Flush with conversation

There are mothers out there who complain that they can't get their kids to talk with them, but I don't understand that.

Frankly, I find it a cinch. All I have to do is go into the bathroom.

Picture yourself sitting in there with the door shut, looking for a little privacy—after all, your mother didn't raise you in a barn. Yet, a few rather personal moments later, the door swings open and there's your 6-year-old daughter, the one who at breakfast stared at the cereal box and hummed while you tried to talk with her about her friends, her shoes, her cat—anything.

Now she's staring at you, wide-eyed, but not because she's stumbled into the bathroom at a rather indelicate maternal moment. No, she's wide-eyed because she wants advice about how to extricate her little neighbor friend's parakeet from another little friend's dog's mouth. Unfortunately, she's brought the problem with her—dog, parakeet, both friends. All of whom are staring, too, wide- eyed (except the parakeet.) As you shove the door shut, you realize that the parakeet is just a stuffed toy—yet you're sure anyway that you can hear it moaning in a combination of terror and humiliation. You know just how the parakeet feels, too.

For some reason, this kind of thing doesn't seem to happen much to dads.

But the real problem for moms is not that these kind of things happen to us, but that we fail to see them as an opportunity. Yes, an opportunity!

Try this. Go into your bathroom. Lock the door. Run some tap water, hum a little. (This won't work if your kids think you're faking.) Before you know it, your children will have flocked outside the bathroom door, the little click of the lock being a Siren song to them. They will be hollering to you things such as, "Moira's got new pink sneakers. Can I get some too?" Or, "At lunch today, I traded that healthy tofu-on-rye sandwich you packed for me for a fried bologna burrito. Is that OK?"

Voila! Your kids are talking to you. Wasn't that easy?

The downside, of course, is that you'll find yourself limiting visits to the bathroom for actual reasons of nature to, say, when your kids are at school. During these times, the little dears' ears will perk up, but they will restrain themselves from running out of the building and coming back home. Or at least their teachers will restrain them. Most days. (I admit that summers, spring breaks and sick days are problematic with my method.)

However, there are other ways aside from the Bathroom Method. The Traffic Method, for instance.

I like to save my children's art projects—the ones they stuff to the bottom of their backpacks along with apple cores and rocks and damp socks. If I pull out the projects and coo over them at dinner and beg, "Please, oh, please tell me all about this," my kids just shrug and stare dumbly.

So, I've developed a new approach. Once I've collected several weeks' worth of drawings and clay pots and pipe-cleaner figurines, I load them and my kids into the back seat of my car. Then I take us for a drive, making sure that we get enmeshed into some really gnarly traffic.

Sure enough, soon my little dears are saying, "Mom, Mom, Mom! Turn around and look!" At that point, they'll carefully point out and discuss the various parts of the art project, in the order they made it.

My kids still believe I do have eyes in the back of my head, so they think I'm really seeing all they're showing me. I'm having teeny-tiny video cams mounted in the back of my car next week, so I can watch later what they've so earnestly demonstrated. This isn't because driving and twisting to look in the back seat is a dangerous combination. This is because if I did turn around to look, they'd suddenly drop the stuff and stare out the windows.

You see, the trick to getting your kids to talk with you is to make them think you aren't really listening. And if you get in enough practice now, these diversionary tactics will continue to work for a lifetime. I envision myself, about 12 years from now, going into the bathroom with my portable phone receiver and locking the door. Turning on the tap water. Humming. Sure enough, the phone will ring. I'll answer, dewy-eyed with the knowledge that my kids aren't so busy with college or work or whatever that they can't spare a few precious moments to chat with dear old mom.

And they'll say, "Hi, mom. I’m kinda short on cash right now, so I was wondering..."

Hey, I never claimed my techniques would result in conversations that were actually interesting.

 Search for hobby becomes notable quest

I decided a few months ago that I needed a hobby.

At some spare moment—between family, work, and volunteer commitments—I realized I wasn't doing anything just for fun. Not that family, work, and volunteering aren't fun. But you know what I mean—I wasn't doing anything that was purely for fun. Purely for me. What's worse, it had been so long since I'd had a hobby, I had no ideas about what to try.

So I went to the experts: my family. My husband and two daughters represent at least six hobbies among them.

My husband (singing, soccer, painting) suggested that I take up cooking.

Uh huh.

So while we were eating dinner that night at a fast food restaurant, I asked my daughters (tae kwon do, soccer, computer games) what Mommy should do for a hobby. The darlings informed me I already had a hobby—cleaning the house.

Uh huh.

My hobby hunt suddenly became serious. After all, I couldn't let my daughters think the only "hobby" adult women have is housekeeping. So that night, while dusting the furniture, I tried to think up a hobby for myself. This proved more difficult than you might imagine.

For one thing, I don't like crafts. As a kid, I sewed right through my thumb in my junior high home economics class. So any kind of needlework was eliminated on the grounds of potential danger to myself and others.

And despite what my athletic husband and daughters try to tell me, I just don't see sports as a hobby. I view exercise as a health maintenance chore—like flossing.

Hardly hobby material. And as for sports... well, I like to watch games, but I have never been even remotely athletic. As a high school junior, I flunked the bowling portion of my gym-for-klutzes class.

Art or music seemed better hobby categories for me. So the next morning, I checked out art classes. I have an enduring sense that the sky will indeed fall if I fail to fulfill an obligation, so I knew I would attend an art class, thus being forced to keep up with a hobby. But the class time conflicted with my family, work, and volunteer commitments.

That left music. Music lessons are scheduled between teacher and student, so I figured I had a shot at finding time in my schedule for music. I studied piano as a kid, although I'd actually wanted to study clarinet. I checked with our occasional baby sitter—a teen who plays the clarinet—and she informed me that learning to play the saxophone would be easier.

Hmmm. The saxophone. Now that caught my fancy. I imagined myself casually saying to folks, "Hobbies? Oh yes, I have one. I play the saxophone." Wow! How cool! How hip! My daughters would never again think mommy's hobby was vacuuming! This would be fun!

So, I rented a sax. Arranged lessons. And found myself, on the way to my first lesson, completely horrified with what I was doing. Not because I doubted my choice of hobby. But because I knew there were paragraphs I needed to write. Laundry to fold. Committee meetings to prepare for. My enthusiasm for my fledgling hobby waned. How dare I take time away from my family, work and volunteering for something so... so... unnecessary as a hobby?

But I swallowed hard and went to my first lesson. I came home and started practicing. I kept practicing even when my daughters suggested that the basement, rather than the living room, would be a better setting. I kept practicing even when my cat stood by the window, howled, then finally clawed through the screen, jumped out, and ran under the deck where she hid for several hours.

At my next lesson, I learned that our clarinet-playing baby sitter is only partly right. The fingering on a saxophone is fairly simple. Getting the right tone is the challenging part. And breath support, my saxophone teacher explained to me, is essential to a good tone. He suggested some breathing exercises.

Driving home from my lesson, I thought carefully about what he'd said about breathing. And his advice brought to mind a seemingly discordant image: on airplanes, before takeoff, during the obligatory safety procedure demo, you're always told that if the oxygen masks drop down, take care of yourself first, and then help any small children who are with you. I understand the reasoning; yet I've always been mildly offended by it, because of course my first instinct would be to help my children.

But then, driving home from my saxophone lesson, the advice made more sense than ever. In an airplane emergency, I'd have to put that mask on first, because if I passed out, I couldn't help my children. And maybe the same was true of having a hobby—even one that drives my cat in panicky horror out the window.

 Chicken noodles ritual offers a recipe for life

I'm the sort of cook who has to check the back of the microwave popcorn bag for the recipe. Whose signature potluck dish is a plate of apple wedges—artfully arranged, of course.

So when I volunteer to help make homemade noodles for the annual chicken noodle dinner fund-raiser at our church, the ladies-who-always-make-the-noodles are, understandably, a little surprised. Still, being kind souls, they agree that I can help on noodle-making day.

I have an ulterior motive. I want their secret noodle recipe. The chicken noodles that the ladies of St. John's Lutheran Church in Miamisburg create once a year are, well, heavenly. For that know-how, I'm even willing to spend some learning time in a kitchen.

When I show up on noodle-making day, someone asks me, "Did you bring your rolling pin?"

"Rolling... pin...?" I repeat nervously. I have vague memories of seeing it in the kids' sand box once. "I need a rolling pin?"

"After you make the noodle dough," says the woman who will end up being my noodle-making mentor, "you have to roll it out, then slice the dough into noodles, then let them dry. You can use my rolling pin."

She hands it over and positions me in front of a lump of noodle dough.

"Just roll it as thin as a sheet of paper," my noodle- mentor advises. "But without ripping it."

How hard can that be? I smash down on the dough, roll as hard and fast as I can... and half the dough sticks to the pin, while the other half flings itself up and over the pin and onto the counter. Argh.

I start over with fresh dough, heeding my mentor's advice to add a little flour while rolling and to roll more gently.

After a while, I get the hang of it, enough to relax and listen as the ladies swap stories of how long they've had their rolling pins—some for as long as they've been married, 30 years or more. Some are on second or third rolling pins. I don't mention the location of my rolling pin. I just listen and roll.

The rolling pin stories lead to other stories... funny and sad, of triumphs and losses, some recent, some from long ago. From their stories, I realize these women know a lot more than a secret noodle recipe.

Eventually, I get the hang of rolling out noodles and am rewarded with getting to actually make noodle dough.

My mentor pushes a bowl, a scoop, two eggs and a bag of flour in front of me. I look around. Where's the recipe book? The secret list of ingredients? Measuring spoons and cups?

"Crack the two eggs into the bowl," my mentor instructs. "And add flour."

"How—how much?"

She shrugs. "About a cup."

I'm horrified. How much is about a cup? Nine- tenths? One and one 12th? "That's—that's it? That's the secret recipe?"

She laughs. "There's no secret recipe. Just add a cup of flour—enough so the dough looks and feels right when you start kneading it."

"But how will I know?

"Experience. After a while, you'll just know."

I scoop up some flour and put it in with the eggs. Stir and mix and knead and add more flour, until the dough, well... looks and feels about right.

And as I start listening to their stories again, I realize these ladies' "secret" to good noodles is the same as their "secret" for a good life: all it takes is some learning from experience. Then you start to know how to get it right.

Corn-fusion for the directionally challenged

Earlier this fall, my husband and two daughters wanted to spend a recent Sunday afternoon at a corn maze. It'll be fun, they assure me.

It'll be fun, they assure me.

I do not think this sounds like fun because I am, I openly admit, directionally-challenged. I once ordered a AAA Trip-Tik in order to make the journey from Dayton to Lexington, Kentucky.

"It'll be a good learning experience for the kids," my husband tells me, knowing I'm a sucker for learning experiences. "The challenge of a puzzle, using your wits..." So I decide to be a good sport and go with my family to the corn maze. I even leave behind the cell phone, the compass, and the backpack with flares and emergency provisions. After all, my husband does have a good sense of direction.

When we arrive at the local corn maze, my 9-year-old decides we should split up into teams. Her dad went with her younger sister, and she went with me.

Fortunately, my 9-year-old has inherited her dad's sense of direction. So I'm calm as we enter the maze and begin our quest: collect map pieces from mailboxes hidden in each of the 12 sections of the maze until we've put together the whole map. All is going well until my 9-year- old suddenly stops.

"What's the matter?" I ask.

"We're lost," she says, pointing at the mud puddle in which I'm standing. "That mud puddle. We've seen it before."

Apparently, in a maze, a sense of direction is only useful for helping you know when you're lost. As the adult in the situation, it's up to me to figure out how we can work our way through the maze.

Just as I'm about to ask her to climb up on my shoulders and scream for help, a pair of young boys come whizzing by, whooping and hollering. "We got lucky! We found the piece for section two!"

Blind luck! Now there's a plan! "Let's just keep walking until we find the mailbox for this section," I say. "How long can it take?"

Thirty-three minutes, as it turns out.

A young couple comes by, notes our discouraged expressions, and says, "If you're looking for the map piece for section three, it's right over there." And gives us directions.

"That's cheating," my 9-year-old scowls.

"Uh, huh," I say. "Follow me." We get the next piece.

Now we've tried a sense of direction, blind luck, and cheating to get through the maze, none of which are particularly effective. Or satisfying.

I remember what my husband said. This is supposed to be a game, a puzzle in which you use your wits, right? Fine. If I'm going to freeze to death in the middle of a cornfield, I'm at least going to go down like a good parent and turn it into a life lesson.

Plus I'm out of ideas. So I say to my 9-year-old, "You like games. How do you go about winning games?"

She thinks for a minute. "How about—we use logic? We can use the map pieces we have to get to the bottom of the next section, then work our way to the top, always following along the right..."

That's just what we do. Eventually, after about two hours, we find our way through the maze with a completed map.

As we exit, I say to her, "Honey, you really learned something today. Life is just like a maze. You can try blind luck or cheating, but using your wits is really the best way to get through. Isn't that neat?"

And she looks up me and says, "Mom? Can we get hot chocolate?"

Fair is fair when it comes to sport's trophy hair

The wigs are my 9-year-old daughter's idea.

She recently competed in a regional Taekwondo tournament in which she won two trophies: second place for "forms" (demonstrations of Taekwondo techniques) and third place in sparring.

Though pleased to have placed, she is dismayed that the figures on the trophies are... boys. So, she tells me a few evenings ago, we need to make wigs for her trophy-people. Now.

I'm not adept at wig making, so I try parental sleight- of-hand: pulling an explanation out of thin air and hoping she falls for it. "Maybe the person on the trophy is supposed to be either a girl or a boy."

"Mommmmm!" she wails, turning my one-syllable title into a multi-syllable lament that, to her pre-pre-teen view, I'm being clueless—again. "These are definitely boys. My sister's soccer trophies have girls with ponytails."

"There are," I inform her, "men who wear ponytails, so maybe your sister has a boy trophy with a ponytail and your trophies have girls with very, very short hair."

She flashes a look which clearly warns that if she has to say "Mommmmm" one more time, it will take at least 10 minutes and forevermore prove that I will never understand anything about her. This is not a fate I relish, and so I concede that she is right. Her trophies are bedecked with boys.

I try another approach. "I'm sure the boy trophies were just a matter of economics."

"Huh?"

"You were the only girl in your particular group for sparring, and only one of two for forms. Maybe the tournament organizers just wanted to save money by ordering boy trophies in bulk."

"Boys get boy trophies," she says matter-of-factly. "Girls should get girl trophies. Are you going to help me make wigs or not?"

I'm tempted to ask why she cares so much. After all, she won the darned trophies. Plus, hairstyles have never much interested her before. This is the same girl who was horrified at my glee in finding cute pony tail holders to match the color of her Taekwondo belt—and refused to wear them.

I'm tempted to tell her that she should feel blessed that no Taekwondo coach, competitor or referee has ever made her feel out of place for being interested in a sport that draws mostly males. That when I was her age, girls didn't play soccer, let alone one-on-one sports with boys. That her paternal grandmother could only play half-court basketball because full-court was considered too strenuous for girls—so she and her teammates once snuck into the school gym at night just for the thrill of playing full court. That for a long time, athletic girls were often considered—well... just a little odd.

But looking at my daughter, I realize telling her to accept "good enough" isn't... good enough. I realize she doesn't need a lesson in the long, challenging history of women's sports. Not just yet. Tonight, she needs wigs.

So we dig out some mauve yarn left over from a scouting project. Scissors. Tape.

We cut little strands of yarn and affix them to the tape. Then we stick the little mauve wigs on the heads of the Taekwondo trophies. Presto, chango. Girl trophies for a girl athlete.

And my 9-year-old smiles happily at them, all the way- too-early-pre-teen angst gone. There's a saying she is far too young to know about, or to yet understand: We've come a long way, baby. But with plucky 9-year-olds like her, we'll make the rest of the journey just fine.