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What’s new at Castle Ferguson (Sam was a knight this year for Halloween, I was a serving wench and Dave was a dragon (who looked a lot like a dinosaur) hence the Castle claim)

Sam takes pictures. As you will see, he does know how to compose. I put the camera on auto, let him compose his shot (and he does take the time to compose) and then he snaps.

Dave is starting his second year of his three year nursing program. He’s made the Dean’s list and even though it’s a might stressful working full time and going to school, he’s found what likes and is good at. As for what Sam thinks…a day that has “No work, no school” is his favorite.

We finally installed our staircase—thank you Q and M contracting. Sam’s friends can come over without the fear of accident and lawsuits.

Uncle Scott lives here again. He’s having a horrible time finding a job, but as I keep telling him, “isn’t everyone.” Although it turns out, not the peops in S. Dakota. It’s the only state with low unemployment rate and their economy is growing but we don’t have oil wells here in S. Buffalo.

Peter Pan our first pet, a beta fish, arrived and shortly there after was flushed. Sam said a-not-so tearful goodbye as Peter Pan circled the drain.

We bought a new car, doing our part to stimulate the economy. We ditched the Jeep for a Mazda 5—the mini-est mini van. Although while doing the research for what car to buy, Dave never used the word “mini” or “van”. He knows me too well. Sam calls it the Batmobile. Zoom. Zoom.

When Skies are Grey

I recently had my 7th and hopefully final miscarriage. According to Einstein, the definition of insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. But when there was such a one as Sam to be had, it’s hard not to try again and again and 5 more times. The fertility doctor had told me, given my reproductive limitations; Sam was “a miracle.”

I awoke to the signs and symptoms of miscarriage on our last day at the Adirondacks; after a long drive home, I went to the ER that night. They wheeled me up to the sonogram room to see what was what but then parked me outside. As Dave and I waited, a girl who could not have been older than 16, fully pregnant and accompanied by her hooligan baby daddy was wheeled from the room and parked in the hallway next to me. She and I waited with our wheelchairs back to back like the opposite sides of a fertility coin. She was young and fruitful while my fertility was ebbing away. She whined about getting fat and enforced bed rest; I didn't need the sonogram to tell me my pregnancy was over.

Often, I think of Sam’s life as if it were it were a biography in progress. Usually parents are given a few lines of exposition before the action of a life unfolds. I worry that my few lines will be this characterization: Lesa Marie nee Quale Ferguson was an insecure, creative, disorganized woman who allowed the disappointment of her many miscarriages to make her depressed and become an embittered shadow in Sam’s young life. He reached out to his father.

I try to banish these thoughts. After I wasted many years despairing that I would never marry or own a home or have babies, I promised myself that I wouldn't let present disappointments make me a pessimist. If I had known that my future held Dave and Sam, I would have enjoyed myself more or at least not holed away in bachelor apartments with endless movies from Rain City Video. Maybe there is a future for me in which all these damn miscarriages make sense. I'm supposed to trust that…not likely. I'm just disappointed.

I hate how cruel life can be. This time, life seemed to be foreshadowing a happy outcome. Throughout my short pregnancy, I kept bumping into this friend of the family who at age forty-four had a healthy baby. The weekend we were in the Adirondacks, Sam was fascinated with our friends’ new baby. He picked her flowers, asked to hold her, gently patted her head and gave her many kisses. He would be a loving brother.

Generally when Sam and I are together, he wants to be somewhere else—with the three girls next door or at Gramma Betty’s eating cookies or in his imaginary world where he and Conor are allowed to watch the new Transformers movie together.

Maybe he likes to be elsewhere because in our little family, I'm the bad cop—the one who enforces tooth brushing and napping and not letting him whack the neighbor girls. When Sam is overtired and hits a wall, he tells me that I'm ugly and stupid. I roll with it and continue to enforce, As Sgt. Joe Friday would say, “Just doing my job, Sir”.

As this miscarriage progressed, suddenly Sam wouldn't leave my side. He threw a tantrum when Uncle Scott came to pick him up. And, he snuck away from Jen my lovely, lovely neighbor who had so generously invited him over to play. Every night, he climbed in bed with me and Dave. He snuggled flush against me. As Groucho Marx once said, “If you were any closer, I'd be in back of you.”

Up to now, Sam has rarely been needy. But then, I've never been a shadow. I’m not sure I know how to put this miscarriage thing behind me. I am sure I can’t be a shadow in Sam’s life. I guess I could start by rewriting these few lines of exposition: Lesa Marie nee Quale Ferguson was an insecure, creative, disorganized mother, who because of her many miscarriages understood fully that she had been blessed.

There are 2 more entries so scroll on down.

Occasions

oc⋅ca⋅sion [uh-key-zhuh] –noun a special or important time, event, ceremony, celebration, etc.: Owen’s and Max’s birthdays were quite the occasions. Sophie’s first communion was quite an occasion. Bridget’s baptism was quite an occasion. Sophie and Caeley's feis in Cleveland was quite an occasion. Camping at the Adirondacks was quite an occasion. Sam’s first dance recital was quite an occasion.

I am Sam

As most parents do, Dave and I put much thought and care in naming our child. Initially, I wanted to name him Texas because I wanted a flock of children named after states; Dave wasn’t sure what name he wanted but Texas wasn’t on his list of possibilities. He liked tried and true names, such as Gordon and Brenda. He did convince me that whatever name we chose, it should be a name that could weather all ages. Texas may be a fun name for a 2 year old and maybe an 80 year old but as a 40 year old man with a family, Ol’ Tex Ferguson might have a difficult time finding and keeping a job.

I put the name Samuel on our list of possible names for many reasons not the least of which was the vision of the 40 year old handing our resumes. Dave and I agreed if we chose this name, we would call him Sam. There are many good Sams out there—Sam I am from Green Eggs and Ham, Uncle Sam, and when I was a kid, my mom called me Sam after Samantha Stevens from Bewitched. If Sam turned out to be a Yuppie, he could introduce himself as Samuel. But it was a name among many names. At the time we crossed Texas (as well as all other state names) and Brenda off our list, we still didn’t know the baby’s gender.

Then when I was five months pregnant, Gram, Scott and I took a drive out to “The Amish” (my Gram’s name for that part of Western NY) to have a piece of furniture made. We drove up to an old bat and board barn and as I got out of the car, the door of the barn flew open and a bunch of blond boys in their black hats, suspenders and bright blue shirts ran toward us. And right behind them, dressed identically, a man walked out of the barn and said, “Hello, my name is Samuel.” I knew right then without sonogram confirmation of the baby’s gender that I would have a boy and I would name him Samuel.

The weekend Sam was born, my great Aunt Pat sent me a card telling me that in the Old Testament, Samuel was born to Hannah, an older woman who had tried unsuccessfully for years to have children, she pleaded to God for a child and when she had her son, she named him Samuel because it means, “God listened.”

My infatuation with names is not always so fun for Sam, my literal minded 3 year old. I will let people call him what they will except for the racist Sambo. The people in the neighborhood tend to call him Sammy. One day he asked me, “Mama, why does Ella call me Sammy?” I told him that is how some names work and listed names you can put a y at the end of, “Billy, Paigey, Owey, Danny, Bethy…”

He stopped me from my unending list, “But, my name is just Sam.”

Dave and I may have given him his name but at some point he came into possession of it. His name’s origin is of no concern to him. It’ll be years before he understands the connections to the Old Testament or Bewitched. I may like to riff on names but that’s all fluff to him. His identity is forming and it is forming around this name—Sam, “just Sam”. Already he has marked it as his own.

For Gaga this Mother's Day

While I was pregnant with Sam, my mother sat me down for one of her talks. She informed me that she would love her grandchild but her life was full and she didn’t want to be one of those grandmothers who spend their twilight years doting. She would be busy. I’ve had more than one of these talks with my mother—when I went away to school, when I was about to be married. I took her declarations in stride. For all her adventurousness and travel lust, my mother doesn’t like change especially when I’m the one doing the changing.

My mother lives by a set of rules and she doesn’t understand why others don’t have the good sense to live by them as well. To be fair, they’re a good set of rules—be good to others, take care of yourself emotionally and physically, don’t be excessive except for walking (there is no end to walking) and do what you have a passion for. She must look in wonder at her children—both excessive except for walking which means we’re not taking care of ourselves and our passions seem to shift and drift.

Right before Sam was born, she worried. She feared that the pregnancy and the C-section would do me in—if I had only taken better care of myself, if she had only insisted on one more walk…thank goodness my mother-in-law, a nurse—who according to mom are people trained in competence and good sense—was there to allay some of her fears. But then Sam was born, I became background noise.

It seems there’s a significant difference between a theoretical grandchild and an actual grandchild. You can’t smell the top of theoretical grandchildren’s heads, swaddle them nor gaze into their recently-arrived-from-oblivion eyes.

I became a mother and a Sam Delivery System—from what I’ve read I’m not the only daughter to have gone through this type of transformation. And my mother’s Declaration of Independence from the tyrannical state of Grandmotherhood went right out the hospital window. I realized this when in the hospital I woke at 3am to a vision: my mother who had draped herself and Sam in long flowing bedding swayed about the room with him, singing lullabies—appearing to me like apparitions from a 19th century novel. At first I thought it was the drugs…

Sam has power, a power my brother and I never possessed, to drive my mother to express excess. And oh baby baby, she is excessive with her attention, affection and need to please and tend to him. In his presence, her world found its centrifugal force. While she is super-grandma to him, she’s absent to anyone else in the room. And she can’t grasp that he radiates goodness and light for a few; he isn’t the light bulb for everyone in the room.

And here is why I chose pictures of Ava for this entry.

Nancy, Mom’s BBF (as in Best Buffalo Friend), had her first granddaughter 6 months before Sam was born. Nancy is super-grandma too and suffers from the same singular devotion. The four of them, Mom, Sam, Nancy and Ava, can be seen around and about town beginning at Trinity (many friendships seem to begin there including Mom and Nancy’s) to Music and Me to Lisa Taylor Dance, from Sweetness to the Globe Market, from Shea’s Theater to the Science Spot even at Talty’s tavern for some St. Paddy’s Day fun, Mom and Nancy supervise their grandchildren’s cultural development. Grandmothers offer a gateway to the community outside the nuclear family and that is what Sam’s and Ava’s grandmothers offer them.

During one of mom’s many travels (she reserved a few rights from the discarded declaration), I took Sam to dance class instead of his Gaga. I forgot his shoes and his sticker card; Sam came undone and wanted to go home and I too began to emotionally unwind and wanted to go home. Nancy whispered to Ava. Ava took off her shoes, gave them to Nancy and reached for Sam’s hand. Relieved, he took her hand and together they strolled into the dance studio, shoeless. And she left her card with her Gammy as well; after class they burst out of the studio with stickers on their t-shirts. Nancy and Ava’s kindness and Sam and Ava’s solidarity leveled me. My three year old son already has a life long friend—a friendship born out of Grandma Love.

There are 2 more new entries so scroll on down.

Activate

I’ve complained ad nausea about how children today are so activity bound, they live in the cars strapped down, and there isn’t enough time being home and bored. No one seems to appreciate the power of boredom—that blank space where the imagination begins to flourish. I guess I don’t believe it either because I’m looking for a 3 year old soccer program for the summer. Right now he’s learning to ice skate, dance, and he’s attending the Waldorf Nursery Program. And that doesn’t cover the myriad of other activities, church stuff and family events. I rationalize this by saying that Sam is THAT kid and he is. He thrives on social events and physical activity. If he was more like me, we’d hang out at home and watch the paint dry into landscapes of faraway kingdoms. He is already so social that he first few weeks at Waldorf, I wasn’t sure who was getting socialized—me or him.

Here is a group of moms and oftentimes one father who pass in the parking lot and what a cross section of parenthood: the stay-at-home moms who’ve just let their only and first-borns alone at school for the first time, hovering in the parking lot, wondering if the best thing would be to break their kid out of there; the mother of five and the father of 2 who give us a nod of “been there done that” before they dash off to get in a work out or enjoy a quiet moment at home; and the working moms trying to make all good things happen in a day. No matter how different our circumstances, it’s so refreshing for me to see other parents navigating this time of life when parent and child are braving new worlds separately.

Goofing

Sam is a goof. Here are some random things about Sam:

He likes to pounce and roars like a tiger. His favorite toys are foam swords that he plays knights and when he gets you, he says “Touché”; or he’ll play pirates but he gets to be “Mr.” Hook (little did anyone know that Captain Hook was once a gentlemen). He likes eggs for breakfast; oatmeal makes him gag. He cuts with scissors and he’s good at it—too good. He named the sock monkey Grandma Joyce made him, Bernice Peanut. His latest favorite movie is Shrek but Cars was his first favorite movie and the first movie he went to see at the theater was Wall-E. Now he calls Ava, E-Eva because she was Wall-E’s love. When I told him Conor was going to Norway, Sam said, “No, Conor comes here on the airplane. Norway’s closed.” Seems as though Sam gets direct reports from the embassy there. His bedtime favorite song is This Old Man—he sings along. His first lullabies were Mercedes Benz and King of the Road because those were the only songs that I knew all the words but then Uncle Scott pointed out they songs about drinking and smoking so I added All the Pretty Little Horses until I found out it was a song sung by slaves to their white charges and the lyrics include “The bees and the butterflies pickin' at its eyes.” So even though there is a “paddy-whack” in This Old Man, I’m sticking with it. His favorite book at bedtime is Horton, Where the Wild Things Are and Noah’s Ark Pop-up Book. Daddy’s favorite book to read is Caroline Kennedy’s Collection of Poetry. I think this puts Sam to sleep. And so he is right now. Sweet Dreams.