpits-man makes it to the open vehicle windows on the left-hand side Turner loudly yells, "Hey! Hee can't do that. He can't ride that on the street!" The man does not hear him or, at least, he makes no comment as he motors by.
"Mommy. That guy can't do that because it's not safe. No, it's not safe to ride on the road on that thing." A minute or so later, we've pulled from the parking lot, and Turner resumes, " Mommy? Yeah. I get to ride my biek on the road because I'm the big kid, and I can pedal all the way. Yeah. And, I have a mommy with me and I pedal, pedal, pedal." His eyes scrunch up as I imagine he pictures me yelling, "Pedal, pedal, pedal" as I ran alongside his training wheels to cross Speedway earlier in the week.
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Turner is amazing me with his wonder-boy-bike routine. Over the speed bump. Back again. A circle very close to the dumpster. A whirl down the sidewalk with a little roundabout. A "whee" as he tries to tap my shoulder as he moves past me. I look to my notebook (I'm writing this blog) and he turns quiet. My eyes find him, intently looking to his feet and grunting with each push of the pedal. The pedal has fell off the left side. He pushes, quite unsuccessfully, with his tennis shoe the nub where a pedal once was. The pedal is gripped in his armpit. I move to replace the pedal as best I can (fourth time since Sunday; I need to break down and get the wrench). As I turn the small nut slowly Turner watches with intent and reflects, "That's hard for little boys. But I'm gettin' bigger because I can ride my bike." "Yep, you are big buddy. Just sometimes boys, any boy, wants help from the Mommy." "Yeah," eyes closed, deep in nod, "Yeah, they do."
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Post chocolate cake (yes, another one), chicken nuggest ("just like La, La"), mac and cheese and, surprisingly a continued favorite, broccoli, Turner is taking us minature golfing. The first place is closed. The second place was not busy, expensive, and quite aesthetically diverse...all the markers of a GREAT place to spend your third birthday. The windmill was the favorite. Four rounds on that hole. Turner played a great game. He even, perhaps, beat one if not both of his parents. As we near the end, he passes by me and near-whispers, "Thank you Mommy. I like golfing." I smile, of course. Andy finishes his putt and we finally make it, over an hour later, to the last hole. It is well past bedtime. Mid-yawn (mine, not his) Turner asks Andy, "Did you have fun Daddy? Did you have fun golfing? Did you?" "Yes Turner. I did. Did you?" "Yeah Daddy. I did. Did you have fun golfing Mommy?" "Yeah Turner, I did. Did you?" "Yeah." And it was the kind of yeah that trailed off while he nodded his head, eyes closed.