The art of losing scissors isn’t hard to master

If you come to my house, there are three things I dare you to find: scissors, a hairbrush or a garden shovel.

It doesn’t matter how often magical beings like Santa or the Easter Bunny supply these treasures, they always disapparate whenever an adult in the house needs them.

I realized the other day that I hadn’t brushed my hair in three days. But it wasn’t until I went to dig in the garden that I nearly lost my mind.

It’s not only the missing item in question, it’s the blank, blameless stares of my sweet gremlins who swear on their lives that they don’t possibly know where said item is.

Until, suddenly, it apparates magically and everyone cheers.

Really, I’m just tired of looking for things. I feel permanently stuck in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, “One Art,” with its famous first line, “The art of losing things isn’t hard to master.” There has been a lot of loss over the past year, and like my kids, it seems just so easy for many people to minimize. I am in turn joyful for a return to socialization, and still unsocialized enough to find most people maddening. I used to appreciate the bridge-building concept; now I’m pretty confident that we need to burn the bridges and build rafts. Arson sounds like the easy part; we still have to figure out how to cross the river together.

I’ve been reading Erma Bombeck lately, and I can’t help but wonder what she would have made of the pandemic and parenting and the predicaments of being an adult in 2021. I suspect she would tell us to grow up and give us some humorous instructions on how to do so. There are a lot of assumptions in her columns on who is doing the caregiving of young children, mothers mostly. She writes from a time when a single-income household was still the norm, and white women were expected to stay home. She definitely includes the plight of the working mom, but such a person seems anecdotal in her early columns. I might have rejected her before the pandemic, but now her 1960-something advice is reassuring, even as it is annoyingly static — will anything ever really change?

At least she claims the privilege of shouting. She writes in a 1969 column:

“No one is born a shrew. I used to watch women getting flushed and angry while they chewed out their children and I’d say to myself, ‘My goodness, that woman is going to have a heart attack. No one should discipline their children in anger’ … Having children of my own has knocked a hole in that theory. To begin with, there was only 32 hours of every week when I wasn’t angry, and then I was sleeping.”

She owns it! I’m not suggesting we all go out and rail against our children and partners. I’m an advocate of gentle parenting and learning to cope with big feels in healthy ways. But yeah, it’s hard, and please God, let there be some humor somewhere. I think Bombeck would rail against the privilege and perfectionism that white middle- and upper-class parents approach family life. I think she would have given us permission to lower expectations of ourselves during the height of the pandemic, and I think she would have reminded us that we are still emerging and mothers are still struggling.

Anyway, my child has interrupted me at least three times in the process of writing this column. No, I have not yelled. But I did tell her to go away for at least 20 minutes, and she presented the idea of an art project.

I told her she needed to find scissors first.

Mercedes O’Leary is a community organizer, grant writer and poet living in Homer. She holds an MFA in creative writing from New England College.

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