All Adither

All is merry and bright. Or something.

 

We get a holiday card every year from the medical study Kitty Cat is in. She has a gene. One that's not so great and could someday turn into something chronic (but probably won't). So the people who work for this study poke her and examine her toenail clippings and evaluate our drinking water. 

I hate the whole endeavor, to be honest. But I know we're doing something good, helping to advance research, etcetera, etcetera.

The card is festive and is all "Happy Holidays! Season's Greetings! Thank you for collecting your daughter's poop every month and mailing it to our East Coast lab! Thank you for letting us draw her blood far more often than a baby/toddler/preschooler should have her blood drawn! Thank you for the privilege of also testing her for celiac disease and worrying the shit out of you this past summer even though it all came to nothing!! Thank you for opening our letters every three months (with trembling hands) as we send our Yea, she's developing the Evil Antibodies or Nay, she's still good, after every blood test!"

Each person involved in the study signs the card. Because we're all friends. These do-gooders and us.

I glance at it and toss it in the recycle bin.

*-*-*-*-*

I'm ambivalent about Santa. We've told the lie and perpetuated it all these years (J. going to great lengths to keep the kids believing). It's fun. It's absurd. It's totally not what Christmas is about. And yet...and yet...I believed as a kid and I don't remember that learning the truth did me great harm. 

I do recall extreme irritation when, at 7, I grilled my mom, demanded she tell me definitively if there was a Santa or not. And since Christmas was just days away, she said, "The SPIRIT of Santa Claus is real. We'll talk more in January."

"The Spirit of Santa?" I thought. If I had known WTF then, I certainly would've uttered it. I could not grasp what The Spirit of Santa meant.

Looking back, though, I think she handled it well. And I know Fruit Bat will ask soon. He's already announced that he doesn't believe in magic. Magic is how I've explained so much Santa ridiculousness.

How does Santa get in through our chimney-less gas fireplace? Magic, of course. How does Santa make it to every hut and yurt and house and condo in the world on one night? The big M. How do Santa's elves mold plastic to make it look exactly like the Tonka truck at Toys 'R Us? Why, Magic, my son.

So, the whole gig is blown if he doesn't believe in magic. Which I'm kind of okay with. A few times these last weeks I've been tempted to blurt out the truth. But I haven't. And I shouldn't. Not yet.

There'll be plenty of years during which Fruit Bat and Kitty Cat can hone their cynicism, not enough time for them to just enjoy This.

More than 100 words--I tried, y'all

One of my favorite bloggers, Slouching Mom, issued a challenge last week. Write a story in 100 words. I did my best. Really, I did. But I came in somewhere around 260. Yeah. I'll keep trying.

*****

She'd agreed to meet him for coffee. Why? Curiosity, she supposed. Justification: it was like a business lunch. Coffee, for God's sake. What could be more benign?

But once he arrived, she knew it wasn't benign at all.

Outside the lecture hall, he looked different. Smaller. A tiny piece of Kleenex clung to the whiskers on his chin. His lips were dry, his eyes pink and watering.

Still, her heart pummeled her ribcage. Here they were, sipping Americanos together. After all this time.

She tried not to think of his wife. Her grades. Her parents back home. She focused, simply, on his hands wrapped around his mug, on his chapped knuckles. And she swallowed hard, her brain already spinning--like a caterpillar spewing out silk--as she imagined what lay ahead on that gray afternoon.

He talked about the wind, a paper he was publishing, his assistant professor. His tone was more condescending than it had seemed in his office (as he played with a Rubik's cube and, over the top of it, flirted).

Her coffee wasn't even cold yet. But she felt her arms snaking into her jacket, realized she was groping around for her gloves. 

"Stop talking," she said, suddenly powerful, suddenly, she knew, right.

Startled, he looked at her.

She wanted to reach out and pick that stupid bit of tissue from his jaw. Instead, she said, "My roommate's gone for the weekend. Let's go back to campus."

Because campus, it turned out, was only place this would work.

 

Guilted...not gilded

It is a long endless string, perhaps lit with small yellow Christmas bulbs, or maybe not maybe it is really a fuse and if you hold fire to it, it will eventually explode but it is there, always there, running under and behind and through everything you do You really shouldn't buy that You shouldn't eat that You should talk to her You owe someone a phone call You're not writing prolifically You're giving too much time to writing and not enough to your children You should definitely earn more money You need to read that book Your house is a mess mocking you every time you turn a corner You should be spending the holidays with your parents You have too many pairs of boots You aren't doing that the way your husband would like you to and the string runs on, tangling, hanging then holding taut never turning to dust until you do.

And you breathe in. You breathe out. You breathe in. You breathe out.

You're about to turn 41. 41 and counting. And you never thought you'd still notice the string. Much less that the string would be thicker and heavier and wound around you more tightly than it used to be.

Forgive me, for I have Flipped (again)

I don't know how to explain my recent fascination with this little gadget we've had sitting around our house for quite a while now. I'm completely into this little Flip and I think the Flip people should pay me for extolling their ease of use and funness and compactness and all around adorableness.

But I won't hold my breath.

Here's a short of my beloved Seattle. I've been here 10 years now and can't, at the moment, imagine living anywhere else. I think I'm a lifer. I only wish I were actually from Seattle so my parents and sister and aunt Betsy would be here too.

Shallow

I could blog about Tiger Woods, who disgusts me now. Who (Whom? Whom cares?) I never thought much about before a few days ago. But who has clearly been seriously power tripping these last few years or living out some teenage boys' fantasy.

I could blog about how Obama is sending more troops to Afghanistan, and how weird I feel about that, but how I'm trying to believe in him because I think he's trying his best.

I could blog about red wine, and how the only way I differentiate vintages is bitey and smooth. And how much I love smooth, but won't pay more than seven dollars for it. I'm cheap that way.

What I really wanted to do today, though, was play with my Flip.

A Pleading Green

Okay, you Greener Grass hounders, here's another installment. (You know I secretly like that you hound me, right?) 

If you've never read, but want to, the first part of the story is in my right sidebar under I Like To Write. Just be warned that it's getting long. Entirely too long.

*****

Nurses changed shifts. Dave went home to shower and came back still looking haggard, but clean. Tamara stayed, dozed on a hard plastic chair for a while and once with her upper body draped across Joshua's feet. She drank coffee from a vending machine and ate candy bars and bags of peanuts. She studied herself in the bathroom mirror and thought she looked profoundly wasted--eyes small and glassy, hair all over the place, clothes wrinkled and starting to stink.

Yet she couldn't go change into her own shorts and shirt, clean up or grab a proper meal. She was in a purgatory that, she couldn't help believing, was of her own making. She just had to endure it. Endure Dave's anger and her guilt and Joshua's comatose state. By enduring, she was, in a way, repenting. Which was the only thing she could do for Josh right then.

"Why don't you run home, see the kids," Dave suggested, pulling out a fresh copy of the Sentinel and rubbing his cleanly shaven jaw.

"Who's with them?"

"Megan."

Tamara must've slid him a questioning look, because he said, "Theresa's daughter."

"All this time?"

"She's good with them," Dave said.

Just then they heard a small rustle coming from the bed. Tamara scraped her chair up to Joshua as his head rocked, just slightly, back and forth. His eyelids peeled back and he looked straight ahead with unfocused pupils.

Dave rushed to the bed and grabbed Joshua's limp hand. "Josh, it's dad. We're here. Mom's here," he looked pointedly at Tamara as he said this. "You hit your head, but you're gonna be okay. You're gonna be okay."

He had no way of knowing that, of course. But Tamara kept her mouth shut.

Joshua's eyes drifted from one side of the room to the other, then closed again.

"Shit," Tamara muttered. "Shit. Joshua?"

Nothing.

She ran out into the hallway and grabbed a nurse. The nurse listened to their recount of what had happened and nodded. "Let's hope for more and more of that," she said, but didn't offer further encouragement. She jotted something in Joshua's chart and left them again.

The room was silent. Or as silent as a pediatric ICU can be, with machines humming and people talking quietly in the hall and the far off trill of a phone.

Dave was looking at Tamara with watery eyes, his lids opened so far that the whites were visible around the entire perimeter of his irises. Like small, floating rafts, she thought.

"How could you have left for so long?"

The harsh honesty of the question made her jump. She didn't expect to be asked outright. At least not yet. It was more Dave's style to criticize around the edges of the main issue, to make it clear in small and biting ways how hurt he was.

She came back with, "How could you have forgotten about me? About you and me?" She would've done anything, in that moment, for a drink. Anything except walk out of the hospital while Joshua was in the big, white bed, his body so small and vulnerable surrounded by metal boxes and rubber tubing. "Everything became more important to you than me and us," she added. "Golf. Work. Mail. Everything."

"You do not know that," he said, pointing at her with his first two fingers stuck together. A small oddity of his.

"I felt that," she said, and her voice was hoarse with emotion. She sensed the tendons in her neck straining, the vein along her right temple bulging.

And in that short exchange they had cut the complexities and small disappointments of their relationship down to what it was. Tamara saw it as something palpable, like a small, lumpy sculpture she could hold in her hands. She had no idea, though, if it was malleable, or too set in its shape to morph into anything else.

"Do you feel this?" he asked, his gaze cutting to their son, their oldest child.

She thought of all the times she'd spent with just Joshua, while Dave worked and before Caitlyn and Eli had come along. Just the two of them trying to fill the days. Going to Gymboree and napping together on the futon in his room. 

She remembered the excitement of feeding him his first bites of liquified sweet potatoes and the hair-ripping frustration of potty training him. They'd been a team. And she'd often thought, as tedious and isolating as a lot of it was, that she should have stopped with him. Should not have gone on to have more children.

"Of course I do," she said.

He said, "Good. Because I thought maybe you were done feeling."

She had to chew her lip and clamp her hand over her mouth to keep from fighting anymore. It wasn't right. Going at it there in Joshua's room. For all they knew, he could hear.

She sat back down, laid her head on Joshua's mattress and rested that way for a long time. Finally, she sighed, stood and said, "I think I will run home and check on the kids. The car out in the lot?"

He threw the keys hard and they skittered across the white, tile floor.

She scrambled for them and, kissing Joshua's forehead, she left, thinking, please, please, please, please.

Thanksgiving 1969

This is my extended family 40 years ago. I was almost one, so probably sat off to the side in a high chair smearing mashed potatoes all over myself.

Carving the turkey is my Grandpa, John. I blogged about him once, about how he lost a finger in a lawn mower and about his stoicism and infuriating reserve. He was in the Navy during World War II, though I could never convince him to tell me stories from those days. His reticence frustrated me back then. Now I wonder if he was too traumatized to speak of it. I don't know.

When this photo was taken, he and my grandma, Ruth, to his left, owned a 9-hole golf course (hence the lawn mower incident). They lived there, in the clubhouse, occupying a few designated rooms upstairs and off the back. We took big family meals in the common dining area. And this is where the photo was shot. Oh, how I remember that golf course. Even now, the fuely smell from a fleet of golf carts takes me right back.

The auburn-haired stunner to the right is my aunt, Betsy. She's an all around lovely person with an artistic eye and a sweet soul.

I hesitated to post this picture. It's just a holiday snapshot, after all. Probably boring to most of you. But I love how it captures a family moment, a moment when the world was about to enter 1970. And how that time makes me think of so many other happy times from my very groovy childhood.

Enormity

There was a summer evening several years ago, when I was pregnant with Fruit Bat--so newly pregnant that the awful seasickness hadn't yet begun--and J. and I were at an outdoor party on a rolling estate.

I was seated at a table of attorneys. About ten of them. They spoke legal. Telling lawyerly stories I could sort of (just barely) follow. Follow, that was, until J. spewed out a latin phrase. He made everyone at the table laugh uproariously. Except me.

I sat there dumbly, the only one who didn't get the joke. I'm not sure if I've felt so stupid and out of my element since. I was just a poorly-compensated graphic designer for a stuffy inflight magazine, after all.

And now I think, but I was something. People respected me for my layouts and gave me mostly positive feedback. They gave me paychecks, too.

Being a mom is not nothing, of course. It's an enormous responsibility. An enormous privilege. 

When you stay home with your kids, though, there is no one to tell you "Hey! Sweet save on the tantrum!" or "My, what a balanced and tasty breakfast you made for the children."

My therapist, who I haven't needed to see much lately, but who I went to last week for a tune-up, strongly believes I should get a part-time job. Not the kind of job where I blog at a coffee shop, essentially alone. Or where I write my fiction and pretend it's work. Also, essentially alone. But the kind of job where I check in somewhere and interact with other adults.

I agreed with her. I explained, though, that I am giving myself until Kitty Cat is in Kindergarten (Fall of '10) to find an agent or get significantly published or pull in new blogging jobs, to really launch the writing thing, before I succumb to the call of "the job". Not that I have anything against working. I don't. 

I've just been home so long it's hard to imagine answering to a boss who isn't 4-years-old and who I can't manipulate with promises of licorice or doughnuts.

This SAHM gig makes me too hungry.

Too hungry for validation in a way I never was before. And I need to do something about that. Soon.

Detritus

A storm that wasn't dramatic so much as persistent rose up from behind the Olympic Mountains a few days ago and buffeted Seattle with its winds and rain and knocked over the two shopping carts. Their contents now lay, sodden, across the sidewalk. No one seems to care.

*****

I am tired of hearing my bloggy voice and have been having a hard time hitting that green COMPOSE button lately. What more can I say about being a stay-at-home mom who simultaneously adores her children but would like them to move out? It's the same old see-saw. Marriage, too. Up and down and sometimes round and round. So, if I'm posting more photos and fiction than usual, please know I'm looking for my voice, trying to figure out where to take this site next.

*****

I have made the monumental and expensive decision to hire an independent editor for my manuscript. I believe I've found a good one, an honest one, a thoughtful one, and I'm excited to learn what she says about the flaws in my narrative. I hope I'm up to the task of fixing them.

On the writing front, I'm also polishing up a short story I've been working on for a few months now, have passed it to a friend to critique (anyone else want a shot?) and like it quite a bit. Soon I will send it out, releasing it to anonymous slush piles and waiting for bites.

*****

Re: Knitting. I gravitate toward the yarny looping and weaving the colder it gets. It's one of the most meditative things I do. And, though partaking makes me feel about 82, it's lovely. Fruit Bat, more than anyone, is interested, asking if he can help, watching intently as the needles slip and click, often proclaiming, "Mom, you're good! You're a GOOD knitter." In reality, I'm mediocre. But I like it. And I like that he likes it.

Shhh

People are peculiar. And narcissistic.

I know this because I am a person. And a watcher. 

Though I am not the listener I strive to be. 

I see myself in conversation and I am absorbing what you're saying. But then I'm jumping in with my own thing. With my own spin.

And I think, God, just hush. Let the other person talk. Let them emote.

Part of it is a desire to keep the conversation going, the fear of the lull. Part of it is a crushing need to relate with a shared experience. And yet another part is this itch to talk about me. To validate my existence by telling you about it.

And that? I don't want. I want to be someone who makes eye contact and listens and nods and lets you dribble words until they fail you.

I think I'll be working for it until the day I die.

Weary of you

She loved her old Scrabble set. The board was sturdy. The trays wooden, like small pews. Whenever she opened the game, she ran her hands through the smooth tiles as certain people might run their hands through money: over and under, around her fingers. Sometimes she scooped up the tiles and let them fall, clicking into a slippery heap.

Now, though, all the tiles were laid out neatly, the board a vast diagram of words. She had only three letters left to play.

"Why do you make that sound?" her husband asked, looking up at her from where he sat on the couch.

"What sound?"

"That high sort of sigh. Like a whinny. Every time you think."

She laid her hand on her flannelly chest. She wore her nightgown even though it was just eight-thirty. She liked to change into it as soon as she got home from work. "Only when I play Scrabble, though, right? I don't do that when I'm thinking about other things." She imagined herself at Davis + Davis, whinnying, as Gordon put it, while she compiled quotes or made copies.

"Mostly during Scrabble. Sometimes when you sleep, too. Or balance the bank account." He thought for a moment, and then added, "When we're, you know...when I'm parking the Porsche in its garage."

She registered annoyance at another of Gordon's weird euphemisms for sex, but said, "Are you serious? Why is this the first I've heard of it?"

He shrugged, mumbled, "Seemed like a small thing. I'm really just curious if you're aware of it, is all," and reached for a handful of cashews from the side table bowl.

She said, "Small?"

"In the big scheme, yes."

She tried to concentrate on her three tiles, but could only hold her breath and try not to emit strange noises.

The faucet dripped. Her grandmother's antique mantel clock ticked. Gordon crunched his cashews.

Then there was the clatter of wooden Scrabble tiles, the soft thud of the board hitting the cushion next to Gordon, the rattle of the pews and heavy, wool-socked footfalls down the hallway. The slam of a door.

Gordon shook his head, wiped salty hands on his pants and stood, letting out a sigh of his own, though this one lower and less earnest than his wife's.

He knocked on the bathroom door. He called her name. He hated when she got like this. Things were humming along just fine. A nice Friday night with a Scrabble game, maybe a large pour of merlot later and the sports section before bed. But now. Now he'd spend his evening trying to appease her. Offering her wine. A foot massage. Specially smoothing out the Op-Ed and Cooking pages for her to peruse while they sat propped against their pillows, twin lamps throwing discs of light across their laps.

And she'd be reticent, reluctant. Making it clear she was doing him a favor by letting him wait on her.

Well, not this time.

He went to the hall closet and grabbed his heavy corduroy shirt, letting the hangers clang so she would know he meant business.

Gordon tramped three blocks to the Hot Spot, a grimy little outfit with a pool table, flashing trivia screens mounted to one end of the bar and rows of gleaming liquor bottles that, he suspected, never sat long enough to accumulate dust.

He drank two glasses of house red: a bitter, young blend of sub par grapes.

When he returned home sometime later, having lost badly at a trivia game to a couple who looked like they'd just ridden in on a truck bed filled with gasoline cans and snarly German Shepherds, he hung up his shirt and went right to the bedroom.

To his relief, she was asleep, whinnying. He turned to go into the bathroom when, in the light of the lamp she'd left on, something shiny caught his eye. He looked back at his wife. He stepped closer. He saw that her slumbering body was surrounded by right side up Scrabble tiles and that, above her head like a parenthesis, was the word, Sex. She'd taken a post-it, too, had drawn on it a long, black exclamation point and stuck it to the sheet to emphasize Sex!

He raked his hands through his hair, paced the creaky floor twice and came back to her. He plucked out the letters he needed and, across his own pillow, spelled, Weary and went to sleep on the couch.

Waxed

I make my call. Covert. Standing in the laundry room with the dryer doing its airy spin, muffling my voice.

Later that afternoon I glance over both shoulders, then hop quickly into the car. I drive south, find the building along old railroad tracks that don’t get used much anymore.

Head bowed, I stride inside and give my name.

A woman named Tara greets me. She tells me to remove my coat and lie down on a cot, face up.

I do.

She shines a hot light in my face and proceeds to slather wax over the edges of my eyebrows. She yanks hard. I grin. I love the whole process. The warm paraffin, the sting, the cool lotion they rub in afterward. 

But I feel guilty too. The shameful waste of money. The gross connotation of a richy woman with so much time on her hands she can engage in such things. What’s so wrong with tweezers, after all?

Except, with tweezers, there’s no warmed bed, no soothing music or efficient ripping out of all the little hairs I hate. There’s only me, hunched over the sink, plucking under an insufficient bulb.

So I suffer the guilt. Pay with cash. Skulk out, large sunglasses covering my reddened skin, hoping the next six weeks pass quickly so I can do it all again.

You can't tell me it isn't

Art in unexpected places. 

The wheel of a tractor. 

The way a girl's hair curls under her chin. 

How a boy looks when he, gap-toothed, laughs with abandon.

The reinvigoration of hope and how it surges through you like hot liquid. 

The sound of an acoustic guitar played well. 

The taste and waxy pull of honeycomb. 

Sun hitting the fire-y leaves of a Japanese Maple. 

Gleaming railroad tracks. 

Watching someone do what they're best at.

Art.

All of it.

Saved by a pumpkin patch

I took Fruit Bat and Kitty Cat to a pumpkin patch yesterday. The sky was low and gray, the weather nondescript. No breeze. No raindrops. Nothing except a nip in the air.

And my children? They couldn't have been better. More cooperative. More precious.

It was quiet, the pumpkin patch, but there were a few other small groups. One was a mother with three toddlers. She was overwhelmed. Beyond overwhelmed. She reminded me of myself last Saturday. The abundant mud drove her nuts. Her kids could do nothing right. They were too loud, too exuberant, too dirty. While part of me wanted to send her telepathic messages to relax and remember that outside, on a farm for God's sake, was the perfect place for whooping and getting grimy, another part of me understood completely.

There are days (weeks, months) when you're at your limit and attempting an outing of that magnitude puts you over the edge. You do it, because you think the kids will enjoy it and that you should, after all, take them to a pumpkin patch in October. When what you really ought to do is find help so you can sit in a bean bag chair with a giant mug of something hot. Alone.

As I watched her, and listened to her (dear dog, did I have to listen to her) I felt so much on the other side of my foul mood Saturday. Like I actually had a choice to embrace my good fortune or not. Last weekend, there was no choice. I was at the bottom of a well. As close as I ever come to depression.

I've made no secret of the fact that weekends are hard for me. That J. and I often fall into a strange groove of deferring to the other or fighting for control of how the household will run. Last weekend was a little (okay a lot) of both. Less symbiotic and more judgmental and argumentative. That's not how either of us want to be. And then there are the kids, wanting and needing me, when what I crave is a day to move at my own pace.

One thing, too, I never considered about motherhood, when I was young and considering motherhood, was that it would turn me into a nag. Not even nagging J. really. While we have our issues, I don't think nagging is on his list of what bugs him about me. But nagging the kids. To brush their teeth and get dressed and eat and clear dishes and turn off lights and wash their own damn grapes because I'm tired of being in the kitchen. I never thought of myself as nit-picky and annoying, but that's often what I feel I've become. I hate that particular version of myself.

Maybe the woman at the pumpkin patch was thinking the same thing: I hate being like this, yet I can't stop because it's kind of a vortex that sucks you in and how will these kids survive if I don't protect them from the dirt and untied shoes and their own exhilaration?

All I know for sure is that the pumpkin patch did the opposite for me. It helped save me from that Angie. I got to hang with my kids and let them get grungey and yell and run. And I enjoyed every second of it.

Fragility

 

I lose it this weekend. It doesn't happen often. But when it does it is ugly and sad and I weep and bury my head in my hands and insist that everything is too much. The kids! The chaos. The someone always needing something.

The animalness of Fruit Bat and Kitty Cat. The curious, babblyness of them. And I start to cry and have to go upstairs. But guilt sets in and I come down too soon and I am still not right. And am I scaring the children? I am scaring J., I know.

Fresh, hot tears and tension and anxiety.

Finally, I agree to drive around Seattle looking at ovens (we need one).

Talking to appliance sales people, one who is insufferable and one who tells me I don't look like I eat much fried chicken (if only she knew), but that if I ever DO want to make some, she has the perfect hood for the job. I feel better. More human. I almost, almost enjoy myself.

Back at home my throat closes in again. I try conversing with J. but have to stop because both kids are all over us. Talking and shrieking and laughing loudly. They're healthy, I think. They're fine. They're just boisterous. They're just 4 and 6. Why am I so ungrateful? Why can't I just enjoy this? Sometimes I do. Sometimes I look at Fruit Bat and Kitty Cat and think I made them. In my body. And I love them. And I'm so proud of who they are and what they've accomplished so far.

I clean bathrooms and we roast pumpkin seeds and this should be enough. But where is my serotonin? and please let this be hormonal and let it go away soon. Because I am not doing this very well and I am scaring everyone. Including myself.