To the Finish Line

I am a three.

A year ago, I handed Max a notebook with an image of the The Cat in the Hat emblazoned on the front, a freebie that I had picked up at some teacher’s conference.  Until last night, I never knew that he cared about it.

Apparently, he has become a regular William Bradford, my sweet son, chronicling his travails and his triumphs, scribbling away, night after night, page after page.

Last night, he revealed his musings to me.

Other than a snippet of disappointment about the fact that it was July and he had only been inside Busch Stadium one time in 2009,  there was not even a brief mention of his beloved Redbirds.  That was the first surprise.

Instead, what Max has created is mostly a compilation of lists.  Lists and rankings.  His scale for these rankings begins not at one, but at zero.  A four is perfection, mastery, an A-plus.

The criteria?  That’s a little bit fuzzy, the boy’s private terrain, I suppose.

But one of Max’s classmates, the son of a St. Louis Rams football player, (now traded), and “a cheater at soccer,” regularly earns zeroes.    A few girls in his class earn solid 4s.   Interesting.  And a tiny bit disconcerting.

Little Sister Sarah, whose baby-talk to the dog, Hooch, might, one day, drive Max to the Absolut bottle atop the refrigerator (right now, he can’t reach it and, anyway, refuses to drink anything but apple juice), Sarah earns mostly ones.  Occasionally, when they have conspired against me (ex:  stealthily slipping carrots to Hooch during dinner, or hiding one of my New Balance when I already can’t find my keys and they are late for their dental checkup), then Sarah’s ranking improves, but just a tad.

Lorne mostly earns fours.  You know how Dads are.  Just last night, he arrived home with some 5,000-page history of college football, complete with charts and tables, oh, and lists.   “Buddy, I found it on the sale table at Border’s for a dollar.”  I mean, how do you compete with that?

Hooch earns fours too.  Every day. That silly hound has a perfect stream of fours, even though he has disemboweled at least twelve of the boy’s stuffed animals.

And the woman who slaves over his favorite dinner (frozen cheese pizza and grapes), who always stocks plenty of Life cereal in the pantry, who taught him how to tie his cleats, to ride a big-boy bike, to move a knight and a bishop, to wear clothes that sort of match, that woman mostly earns 3s.

Once, during a visit with his aunt in Miami, he ranked some Israeli girl, with whom he had spent a grand total of five minutes, higher than he ranked his dear old Mom.  Ummm, yeah.  Maybe that’s because Ofeer got bitten in the face by my sister’s shaggy dog and so she earned sympathy points.  Or maybe that’s the day that he asked me to play a fourteenth game of ping-pong (and I refused).  Maybe…

On one particular Tuesday in April, in this Cat in the Hat journal that he keeps beside his bed (the bed with the Cardinals blanket, that you-know-who bought him, and earned a 4), Max referred to me as, “Bad Mood Mommy…” (note: capital letters have been added by the English teacher).  I think I earned a two on that Tuesday.  That seems somewhat generous for a day when I garnered such a grand title from my eldest child.

I could go on.

A few days ago, during the last morning of a writer’s workshop at Lesley University in Cambridge, a colleague asked each of us the poignant question:  “Why do you write?”

My answer is simple.  I write because doing so gives me a voice that feels more powerful and braver than my real voice.  I write to help me make sense of this crazy world and because it makes me feel so, so alive.

And I love that Max pulls out this notebook at the end of a day in his nine-year-old life and makes sense of it all, imbues himself with power, coronates himself as king with his lists and his numbers and his tallying.  He is a writer, my son.  And Bad Mood Mommy could not be prouder of that fact.

The little guy, who seems suddenly so darn big, upholds high standards, too, showering only the deserving with an A.  I like that.  After all, quality is quality, right?  Maybe tomorrow, if I hug him a little tighter or listen to his stories with a little less distraction, I might just squeak by with a 3.5.