As for Spider Mama and mini-me – they are all gone. GONE I say. Not a single spider is left hanging in the now tattered and forgotten web in my east bedroom window. There are tons of bugs still stuck in the awkward, splayed poses of the vanquished but there is no spider left to eat them. Rather than think of the spider-absence as a sure sign of arachnoid demise, I prefer to think of it as a temporary loss. Those spiders packed it up and went to Bonita Springs for the Winter. They’ll be back, come April, with the robins and the tulips and the sweet smell of new grass.

*****

There’s been a nice and unexpected development in the bus situation and I’m left feeling reassured that there are some kind kids still left on the planet. I did a little reconnaissance yesterday. And hired a fifth grader to do my snooping. I have an acquaintance whose son rides the bus with O and G. He’s a quiet kid, a well-behaved eleven year old who is rarely in trouble. I asked this child’s mother if she had heard any bus-tales from her mild son. She had heard nothing but promised to ask him about the bus on his return from school.

She called last night to say she’d spoken with her son and he had validated O’s cry of foul. According to quiet-boy there are two or three kids who give my O a really hard time. This child not only felt concerned about how O was being treated, he felt sympathetic enough to offer to be O’s seat partner on the bus. There is safety in numbers. There is safety among the green vinyl seats of school bus hell when a big fifth grader offers to watch your back. Needless to say, O and I are thrilled and thankful and anxious to see how this new alliance changes the dynamic on Bus 7.

*****

While I’m talking about dynamics, I’ve gotta share the interesting news that was presented to me last night. (Yes, it was a very busy phone night at the Madmarriage household). I was chatting with my friend and mother of another student in O’s class, (okay, I was complaining about the trials and tribulations of being a room parent and she was patiently listening), when she broke in to tell me about the true drama at hand in classroom 137. According to my friend, there has been a great to-do surrounding a the new kid, I’ll call him Justin. Apparently Justin has a penchant for developing long and violently disturbing stories during journal time. His tales of animal dismemberment and bloody conflicts have frightened some of his classmates. The mothers of the frightened classmates have launched a full offensive designed to remove Justin from the class and the school. Phone calls home to Justin’s parents have not been returned. Child services may be called in to do a home visit. A witch hunt, perhaps justified, perhaps not, has been launched. There are angry mothers demanding that this Justin-kid be burned at the stake.

I feel sort of sorry for Justin, clearly there are issues at hand. And I feel deeply sorry for the teacher, Mr. S, who must soldier through the brouhaha and sort fact from fiction all while trying to reach Justin’s disinterested parents and dodging the expert advance of mothers with inflamed imaginations who, if left to their own devices, would have Justin hog tied and roasted on a spit.

I am confused by my own reactions to the news about Justin. After all, I had a perfectly normal conversation with Justin’s mother just yesterday about the upcoming class Halloween party. She didn’t strike me as negligent or pathological. She did mention that they had just moved. Perhaps, in the relocation process, her voice mail was broken and phone calls from the school were lost rather than ignored. I’m inclined to give people the benefit of the doubt and I guess I’m naive, but I have a very hard time believing that a parent would purposely ignore phone calls from their own child’s teacher. The idea of deliberate neglect is just so hard for me to fathom.

But while I’m feeling all kinds of progressive and accepting, I’m also wrestling with my inner neurotic. After all, there have been more than 50 school shootings since 1997, Columbine (the mother of all school disasters) and Paducah and Jonesboro and Va. Tech and Cleveland, all jangling at my nerves, making me feel edgy and irrational and fiercely protective.

This Justin-thing is a tough one as it is really none of my business until, well, it is. And it will only become my business once my O is directly effected, violently or otherwise. So I soothe myself with the facts. All but one of the notorious school shootings were perpetrated by children twelve years old or older. There is only Mount Township, Michigan to remind us that even six and seven year olds can die at the hands of their peers.

Amid all this worrying, my e-mails to the parents of Room 137 about candy corn relays and spider web cookies and Monster Mash Freeze Dance must seem incredibly discordant and unbelievable. But, really, eight year old children and their parents should be concerned with pumpkin table clothes and how many jelly beans are in the Halloween jelly bean jar. Morbid thoughts of potential grade school violence are just not normal.

Each year, this parenting thing gets a little more complicated. The answers to difficult questions become more elusive and obtuse as my children grow older and spend their days swimming up stream, in a river of peers and perverts and juvenile delinquents. What a world. What a world.

I am thankful O has decided to pause and ponder and strategize a way around this thing. I’m hopeful that it’s a sign of self awareness and confidence. But, alas, it may well be that I scared the crap out of him with my warnings about retaliation and the results of earning a reputation as a tattle-tale. Nevertheless, these are valuable life lessons. No one likes a narc. And while bullying should not be allowed, should not exist in a perfect world with perfect children and perfect schools and perfectly positioned and attentive adult supervisors in the form of teachers and bus drivers and crossing guards, we all know that this longed-for perfection is not the reality. I believe that the sooner my kids learn to handle the taunts and tortures that are an inevitable by-product of childhood, the better off they’ll be.

So we shall see how this pans out and, just to make you all feel a little better about my decision to let it roll, let me say that my O is very large for his age.

And there’s my own personal experience influencing my parenting decisions. The whole bus-bullying situation not only reminds me of having to apologize to Becky Rhettman back in grade school, it also reminds me that I, too, was bullied. It was seventh grade and there were three mean girls, Bridgette, Francesca and Lisa and they had it in for me and my two chums. Like Brian and Max, they were a year older than us and, now, with hindsight I can see, threatened by the utter cool factor exuded by me and my two BFF’s. They were trying to establish dominance by way of prank calling (ahhh, the days before caller i.d.) and threatening to beat us up at football games or in the seventh grade hallway between classes. (Yes, some girls do threaten violence but only Townie girls).

And finally, rather than involving my parents, I took the intiative. I figured if they beat me up once, then there’s little to no fun to be had in the second lashing. And if things turned out in my favor, then I’d have the upperhand for awhile. I saw it as a win-win. The torture would stop no matter the outcome. And it helped that one of the three biatches rode our bus home from school without the support of her, big-haired, frosted lipstick wearing, gangster friends. She was isolated. She was quiet and retreating without her posse. So, one afternoon as we rode home from school, I challenged her to what should, for all intents and purposes, be considered a duel.

With all the bluster and bravado that an eleven year girl can muster, I suggested she put up or shut up. I clambered off the bus at her stop and said, “Let’s do it.” I was ready. “Bring it on.”

And of course she sort of quietly skulked off and evaded my advances. Her bark was a whole lot worse than her bite. As I remember it, that was sort of the end of the prank calls and the taunting and the threats.

I’m sure there’s a little revisionist history at work here. It all seems to cinematic, too tight a denoument for real life. But the important point is that I survived, my friends survived and Lisa, Bridgette and Francesca are still probably living in that small and stultifying town where we grew up. They are bar maids or mechanics or professional wrestlers.

As well that ends well…

Undoubtedly this will be a delicate confrontation. One that will require my most expert attempts at deflecting hostility with ample amounts of self deprecation and plenty of observations about the horrific behavior of my own children from time to time. This almost always works, the old: I’m-a-terrible-parent-too-and can’t believe my-own-maladjusted-children-haven’t-made-little-girls-cry-and-younger-boys-weep type of approach.

This is a particularly uncomfortable role for me. I can still remember the time my mother dragged me by the ear over to Becky Rhetman’s house and made me apologize for teasing her on the bus. (She did wet her pants. It was fourth grade when wetting one’s pants is social suicide, but, still, I was made to grovel.) I know first hand the scolding and the reprimand and the possible halt on allowance that Max and Brian will experience after my visit. I do not envy them the fall-out of my purposeful knock.

And, knowing the ins and outs of fourth grade bus shenanigans, I have made it abundantly clear to O and G that my going to Max and Brian’s house could spark a veritable teasing shit-storm. That instead of the intended result, my visit could launch a retaliation that may include increased harassment, merciless taunting and a lifetime of well launched spit-balls. They seem willing to make the gamble.

So I steel myself for the confrontation and hope that I’m doing the right thing. Damn this parenting thing is hard.

CCE of Madmarriage enters the room in yesterday’s pajamas, her hair limp, dark circles beneath the eyes. This reporter can’t help but think she’s still on death’s door.

Wow, you don’t look like you’ve progressed much in the past 24 hours. Are you still ill?

Yup…still sick. Headache, stomach cramps, general malaise and I can’t understand why. My children weathered this violent stomach bug and in a mere 24 hours were asking for chocolate bunnies and pizza. I guess I’m representing the old and the weak. Those who die of the Roto virus or the Noro virus or whatever plague has it’s teeth in me. I can’t help but think about Sunday’s Planet Earth when the aging, slow elephant is separated from the herd and devoured by lions. The young survive; the old and weak are dinner.

Have you thought about seeing a doctor?

I did consider packing it up and checking it to the ER last night when I was on my third hour of excruciating stomach pain – Just think childbirth, that’s all I can relate the experience to besides my wedding night which is a whole other story. My Better Half is still out of town and I would have had my two children with me in the ER. I can’t overstate how unpleasant that experience promised to be and, of course, there was the danger of them contracting a flesh eating Strep virus from our time in triage so I decided to ride out the pain at home.

Wait…let’s back up here. Your wedding night? Care to elaborate?

Oh God, it’s such a pathetic story that has to do with bad sushi eaten a few days before the wedding and a nasty case of food poisoning that remained unidentified for a few too many days. Let’ make a long story short and say the honey moon was spent in the local hospital where I was operated on twice and finally diagnosed with the most noxious case of Campylobacter that doctors have ever seen. The ‘in sickness and in health” thing came up early in the relationship and kind of set the tone for the duration.

That sucks. Do you ever think about having your wedding over again. You know, just to do it without probable death as an accompaniment?

Nah, I don’t know too many people who would want to go through the stress of creating a guest list, choosing a menu and a dress and the appropriate foot wear all over again. The whole thing really went off well considering how awful I felt…the lilacs were in bloom, the peonies on the tables were fragrant and stunning, the band was adequate and the Best Man gave a shitty speech that was more appropriate for My Better Half’s funeral. No, everything was just as it should’ve been, though if I were to do it all over again, I’d pick a different dress and wouldn’t wear that stupid veil. Who was I kidding conjuring the virgin bride? What a farce.

By the way, talking about weddings reminds me of the book I’m reading right now, A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon (see link at top of page). It’s a great read, hilariously funny and has a lot to do with spoofing weddings and marriage and it’s really been a consolation to have a good book to dive into while convalescing. Plus I’m a huge sucker for British dialect, throw in a few words like shagging, the telly and nappies and I’m hooked. Let me read you an excerpt to whet your appetite:

“Katie and Ray headed into town and had a minor disagreement at the printers. Ray thought the number of gold twirls on an invitation was a measure of how much you loved someone, which was odd for a man who thought colored socks were for girls. Whereas the ones Katie preferred looked like invitations to accounting seminars apparently.

Ray held up his favorite design and Katie said it looked like an invite to Prince Charming’s coming-out party. At which point the man behind the counter said, “Well, I don’t want to be around when you two choose the menu.”

It goes on like that, funny and true and total delight when you’re dying in your bed, alone.

When your kids got home yesterday were you able to help them with homework and drive O to boy scouts and prepare dinner despite your illness?


I did manage to do most of that, kind of doubled over and half-assed, but I got it done. There was really no choice but to immediately tend to their needs as G got off the bus crying and O was practically crowing about how she got in trouble and the bus driver insisted on writing up a conduct report because she wasn’t sitting in her seat properly. According to my inconsolable five year old, “she didn’t know that sitting in the aisle was forbidden. She was sitting down after all. And seriously, she was just trying to get closer to Fiona Bryan who has, like, ten Webkinz and is pretty much royalty in these parts.” There was so much grief and shame leaking out of her eyes and running down her rosy cheeks that I just couldn’t be mad at her. And I helped her understand that I still loved her. And it makes my heart bleed just a little to think of her going to the principal’s office today. She’s hardly a juvenile delinquent. I mean, she wears Hello Kitty sneakers and shirts with heart appliques and carries a doll named Baby in her pink backpack. I think there’s something inherently wrong with a bus driver named Eddie who belches into the intercom, picks his nose and eats it, makes a game of achieving unique speeds on windy residential roads and gives conduct reports to five year olds. I don’t care how sick I am this afternoon. Come three o’clock I’m meeting that bus and getting to the bottom of this. I mean, WTF, my G woke up at 5:30 this morning sobbing about having to miss her field trip because she’s surely going to have in-house detention. She’s five for fuck’s sake!

I can see you’re worked up about this. But I’m kind of curious, would you have been half as supportive and understanding if it had been O who had received the conduct report?

(Shocked silence and veiled hostility apparent on CCE’s face)

Well, I’m thinking about that one and, if I’m being honest, I’m not entirely sure. Though I think you’re a bitch for pointing out that I may be shamefully biased towards one of my offspring.

Just trying to ask the probing questions that make for good journalism. When you’re done weeping into your hands and lamenting your failure as a mother we can continue…..or not.