All Adither

Goodness

 
Me, Southfield, Michigan, 1977

I've always had this odd, inexplicable compulsion to prove to myself that I'm a good person. I don't know where it came from, but if I fail to act nicely, fairly, honestly, (ever) I disappoint myself.

I haven't always lived up to such virtues, of course. I've done and said some not-so-nice things. Especially in my younger days. I've criticized and stolen and jilted and snubbed. And often, the small meannesses come back to me and make me cringe. At times, in the past, have almost suffocated me.

My manuscript, the one I keep yammering on about, was originally titled The Goodness of Meredith Beam. It's premise? One woman who strives for goodness, but who is completely botching the endeavor by falling into an unscrupulous situation.

I've been working on this thing since I was 31. I am now 41. And I've lived and learned and realized a lot in the last 10 years. Namely, no one is fully good or fully bad. We all, every single one of us, is teeming with lightness and brightness and kindness and trust. But also,we are graphite smudges and black shadows of cruelness and selfishness. Often the two dance together and around each other, like sunlight filtering through leafy trees.

Bear with me on these flowery analogies. Sorry.

A lot of what I've realized has come from having kids. I see every angle of these two little beings. Their sweetness and ridiculous greed. I see that both behaviors are innate. Which helps me better accept the darkness in myself. And in others.

Sometimes it's hard to acknowledge that there is no perfection. No flawless, bleached white souls in the world. But it's true. And we're all better, and far more interesting, for our foibles. Without them, after all, there'd be no fiction. No movies. No absurdly angsty blogs like this one.

The good it does

The top three headlines on my homepage this morning:

Bomb hits Baghdad hotels, killing 37

Ethiopian jet catches fire; crashes into sea with 90 aboard

Haiti quake survivors: 'We live like dogs'

And I thought, Shit. And I thought, I'm so lucky. I'm so lucky. I'm so lucky. Which, is, of course true. Then I thought, how are we supposed to process all this tragedy? We can give some money. We can email and call our lawmakers. We can pray or send positive vibes or whatever it is we do.

But, seriously. This world.

I'm prone to sitting in my cozy, coffee shop or house and musing my good fortune and wondering what horrific things are going on in the condos across the street or across the city or across the world. It's a worthwhile thing to do, from time to time. To keep me grounded. To keep me grateful.

I also, though, have to pack lunches and help with math homework and teach kids how to zip zippers and load the washing machine. Thus, I occasionally have to close my eyes and shake the images away. I sometimes just have to think about two girls dancing in my rainy driveway.

 

 
 

A normal kind of week

This week I:

Boiled and baked bagels with Kitty Cat (recipe here)

Had coffee with a guy who always makes me feel comfortable and fun and hip(ish)

Parked my car and turned to watch Kitty Cat dodging restlessly around the backseat. She played with seatbelts and locks while she asked me what would happen if you died alone. If one died alone. What would happen? Who would call the firemen? She wasn't particularly disturbed. She just wanted to know

Ate far more cupcakes than was nutritionally sensible

Started knitting myself legwarmers. (I know. I know.)

"Worked"

Spent hours upon hours circling the house like an aimless vulture. Only I was picking up other people's crap rather than looking for food. (Except that maybe I did stop by the kitchen for a cupcake or two)

Listened to Rosie Thomas and let it get me down

Listened to Cibo Matto and let it get me up

Fed Fruit Bat his first nut ever (a macadamia, ordered pure then scrubbed, salted and roasted by me)

Stared at and drunk in and stared at and drunk in Kitty Cat's face, possessing that odd sense of foreshadowing--knowing, deeply knowing, that I'll someday miss this version of her moony, roundy features

Flicked the back of Fruit Bat's neck after he flicked his sister's. Then felt bad about it

Watched 15 minutes of TV

Toiled away on my manuscript

Spent an afternoon with Wendy, my roommate when she was 23 and I was 25 and we were going through a divorce and a bad breakup, respectively. That girl is fierce and strong and lovely and artistic and I miss seeing her regularly

Daydreamed too much

The necklace

The sweetest of sweet things today...

For Christmas, Fruit Bat got a rock polisher. I was the genius who bought it for him, thinking, Oh, it'll take, like, a day to shine those pebbles up. He'll love this!

He did love it, yes, but the polishing cycle takes closer to three weeks. If you're lucky. So, for the past 21 days, give or take, we've had a rocks tumbling around a plastic cylinder in our garage. I tried not to think about the power we were using, or hear the constant grind as a slurry ground stones to glassy, little beads.

Finally, yesterday, it finished. We dumped out the rocks and Fruit Bat set right to work making jewelry. Necklaces, rings and keychains mostly.

He tucked one of the freshly minted necklaces into his backpack. When I picked he and his friend Anna up after school today, he handed her the necklace and said, "I made this for you."

"Thanks!" she said, sincerely delighted. I helped tie the cord around her neck.

We all trounced to my car and I thought, How beautiful. How innocent. In three or four years, maybe less, handing a necklace to a girl will be fraught. 

But for now, it is just a small gesture of friendship.

I have it good and I know it

Okaaayyy, that last post riled one or one of you. And, to the one, I'm so sorry for your losses and frustrations. Truly. I have been incredibly lucky to have been able to bring two fantastic, thriving, loving little people into the world. I am thankful for my good fortune everyday. I may not express it here, necessarily, but I do feel it. And my children know it, too. I (often) hug them and murmur sweet nothings in their small, seashell ears and kiss every inch of pale, smooth skin when they let me.

I didn't mean that last line (Jealous?) to be flippant. I meant it to be funny.

Mothering is this huge, fluid, amazing, heartwarming/wrenching, aggravating thing. And sometimes it siphons the living soul right out of you. When it does, you just have to laugh and make fun of it. Or cry. Or both.

But, yeah. I can't make this blog only about how honey-warm-and-sweet parenting is, because a lot of it sucks. It's the truth. Doesn't mean I'm not grateful.

And now I'll stop with the defensive bit.

In other news, 

 • It's Delurker Day. If you read All Adither, if it ever amuses you enough to turn up the corners of your mouth or annoys you enough to grunt at the screen, please comment. I would love to know you're out there. It keeps me inspired.

• I saw a man this morning, a Real Change vendor, crushing a cracker into the pavement with his shoe while a pigeon waited patiently nearby. When the man was done, the pigeon pecked away at the crumbles. It was so sweet.

• We're all thinking about Haiti today. About the poorest of poor nations with an unstable government, shoddy infrastructure and suffering people. If you'd like to donate and haven't decided where you'll give yet, consider Doctors Without Borders and Partners in Health. Both are highly-rated organizations with strong histories in helping humanity.

• I recently sold something on ebay so I could afford to buy another lens for my Rebel. (And, oh God, how absurd does this sound considering the previous bulleted item?) The woman who bought this something, one of the only semi-valuable somethings I actually owned, has struck up a friendship of sorts with me, emailing me about her life, her husband, her sons. She ends each email with a question, drawing me further into the dialogue. Not in a stalkerish way at all. Just in a, you are human and you seem friendly way.

One of the joys of life is connection, yes? Is knowing there are so many good people out there.

Mourning

This is what it's like living at my house:

Fruit Bat (this morning before school, holding a plastic model of the solar system): "Mommy, Mommy? Mom. Mama. This is how I think the planets are aligned right now. This is how I think they are. Pluto isn't a real planet. It's a dwarf planet. There's another dwarf planet, too. Right, Mama? I think I knew about the other dwarf planet before scientists discovered it. Mama, look. Look, Neptune takes 244 of our years to go around the Sun once. I won't live that long, will I Mama? To see Neptune go around the Sun once."

I say, "Two hundred and forty four years? I don't think a person has ever lived that long, no." It makes me a little sad to say.

I am scrambling eggs for Kitty Cat, making fruit smoothies, trying to get Fruit Bat's lunch together, gathering library books to be returned, dumping vegetables in the slow cooker for dinner, emptying the dishwasher and transferring laundry from the washer to the dryer.

Kitty Cat is dancing around the living room with a yogurt-covered raisin in her mouth.

"Sit down and chew your food," I bellow. "Please. That's choke-able."

Kitty Cat says, "Two plus three equals four, right mommy?

"Five," I say. "It equals five."

"Let's pretend we're in a raisin factory and I'm the expert yogurt-covered raisin taster. Okay, mama?" She asks. "Let's pretend we're in a raisin factory and I'm the expert yogurt-covered raisin taster. Okay? Okay, mama?"

"Yes, let's pretend that. How are those raisins, expert taster?"

"They're okay."

Fruit Bat: "Mama, why didn't they put rings around Neptune when they made this solar system. Neptune has rings too. How long do you think that red storm on Jupiter will go? How long Mama? How many years?"

"I don't know...thousands and thousands more years. Wait a sec, I'm turning on the blender."

"Mama," Fruit Bat says. "This smoothie is too watery. I don't like it. I don't want it."

"Watery? I made it the same way I did yesterday."

"No you didn't. It's too watery. It's gross. I don't want it."

"Fine, don't drink it then."

"Mom, uh, hello?" It's Kitty Cat chiming in again. "I wanted to wear a dress today? A pink one?"

"Go get a pink dress from your room then."

"I need someone to go up with me."

"You're almost five. You can go up yourself."

Crying. Whining. "I need someone to go up with me."

Fruit Bat finally agrees to go with her. He comes back down with a book of animals facts and asks me to read them.

"Oh, I'd love to, honey. But, after school okay? We're getting short on time now."

"Mama? Mama? Hey, Mama. Did you know there's a river in this part of Africa that crocodiles live in. And some people hunt them for their skin. Did you know that, Mama?"

"I think so," I say. "I do now."

Etcetera.

Jealous?

Overhaul

I hired an editor named Alice to read my manuscript. I wanted her to tell me how to make it salable.

She took a month with it. She wrote me a fifteen page letter. Suggested I shuffle chapters, hone characters, add new scenes, chop others. 

On Tuesday, I spent an hour on the phone with her. She said, "There's no reason this book shouldn't be published. You're almost there. Do NOT give up." She even added a, "Please."

I went about the rest of my day filled with possibility and hope. Could I really pull it off? Did I have it in me to rewrite yet again and send it on the agent junket once more? I thought I did.

So I started cutting, writing new scenes, rearranging.

And now I am standing in the middle of a room that's being remodeled–-with drywall hanging, floors stripped, dust everywhere, wondering if it will ever look livable again. In the span of just three days I've hit lows where I felt dirty and gritty, a cross-cut saw at my feet and nails clenched between my teeth. And I've experienced moments of triumph where I scrawled a scene that accomplished exactly what Alice and I wanted it to, and I thought, Maybe. Possibly. This just might work.

There are other things needing my attention, of course. Kids and meals and completely banal chores like floors that want to be swept and old lamps waiting to be sold on Craigslist.

But I am giving my manuscript all the extra time I have. Everything I've got. And if that's not enough...then maybe I'm just not meant to write and publish a literary novel. I still, though, like to believe I am.

A Contrite Green

I'm sorry, Greener Grass readers, that this installment took me a month and a half. But here it is. Let me know what you think! 

If you'd like to read the first part of this story, it's in my right sidebar under I Like To Write.

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The garage door chugged open in front of Tamara. There were the kids' bikes and scooters and helmets in a tangle along the west wall. There were Dave's tools on a pegboard and his workbench littered with washed butter tubs and stray screws and rolls of masking tape.

She pulled in slowly and sat, her forehead on the steering wheel. The house was oddly quiet. Normally, from there, she'd hear the pounding of small feet, screeching, maybe laughter.

How could she go inside? How could she face Caitlyn and Eli and explain where she'd been? That she'd run away not from them, but from their neediness. They wouldn't be able to sort through the morass of reasons why she'd gone. She'd have to simplify, lie a little.

As she was pulling her plastic grocery bag of clothes from the car, Craig stepped into the garage behind her.

"Oh, hey," he said. "I thought you were gonna be Dave."

"Nope. He's with Joshua."

"How is the little guy?"

Her voice caught as she said, "Um, not so good." She dropped the plastic bag to the concrete and pressed her fingers to her eyes, trying to stop unstoppable tears.

Craig took a few steps toward her and went to pull her into a hug.

She pushed him away. She shook her head and stooped to retrieve the bag. Next to her, the car ticked. Rain had begun snapping the driveway. She wasn't even sure what time of day it was, but thought maybe early afternoon.

She knew she was a mess. Dirty. Rumpled. Smelly. Still wearing Cornelia's black skirt and turtleneck, which were far too whimsical for her or for this situation.

"I need to go see the kids," she told Craig.

He stuffed his hands in his shorts pockets and took a few steps backwards. "So, where were you, anyway?"

She cocked her head and squinted at him, weighing whether he deserved an answer. She decided he didn't. "Far, far from here," she said. She turned and went to the door. She grabbed the cool, brass knob and filled her lungs with air.

When she entered the house, she could hear the TV's faint squeals and murmurings. She looped her bag around the banister and moved toward the back rooms. Her heart fluttered. Her stomach hurt. The last time she was here she'd been pregnant. She remembered vomiting into the plant. Being so sick of the kids she thought she might burst right out of her skin. Which she supposed she had. Figuratively.

The house was cold, the central A/C blasting. She would've had the windows open to pull in the damp air and sound of the rain.

When she got to the family room, she saw Caitlyn and Eli watching Sponge Bob and a teenage girl on the couch with them, her knees tucked under her chin. When the girl looked up, Tamara realized it was Megan, Theresa's daughter. But instead of recognition, Megan's eyes brimmed with something...contempt? fear? Tamara couldn't think about it then. She said quietly, "I'm home."

Caitlyn and Eli turned. Eli ran toward her and jumped in her arms, buried his face in her neck. Caitlyn half turned, half watched TV. Distractedly, she said, "Mommy."

When Eli pulled back far enough to see her face, he was grinning. He said, "It worked! It worked!"

"What worked, honey?" Tamara's legs were weak, so weak she had to sit down so Eli straddled her lap. She noticed that his hair was a little long at the ears and food was crusted around his mouth. Her throat glutted and she swallowed hard several times. She wished Megan would turn off Sponge Bob, with his ridiculous laugh and the annoying sound effects.

"Joshua's plan!" Eli crowed. "Joshua said if he falled and hurted himself that you'd come back to take care a him."

Everything within Tamara sank. She sank and sank and sank until she was a mass of wrinkled black clothes on the floor with hair and squeezed shut eyeballs. She wanted a gin and tonic. Oh, how she wanted a gin and tonic in that moment. Instead, she held Eli's wrists and, unable to look him in the face, said, "I'm sorry. I'm so, so, sorry."