tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-87564418108381670822024-03-08T06:53:43.250-05:00On My Way to the RevolutionMusings on Life by a Reagan BabyIn Brief:http://www.blogger.com/profile/00125561697276633742noreply@blogger.comBlogger35125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8756441810838167082.post-36522168204863116672011-08-15T08:32:00.000-04:002011-08-15T08:32:51.443-04:00Swing It, Glass Lady<!--StartFragment--> <br />
<div class="MsoNormal">Every August we try to go to the <a href="http://www.lafamigliagiorgio.com/northendfeasts.htm">Italian Feast Days</a> in the North End.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Almost every August, we fail.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">One year we made it twice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>KK was an infant and we were really trying to do family things.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I projected so much onto little KK as a baby, that I swore she was in tune with her Italian heritage as I pushed her up and down the tiny narrow streets in her Graco Metrolite.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Looking back she may have felt some kinship, but most likely she was just content cause she is a nosy being, and festivals like that used to amuse her immensely.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">They do not anymore.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">KK is a bit on the anxious side.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">So it was with delight that today, when we finally made it to the North End for the celebration of the <a href="http://www.madonnadellacava.com/">Madonna Della Cava</a>, she became enamored by the kooky lady playing the glass harmonica at the mouth of Hanover Street.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Before this fascination, KK had fallen a little in love with the Madonna Della Cava, the saint whose feast it was this weekend. When I looked up to see whose festival it was, up came a small little picture of the Madonna Della Cava, causing KK to declare "It's so <i>BEAUTIFUL!" </i>The story of the little mute boy, hundreds of years ago, dreaming of uncovering the Madonna and then telling his mother he must help find the Madonna-- how, I am not sure, him being mute and all and it kinda being an intricate story-- and then making his whole village go and do just that, struck a cord with my flair-for-the-dramatic daughter. You mean no one listened but he was RIGHT? And then they built a TOWN because of him? And now we can go "celebrate" with her? This is for me!</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But before the Madonna, there was kooky lady.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The <a href="http://www.glassarmonica.com/">glass harmonica</a> sounds spooky.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s long and looks like someone has glued together a bunch of champagne glass tops, stuck cork through the entire thing, and then placed it on a spit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ben Franklin thought it up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I do not think it ever caught on.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">When we approached, the kooky lady was playing the theme from Harry Potter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perfect for the glass harmonica (“doesn’t it just sound like that was MADE for this thing?” kooky lady exclaimed at one point), and also fitting for the very old and tiny streets of Boston.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">H, who was asleep when we walked up to kooky and her glass harmonica, immediately woke up, music lover that he is.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Katia stood transfixed.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Where are you from originally!” She asked as she dipped her finger tips in little glass bowls and played, as a tourist kid wound the harmonica’s wheel.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Arlington, Massachusetts!”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am proud of this.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And it’s colonial, so I thought fitting.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I was wrong.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Okay, so how about I play Twinkle, Twinkle Little…Twinkle twinkle little star, how I wonder…” and off she went.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I racked my concussed brain (that story is deserving of its own post, for sure) to try to remember if the author of Twinkle, Twinkle is from Arlington.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then I remembered it was Mozart who worked on variations of it and my head almost imploded and she was on to someone else.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Where are you from originally!”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“New York.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“No.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>ORIGINALLY.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Ehhh.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Columbia.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Oh, oh!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Okay!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Want me to play the national anthem of Columbia?”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I don’t think this guy really did.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am pretty sure this guy felt he is an American.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“…Okay.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">She got out a huge book of sheet music and searched for Columbia.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Can you hold my book?” She asked another tourist kid.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">She began to play.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The man and his relatives, who had by now joined him, listened with respect. They kept mentioning<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>something about hats, and laughing, but other than that were not too miffed she did not just play the American anthem for them.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">When she finished she said something in very bad Spanish.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">They gave her a dollar.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Where are you from originally!” She moved on to a woman in the small crowd.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Quebec City, Montreal.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Kooky lady said something in even worse French, then said “How about Oh Canada!”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The woman groaned.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No no, she said, not that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At first Kooky lady agreed “okay, not that” but then Kooky lady realized she had not other song for someone from Quebec City, Montreal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Then how about Harry Potter!”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The woman looked horrified.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So Oh Canada it was.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Accompanied in French, by Kooky.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">When she finished, she got a dollar.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Where are you from originally!” She asked someone else.</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Can you play Rocky Mountain High?”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“John Denver!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But does that have a melody?”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“I dunno.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Try it.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Kooky wet her finger tips and the tourist kid wound er up.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“How about Harry Potter!”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She said just as her fingers touched the glass.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Doesn’t it sound like it was made for this?”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The crowd began to break up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For most people, even those of us who are enamored with Harry Potter, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the mention of him three times in five minutes makes an impression.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The crowd dispersed except for KK.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And me and H with her. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And I remembered all of have a little glass harmonica player in us.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That shy sliver that sometimes makes others back away.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But sometimes it can make one person stand there, in awe, of what you are, which is unique, which in this case is a sixty year old lady who, okay, most likely has many cats, and spent money to have a glass blower make her this crazy ass thing Ben Franklin thought up when he wasn’t creating a new country or sleeping with lots of ladies and impregnating them or running around with a kite and that mouse who was his kindred friend.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Our shy slivers enjoyed your groove, Kooky. And I have had to accept KK is shy. Which is kind of a dirty behavior: you mean your kid is not that outgoing precocious kid who talks to anyone like she is a long lost relative, easing adults around that they are good and true? Shy kids tend to make adults feel really awkward, I've found. They talk and act goofy and get no response and blame the kid: oh, she's shy! they exclaim. To which I want to say "that, or she just has no idea how to process a grown up in her face staring at her hair, asking if she is a pretty girl, if she is an older sister, if she loves her mummy and wants you to get OUT of her FACE!" And, after the glass groove, we spent the rest of our time negotiating the festival. All the doggies, there with their human parents, terrified both kids, even the tiny toy ones, causing me to carry KK on my hip and push the stroller, diaper bag, and H with my free hand. It's natural and American for kids to love dogs, so no one seems to realize the grimaces on my kids' faces are signs of acute anxiety. The owners smiles bag as my kids point and screech "doggie! doggie!" and then try to shimmy back into my womb as the pet gets closer. "He loves kids! He won't bite!" Can you imagine meeting, someone at a party like that? "You're a teacher? My husband loves teachers! Oh, he won't--Okay honey, stop that! Stop now. Sit. He usually loves teachers, I don't know why he did that. Bad Boy!" </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">When it wasn't the dogs freaking my KK out, it was other animals. We bought fries and fresh lemonade and took them to a park to eat. Because I could not put KK down. Because of the dogs. And the sounds of the sound system being tested which she could not see so could not identify so felt scared by....We entered the park and KK looked furtively around. "But there's pigeons!" Which is H's cue to try to climb away to try to chase the pigeons down. I can't turn off the teacher in me, so I decided to use the moment: "KK, do you want to like animals sometimes, but just get a little nervous?" "YES!" she said. "Like those pigeons. They just might peck peck peck me. You just don't know." So we ate our fries away from all dogs and all pigeons.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And then slinked back to the festival.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I knew enough not to ask if anyone had to pee. I had used the porta potty, but KK is also terrified of public restrooms. With good reason. They stink. The vast majority flush on their own and get her butt wet and make this horrible whooshing noise that sends mortal fear rushing through her body. Once, in a Mobil station in Connecticut, I swore to her the toilet was safe. It was "manual" I explained. No motors. It would not, under any circumstance, splash water on her butt or make any noises. This violates one golden rule all should follow, no matter what color state you prefer to live within, when dealing with kids: never promise anything you can not fulfill. If you don't know the answer, tread lightly over that delicate ground. Or you will slip into quicksand and the last thing you hear will be screams and wails as you go under. But I forgot that rule. "It's manual!" Our ritual is I go first. To show all is okay. So I did. The only thing I noticed is my bare skin felt a little colder than it should. Indoors. On a sunny day, even in fall. I pulled up, she pulled down, and I put her on the toilet. And I was ill prepared for what happened next, as the water in the bowl began to whirl and whip around and a very loud whooshing sound ripped up and through the pipes and into the bowl, splashing ice cold water all over my poor KK. It was a humiliating moment for her and she was terrified. And never again would she trust me that public toilets were "okay, see? like mommy does?" So I barely ask anymore. Instead I try to soothe anxieties as she looks wide eyed at strange toilet bowls, wondering how they might betray us.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Despite her worry about the music (it's too loud! I don't like those drums!!!), she was enthralled as the Madonna Della Cava Society carried the Madonna relic through the streets. I was the very darkest person following the procession, I can tell you that. And forty years ago in Boston I am sure this would not have gone that well for me, despite my kids being part Italian themselves.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But for a little bit, we were not so shy, standing there listening to Ben Franklin's invention.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And Harry Potter does sound good on that thing.</div><!--EndFragment--> In Brief:http://www.blogger.com/profile/00125561697276633742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8756441810838167082.post-72704189887930463862011-08-01T12:41:00.000-04:002011-08-01T12:41:11.155-04:00Our Sunny Adventure<!--StartFragment--> <br />
<div class="MsoNormal">Our family is on an adventure.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I must call it this or else it becomes in name what it is in spirit: a rather challenging week <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and a half where I churn out twenty to forty pages of revised work a night while my children behave like, well, children.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Our adventure coincides with several things.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One of them is the rearranging of our apartment back home.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Every room except the bathroom got switched all up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My kids have a larger bedroom, my husband and I can now walk all the way AROUND our bed like adults, and we have an office.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We also have, when all added up, a couple hundred dollars worth of new shelving in the kitchen, making this mama lady feel like slight family organization is within reach.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But the whole thing was disorienting.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The kids go into our bedroom looking for their toys, which had been living in that room for two years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I keep trying to throw things out where the trash cans were, only to have to turn on my heels and search around for their new place. And the back porch I cleaned and was proud of last weekend is now the receptacle for all the things my husband brought home from his mother’s move, which we’ve been assisting as well.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">So there is that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is flux.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I know I am a neurotic writer. And so I know flux makes me edgy and in need of some fancy drinks and gossip.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My releases.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am just a teenage girl at heart, really.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Then there is this trip.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To work on my new play.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Here inidyllic La Jolla.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am from Boston.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Most things are old.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And narrow.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am astounded by how new everything looks here, even when it isn’t.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m perplexed by all these apartment complexes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>With pools.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And manicured grass and flowers and palm trees.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Our days go like this:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">4 AM<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I try to peel out of bed to pee but since the kids and I are sharing a bed here, I am usually unable to pee alone at night, since they are worried I am going to go to rehearsal on the sly.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">4 AM to 6 AM ish <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Small people ask me if it is morning and if there are owls in the palm trees and if there are, are they hungry? Will they find us?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There ARE owls in Medford.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But they won’t eat us there. Will they eat us here?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Okay.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">6 AM to 7 AM<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All attempts at breakfast for H are mocked, while KK requests option after option.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">8 AM ish<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is always some sort of “miscommunication” about when I was to leave to go write.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Until 10:30 AM ish<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I write, buy what seems like 500 dollars with of food and apple juice, and realize that everyone here reminds me of the people in Somerville’s Porter Davis area…friendly and spacey.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">12:30-7 I am in rehearsal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am astounded by the actors, my director, the stage managers, the dramaturg.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These are some kick ass artists.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Come see the show!</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">7 PM<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I usually around this time get a text saying the kids are crazy and not tired.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I night they fell asleep at 5 but that was once.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That is over.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>During this time R takes his leave.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Til 11 PM<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I do more rewrites.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">So I am very tired.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This post is not even that interesting because I am so tired.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But it has been so long since I have written.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">For various reasons.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Among them is four.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I know every age has its challenges.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I know I have probably said this about three.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And two.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I know my mother has heard me rant.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I know my friends have, too.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But four is grating on me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I also understand that if someone has a child who is delayed in anyway, my complaints sound ungrateful and annoying.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But four.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Is.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Frustrating.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To be kind about it.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The talking, the questions, the demands, the ruminations, are INCESSANT.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe she is just the typical overindulged twentyfirst century preschooler.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But I am not so sure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We do have boundaries and limits and she does not really throw tantrums and is usually so sweet and kind.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But four. Is. demanding and constant and in need all.the.time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I don’t know how people do this with more.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Someone is always falling or destroying something.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>People remark “you’ve lost all the baby weight!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You’re thin!” And I say: um, this is stress?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And, you lose your appetite when you spend meals asking people to sit, to eat, to stop hitting, to chew, and then someone says “I have to go to the bathroom” and insists you watch her, and then help her, and really, I am not sure who is still hungry if that is the pattern your meals and days take.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I have also been thinking of the following.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Years ago on Phil Donohue, Audrey Hepburn was asked if she’d even write an autobiography.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She said no.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The audience specifically wanted to know about her dad who left them family around the time of the war.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She said no. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She said “A life involves too many other lives”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s okay I invoke her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She must be smart if Target sells her posters, right?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>College dorm art corners the market on insight, right?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Anyway, it is not an untrue statement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am wary of plastering my kids’ lives on the internet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or my husband’s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or even my own, when so many can have access to it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So I’ve been in the weeds, thinking of these things…my bladder full, the little fingers digging into my side.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><!--EndFragment-->In Brief:http://www.blogger.com/profile/00125561697276633742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8756441810838167082.post-18035830862380296612011-03-08T14:55:00.002-05:002011-03-08T14:55:23.991-05:00Dear Mommy<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #222222; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15px;"></span><br />
<div style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">I would just like to nurse off one and touch the other to make sure it is not going to be taken away from me, is that okay? Good! Sorry about the nails, I know they are sharp since I will not let you cut them unless you have an assist from Dad, who has been working almost non stop for the past few weeks, so is never here (LOL, mommy!) so I know that you probably don't like me digging them into your boobs like I do. OH, and, I'll just be here every five minutes til dinner making time, then I will need to be here every two minutes, okay? Good! </div><div style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Signed,</div><div style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">H!</div><div style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><br />
</div><div style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">PS</div><div style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">And do not even think of weaning me. That is a bad idea. A definite No No, in my opinion. And my vote counts.</div>In Brief:http://www.blogger.com/profile/00125561697276633742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8756441810838167082.post-20684089038584261182011-02-28T20:58:00.000-05:002011-02-28T20:58:33.484-05:00Me and Junie C., or, Where Was I Going?, Where Have I Been?<!--StartFragment--> <br />
<div class="MsoNormal">I have not posted in oh so long.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I dream up many posts in my head. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But they never make it through my fingers and onto my computer screen.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I will be honest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My kids have stepped it up a notch in terms of their kidness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is what I have been telling people lately when they ask me how I am.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is a safe and coy answer, as the real answer might lead one to believe I feel more as though I am held captive by my kids, than that I am happily and effortlessly engaging in some post modern June Cleaver fantasy life.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I will continue to be honest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Before I actually had my kids I often engaged in a post modern June Cleaver fantasy life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think in many ways all of us have to, on some level, or else how could we ever take a gander at this having kids thing in the first place.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When you picture your family, whether you are twenty or thirty five or forty two, you picture the ideal, whatever that ideal is for you.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe your ideal is that white picket fence and two story colonial.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or maybe it is that you will have kids and still be able to use the bathroom without people watching you; or that you will still go to movies so you get the jokes on the Oscars; or <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>that you manage to clean the toilet on the regular; or buy magazines, or send greetings cards to people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whatever it was, here, with the actual kids running about, it ain’t.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Which leads me to what I have been up to as of late.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Which is.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">That I have been in a strange and mystical place where unless I am sleeping (and I only do that for about two hours in a row these days.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They either wake up and are needing or I wake up anyway, wondering if they are needing, and once I get to sleep, they do indeed wake up, needing) I do not sit in one place with out <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">doing </i>something for more than five minutes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I manage to shower, while inhabiting this mysterious space, but I do it while being watched and answering questions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or, if I manage to run in there and shut the door—cause let me tell ya, I have, I admit, resorted to setting up Legos or the play food in the playroom, getting people jazzed about playing with that stuff, and then shedding my ubiquitous bathrobe and other clothing while running through the apartment to the bathroom, where I take a shower until my lovelies have figured out I am gone—I usually end up making the shower pretty snappy as my son has learned to use his body as a battering ram and slam his nineteen month old self against the bathroom door until I come out and he can get a good look at me and make it known I had no right to wash myself when he needed some nursey.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nursey days are drawing to a close, but I am pretty sure he realized weaning is going to require a store of energy I just do not have right now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Huzzah, mommy, Hu-fucking-ZAH!</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Because did I mention my kids have stepped it the f up?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">They have.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">My husband and I are exhausted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">It’s almost like they are newborns, only, they are not.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They follow us from room to room and are eating us out of house and home.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">They also have the sass.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">If your baby hasn’t learned to speak yet, you are lucky, the sass has not come to visit yet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But it will.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And when it does, you will realize parenting books are crap, parenting sites are crap, the only comforting truth is that there is whiskey and ice cream in this world and that one day they will have their own children and I can laugh at them the way I am pretty sure my mother laughs at me with her coworkers.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">It began in January.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">We had the fevers, and the snotty noses, and the snow.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And our balance had never been quite the same since the holidays, which threw us <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">off</i> child, Oh My <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">goodness</i>.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And around the end of this January, both kiddos kinda<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> emerged</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>H started becoming more of this world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And less easily placated.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He is in to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">everything</i> in a way that all my women’s studies courses would disagree may be because of all the testosterone he’s got compared to KK.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He is interested in many things but in particular drumming, dancing, falling off things, running into corners, and swiping knives from drawers and the dishwasher.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I got him a play sword for Valentines thinking, Well, it is not a gun and yay, he has an interest, maybe he will be a competitive fencer and it will pay for college.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I regret this choice because now I am worried he is a budding weirdo.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My mom says “no, he is just a BOY!” But. That does not make the title of weirdo inapplicable. Which I really would like it to be.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(I have hidden said Valentines sword, by the by).</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Not to be outdone, KK has perhaps gone from preschool three to preteen “what did you just say to Me? Go to your room please right now”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She has taken up “humming”, which is really moaning just a pitch too high to be easy on the ears and just a pitch too low to be using her real voice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She does it all the time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It makes you want to pitch yourself out the window and hope you miss the shrubs and land right on the pavement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She also whines.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s delightful.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The books say ignore it but the books must not have experienced this particular brand of vocal styling. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They are crap, see? And ignoring, I have learned, is either an invitation to keep going indefinitely or, to our sensitive soul, a sign you are not listening, don’t love her only H, and hope she would go away.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She has said this.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In so many words.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">She is also very upset she cannot read and write.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Very upset.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But she is also stubborn so attempts to actually teach her to do so end in her telling me—and, I am a writer, you know.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have agents.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not to get all uppity about it but people have given me awards, okay?—that I am wrong and don’t know what I am talking about.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She is three. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This feels like arguing about homework.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or Kant after she’s been away at college one semester and comes back thinking she knows <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">everything</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She goes to preschool, not Exeter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>OYE!</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I suppose I could abide this raising of the bar, if it were not affecting my mind.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Things came to a head when I missed a telephone meeting last week.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I thought I had written down the details of this meeting, but after I had missed it—and I realized it as I was walking out the door to go to the play space after a week of keeping them in from the extreme cold and tried calling all those at the meeting whom I had stood up while <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">in </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the play space surrounded by screaming kids and just as sleepy as me moms.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So yes, that went badly, trying to um make up those calls like that and sound professional and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i> like the resident soap flake—I looked at my three family/mom calendars where I write such details down.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One is covered now in scribbles, or, excuse me, CURSIVE!.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The dry erase has been slid down the fridge and well dry ERASED. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The magnetic one is covered with magnetic squares of holidays that have nothing to do with February (we sing a weather song every morning after breakfast but H is not satisfied until he has added holidays and activities on his own) And my electronic one has no record—no fucking record!!!!!—of anything on the 24<sup>th</sup>.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">(As soon as those children were in bed that night I had a new, pristine, date book overnighted to me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Its home is my desk and if I see even one jam fingerprint on it, heads are gonna roll!).</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Oh, and this raising of the bar has also affected my living quarters.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I try to clean and my kids whip stuff out after me. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“They are like the Little Rascals” I said to my mom as she watched them in action.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Yes!” she said.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I could not tell if she thought it was funny or just sad.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That my panty hose from work that had been in my hamper was peeking out from behind my bedroom door.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Which is off the living room.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Which means when people come over they can, well, see my underclothes in plain sight.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Aces!</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And as my kids get more kid like, the world is churning and chugging and actual revolution is knocking through streets and back alleys and capital buildings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Revolution is the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">namesake </i>of my <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">blog</i> and I am being clobbered by the laundry and the shopping and the cooking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Shameful.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">So this is where I have been:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>in the weeds.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Fighting like all get out to sit down and take showers without an audience and remember my professional obligations cause um, I have wanted this career for almost twenty years and that is not cursive and those parenting books suck and did I mention my deadlines? And I owe several friends emails and IMs and I have given up being able to call anyone except my mother and sisters ever again.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The weeds, my friends.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Where, luckily, me and June Cleaver get wi fi.</div><!--EndFragment-->In Brief:http://www.blogger.com/profile/00125561697276633742noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8756441810838167082.post-36014111204119134882011-01-13T21:56:00.001-05:002011-01-13T22:14:59.126-05:00Daddy Went Skiing<div class="MsoNormal">Today Daddy went skiing.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">This is how our day went.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And for those of you who do not think you would ever call your partner the title that explains his or her position in your nuclear family, you just aren’t there yet. Maybe it takes a month, when you have realized doing it passive aggressively helps you to get him, or her, to take out the trash while you are stuck on the couch nursing while also smelling dinner from two nights ago rot in your rubbish bin. Or maybe it takes five years because the first bit of parenthood was so blissful that you looked up one day and realized you are just so happy you can’t even remember this partner’s name you are so blinded by love and adoration. But it happens. Eventually. Trust me. Wait for it.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Anyway, Daddy went skiing and our day went a little something like this:</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">12:30 AM Daddy gets home from work and begins to open the only two closets in your apartment that also happen to be in you alls’ room, looking for goggles, ski pants, and ski boots. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">1 AM The baby we are sleep training wakes up. Daddy is on it.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">3 ish AM I wake up with a hacking piercing cough. Because I am not being sleep trained, no one looks after me to see if I have not coughed up a lung.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">5:15 AM The baby we are sleep training wakes up, and forlornly talks to himself in his crib.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">5:20 AM Big girl wakes up and climbs into our bed.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">5:40 AM Daddy’s alarm clock goes off.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">5:43 AM I try to pee alone, but am followed.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">5:45 AM I get up, start turning on lights, and Dad and Big girl give me WTF looks. I turn them off and go back to bed, reminding everyone this is often when we do get up and we may as well get up now anyway and when was the ski ride supposed be here? and maybe I am just still asleep.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">6 AM Daddy gets dressed. Baby girl looks up confused as he walks away, dressed in full ski regalia. A sight she has never seen, because we don’t have personal activities anymore, we have family outings now.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">6:45 AM A miracle! The little people have fallen back to sleep so mommy can fall back asleep and this is the time we wake up for good. A miracle, I say!</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">6:50 AM Big girl races me to her bedroom, where, since she got there first, she is trying to pull the baby out of the crib. By his arms.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">7:00 AM I try to lay out crackers (the good, buttery, not really very good for you kind) so people will not ask for breakfast yet because despite the sleeping in I am still sleepy. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">7:01 AM The crackers are rejected. Juice is requested.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">7:05 AM The crackers are accepted. We all three sit on the couch.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">7:15 AM The crackers are sprinkled on the couch. Then rejected. Cereal is offered.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">7:16 AM Pancakes are requested. Which is sweet, as they were only introduced to pancakes yesterday during a snowstorm. Although wary at first, they decided they were very good. Sadly, there are no more pancakes for today.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">7:20 AM Cereal is mentioned. Again. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">7:21 AM The KIND of cereal I offer is rejected. So I counter offer with another offer of cereal. I say another offer of cereal because it is the same KIND as was offered previously, just in an unopened box. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">7:25 AM Cereal is offered to one in a green bowl and to the other in a blue bowl. Big girl rejects her bowl, and when I say she will not get another kind of breakfast and will have to go to her room if she continues to cry about it, Big girl stays in a corner, the corner near her brother’s green bowl, and is very quiet.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">7:26 AM I ask “are you waiting for that green bowl?” and Big girl laughs and says yes! </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">7:27 AM Baby abandons green bowl to run wild around the kitchen, and Big girl gets the rest of his cereal.<br />
<br />
7:28 AM We sing the "what's the weather" song and do "the weather" on our magnetic calendar. We do this every morning. It's nice.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">7:30 AM I clean up. While cleaning up, my kids run past me, pants me, and one yells “we’re sea monsters!”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">7:30 AM I pull up my pants.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">7:31 AM I update my Facebook status, explaining my kids just pantsed me. Sometimes, you keep your dignity by sharing, and hope the six hundred people you friended understand you are not crazy, just with kids all day. All. Day.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">8 AM My mom calls. She calls every morning, and has since Big girl was one week old. It is my salvation. Along with Facebook updates.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">8-8:20 AM I try to talk to my mom, while my kids jump on each other.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">8:20 AM I am forced to get off the phone with my mom.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">8:20-9 AM I clean while Big girl and the baby un do what I have just done. I wonder if famous playwrights spend their days spraying things down with 409 ( I tried organic stuff. We got mice) and wiping bottoms. Then I come to my senses. Of course not. I wipe some bottoms.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">9 AM I get the baby dressed. I go to get Big girl dressed and realize the cut she told me about on her foot is from a toe nail that is too long. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">9:01 AM I agree with myself I am the worst mother ever, and explain to her that I must see that toe nail.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">9:01 AM I am rejected.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">9:01 AM I explain this is all mommy’s fault, but I need to see that toe nail.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">9:01 AM I am rejected.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">9:02 AM I demonstrate getting toes clipped is no big deal by clipping the Baby's toe nails. The Baby protests, but is calmed by crackers.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">9:03 AM I realize I must get at that toe nail before we put on tights. And we must put on tights because Baby girl refuses to wear pants, only skirts and dresses.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">9:02 AM -10:30 AM I think about how I am going to get at that toe, clean, and make a chicken stock.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">9:30 AM We eat our daily popcorn.<br />
<br />
Various times during the morning: People on Facebook post about their kids going out in the snow. And I recall my mom telling me to take them out. And I resolve we will go out! And have fun! Eventually!</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">10 AM The baby comes into the kitchen, asks to be picked up for a cuddle. I am so happy. I cuddle. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">10:01 AM I walk into the living room and see that the baby has spread popcorn all over the floor.<br />
<br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">10:02 AM The baby laughs at me. As I clean up the popcorn. With him pointing and “yelling” at me in baby babble.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">10:30 AM The baby goes down for a nap, and I realize I must wait until he gets up to deal with that toe because Big girl is gonna scream. I start in on the laundry.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">10:45 AM I reach a new level of horrible mother and try to bribe Baby girl with the sandwich cookies she likes if she will let me clip her toe nails quietly.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">10:45 AM Baby girl negotiates, and it is um agreed? I will clip the nails after she is done with the vanilla side, but not the chocolate. I go to do dishes.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">11:00 AM I go to the living room, see a teeth-scraped vanilla cookie and no chocolate cookie and realize I knew that was coming and I am an idiot. I offer to cut Baby girl’s toe nails and am met with a sly smile and a NOPE!</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">11:30 AM Mysteriously, the baby is still asleep, putting a dent in my hard core mommy toe clipping plans.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">11:45AM I offer lunch.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">12:00 PM We peek in on the baby. Still asleep. Toe clipping still halted.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">12:15 PM Despite lunch having just been offered, a snack is requested.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">12:20 PM Someone “breaks into” the bag of baby clothes that is going to a coworker and slips into an 18 month sized Christmas dress from 08.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">12:30 PM A snack is requested.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">12:45 PM A snack is requested.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">1:00 PM A snack is requested and denied. Paints are offered.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">1:05 PM The baby is uncharacteristically asleep, so I lie on the couch while painting continues because that cough is making me tired.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">1:10 PM Baby girl begins falling asleep while painting. I offer the couch. Baby girl lies on couch with mommy.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">1:15 PM Baby girl begins kicking mommy in the ribs. Mommy goes to eat cookies.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">1:30 PM Nobody’s toes are clipped that weren’t clipped an hour ago.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">1:45 PM Young neighbor from upstairs asks to use computer and mommy says yes and explains she is wearing her bathrobe OVER her clothes, so she is not as dead beat as she looks.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">1:55 PM The baby wakes up, very happy. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">2:00 PM Lunch is offered to the baby.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">2:05 PM Baby won’t stay in seat so lunch for the baby is ended.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">2:10 PM I realize that toe must be clipped before the tights before we venture out in the snow. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">2:15 PM I make coffee, realizing I might fall asleep in a snow drift out there.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">2:20 PM I get tough about the toe nail. There is screaming. I hope the neighbor realizes I am not a bad evil mom. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">2:25-2:35 PM I squeeze people into coats and snow pants and mittens and hats. The Baby begins screaming. We leave the house with the baby not wearing a hat or mittens and I hope the rest of the neighbors realize I am not a bad evil mom.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">2:35 PM The Baby’s nose begins bleeding the moment we step outdoors.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">2:35 PM I try to do the five minute warning but Baby girl looks at me like WTF!</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">2:35-3:15 PM We walk about, the Baby screaming more often than not, still refusing mittens and hat.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">3:18 PM We come inside. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">3:20 PM I offer hot chocolate to people I do not trust to drink out of mugs and who won’t drink anything hot anyway. They do, however, appreciate the chocolate. I could not buy marshmallows cause I shopped with the baby and I could not find that aisle and he was about to have a fit. So the hot chocolate has no marshmallows but they don't know the difference cause they are new to this world and don't know the customs.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">3:30-4:30 PM I try to do work emails.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">4:15 PM I text Daddy to see um when he might be expected to return.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">4:30 PM I start on dinner.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">4:31 PM Everyone feels the kitchen is the only place to be and asking for food is the only way to interact with mommy at the moment.<br />
<br />
4:35 PM The cough comes on and the kids watch me as I cough. They then cough, too. We're SICK yells Big girl.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">5 PM I realize soup is silly for people this young. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">5:30 PM Dinner, having taken twenty minutes longer than usual cause I got all Martha Stewart and did this homemade stock thing, is being wiped off the floor.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">5:35 PM I race to set up the bath, making sure the kids do not follow me in there, or they will want to get in there now, and I am not ready for them to be in there now. The Baby follows me around the house, repeating BAAATH BAAATH in a raspy stalker way which has been known to freak my mom out.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">5:55 PM I wrangle wet babies out of the BAAATH.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">6:00 PM Baby girl examines her toe nails. I say SEE? How smooth? I am met with a frown. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">6:05 PM The Your Baby Can Read commercial comes on, freaking Big girl out that she can’t read. She asks for her dry erase letter board.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">6:20 PM Dad comes home. But I am pretty sure there was après ski. And he sits in his chair. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">7:00 PM Baby boy goes to bed. Mad.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">7:15 I read developmentally advanced chapter books to Big girl. This satisfies her need to one up the babies on that Your Baby Can Read commercial. It also lulls her to sleep.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">7:30 PM Big girl wakes up when I drag her to the potty, and Daddy falls asleep on the couch.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">8:00 PM Big girl asleep.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I am happy Daddy got to ski. But could Calgon come over for a little while?</div>In Brief:http://www.blogger.com/profile/00125561697276633742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8756441810838167082.post-47401113365648409602011-01-05T21:22:00.001-05:002011-01-05T21:25:23.697-05:00He's Our Second! We Know What We're...Oh Okay Fine, We Don't, or, Sick Baby Visits Are For Suckers<div class="MsoNormal">Our kids are healthy.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Last year when our son’s blood work came back wonky at his six month check up, we were reminded just how healthy and blessed our family is, because for a few weeks we weren’t sure we were that healthy and blessed. We spent all of three hours in the pediatric hematology center at Mass General Hospital and realized just how good we have it, as our (at the time) 96<sup>th</sup> percentile baby waited for his exam and, thankfully, clean bill of health.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And yet, because we’re parents, we worry.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And sometimes even colds make us worry.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And fevers.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And the now that I really look at it strange way the toes on her foot line up cause what if it’s more? What if there’s something WRONG.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But since there rarely is, my husband and I have learned not to call the doctor unless our kid is gushing blood and running a fever of 106.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">So this time, we played it close to the hip.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Just before Christmas our three year old caught a cold, which spread to our seventeen month old. So much snot I used large old cloth diapers from their spit up days to chase them around the house, trying to wipe and pick at them. When the fevers spiked I knew what to do. When the snot thickened, I took it in stride. I did not even entertain the thought of calling the doctor. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The only thing this long two week trail of snot seemed to put a damper on was my vow to kick my beautiful but still night nursing son out of our bed. For good this time. No more caving. No more oh, I guess you can still this <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">one </i>time. Knowing my show and the holidays would be over come December 27 (New Years is just no longer a holiday around here and I’ve found I get slightly irritated by even the thought of plans. Give me my take out lone glass of wine! Let me do all my laundry on the first!) I deemed that day the start of my brand new mommy life. A life where I do not sleep in a pretzel shape and can freely go pee without my bed mates crying. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But the 27<sup>th</sup> slide right past me on a slimy snotty road called hell.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">With the odd exception of Christmas Eve, both kids have been waking up every hour for over a week. While hippier parents than I see this as a wonderful way to snuggle and enjoy warm winter nights in a cozy family bed, I see this as a cruel reversion back to when I was trying to figure out how to get my mother to adopt my newborn because I didn’t think I could take the lack of sleep. Foolishly I had spent my last trimester thinking I would be so happy to give birth so I could finally get some sleep because I was going to train my baby to sleep so I could sleep, too.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">As the snot began to wane, I began to envision my salvation. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">On the 2<sup>nd</sup>, I fashioned a plan. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“I’m really tired,” I told my husband. I always announce this as a declaration that seems as though it should be a revelation to him. But it’s been four years. New info this ain’t. “If he wakes up,” (I am always foolishly hopeful he will magically sleep) “comfort him and then leave the room, okay?”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Sure.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But there was a football game on. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And this is what happened instead: around one, my son woke up. I sprang from the bed, went out to where my husband was watching TV, and said “okay, just comfort him and get out of there.” And off he disappeared. But around 1:40, I woke up realizing my husband had never come back. The monitor was silent. Was he asleep on the floor, out for a beer?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">A few minutes when by and then all hell broke loose as my husband came in to the living room, my screaming son in one arm.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Sleep deprivation chips away at your maternal instincts.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">My gut reaction was not to cuddle but to yell “I SAID PUT HIM BACK AND GET OUT!!!”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But I didn’t.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“He threw up.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Oh!</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“All over the floor.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But will he still wake up at 5:30 after this? </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Tonight’s just not the night for this sleep thing.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Well of course not NOW, NOW he’s AWAKE and out of that CRIB!</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">So my mommy self sprang into action and temperatures were taken and Tylenol was given and dang if that kid did not end up right where he was angling to be in the first place: in my bed.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The next night I was too tired to fight. When he woke up yelling MaMa, MaMa, I acquiesced and he spent the next three hours tossing and turning and making creepy faces at shadows like the kid who sees dead people in The Sixth Sense. Finally I realized he was not babbling to me but repeating CRIB! CRIB! to me and I placed him back and enjoyed a delightful sleep until five, when my daughter crawled in beside me and began moving the mucus around in her nose next to my head. They are angels, they really are.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">So last night I decided this was it.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I am too young to look this old.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And I decided I would not cave.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The night was long and the wails were loud, but I thought we made some real progress.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">It was not until the afternoon when things went sour.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">While napping my son proceeded to flip the f out.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">His crying was frightening, as if he was in pain, and when he would not stop and could not stop and kept indicating his ear was killing him, my husband called in late to work, I decided not to take our daughter to dance, and we were lucky to have my mom be able to meet us at the doctor’s.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I should have had an inkling.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">While waiting, I heard a nurse as she looked at the receptionist’s screen: “Crying?”</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Yep” “What does that even mean?” “Hunter.” “Well okay!” </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Ridiculed!</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Well we’d show them.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Once in the exam room, however, my son had different plans. Once in the exam room my son turned on the full charm. Smiles, sweet baby babbling, knowing looks. As I gave the doctor the run down of his symptoms, he looked at her and said “yeah yeah yeah yeah” and pointed, which made the doctor smile and my heart sink.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“I don’t see anything,” she said as she washed her hands.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“We always wait to call!”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“It’s the magic of the doctor visit.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“This always happens. Nothing’s ever wrong.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“He’s our second,” my husband added, as if to say: we’re not as stupid as this makes us seem, we know what we’re doing. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Even with the long cold, I’m not worried, no fever—“</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“We’re never coming back here again, we promise.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“You did exactly what you should. We love to see you.” This struck me as particularly embarrassing because she was not even our regular doctor, she was just looking at out file and how many times we used to call and zoom in before we toughened ourselves up, once, of course, we realized it was much harder to yank two kids into the sick baby visits than one kid, which is what we should have stopped at because clearly we are crazy Munchhausen-by-proxy parents who will next be insisting our kids have Ebola, Typhoid, and leprosy just to get the attention we so clearly crave.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Maybe he had a nightmare,” she offered.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Maybe…” I looked down at my son, who was nursing with a huge shit eating grin on his face until our eyes met, and then he laughed at me.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Maybe he’s going through something,” she offered again. “Babies go through things, we just don’t know.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Through things?”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Maybe it’s behavioral.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Behavioral?”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">So our kid, at seventeen months, is a maladjusted hypochondriac.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“He might be working something out.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Chagrined, we put his shoes and socks back on.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">My husband took my mom’s car to go get ready for work and the rest of us drove back home.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“We’re never going back there again.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">My mother is slightly amused by this all.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">In the back seat my son babbled and giggled.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Poor baby,” my mom gushed.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Poor baby, whatever. He’s happy. Listen to him. He is LAUGHING at me."</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">My mom let out her own laugh.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“What could he be working through? Everyone else is working through! He’s the one person whose plans did not change today!”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">My mom laughed harder.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“You think he’s mad at the C-I-O?” [Current lingo for cry it out—controversial but oh so effective sleep training. And until you have been so tired you shake on a continued basis, don’t try to talk me out of it. My kids are mules. We’ve tried almost every method out there. They don’t drift off. They don’t deeply slumber. They need 4 hours of wind down time and adults saying get out of my bed if our household is going to sleep for more than two hours in a row. And that is something I have not done in months. Literally. Sleep for more than two hours in a row….].</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">We both looked back at him.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">He laughed back at both of us.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Will you do it again?”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Of course I’m going to do it again. He’s got to get out of my bed. If it doesn’t work, he’s already messed up by it anyway, another week won’t matter we can deal with his psycho issues then. Right now I need sleep.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">This made my mom roar. She is a therapist and was married to a manic depressive. She gets and likes crazy-pants humor.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“I do feel bad maybe he is just remembering last night over and over maybe. Maybe he is just really pissed off today.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And while many would say it is impossible for a seventeen month old to fake it, I am not so sure.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Cause I’ll tell you what: despite hours of screaming and ear holding, once he shined in the light of that sick baby visit, he has not once held that ear or screamed his take me to the ped’s office right now you abusive parents, or I am calling DSS cry.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The little stinker. Having one over on his sleep deprived mum and dad. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">We are really never taking him to the doctor's again.</div>In Brief:http://www.blogger.com/profile/00125561697276633742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8756441810838167082.post-40848310687938412672010-12-20T19:58:00.000-05:002010-12-20T19:58:53.834-05:00Give the Tots Their M---F--- Toys<!--StartFragment--> <br />
<div class="MsoNormal">Over the weekend, someone stole some of the most expensive toys from the Toys for Tots drop off center in Burlington.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">If you don’t live around here, Burlington is kinda nice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You can tell cause while there are buses out there, there aren’t always sidewalks.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Perhaps I got so upset about this news because this Christmas is proving to be a challenge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The end of my show (I am always sad after closing, even if it is just a reading), my busted tooth, trying to get shopping done on a very very tight budget with two very active people under the age of four, and bills, bills, bills.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So perhaps my inclination to burst into tears when my beloved Channel Five “Eyeopener” (me and Channel Five both start our day really horridly early) reported this is because I am stressed out.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Or perhaps it is because it really did make me sad.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Authentically so.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I have never been the beneficiary of Toys for Tots.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And truth be told, I have never donated to Toys for Tots.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My sister has, and does every year, even after the time she got mugged for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">her</i> Toys for Tots gifts while walking home from shopping.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But if there is one thing my heathen self is sure of, is that this is the season of giving.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even if you hate the holidays: you’re Aunt Clem hid your Candy Canes when you were five, you were nobody’s favorite and got slipper socks each year, your parents nag you about your divorce over the roast beef, or your brothers and sisters always seem to get in digs about how you never finished whatever it was you never finished while they zoom about in SUVs complaining about taxes, if there is one thing all of us adults can do at this time of year it is give to those who need it.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The first time I relished this idea was the first Christmas after my parents got separated.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We were rather short on cash that year, and we’d been told Christmas was going to be a little tight.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">A few days before Christmas my mom got paid.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This was before direct deposit, so she cashed her check and we headed to the A and P that’s now Walgreens in the Heights (of Arlington).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Going into the store, we stopped at the ubiquitous red kettle.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We smiled at the bell guy as my mom slipped a bill in and the bell guy looked down, smiled very wide, and bellowed “Merry Christmas!”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And in we went.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Since it was pay day and Christmas we got a lot of foods we’d learned, that fall, not to ask for anymore.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Things aside from what needed to go into dinner and lunches.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">When we got to the check out my mom pulled out the bank envelope and gasped.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>An entire fifty was gone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">An entire fifty was in the barrel of that red kettle.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Which explained the enthusiastic response.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Which explained why we put back our extras.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Somewhere someone else needed that fifty more.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">My mom and sisters and I think about that grocery store trip often.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And we thought of it for sure the next Christmas as we did our Christmas shopping.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">If money is tight, you do your shopping in cash last minute.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">So there we were, at the mall with the other poor people and the husbands.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">As we left, we saw a very unusual sight for Burlington.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Yes, the aforementioned Burlington).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A pan handler.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sitting right there in army fatigues (this was when wearing army fatigues had nothing to do aligning yourself with the missions of soldiers, they were what you wore if you were a little maybe funkier than others.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And this guy, pan handling on a traffic island in a suburb on Christmas Eve, was a little funky indeed).</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">His sign said he was hungry.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">He looked very young.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">He had a duffel bag next to him.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">It was inordinately cold.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Frigid.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Please, can we get that guy McDonalds?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>we asked our mother.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Yeah, Big Macs.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">There wasn’t much else on that strip then.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think Howard Johnson’s was already shuttered at that point.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So to McDonald’s we went.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">When we circled back through the parking lot and dropped off those Big Macs, and apologized it was just McDonalds, I don’t think we’d ever seen a person look so hungry before. He thanked us over and over and he tore into the hamburgers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He didn’t look up, only down into the meat and bread most of the rest of us make fun of, and he ate.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">So I guess I was so upset because it hurts to know it is true that someone’s heart is sizes and sizes too small.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To be downright Mother McCheesy about it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There’s a very warm place, I think, waiting for that person who took the time to drive up that hill, pick that lock, and thwart the meaning of this time of year.</div><!--EndFragment-->In Brief:http://www.blogger.com/profile/00125561697276633742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8756441810838167082.post-89015125391301092952010-12-19T21:35:00.001-05:002010-12-20T08:24:08.191-05:00Brute Force Meet Tooth<div class="MsoNormal">My son fucked up my tooth.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">My writing group chuckled when I said I was channeling my inner six year old, and was having trouble speaking, but I realize now, after another half week of sounding like Cindy Brady, that I meant it less as a joke and more as a plea for compassion.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Truth be told, my teeth have been sliding towards trailer for years. I’ve never ever liked them. Well, maybe I think I liked my baby teeth, but those all fell out, so there you go. These adult teeth, which have been with me (well, some of them have. Others were not so fortunate) for going on three decades have been a royal pain, and every dentist I’ve been to has agreed.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">My sisters have great teeth. I am not sure how I ended up in the shallow end of the gene pool on this one. For it is true they are not the lovely pearls male poets like to write about in love poems. I remember one dentist, when I’d gone in to have a broken tooth fixed, got very excited at the prospect of “a project”. Actually, he was not really a dentist quite yet. That was the year the University of Iowa offered dental for the first time, and to save money on what I knew was going to be a very large job, I went to the University of Iowa Dental clinic. (And my fellow patients really <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">were</i> trailer. More gaping holes in that place than in a block of Swiss cheese). </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">My dentist was from Jordan. He himself did not have very great teeth. I assumed maybe he was working on that, at night, with other dental students, because how could he honestly expect to get work with his own mouth jackety jacked up like that? </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">My dentist also liked lame club music. Where would one go clubbing in Iowa City you ask? I mean, if you are not twenty, but say nearing thirty, which this guy was? I am really not very sure. He would sing the songs as he poked around in my mouth. If you have never been to a university dental clinic, then you are unfamiliar with the way these visits work. Basically every procedure can take up to three visits. I had a root canal that took up three or four afternoons as the dentist to be worked on what she called my “groovy anatomy”. She was Columbian. Perfect teeth. And very happy explain part of my problem was my very windy roots. She seemed to work alone, stealth like, in an empty floor. But for most of these clinic visits, if the almost dentist even changes a brush setting on that electro tooth brush, she or he has to have a supervisor come and okay it. So I got to know club music very well. His favorite went something like this “you’re my butterfly, sugar, sugar” at which point, even after several visits and a mutual understanding that I did know that song from the radio, he would ask, for the millionth time, if I knew that song. Did I like that song? He loved that song. Sugar, sugar….</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">After the fifth or so visit, my club dentist got very excited. He’d been thinking. What I’d like to do, is this, he held his hands like a mouth, his fingers standing in for teeth, and pulled all his fingers in like hermit crab legs. Oh! I said. Um. Okay! He’d been thinking, he said, and after the root canal (maybe one, maybe two, yes?) he’d like to really get down to fixing things.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">This struck a cord.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">From fifth grade on I had dreamed of braces. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I, too, had been wanting to really get down to fixing things. For a very long time.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I’d gone to private school and basically the rich start whipping their kids’ teeth into straight lines right after they let their full time nannies go. Okay, no one in my class really had that kind of nanny, but by junior high everyone had very nice teeth. Except me. So it was my delight when finally, despite being basically homeless (we lived with my grandparents, so saying this was obviously met with contention because we were NOT homeless, we just didn’t, say, have our own HOME), and loosing all our furniture in storage, and coming to terms with my father’s mental illness, my mom made an appointment with an orthodontist. I was overjoyed. I made it through all the impressions (horrible!) and teeth pulling (four! to make space which I did not understand because I have gaps. And they gave me too much gas and I was convinced I would be kicked out of my honors and AP classes because I’d lost brain cells. You, too, would be convinced of the same if you could recall coming back into consciousness while biting the fingers of one of your dentists while hallucinating everyone is laughing at you as you guest on Oprah and you hear another dentist say, as you see him watch you gnaw on latex, “Oh, maybe that’s a bit too much, give her less!”) and finally got my braces, only to have things go a little south in our house and have my mother forget to take me back for subsequent appointments. The orthodontist was understandably upset and yanked them out a few days before I left for college. “Maybe you can come back when you are more responsible”. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">So I nodded vigorously when this club dentist said he wanted to help me. He slipped out of the cubicle and came back with his supervisor. He explained his plans. He did not ask him if he knew the Butterfly/Sugar song. The supervisor sighed, finished looking in my mouth, looked at club dentist and said “that might make her look a little funny”. “Funny?” Club dentist seemed sad all of a sudden. “Funny. Like a horse. If you bring her teeth in like that, she’s gonna look like a horse. You don’t want that, do you?” Um, the obvious answer is to shake your head no, as the other students prod around in there, too. No, no I do not want to look like a horse. Butterfly, sugar, butterfly, sugar, no horse, no horse, no horse.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I was not yet twenty-six and I had been deemed a dental disaster. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Which made me paranoid I was not, along with all the other hang ups many girls have in their twenties, deserving of good teeth. Sometimes I wished I lived in England, where I hear no one has good teeth, so I’d fit in. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">One of my biggest fears about my teeth is that they will crumble out. Which I have looked up and is supposed to suggest I am afraid of growing old, but I really think I am really afraid of losing my teeth.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">So two babies in two years has not helped with my teeth phobias. Those suckers take every last vitamin and nutrient and use it for their own little selves. Apparently, I’ve learned through this debacle, they’ve leached the calcium from me, day by nursing day. Lovely.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">So the tooth my son fucked up was already a weak link. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But when he chose that particular one to continually head butt, over and over, in October, I knew it was a goner, even if it had been less of a loser at the time.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">It all began the day after I got my hair rebraided. After months of letting it go, I finally looked like some semblance of a person who recognizes the importance of personal hygiene. And it was only a matter of a few hours before my son made his mark, by head butting me during a middle of the night wakeful because I am teething session. I remember grabbing my mouth and saying to my husband “It’s cracked! I finally got my hair done and now my mouth is messed”.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I had no idea how messed it could become.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Despite being so dismayed, I was due at rehearsals in New Haven and could not go to the dentist. Or, could not commit to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">finding</i> a dentist. I think relatively few writers have dental, and I am one of those not few. So I waited. My son, however, did not. Over the course of the next two weeks, he proceeded to head butt me over and over. In the same tooth. Until during one trip to New Haven I remember eating nothing but McDonald’s chocolate shakes in an attempt to keep my calories up to keep my milk up to keep feeding this crazy beast of a child who was hell bent on my being as dentally compromised as he was.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">One head butt, as we folded him into his car seat dressed as a very reluctant tiger for Halloween, produced the type of hole through which you can feel air. I spent my time at the following Halloween party convinced the parents with real jobs, and, therefore, dental, could see down into my throat. I also spent it shivering. Since the party was outside and the wind went right past my lips through that hole and up into my forehead.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">About a week later I knew I had to act.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">As I sat in that dentist’s chair (finally!) I gripped my hands, certain the diagnosis would be to remove each tooth and I could come back for more only when I was more responsible.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“It’s not as bad as you think,” was the verdict. Along with an estimate of a twenty three hundred dollar bill.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">So I did not quite act.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But my kid is not a quitter. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">In fact my kid seems to like a challenge.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And butt his head continued to do.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The biggest hit came the day before my opening night, when I tried to dance with him to that Mariah Carey Christmas song, and I guess he’s not in to Mimi cause bam went his very hard head into my bedraggled mouth.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I toasted my play, the next evening pre curtain, by sipping my proseco through the side of my mouth, hoping none dribbled out of my mouth as all those donors and subscription holders who’d been invited to the opening night wine reception watched me.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I spoke at a Humanities Lunch sipping my iced tea through a straw and demurely declining the sandwiches and chips offered me. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I lost five pounds and was a royal B for days. Skinny girls aren’t mean because they’re beautiful, they are mean cause they are fucking hungry.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And it was with a whimper that the tooth finally quit me, after only the slightest of butts, about a week later.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Leaving my mouth looking like I am a professional hockey player.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Don’t worry about it,” my daughter’s preschool teacher chirped. “My husband doesn’t even <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">have</i> any teeth!” And she went on to say her boys used to head butt <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">her</i> so much, that she had a constant bloody lip for years when they were small. “It’s boys!”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And I can’t really disagree.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">He goes at life with an entirely different energy than my daughter. I write <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">so</i> very much about my daughter. Disney and hair and beauty and senses of self that don’t involve eating disorders and cutting and feeling less and less and less.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">All my fem theory and I am not quite sure I thought I’d have to think as much about boys.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Ridiculous, I know.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But he is moving through the world with a different force than I am used to. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I come from a family of women, of girls, of strength in spite of, rather than strength because. If that even makes sense.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">For here is a force that is determined and fierce and dangerous, if you ask my teeth about it.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Here is a force that I was taught could be tamed and should be tamed, and, perhaps, it is a force I was not sure really existed. Testosterone? Ha, I think I would have said a year ago. He just needs hugs and kisses and oh shit, there is my tooth in my hand, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">shit</i>.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">So if you see me between now and tomorrow when I am due to have my front tooth replaced, just know I am a mother of a boy, who was once foolish enough to think brute force was a product of nurture, not nature.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I am pretty sure I was wrong.</div>In Brief:http://www.blogger.com/profile/00125561697276633742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8756441810838167082.post-78465763380447266752010-11-16T16:18:00.001-05:002010-11-16T18:37:35.113-05:00And Someone Listened: Thoughts on the 2010 Wasserstein PrizeSometimes people get heard. And change occurs.<br />
<br />
In my previous post I wrote an open letter to the 19 female playwrights who were all rejected from the 2010 Wasserstein Prize. Since that post, the internet has been afire, and theatre artists came together, via Facebook Petition, to protest the Theatre Development Funds' decision not to award the 25,000 dollar prize.<br />
<br />
Yesterday I was asked for my comments about the situation by blogger and playwright Callie Kimball. Her <a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2010/11/16/131356062/writing-an-ocean----and-what-it-means-when-the-world-takes-notice">article</a> appeared today on npr.org. In it, she cites my email to her. Below is my email in its entirety.<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica;">Hello,</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica;">Thanks for the email.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica;">And this is wonderful you will write about the "debacle", although that term trivializes the matter a bit, I do admit.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica;">Over the weekend, as the outrage gained steam, I began to think about the award and awards in general. I was surprised by the responses I got on my blog post. I was away for the weekend for rehearsals for a play of mine, and kind of just got riled up in the moment possibly because I was charged up from my time at Yale Rep, where I feel very very fortunate to be, and for some reason, the idea that this award had been kept from possibly a deserving writer, made me, obviously, very upset.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica;">Sometimes in this business, the gates get kept in ways that are rather painful. Who gets produced, who gets good reviews, who gets to keep doing this because they have the means (be it family money, access to health insurance, access to a pay check, access to housing, access to the gatekeepers...sometimes these things are just so arbitrary it's almost unfair. So what got me hopping mad was that an award that should be helping to ameliorate these gate keeping practices didn't open the gate to ANYBODY. Very curious, especially after Julia Jordan's study.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica;">I was telling a colleague this afternoon, as we discussed the Wasserstein, that when I've adjudicated awards, the spirit of the process has often been rather generous. In most instances, while there may have been dismay at the plays that sometimes ended up at the top of the pile for whatever reason, there was usually always the feeling that we did indeed WANT to give the award to someone, and were happy to give an opportunity to someone who was just starting out. Did we have to wade through some plays that should not have ended up in the final rounds? Yes. Almost always. Were there sometimes plays or writers who needed much more time and many more years to grow? Yes. Almost always. But awards such as these (especially the ones I was judging, cause let's face it, I am still emerging myself) are meant to see promise and the start of a career. And we saw so many different kinds of starts. Or those who were starting again. Or starting despite great odds (some of those personal statements are, indeed, very personal and revealing in a surprising way). </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica;">And I am under no delusion I was the best adjudicator. In fact, I know I flaked out on more than one process.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica;">But in the end, my job was to give out the award. Not shut the gate.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica;">I was also surprised, quite happily, by how many female writers wrote to me, either through my blog or through Facebook, and said they'd received similar awards (those of about 20,000 or 25,000 for new and emerging writers) and those awards changed their lives. Perhaps not financially (25,000 for writing a play is fabulous. But if you told someone you MADE! 20,000 a year, and got all excited about it, many people would look at you funny. While I am sure many writers do things like pay off student loans or credit card debt or perhaps? invest, I think there is another camp of writers that use the money to breathe a little and not have to work as many day jobs or teach so that they can write or research. And when you do that, that money does not go as far as one would think), but just about every person who wrote to me said getting an award like the Wasserstein made them think of themselves as real writers for the first time. You can't put a price tag on that type of confidence, and once you think that and believe that about yourself, you never go back. It profoundly changes how you think of your work and your self as an artist. I know it did me, when I received an NEA Fellowship. Sadly the money got sucked into having to move because of the residency requirement, but for the first time in my life I was paid to show up to work to be a writer on a regular basis, and it altered me.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica;">What's been happening today, too, is people have been (mostly on David Adjmi's Facebook page) citing female writers they felt were young (under 32. why 32? we're still not sure) and talented. Many people named Annie Baker which is so wonderful, but this is what this business LOVES to do: choose one player and place ALL the burden of whatever on that one person. Let Annie Baker be Annie Baker (because she is wonderful) and let other young women ALSO flourish and shine. We can do that. We really can.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica;">Okay, still on my soap box obviously but will stop typing now.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica;">Thanks for emailing me.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica;">Kirsten</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica;"><br />
</span>In Brief:http://www.blogger.com/profile/00125561697276633742noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8756441810838167082.post-37246104153234306672010-11-13T21:46:00.002-05:002010-11-15T21:48:40.998-05:00To Those 19 Playwrights<div class="MsoNormal">This week it was announced that the 2010 Wasserstein Prize was not awarded because its judges felt that no woman playwright who is 32 or younger in America is worthy of the prize, which is supposed to honor promise in emerging playwrights(newsflash, though, you could have raked in 500 thousand in prize money, commissions, advances, and house sales, be 57, and STILL be considered emerging in this business).</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">So this being the age it is, I just signed an email petition to let those who decided such a matter that this is absolutely ridiculous. My colleague <a href="http://youngbloodnyc.blogspot.com/2010/11/no-wasserstein-prize-in-2010-selection.html">Michael Lew</a> voiced many of our playwright community's concerns brilliantly in his blog.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And I must admit, when I first clicked on the link to his post, the first thing I thought was: 32? Seriously?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">At 32 I think I was only beginning to realize what it means to be a playwright who is also female. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Here is what I thought it meant: when I began to think I wanted to be a playwright, I had no idea women could really do such a thing. I was a senior in high school and had just plowed through TO BE YOUNG, GIFTED, AND BLACK, but Lorraine Hansberry had died young. I did not want to die young. So I pushed her out of my mind and just thought about all the other playwrights I was not like at all: men playwrights, white playwrights. I had not yet met the works of Shange, Nottage, Parks, or Corthron that made me think: OH! I could do this.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I also thought being a female playwright just meant that usually girls don’t do this kind of work. I didn’t realize that they do, and when you look around any given conference, workshop, production experience, or fellowship opportunity and do not see someone who resembles one of your demographics, you should wonder why. You should not always be the only. And if you are, you should not accept that you really ARE the only, but that there are others (female, black, poor, or what have you) who are not there for a reason, not because you are so much more talented than they are.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I had an inkling being a female playwright was considered “different” when I got in to Humana and Marc Masterson said, early on, before I even got into the rehearsal room, ‘be prepared for people to call this the year of the woman, since all the plays are by women this year except one’. I am pretty sure, when there is only one woman in a line up of plays being done, that people do not call it the year of the man. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But then I experienced something that really only women experience.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I had a kid.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Then another.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">While boys have kids, too, I am pretty sure they do not complete commissions for rent money while breastfeeding.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And given how so many developmental programs are geared towards LEAVING your home for weeks on end, I am pretty sure that while most male writers in our modern age are more aware of childcare issues than they were fifty, twenty, even ten years ago, most probably do not lug their kids around the country to work on plays. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">All this is to say that, at 32--since I had my daughter at 32--I had no idea what the full extent of being a female playwright could possibly mean. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I had no idea I’d have to place many writerly things on ice while I went about the kinda messy dealings of learning to be a parent.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I had no idea I’d have to say no, at times, to a career I’d spent over a decade and a half creating.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And yet, something continued to burn, something continued to make me need to write, even when my self was at odds with how and who was celebrated as a writer. In this business.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">So to those 19 who were rejected: your beginnings are burning. Your need to do what we do is real and right and necessary.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Fold that letter carefully and put it where you will not be tempted to read it or believe it.</div>In Brief:http://www.blogger.com/profile/00125561697276633742noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8756441810838167082.post-71673244987416784302010-11-11T21:44:00.000-05:002010-11-11T21:44:01.420-05:00Me and the Duggars: Full Steam Ahead<!--StartFragment--> <br />
<div class="MsoNormal">I am sitting on my hands and knees on the slightly dusty parquet floor of the Company Housing apartment that has been our other home for almost a month.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">K is in a cot, purchased especially for this trip, covered in blankets and one of her sheet sets from home. H is asleep after having thrown all the soft things I tried to set in his pack and play for him over the side.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Okay, the floor is very dusty.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>More than slightly.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Each time I try to sweep it, the kids go absolutely nut bag.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They go to the front closet and pull out all the cleaning instruments the theatre has provided.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They sweep and dust and try to mop with abandon, narrowly missing the flat screen TV, the glass coffee table, and the wall of windowpanes.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I would clean when they go to sleep, but I am just too tired.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Truth be told, I lie on the floor at home like this, as K “drifts” to sleep.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It started as being better than fighting with her about bed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She is a clingy one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now it is just our way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And it is not entirely bad.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I get a lot more writing done this way than when I was mean mommy taking her begrudgingly to the bathroom over and over (potty training really makes one second guess oneself) and yelling IT IS<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>BEDTIME!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>NO MORE TALKING!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>which is not really conducive to sleep.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Lately I have been thinking quite a bit about mothering and work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Last night I saw a program about Amish weddings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was not the best documentary.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I came in late, since I was, yes, lying on the floor for its first half, so I must have missed the part on why true Amish people would allow themselves to be filmed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And, granted, one couple was not allowed to keep on filming as their wedding date approached; however, it was engrossing, as are most programs about people who live so far removed from the mainstream that, well, people with cameras go and get all up in their faces, trying to make them tell us more about themselves so we can examine the gulf between our worlds.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">During the program an elder Amish man spoke about his community’s feelings about family.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No surprises here.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He explained a woman’s duty was to her family and that things work better when wives don’t work.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">My feminist self might cringe if it weren’t for the fact that another larger part of myself agrees.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Not that women should not work, but that, the way we’ve created workspaces makes it very difficult to both be a very good mother and a very good worker, whatever the work part of us happens to be.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I can say with absolute certainty that our house runs more smoothly when I am not working regular hours.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I can also say with absolute certainty that I would cease to feel I had much of a worldly purpose if all I knew how to talk about was poop, teething, potty training, and breastfeeding.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">There is a schism. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Today I tried to take my kids to my work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Mommy’s work” is a mystical mythical place.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Because I am a writer and field emails in fleeting five minute increments and do rewrites after I’ve peeled myself off the floor next to my daughter’s bed, often “mommy’s work” is located on the living room couch.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But, at times, it is located in a classroom or a rehearsal hall or a theatre, and I actually have to get up off the couch at odd hours and go away.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Such is my life currently.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Each week, sometimes once, sometimes twice, although really it should be more, I feel, we make the two hour trek so “mommy can work”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is a herculean effort.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Trust me, sometimes I say this to myself in the shower “this is a herculean effort”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Because this requires me to pack up house, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>move all the stuff that is toddler world with us, buy food for two households, and procure childcare.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To make sure my kids don’t completely flip out on me and feel more confused than necessary, I also make sure everything is done in the same way at the same time in each “home”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Dinner equals 5:15.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Bed equals 7.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are still time outs and kisses and hugs and sweet treats.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But, yes, this is all herculean effort.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">When I have done this in the past, it has been for a week.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The longest was for three when I took my then only child to Sundance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But this current stint will last, when all told, for two months.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">People like to commend these efforts until I explain what usually happens to me physically in order to accomplish them, which is that my body, in someway, at some point, just stops working.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I spend the entire time tending to two very needy humans and rewriting and by the end, I am exhausted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The kind of exhausted nineteenth century writers talk about, when they go to someone’s country estate to rest or something.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I do not know anyone with a country estate and even if I did, I am sure I would not be able to find a sitter so that I could go there and walk to moors or whatever while I “rest”, so I make do with reality TV and ice cream.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Okay, it’s liquor, not ice cream.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And while every single theatre has always been more than helpful to me and my family, I keep wondering: what if?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">What if this were seventy years ago. When you did not have to get that much childcare, just a comfy hotel drawer, so your baby feels like it is in a cradle, while you go do your theatre work so all you all can eat for the next month?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Then I thin of Eugene O’Neill and how that is how he grew up and look how fucked he was.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The first great American playwright, sure, but the guy was a hot mess and then some.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">So then, what if more of the jobs we do were like the circus?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Cause the OTHER show I watched last night was CIRCUS on PBS, and IT was all about The Big Apple Circus, and I thought, mmm, what if we just trained our kids from very young ages to be AROUND us as we worked?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some of these brilliant circus artists are ninth and tenth generation performers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That means circus is all their families have ever done for hundreds of years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And while I am sure not all of us want to be accountants like our dads or lawyers like our moms, I know that when I look at what my family and relatives say they choose to be, we all end up being similar things.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For the most part we are all writers or teachers or social workers or some off shoot there of.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Cause this Circus show reminded me of an author I once heard on NPR’s show THE CONNECTION, years ago as I waited in the pick up line when I was a nanny.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He mentioned that if you ask an indigenous person how much time he spent with his kid, he’d look at you funny.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Cause the kid was just always expected to be around, learning how to live from his or her parents.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And this all makes me think about old times.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe cause it’s Thanksgiving soon and so I just read a book about the Mayflower to K and it had historical interpreters in it dressed up like Pilgrims—awfully clean ones, though, I guess cause yeah, it is a kid’s book and showing everyone all pukey with their collars all browned would be gross and scary for children—and the main characters were child apprentices and I thought, mm, no childcare here, these kids are just THERE.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Soaking it all in.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I mean, I know they were probably maybe in reality not really enjoying the best crust of English life, but still.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And THIS all made me think of The Duggars, that Arkansas family with the nineteen kids.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Today the daughter in law announced she is expecting baby number two.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you are unfamiliar with the mothering set, baby number two is a huge deal, and here she just announced it on TV and is very calm with it because the life she leads expects it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you are unfamiliar with the mothering set, then you do not know that<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you don’t want baby number two, there is the pressure you feel every time people look at the already pretty f n cool being you ALREADY are steering into the world, and say “will you have another one?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That, or every time you say you are tired, people ask if you are pregnant with baby number two.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or, if you know you’ve always wanted to pop out babies til Mother Nature says your time is through, there is the pressure of when and then how many more and then how do we pay for all these freakin’ kids and then what happened to my so called life anyway?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But here was this twenty two year old person very calm with the idea baby number two was on its way and you could knock her for it, but I know I can’t.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The Duggars are an obsession with me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They do a lot of things I just don’t or won’t do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They home school.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They don’t use birth control.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They don’t read conventional literature. They are evangelical<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>to the point where the girls don’t wear pants and the boys don’t wear shorts and they perm their long hair in that way people such as that seem to do. They are not just Republicans, but are pretty much the kind of right leaning set that wants to ensure as many white, their brand of Christian, non pant/permed out/no mainstreaming people populate the United States before other browner less Christian people do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And it’s my understanding that they feel the other browner less Christian people are doing just that very quickly so they’d better get on it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But this is hearsay, their website makes no mention of this non brown person thing.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I just can’t get enough of these people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My sisters laugh at me.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">At first it was the nutter factor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One would like to believe anyone who does all the things listed above is a fruitcake with extra walnuts baked inside.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What woman would choose to get pregnant every year of her adult life?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I mean really.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you only have one kid and you had a lovely pregnancy and your baby sleeps and you don’t even know what colic is and all your relatives are just the best babysitters and your boss said oh just take as much time as you need and I can just send these checks to your home address, right?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and your husband does dishes and laundry and wakes when the baby wakes and does not dress your kid in mismatched clothes when you are not looking and when you specifically grouped matching things together so your kid looks like she comes from a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">home</i> cause you drive a Toyota, not a fancy car that people can look at and say oh they dress their kid like that cause rich people can pull off the mismatched thing AND you’ve already lost the weight, then don’t answer that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Over the years (yes, I have been watching them that long) I have realized a lot of what the Duggars believe is not that very far off from what I believe, when it comes to family.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">That does not mean I do not think women should work outside the home or we should all start perming our hair.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">What I realized is that like the Duggars, I would like to believe that there is something so special about children and family and parenthood, that the lines between all these things should not necessarily be easily defined.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When I watch Michelle Duggar, the mom, after she has had a baby, I am amazed at how regulated the addition to their family is.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Usually Michelle Duggar has the baby on one of those Brest Friend things you can use to breastfeed, with a modesty throw over her shoulder.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This woman who wears three layers of clothing in summer in Arkansas, is very forthcoming about the whole breastfeeding/new baby in the house thing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And it makes me wonder.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It makes me think what if.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What if we did not have to compartmentalize ourselves in our workaday world.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Granted, I know I can’t take my kids to rehearsal.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I tried tonight and their voices were so loud, even as we sat outside the room, waiting for a break so I could check in, that I basically had to banish us, with my three year old stating “WHY?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>MY VOICE IS NOT SO LOUD!”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And my fifteen month old growling at fever pitch at a picture of the college’s stuffed mascot from 18 something or other.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">As I tried to hightail it out of there (the assistant stage manager had come out and so yes, indeed, it really was loud) I dropped my daughter’s babydoll, all our coats, and the two cups of water I’d tried to keep them quiet with.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Not very graceful.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">So despite my dismay over the Republican sweep, there is something to be learned from those Duggars, whom I am sure are not very excited about Obama, although they were mildly respectful of him when their reality show sent them all to Washington DC once.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Perhaps there is a Shangri La where I do not lie on parquet floor wishing my work life and home life met at less jagged angles.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Until then I can be seen dragging two kids, a babydoll, and many cups of water that did not work as they were intended from the rehearsal halls I hope to be asked to attend to in the future.</div><!--EndFragment-->In Brief:http://www.blogger.com/profile/00125561697276633742noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8756441810838167082.post-40539915333691710772010-11-06T22:53:00.000-04:002010-11-06T22:53:25.648-04:003, 3 Buzz, Buzz<!--StartFragment--> <br />
<div class="MsoNormal">It is trendy, when writing a post about your kids, to refer to the age of your kid and refer to it in the third person and expound about how horrible this particular age is.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I have resisted writing these kinds of posts.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">One, I don’t like the idea of being trendy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I didn’t buy Crocs until this summer and even when I did, I bought the ballet flat looking kind, not the kind that make your feet look like some kind of modern art museum.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I don’t have an I phone or an I pad (okay, mostly cause I can not afford an I pad),nor do I download anything onto an I pod and listen to it while I “work out”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I resist trends not because I am too cool (cause if you’ve met me, you know that isn’t true) but because it all just takes too much energy.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But I can no longer resist writing this post.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I have a three year old.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And just in case you are listening 3, you are really getting on my nerves.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I love my daughter.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I am not a fan of three.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Sometimes my husband and I, as we pass each other while one takes out the garbage and the other is wiping someone’s dirty poopy butt, will quip, “don’t you just love this age?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And the other will retort “I just LOVE this age!”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then one of us laughs while the other, who is usually the one neck deep in 3! at that moment, usually does not.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">3! came early to our house.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">You know 3! 3! insists she can do it herself, then dissolves into tears because she “can’t do ANYTHING!”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>3! Is very sweet at preschool.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While whining about needing to eat ice cream for breakfast and then asked if she speaks like this to her teachers at school, 3! looks genuinely horrified.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>NO!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>3! declares.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There’s no whining at school!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>3! decides she is too stubborn to blow her nose, so walks around with snot literally bubbling out of her nose and acts as if you are Joan Crawford when you try to come at her with a Kleenex.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Perhaps 3! is so challenging because you are out of the magical Black Forest that is babyhood and are now called on to really get in to the nitty gritty of socializing a person before she or he goes on to become a homicidal maniac.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Because we’ve all met kids who kinda hang out around 3! for too long.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Chances are one of your friends has one of those kinds of kids.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’ll never be ME! You say when you watch your college friend who used to do a mean jello shot be reduced to pleading with her offspring to please put on his shoes or else Santa and the Easter Bunny and even Christopher Columbus will never ever come and bring presents again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Who’s Christopher Columbus well just you keep this up and you’ll find out who Christopher Columbus is and just put on your freakin shoes because I said so that’s all you need to know!</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">What is exciting about 3! is that we are watching this tiny being become a person, with likes and dislikes, with preferences and strange aversions.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Our 3! has decided she will only wear skirts and dresses.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This means no pants, no jeans, no sleepers, no pajamas with bottoms (unless they have ruffles, but that is a whole other post entirely).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This also means no sneakers or shoes that are not ballet flats. Because, of course, those go with the skirts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Sometimes these skirt ensembles will be accompanied by a costume.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This could be a pair if fairy wings or, as was the case last week during grocery shopping, a fuzzy bee costume.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She sat in the car shaped cart wearing it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If I was stopped a beat or two too long in an aisle, she would jump out (the safety belt was torn off.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Trust me, I tried to strap her in there) and yell “I’m buzzing, I’m buzzing, I gonna STING YOU!”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">One fellow customer found this delightful.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was one of those fellow customers who comes in around the same time you do and you just can’t shake.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They’re with you near the lettuce, in front of the juices, beside the dairy case.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Usually I feel badly for those people, having to be subjected to my very loud grocery goings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But this guy ate it up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“There’s that BEE!”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Oh, don’t sting us, BEE!”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But what often usurps the excitement of watching someone come into being, is the fact that 3! is often irrational, demanding, rude, and annoying.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“It’s hard because you’re socializing a person from scratch,” is what my mom has pointed out.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And unlike two years previous, when you’re just so charmed by anything the little darling does, you think to yourself, this could be the moment when it all goes down hill and I raise a brat. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And often, that is what 3! seems like. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Let me repeatL we love our daughter.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But 3! is kicking my ass.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>3! Is stinging us over and over and it’s lucky she is so cute doing it.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><!--EndFragment-->In Brief:http://www.blogger.com/profile/00125561697276633742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8756441810838167082.post-70605447452537161832010-10-26T21:26:00.000-04:002010-10-26T21:26:08.352-04:00One Up, Two Down<!--StartFragment--> <br />
<div class="MsoNormal">We’ve all done it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I know I have.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe it is a byproduct of living in this computerized age, this tendency we have to cut down, rather than support or build up.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Nowhere does this prevail more than between mothers. It’s actually a bit frightening, even though I think most of the time it occurs the same way a ring of dirt appears during bath time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It sneaks up on you and then it is there, in plain sight and offensive.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I belong to several mommy groups.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They each have their own hallmark of membership. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There’re my breastfeeding groups (yes, plural) and my born in 07 groups (again, plural), and my paranormal lover’s group and my mother’s to boys group and my “mixed” babies group and my c section mama and proud of it group…the list really does go on and on. And on. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And with the exception of one group (it knows who it is), what all these groups have in common is the way the moms in each have the uncanny ability to go right for the jugular. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“What is it with these <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">MOMS</i>”?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My sister often asks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Why are they like this?” </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">For these mamas are far removed from the warm and gentle milk and cookie toting June Cleaver types. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They are more likely to call you a dirty ho bag than invite you in for sanka and a shared smoke. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perhaps this is the best case for persistent feminist thought to pervade our culture further: rather than advocate for the blending of the domestic sphere—which has always been considered to be feminine and therefore the “logical” place in which women should exist—with the dominant and male centered public sphere of the workplace, perhaps we should admit that that gentler, warmer, domesticated space that we expect should be filled with gentle waves and soft pastels—you know, like on those old feminine hygiene commercials—is as biting and about as nurturing as a tank full of piranhas.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Maybe we should rejoice that the stereotype has been shattered.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After all, mommies are people too.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Who just happen to be female and can’t all happen to be nice, or in command of a sense of humor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But to be honest, a lot of what I see on these mother boards horrifies me just as much as it does my sister.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Part of this relates to this book I read for one of my mom’s book clubs (yeah, I belong to a mom book club, wanna make somethin’ of it?) called <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Mask-Motherhood-Becoming-Mother-Changes/dp/0140291784">THE MASK OF MOTHERHOOD</a>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Basically the premise is that as mothers (or, parents, too) we hide behind a mask.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A large, community condoned mask of “isn’t this WONDERFUL?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I LOVE being a mommy SO much, ALL the time every MINUTE, to be precise, because every second is so fulFILLING and REWARDING! And to admit anything else would be saying I do not love my family or my baby or myself, because really I was MADE to do this, if you don’t feel this way the moment you find out you are about to be a mommy and stay this way through every moment of your baby’s childhood, then, well, I feel sorry for you because there is something wrong with you and by the way my baby sleeps twelve hours a night and eats very well and never cries and is hardly ever sick because well that would mean I am a bad mommy, letting germs get to my precious lovely, and that is not me at all, that is not me at all because I am a very good mommy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am a very very very good mommy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All the time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is exactly how I knew it all would be, my partner helps whenever I ask and my mother in law says all the right things because she knows, she knows how good at this I am, and I have no second thoughts about anything because I am a good mommy, right?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Anyone?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Still listening?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To me?”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And perhaps the people at Hallmark are still listening because they need inspiration for their overpriced greeting cards, but by that point in the mommy game, the only other people still listening are parents who also have marshmallow sweetness coursing through their veins.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Because to admit to the confusion and chaos and sleep deprivation that is parenthood during the early months and years, is to admit, somehow, that something has gone wrong with you.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To vent about it is akin to admission that you really feel you should have left your children in some Baby Safe Haven drawer like the grotesque parent you are.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Because what often happens when we as parents participate in the one-up-manship that is often at the core of our playground and dance class interactions, is a swift and sure dismantling of affirming that the person who has just admitted their baby only eats chicken nuggets or only sleeps two hours at a time or still wears diapers…at 4! is able to be, has within them, the ability and tenacity and determination to be a kick ass amazing parent, even if her kid still craps himself, can’t self soothe to sleep, and has the eating habits of a person with a severe and acute eating disorder.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And that is what a simple “I am so sorry” does.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It affirms.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It whispers that you are not the freak of the natural world who does not know how to parent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(And modern parenting is, actually, a learned behavior that changes and changes and changes, even when we’re doing it right).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">A few months ago a friend* whose oldest daughter is on “the spectrum” updated her status on Facebook at that desperate hour of four AM.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Four hours of sleep,” it read, “Jessie up all hours and the other two due up soon.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Obviously, this is a terrifying status update.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She is more of an acquaintance so I did not recognize her other so-called friends, but the long list of mommy admonishments in the comments boxes made me cry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And made me get very angry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am a know it all, so the how to posts were understandable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was the posts that basically said this night from hell was somehow all my friend’s fault and that she should suck it up that got me hopping.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Within them was the sentiment that if she did not glory in the splendor of parenthood when she was shaky with fatigue that she was somehow spitting on the blessings she had been given.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And they <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">are</i> blessings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But somehow it seems a “friend”, and certainly another mother, could maybe cut the girl some slack and just say “It will get better”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As opposed to: “Oh, I don’t have that problem, Micah sleeps through the night!” Which translates into: I am better than you at this parenting thing, sorry you are such a sap and in need of so much couples counseling that you can’t rouse your husband up to deal with you.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Which is often a cover for, now that you mention it, just last week three of mine were in my bed all night and for the life of me I couldn’t get them out, they were all over me and my husband who just slept through the whole thing, like those bed bugs the hotels can’t get rid of, so they’re at my mom’s for the weekend because there is something growing in my fridge I need to bleach out and I can never do it cause I am just too tired all.the.time.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I’ve done, we’ve all done it, that one up man ship.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But when I can jump out of the piranha tank for minute and remember we’re all human, I<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>hope I always do that instead.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><!--EndFragment-->In Brief:http://www.blogger.com/profile/00125561697276633742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8756441810838167082.post-50177323643208353202010-10-24T22:48:00.001-04:002010-10-25T07:55:41.625-04:00Twitterpated On Nantucket, or Perfect for Halloween<div class="MsoNormal">One date I would like to go on with my husband is the <a href="http://www.ghostsandgravestones.com/boston/">Boston Ghost Tour</a>. There are several but the one we’ve picked out is the one where, in the promotional brochure, there is a goulish looking woman holding a small deformed baby, perhaps? That looks as though it has been borrowed from the Mutter Museum for this photo shoot and costumed by some goth kids. The guides for this particular tour make up their own characters. Their costumes are not so much period as passably olden days looking. For this tour you hop on a bus and they take you around to haunted places in Boston and aside from the cost being the same as outfitting our kids for boots and winter jackets, the reason we probably will not go on this ghost tour is because ghost tours and me have a past, a past that is not very pretty.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I went on my first ghost tour on Nantucket. Ron and I had been together a year, but he lived in Boston and I was in school in Iowa, so our relationship had the excited, frenzied feeling of a couple enjoying a soldier’s shore leave together (minus, of course, service in the armed forces). I was never in classes when we were dating, so dating was really that: dinners at the Top of the Hub, weekends in Rockport, sangria by candlelight accompanied by tapas our future kids would spit out and declare “BESCUSTING!” It is safe to say we were, in the word of that Owl from Bambi as he discussed true love, “Twitterpated!” </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But after a year of dating, my husband had not seen many of my neuroses in full force. I have quite a bit. Quirks, really. I’ve grown to embrace them cause I’m not about to let them go any time soon.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">One such eccentricity is my fascination with ghosts and scary things. I kid you not, I’ve spent many a night awake while at writers retreats or in workshops, wondering what might get me when the lights went out. My blood actually ran cold when Lloyd Richards told us, during my first time at the <a href="http://www.oneilltheatercenter.org/">O’Neill Theatre Center’s New Play Conference</a>, that there’d been a sighting the night before and for all of us to respect the ghosts, that this was their home and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">we</i> were <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">their </i>visitors. I was not warmed when during my next visit, a year later, I was housed on the very hall where Lloyd Richards had said the ghost had been seen. I was not warmed but I was not surprised because it seems many development programs like to house writers in creepy places. I remember being accepted to one program and the literary manager saying “OH! And you will love where you’ll be staying. A lovely old hotel we’ve got here in town. Maybe the ghosts will inspire you!” But actually, the thought of ghosts really just made me need to pee my pants.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">So perhaps my affectation with this subject is a way to tame the beastly imagination within.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">At any rate, when on Nantucket, I thought it might be FUN! to go on a ghost tour with Ron. I don’t know why. I should have known better.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Our tour guide took ghosts very seriously.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">There were many children on the tour because it was us, a few other couples, and a large family group who also thought a ghost tour might be FUN! during their family reunion.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The kids tuned our guide out, though, when he told the story of a sighting on the street where we stood, and asked us how we thought this could be, how could someone dressed in old fashioned garb <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i> be a ghost, did we think? </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“She was an actor in a play?” one little girl offered.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“No.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Maybe she just got dressed up in a costume from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">another</i> play. From <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">before</i>,” ventured another kid.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Our tour guide leveled his eyes on this kid and said “There were not any plays that day or any other day. It was: A GHOST!”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Then he proceeded to recount Einstein’s theory of relativity and ruminations about bands of time and alternate spatial and spiritual planes—the kind of stuff my mom says “well if you explained this weird thing you have with ghosts like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">that</i>, honey, it doesn’t seem AS crazy, then it’s SCIENCE.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">He lost the kids after his conspiracy theory-can-we-play-World Of Warcraft-at-your-house-cause-I-still-live-with-my-mother tact, and come dark those kids spent the rest of the tour shining their family reunion emblazoned laser lights in his beady ghost loving eyes.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The tour criss-crossed the commercial sections of the island. Nantucket is one ghosty place. It’s the sea, the ghost books I read about it explained. Or perhaps it is “something else” the tour guide intoned. Whatever the hell it was, I spent the rest of the week scared out of my ever-loving mind. I kept vigil for orbs of green and blue light. I tried drinking more than anyone else in our cottage, hoping I’d just pass out and not notice if, while sleeping, any ghosts would come around and try to wake me up—one ghost we learned about liked to have sex with people in the middle of the night. This would prove very embarrassing since Ron and I were sleeping in the middle of the living room. Passing out from too much gin and tonic began, with so little sleep in my system, to seem like a logical way to combat this problem. But, as I learned on that trip, Ron’s friends, with whom we were on vacation, can drink more than me any day of the week and this was not a good or viable plan. In the day I scanned the beaches and streets for apparitions. At night I lay next to Ron, poking him every twenty minutes or so, asking if he was awake and had he “heard anything?”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">These were also my pre mommy days, where I had the habit of peeing every two or three hours at night. In my post ghost tour haze I would seriously weigh the idea of making Ron get up with me to go to the bathroom, in case any ghosts were in there near the toilet or waiting to catch my gaze in the mirror when I washed my hands. They like mirrors, those ghosts. But it was a week of hard partying, and many of those nights Ron just snored off his Knob Creek loudly beside me, as I scanned the cottage and wished the owners had invested in larger drapes for the sliding glass doors, where I was certain I could make out figures out on the porch.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">By Friday I was a basket case, if my condition earlier in the week had not already deemed me so.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I spent our last night sitting up in bed, watching the local cable Nantucket access channel, wondering how the ghosts felt about the TV coverage. I thought of the nun ghost I’d read about, who would appear on the stairs of one young girls’ home when she was too late coming in from dates. I thought about the rum runner ghosts I’d read about, who apparently hang out at Nantucket’s Chicken Coop, running barrels of rum underneath people’s cars in the parking lot. I thought of the little black girl who wanted to go to school, but instead got pelted to death and now the school house –on NANTUCKET! and home to the Black Heritage Trail People [my name for them, my sisters were Park Rangers for them]—is witness to the sound of chalk writing against a blackboard and stones hitting walls. These stories are not to be confused with sightings of orbs and strange lights, which often have people calling in to the Nantucket police station, so said our guide.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Around four in the morning, Ron told me I had to go to sleep, since we were leaving on a very early Ferry back to Hyannis. Reluctantly and against my better judgment, I closed one eye and lay back. For better or for worse, Ron was in twitterpation with a girl who was obsessed with ghosts. And for some inexplicable reason, he did not run away.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Ron does not believe. He listens to my stories, all my ghost stories, waits a beat, and then says, “Kirsten, that’s just ridiculous.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And yet I’ve watched his eyes when I rattle off my latest tale. He always waits that beat before he speaks; because some little part of us always believes, if only for minute, if only for a second. It’s a tiny little pull in your stomach. It’s that little catch of light in the corner of your eye.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div>In Brief:http://www.blogger.com/profile/00125561697276633742noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8756441810838167082.post-89029167367163408792010-10-23T21:44:00.000-04:002010-10-23T21:44:24.770-04:00And What Village Are You From Again?<!--StartFragment--> <br />
<div class="MsoNormal">It has been a very long week.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rewarding and exciting but very, very long.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sunday we packed up and headed to the land of Packies (known as liquor stores in other states)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and Huskies (go UConn!) so I could start rehearsals for a new play.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Once there I promptly left for a one day reading process in Philadelphia (land of the “pay six dollars to get into our city by car”).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The whole six days has left my kids hella crazy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Which I completely understand.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So while my husband and I know we can’t let them be nutters (meaning, whiny, demanding, freak of nature children, you know, the kind that fill up Chuck E. Cheese’s) just because mommy has to work, we’ve cut them a little bit of slack this week.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Just a little bit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We ain’t goin’ soft up in here.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There’s till been plenty of time outs doled around, even for Mr. Huggy Bear, aka Hunter-man (30 seconds tops for the little guy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I know. I am a mean mean mommy).</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">So when we rolled back in to town this afternoon, I was determined to make the hours between lunch and bedtime “easy” for them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I did not insist everyone “just try” his or her lunch.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Just one spoon of yogurt, hun?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Oh SURE!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No PROBLEM!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Waste away on the toddler diet, I have absolutely no misgivings about that in the least.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not wear a sweater under your coat?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Oh CERTAINLY!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No PROBLEM!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I will just put four extra fucking sweaters in the already stuffed to the gills diaper bag and happily lug it all over the place.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Play “your music” in the car?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Oh FanTAStic!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I love Laurie Berkner so much, it’s my pleasure to play this freakin CD over and over and over after having listened to it in the car all the way back from Yale.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>LOVEly!</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">My Stepford mom approach included a trip to the playground, despite my wanting to start the ten loads of laundry that is waiting for me or make a dinner with spices other than the four I bought for our Yale apartment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Two of those are just salt and pepper, so you can imagine it was a pretty bland week for the Nigros.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">We went to the Davis Square Park, my new park of choice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s got that rubber ground that makes the whole operation seem safer, although truth be told Katia has wiped out almost every time we’ve been there.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It also has a nice offering of sand, but not too much.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Don’t get me started on sand and parks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You’d never know I adored that combo as a kid to hear me lament about them now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But now all I think about is: how dirty can they get and how long will it take me to get their skin and their clothes and their shoes clean enough so they don’t look like they don’t have a home?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Once there I scoped out the other parents.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Despite all the mother’s groups you can join (online, offline, at the Y, at Isis, with people you’ve known for years, with people with whom all you share is that you happened to get it on in the same week a year and a half ago and now are linked cause your kids are the same age) motherhood can be a lonely experience.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So I usually look around to size up the other parents and see who might be willing to talk to me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Desperate, perhaps, but until you have stared down the next six hours of your life and realized you will not utter words to anyone with an emotional vocabulary that does not resemble that of a mental patient (not the Hollywood kind but the 48 hour hold I guess I need a new roommate kind), don’t knock it.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">At first it was slim pickings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A mom and her toddler and two grandmas:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>anyone could see this new mom had her hands full, negotiating between a one year old, her own mom, and her partner’s mom.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe this is an ideal Saturday afternoon in the magical land of in law love, but from the weary way they were all just sitting there, I guessed perhaps not so much.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Then there was a dad and his three kids, the third of which took forever to coax out of the Dodge Caravan.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Fine, you stay in there if you’re going to whine like that”, and magically a little four-year-old head popped out from the recesses of the last van seat.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The dad carried an official looking binder and proceeded to read from it for the rest of their time at the park.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Katia immediately took a liking to the kids, but the dad was a no go.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My guess was either his wife made him leave the house so she could clean or knock back some pre supper margaritas, or this Saturday afternoon of fun was part of his custody agreement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I kept looking.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Next was a mom whose darlings were the same ages as mine, roughly: a preschool seeming daughter and a baby son.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But she was the type of mom I probably would avoid if in my right mind.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She wore a long skirt, very large wide brimmed hat, and booties. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not the type Kim Kardashian would wear, but the kind my sixth grade teacher would have worn:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>quilted looking and mud brown and possibly made by Isotoner.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I will admit I was intrigued.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And later when we did get to talking, I found her to be very very nice and also very very funny (“Duncan!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My, my, my you are very aromatic!” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>she exclaimed just before she had to strip the poor kid from the waist down and use half her supply of baby wipes on his butt).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While at first peek it would seem she might be a holier than thou mommy, ready to pounce on my disposable diapers and prepackaged non organic snack raisins, I was proven wrong when she pulled out a huge bottle of coke and downed it in large meaningful swigs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We were also similar in our choice of generic baby products and the way we both narrate everything—kinda a bit too loudly—so that both kids have a clue as to what the hell is going on and not have one of those toddler style panic attack shriek fits.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But a mommy with two kids who are not yet four is a distracted mommy, so our conversation went something like this:</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“How old is yours oh come back honey, okay, mommy—.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sorry…”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“…Oh, no worries…”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“…Is she three?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Oh!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Akk.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Come back sweetie—.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sorry…”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“…Two years and two months apart.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m so tired all the come back, come back please—.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’s a quick one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sorry…”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">After about an hour of my Stepford mom park experience, I was ready to pack it up and head to Foodmaster so we could have that more than four spice dinner.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">This of course entailed leaving the park.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Which takes a certain amount of finessing, unless you have Stepford children, but those are sold separately from the Stepford mom model.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">To leave the park with most children you must first give “the warning”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This includes a time limit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It can’t be too long, because the non Stepford kids have no idea what the hell time it is.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And it must be exact, because the non Stepford kids will never have any chance of learning about time if five minutes turns into thirty while you discuss babysitters with the new parent who just walked in the playground gate.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I usually dole out a five minute, a minute, and a thirty second.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I make sure I make eye contact so Miss Lovey knows I know she heard me.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">This afternoon my five minute, during which I mentioned Foodmaster and STEAK!, was met with “But that’s BORING!” from the divorcee’s oldest, who had befriend KK during a game of tag.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“I know.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s very boring.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But we have to eat!”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I had the Stepford going on Go-OOD!</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Got that, Katia Kai?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I chirped.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">No answer.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Katia?”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">She reached into her pocket and placed her sunglasses on the ground.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Which was distressing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As this is a gesture you do when you are planning to STAY in a place, not merrily follow your mother to Foodmaster to buy STEAK! and whatever else your mom will bribe you with to make the night remain in the cheerful category.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Did you hear me?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Katia?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>KK!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lovey?”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“…yes.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“You heard me?”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Yes.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Okay!”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“I heard you.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Good.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You know, how about I hold your sunglasses for you?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Okay?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Off the ground?”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“…no.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Sure?”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Yes.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Alright!”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And as I stepped out of the playhouse where she and her new friends were cooking pails of sand, she said, in a rather chipper ring “Can you take my glasses?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was a sweet request.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not the demanding parentally demeaning growl of the THREE year old that makes my husband and I feel like we are raising a brat and keeps me in particular up at night doing google searches about normal preschool behavior and then slinking to bed sadly when it seems this IS normal preschool behavior and the only way to deal is with limits and boundaries and consistency and set bedtimes and set meal times and and and all those things we all do but still at the end of the day, have THREE! to contend with in a way that makes you very very sleepy.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But while I was basking in the sweetness, someone else was decidedly not.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I’d noticed him a bit earlier.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">He looked a little ridiculous.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">He wore a felt semi cowboy/semi Indiana Jones hat and kick ass beer guzzling boots but since he was in a playground, it just looked like this was an outfit he did not get to wear much because now he was a dad and could only go out in the daytime like the rest of us, and yet still he wore it anyway.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">His own kid could not yet walk.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe he had more kids at home.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe he felt he knew how to commandeer THREE!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or maybe he’d just read so many parenting books and websites that he felt he could utter what he did, despite probably not even having to really child proof his house yet because his kid was still a BABY!</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Say PLEASE!” he said to Katia, and I immediately smirked and thought, you are an asshole.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I took the glasses and said “Thanks very much, lu lu.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Uber-parent looked up at me (cause, you know, he had to hold his kid in the upright position cause um SHE is still a BABY! and so was on the rubber ground) and smiled.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Which is when I felt a torrent of emotion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You don’t tell my kid to say PLEASE!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">I </b><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>tell my kid to say please.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And after a week of crazy bed times and pizza two days in a row those first days which is a sign things are wonky cause mommy did not cook and hours upon hours of no mommy and not being able to see her beloved Albie at school, a sweet non please prefaced request when I am about to yank her from the one spot of bright fun she’s had all day works just fine for our family, Mr. my kid still uses a bottle and I have not given one time out in my entire life yet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I don’t live in your village, you do not get to discipline my kid.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">This torrent of emotion surprised me.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I like to think I might do well living in some communal housing situation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ve even looked into it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My husband and I were thinking, since we don’t belong to a church and dropping <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">two</i> kids off at a friend’s, even one that offers, seems intrusive, that living in a co op might be um nice…?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But the ones in Cambridge have pictures of these shared dinners on their websites and my husband and I agree there’s only so many gluten free<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>vegan no nuts no meat no dairy free rangey Sunday dinners one should eat in a life time if one enjoys bread and nuts and meat and dairy in an almost obscene way normally.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But after this afternoon I am realizing I don’t think I could handle having someone in my shit in terms of child rearing.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And I agree, years ago when all the neighborhood parents had license to tell you which way was up, there was more community accountability.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I remember making a disparaging remark about the housing project next to my private school—something like how that was why we had plastic windows at our school, because of the poor people next door, and my friend’s mother saying “So!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Those people are just as good as anyone else!”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I will never forget it and she was right and I am thankful for it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My snotty little eleven year old self needed that and right quick.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But my friend’s mother <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">knew</i> me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My friend’s mother had respect for me and my family.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">In the car on the way to Foodmaster I thought about it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Cause what this guy lacked was knowledge of our context. And to be fair, I was not very open to learning more about his context, either.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Perhaps this guy just saw another newish parent and thought, oh, we’re in the same boat, we live in the same area, we have similar values and so I will tell her kid how to ask her mother to do something for her.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Perhaps.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Or, maybe, this guy saw a youngish looking mom with two kids she is narrating to like a crazy person, and thought, she needs help disciplining her child, I can be that help!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(It’s that you look so small and like maybe a teenage mom or something and that’s why people want to help you, my sister Kaitlyn has said to me more than once.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But if I am so small how come my size fours won’t fit any more, I’d like to know).</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">So I look like a teenage knock up in need of parenting classes as opposed to a mother of two kids under four, maybe.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Maybe.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Or, what if this person is just as judgmental as I can be, and went about assigning his own context to the situation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Youngish looking mom (he can’t see the grey, but it is there, lemme tell ya), two kids close in age, black, kinda, cause the daughter seems not but her hair really is, so black but maybe white, too, and that little girl is pretty, and she can’t get away with treating people like this just because she is a cute kid, and maybe this cat thought, hmm, it is up to me to instill what I know on to this family because I know what is best for this family even though I never met this family.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And a torrent of emotion flooded through me because I do not know what exactly was behind this moment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was probably harmless from his point of view, but I do know it felt wrong.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It did not feel like a warm village hand was patting my daughter’s forehead while gently showing her another, kinder way to be in this world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It felt like a yahoo was denting the easy afternoon we were having because I had to drag my kids to another state so I can work and finally I was saying “just BE. We’re back home and you can just BE, for a minute, before I start in on the Pleases and the Stop that’s, and the this is your warning 1, 2, THANK YOU!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>GOOD JOB oh don’t oh okay oh this is your warn--. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>GOOD JOB. I LOVE YOU.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">‘Cause I don’t think that guy loves my kid.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Maybe it was the way he said what he did but maybe it was also the way he stared, smug, as I buckled my screaming kids into my double-wide. After the thirty second was issued.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">See.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Those kids ARE bad.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She should say please.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I pictured him at dinner, his baby girl quietly eating mashed something the way serene only baby children do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Happily.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Eagerly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not the chaos that descends when there is more than one and both are toddlers and want to run away.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“You should have seen it honey there was this mom at the park and her kid, well I told her to say please, Bethie’s not gonna behave like that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Kids have to learn.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I told her to say—“</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And I’ve been there, I’ve told Ron how some kid at dance class was a real stinker and no way were we gonna raise a jerk like that.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But it still does not feel right, that interlude in the playhouse on the rubber ground.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Cause I don’t think that we live in the same village.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I don’t think that guy loves my kid.</div><!--EndFragment-->In Brief:http://www.blogger.com/profile/00125561697276633742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8756441810838167082.post-10360710828175024622010-10-13T21:29:00.000-04:002010-10-13T21:29:09.981-04:00Every Breath You Take<!--StartFragment--> <br />
<div class="MsoNormal">Almost every one of us who grew up in the 80s remembers Fraggle Rock.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Since my sisters and I could not tell time when it originally aired on Sundays nights, it was always a fantastic and jarring surprise that it came on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>FRAGGLE ROCK!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>OH!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s ON!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And we’d watch with glee as those little muppets who lived in Doc’s wall got up to their crazy antics.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Our favorite episode of all Fraggle time was and still is “Dagoonie”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am sure the episode as a proper title, but this is what we call it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We love it so much that pretty much all you have to do is yell out “DAGOONIE!” and the three of us will curdle into the floor emitting peals of girlish laughter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Which is embarrassing because we’re all old now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even you, Kaitlyn.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Dagoonie” rings true to our Greenidgegirl hearts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And sadly, it probably always, always will.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">In this episode Mokey, the fraggle who seemed as though she’d spent time enjoying “the green” on a commune somewhere donning that hemp looking get up of hers as she drank herbal tea and perhaps made her friends gluten free foods with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">lots </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">mushrooms</i> before she lived in that wall, befriends a random newcomer fraggle<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>whose name is, yes, Dagoonie.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Full disclosure here, Mokey was not my favorite fraggle.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Her “far out, man”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>California vibe made me a little uneasy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m an east coast person.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I realized this when I moved to Iowa and felt just that much more hyper than almost everyone around me. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Dagoonie had long Laura Ingalls style braids, buck teeth, and odd bags under his eyes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We’re talking major luggage.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A bit like the kind I sport now, with two kids three and under who do not like to let me get more than two hours of sleep in a row.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Dagoonie and Mokey become fast friends.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And here is where the episode turns south, for Mokey at least.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Because Dagoonie is a bit, um, high strung.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Dagoonie enjoys Mokey’s company and friendship very much.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So much that Dagoonie begins to stalk and emotionally isolate Mokey from her other friends and finally lures her away from all the other fraggles and critters living in that wall and traps her by herself so she can be only his friend.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Whoa, man.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Even to an eight year old, this episode seemed heavy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It had the forbidden aura of very special editions of Webster and Diff’rent Strokes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Even to an eight year old, the lesson of Dagoonie’s stalker behavior was clear: do not do it.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But this lesson was secondary to us Greenidgegirls, even at such a tender age, because, in all honesty, we found the Dagoonie episode one of the most pleasurable and humorous of our viewing history.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And it has remained so <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">to this day.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i>Of probably every show any of us has every watched.<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And it has served as a template for how we’ve conducted ourselves in our relationships ever since then.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In fact, when I first met my husband, and began to shower him with Dagoonie flavored attention, he was like, I <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">like</i> you, you don’t have to do all that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was touched.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And the fans were flamed even more, which I suppose was okay because we’ve been together eleven years now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And, truth be told, his disposition is more akin to<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mokey’s than to mine.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He dresses much better though.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And does not drink herbal tea.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">We Greenidgegirls can come on strong.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Which is why we can initially come across as rather shy.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">We’ve realized the Dagoonies of this world are often misunderstood, and so we stifle.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Case in point, Dagoonie appeared in no other episodes and countless google searches have never delivered him from the cloisters Jim Henson and his muppet workshop have placed him within.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Dagoonie’s exuberance can get you a restraining order and probably 5-10 easily, so he is perhaps not the best role model.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">So while my sisters and I delight in Dagoonie, I was hoping this proclivity would skip a few generations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But I do not think it has.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">My sister Kaitlyn first noticed my daughter’s desire to attach when Katia was maybe two or three weeks old.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unlike many babies her eyes learned to focus almost immediately. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My first maternal feelings came a few hours after her birth when she looked up at me from her basinet in the hospital and said with her eyes which were dark blue then, and, at that moment, wide wide open: please take care of me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When Kaitlyn showed up to spend some post delivery time with us, she was deeply alarmed by Katia’s gaze.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Why is she looking at you like that?”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“The books say they do that.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“No.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Your baby is creepy”.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Because even at two weeks old, Katia’s eyes were intently trained on me in the way a stalker takes special interest in his or her current project.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Still, this was not enough to feel as though Katia was, like us, a Dagoonie.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">There were little hints here and there, but it was when we were at a family cook out when she was two that my sisters and I realized nuthin had skipped nuthin.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">My sister Kerri had invited close family friends of hers that she and her husband often refer to as “the Nigerians”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They are all related and if you invite some you are really inviting them all, and at that gathering there must have been twenty or so extra guests, kids in tow, to enjoy the “Seafood Extravaganza” that was my mom’s birthday meal that year.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Katia can be slow to warm, so at first she didn’t play with the other kids, who she’d never met before.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And they were older boys, so she was shy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or apparently just latent because within a few hours she’d taken interest in one boy in particular:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Calvin.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By dessert she was chasing Calvin around the yard, yelling his name, jutting out her hip with all the sassafrass her tiny body could emit: “Cal VIN!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You come HERE!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Cal VIN! <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m gonna get YOU! <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I’m gonna get youuuuuu!</i>”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">My husband and I were embarrassed.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I would have tried to rein her in but I was nine months pregnant and it was July.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Everyone else thought it was hilarious.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Still.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There was hope.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Her tendency to literally hide in my skirt folds if nervous made me think she was not a Dagoonie.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or, if that was not the case, she was a reluctant one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One that could still take after her father, if she was at all lucky.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Because being a Dagoonie can be a lonely thing.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But this fall Katia started school.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">On orientation day we met the other families and kids in Katia’s class.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As Katia’s teacher explained her classroom to us, I scanned the other parents.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I must admit, I was sizing them up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We’d searched for months for an affordable school that was not a daycare center.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When a mother at dance class mentioned this one, and I researched it, it became clear the school was a magical place where parents were not asked to pay more tuition than we would at a small private college<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> and</i> was not a childcare wasteland where your kid could be eating paste all day for all you know.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was curious who else was joining us in this Shangri la and were we the least heeled couple in the lot.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I couldn’t tell what kinds of cars these people drove, since we were inside, but I could furtively scope out engagement rings and handbags.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I know.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am horrible.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I should have been listening about curriculum and pick up practices, but I am a nosy B.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">However, I became distracted.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Across the room a little boy was trying to break the heck out of there.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Both his parents were trying to calmly and smoothly keep him from going AWOL.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Albie*!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No, No!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Stay in, this is your new classroom.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Albie!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Stay!”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But Albie was not having it.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The teacher showed her seventeen years of experience.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“This,”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>she pointed to Albie below her, who was rattling the door with all his might. “This doesn’t bother me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It bothers you.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Don’t let it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I know how to handle this.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And she kept on about snacks and making sure we packed hats and mittens in our kids’ knapsacks during winter.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Later that evening, Kaita mentioned she looked like a random chubby white guy on TV, and my right-quick prompted discussion that followed revealed she had picked up on the fact I was the only “brown” person in the room that morning. When I told my husband Katia thought I stuck out<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(my words) he was like, No you didn’t stick out, you know who stuck out?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The parents with that kid who was trying to get out.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“That’s not nice.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Kirsten.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Come on.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And okay perhaps they…did a little.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Because in a room full of women dressed like moms, Albie’s mother looked like she hadn’t yet received her mom gear package in the mail.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Tight acid wash jeans, long blond extensions, starlet oversized sunglasses, Uggs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I would have thought she’d had botox except Albie’s lips exhibited the same bee stung look.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She smelled like perfume, not cheese or apple juice, like moms sometimes can.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(And we can).</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Albie’s dad stood out, too.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>White tight ish T shirt, tight pants, gelled curly hair.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“I <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">am</i> the only brown person.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I wondered if I should have pressed more for financial aid at the other places that prided themselves on diversity.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But “Come on,” was the reply.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The first day of school came.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Katia was rather secretive about how it went, until just before story time, when she drew a picture.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or, had us draw things, and narrated what should be in them.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“And, um, could you draw a little man over there?”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I did.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“That’s Albie.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I got excited.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A friend!</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Is Albie in your class?”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“…yeah.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Is he your friend?”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Two large brown eyes looked up at me, disturbingly and suddenly blank.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Albie was still her secret.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I didn’t push.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Of all the kids for her to glob on to, she chose that one, my husband and I remarked.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Alberto* is family name on my husband’s side.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was a little uncanny.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Because Albie kept coming up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Over and over.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But it was not until this week that I began to worry.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“I wish I was a boy”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Oh yeah?”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Cause the boys, they not like girls and no one listens to me because I’m a girl.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Were you trying to play with Albie and he was playing with someone else?”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Yeah.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Other boys.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I try and try but they not listen because I am a girl.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One day I can be a boy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I just don’t know how.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No one listens, I am just a girl”.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I should have had a good come back for this, but it broke my heart.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Later she revealed she needed to ask Albie to marry her, but she was not sure how, but could I please ask Albie’s mother for a playdate?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So he could come into our house?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And recently she snuck an extra headband in to school to give to, you guessed it, Albie.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When I told her we couldn’t bring headbands to school for just one kid, she said she had more for the other kids, but this one was for Albie.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">She is breaking my heart over and over.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“That poor kid,” my husband said today. “He probably tries to get away from her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She’s probably driving him crazy.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Our tactic now is to mention the other kids in her class and hope Albie is not her only Mokey.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe she can find someone else who is as exuberant as she is.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Because it is hard to place your heart out there in the shape of headbands and have it be ignored.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Which is probably why my sisters and I still laugh so hard at that one half hour of Fraggle Rock that we’ve carried around with us for decades; the laughter is a cover.</div><div class="MsoNormal">Because it is a wrenching experience to be a Dagoonie.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is much easier to keep your headbands to yourself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And I wonder how to teach my daughter to keep her heart open and warm, when her experiences will probably ask that she does otherwise.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">So Dagoonie, wherever you are, I feel you, man.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All four of us Greenidgegirls do.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">*Names have been changed</div><div class="MsoNormal">**This post is made possible by a generous intellectual contribution from Kaitlyn Greenidge</div><!--EndFragment-->In Brief:http://www.blogger.com/profile/00125561697276633742noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8756441810838167082.post-85215283068780471752010-10-06T21:27:00.000-04:002010-10-06T21:27:17.836-04:00Mirror, Mirror<!--StartFragment--> <br />
<div class="MsoNormal">I am working through my feelings about my daughter’s Halloween choice, which is to be Snow White.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I get the princess thing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To some extent every little girl fantasizes she is a princess.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I did.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My sisters did.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And now my own little girl does.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But try as I might, I am having a hard time reconciling with the idea of these flipping DISNEY princesses, who are everywhere, in case you haven’t noticed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Try to buy a knapsack? Boom, there a bunch of them are, mocking all of us with their large and too-beguiling eyes that seem inappropriately suggestive to be placed in the world of a three year old.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Try to outfit your kid with shoes or beach towels or underwear, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and there they are again, waltzing across the fabric, dainty wrists poised, thin waists waiting, for their Princes’ meaty paws.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">My husband and I agreed “none of that princess stuff” when I was pregnant with my daughter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Or Hello Kitty, either!” I’d often add.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For about two years it worked.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was easy to keep her cloistered away from all things Disney when her world consisted of my husband and me and our apartment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We looked with disdain at three and four year olds decked out in full Disney regalia.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">That poor kid, her lousy parents just can’t say no.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No way is that going to be us.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ours is going straight to NASA camp.</i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But slowly, those princesses wheedled their way into our midst.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A Minnie Mouse dressed as Cinderella here, a rubber ball with Belle, Ariel, and Sleeping Beauty there, and voila, all of a sudden you look around and realize you are surrounded.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While our daughter’s only watched two princess movies—THE LITTLE MERMAID and THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG—I can say with chagrin that if you were to walk through our apartment today, you wouldn’t know of our secret prenatal, pre-parental pledge.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">So we’ve been infiltrated.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But I am having a hard time with Snow White.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Perhaps it is her name and the unavoidable mention of her hue.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There’s no hiding what <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">kind</i> of princess Snow White is.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She’s white.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>White, white, white;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the fairest of them <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">all</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But in my daughter’s mind, I don’t think she sees this as a problem.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Last year her ballet school had one class do an entire Snow White number to “Someday My Prince Will Come”, and half those girls in that dance were black.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And not part black, like my daughter who, okay, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">could</i> technically be in a close running for fairest of them all, behind her dad.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But she knows her dad is not a princess, so I am sure in her mind he doesn’t count.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No, those girls in the dance last year were very black and very pretty and so I am wondering if this is the harbinger of that post racial America everyone keeps claiming we live in.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Cause we ain’t there yet.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Cause this Snow White thing is stuck in my craw.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">For a while now I’ve been trying to fix all this princess stuff.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">A few friends had turned me on to THE PAPER BAG PRINCESS, where a prince gets kidnapped by a dragon and the princess saves HIM! and in the process loses her nice clothes and hair and when she gets to him the prince says she looks awful and she calls him a bum and kicks <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">him </i>to the curb and lives happily ever after by herself, Single Lady style.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My daughter was kinda keen to it but my niece who is the same age threw her copy across the room and yelled NO at it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So, perhaps it does not reach everyone in the manner it was intended.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Recently, I also checked two versions of Rapunzel out of the Boston Public Library, one white, one “Caribbean”, thinking I could get her to change her mind to be Rapunzel—a cute biracial Rapunzel—but that backfired, too.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The hair thing freaked her out “why are they climbing up her HAIR?!?” and the black version got too carried away trying to be all Harlem Renaissancey and by the tenth page or so had dissolved into too many poemy words for a three year old kid to take in. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is probably the only bedtime book that really has put my very hyper kid to sleep.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">So the princess thing is hard to “fix”.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But there’s TIANA! others with teeny girls exclaimed when I posted once about my daughter wanting to throw ahem Snow White off that rubber princess ball because her hair was too black and “different” than that of the other princesses. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I had resisted Tiana.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’d resented feeling left out of the princess circle for so long that when THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG hit theatres last year, I had built up quite an ugly wall of resistance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was not until my little eugenics aficionado tried to kick Snow White to the curb that I realized the conversation was happening now, and banning the princesses altogether was only going to make them that much more alluring.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So with great trepidation and my feminist card melting itself in my back pocket, I broke down and bought “Tiana” on DVD.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">We’d seen bits of Tiana at Disney on Ice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sh.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Don’t tell anyone I actually bought tickets to that thing, or its sequel, which is where we met Tiana for the first time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was appalled by my being there and also by the lack of dramaturgical expertise exercised in the evening.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am a playwright.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Storytelling is part of my job.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So when I could find no through line or arc to my TD Bank North Garden one hundred and twenty dollar night on the town experience, I was confused.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At intermission—during which I held my pee because my daughter refused to leave her seat because this being her first show ever had no idea what an intermission was and would not leave her seat without a screaming scene because she was waiting for “the princesses” to come sliding back—I called my husband: “There’s no arc to this f--king thing!” I growled into the phone, my hand covering my mouth so my swear words didn’t echo in the arena or over to our daughter. “Kirsten, it’s the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ICE CAPADES!” </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Yeah, well, still.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If I handed in a script like this to a theatre, they’d laugh at me and I wouldn’t get paid.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“It’s yeah <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">DISNEY</i>.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But I must admit I was intrigued by Tiana, not necessarily because she looks like my daughter, but because when we watched her skate around with her prince on the ice, they looked like my daughter’s parents. And maybe, just maybe, I thought, even though Tiana is shades darker than she is, my daughter might be able to have entry into this world of princesses after all.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">So I began to love Tiana.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">What is brilliant about THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG is Disney knew what it was up against.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It could not have this movie fail.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The one with the black girl could not be crap.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Gone were any fancy cutting edge animation feats and back were hand drawn pictures that harken back to, well, the very first princess, Ms. White in all her classic Disney glory.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I would see this Tiana movie over and over just for its transitions alone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And, while a child can see it and understand Tiana has less than her rich best friend and her love interest, it is still a few years off before a parent would really have to explain why Tiana lives so many street cars away from all the glitzy action (she’s black) and why her real estate deal falls through (she’s black) and why she probably wouldn’t be at that ball except to serve her beignets (she’s yep black).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The story is all about race and yet manages to transcend it at the same time.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">We’ve watched it many, many times.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">We play the CD in the car.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I am delighted but still shocked to see Tiana up there with the other princesses.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I get a strange feeling when little blond kids wear Tiana bathing suits and t-shirts. Forget 2012, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">this</i> is the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it for me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Never would I think a black girl would go mainstream in this way, unless she was selling pancakes with a doo rag on her head or the sexay sexay with clothes designed to show off her behind.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Tiana don’t got to do neither.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And yet, this Halloween season, I am searching Amazon for Miss White’s clothes and repeatedly asking my daughter, are you sure?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Really?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Are you really, really sure?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Because what makes me uneasy about the princesses is that somewhere wrapped up inside them, whether it is my beautiful little everything daughter or some purely blond little pig tailed formerly all American looking kindergartener, these princesses carry something in them that is unattainable, something perfect that only exists as an inverse.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And, you know, girls go anorexic over shit like that.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">They cut over shit like that.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">They sit in salons straightening cause of it and sit in salons curling cause of it and they lie about their age because of it and they have skinny and fat jeans in their drawers because of it and they inject plastic under their skin cause of it and they charge up their cards on Overstock because of it and they drink too much cause of it and they don’t break up with they guy because of it or they marry the guy cause of it and they sit in their friend’s kitchen with the granite counter tops and stainless steel appliances wondering, begrudgingly, why their kitchen still has formica because of it and they covet, covet, covet because of it because those movies promise a dream when it’s life we all walk through instead.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">So. Really? Snow White?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Are you sure?</div><!--EndFragment-->In Brief:http://www.blogger.com/profile/00125561697276633742noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8756441810838167082.post-52772792327584865952010-10-05T21:35:00.001-04:002010-10-05T22:21:45.429-04:00Don't Drink the Milk<div class="MsoNormal">One of my English teachers in twelfth grade told us point blank that if high school made up the best years of our lives, we probably couldn’t expect to have much of a life. I think several teachers said this in some way, but the one I remember actually uttering the words was Mrs. Powers.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">When she let this idea slip out, it felt as if she’d just ripped the veil off of a well kept secret. I was enamored by the fact an adult would let classified information like this just spill out. If these weren’t supposed to be the best years of our lives, why were John Hughes movies so fucking popular? If these weren’t the best years of our lives who was going to tell all the football players and cheerleaders their lives were destined to be crap, seeing as how delighted and fulfilled they made life seem as they toilet papered each other’s houses while riding around in cars their Dads bought for them. As empowered as I felt by Mrs. Powers’ words, I sure wasn’t gonna be the one to sidle up to any of their lockers and say, hey, why don’t you invite me to that kegger seeing as in about ten years you’ll have realized I am worthy of being acknowledged as a human being.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I’ve been thinking of Mrs. Powers a lot as I listen to famous people’s Youtube posts about how life will get better. The posts make me both gleeful and uncomfortable.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I was not bullied. I was one of those kids who was benign enough to occupy the outskirts of many social groups enough so that I could not really be considered popular, but I was definitely not chosen as a target, either.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But Sarah Berkowitz was.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Sarah Berkowitz was part of my combined third and fourth grade class at the Quaker school. And she was odd. Or, even in this community that prided itself on being opening and diverse and warm, this girl stuck out as poison ivy personified. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Which is just the sort of person my mother, the not yet social worker, loved for our family to reach out and embrace. The woman was no joke. She’d done it before with Chris Ziembab, the class spaz, in second grade when I was in public school. He'd been kept back twice already which really just indicated to me that even his twin sister had had more than her share of him in the womb and there was reason she'd left him in the dust. My mother even made it a point to bring that kid along with us to Walden Pond to go swimming, since he told her he loved it there. The key to this exchange was he told my <i>mother. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">He'd figured out the way "in" was through her, not me.</span> </i> At his house one afternoon I discovered his love extended beyond the innards of Concord when, during one of his freak outs, his mom calmed him by saying “Kirsten won’t love you back if you can’t control yourself.” Wait, wait, wait, my seven year old self said. This cat is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">crazy. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">My association with him is ridiculous</span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">a</span></i>nd my mother is completely to blame, with her take -in -the -strays way of behaving all over the place. From then on I made sure I threw my own tantrums when Mrs. Ziembab called for me to come over. My mother never realized the better punishment would have been to cart me over to the Zeimbab's than to make me stay home with my little sisters.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">So in third grade, when she heard my friend Michelle and I giggling about Sarah Berkowitz, she was in the mood for laying out the free cat chow, since it had been a long time since she’d gotten to go into very embarrassing parent mode. And to be sure, these were the nervous giggles of the only black girl and the only Korean girl just happy to be the gigglers, not the giggled at. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Nevertheless, when she heard them she sprang in to action. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">First she called Sarah Berkowitz’s mother.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“…OH. OKAY. I CAN DO THAT.” My mother’s voice was booming in the way it did when she was slightly uncomfortable. She hung up the phone and my heart raced. Could she work that fast? Could Sarah Berkowitz be on her way to our house that quickly? If so, what might work best as a deterrent? A sudden stomach ailment or a spontaneous fight with the baby wherein I knocked her down the stairs or something? Not enough to really hurt her, I could catch her, but enough to stop the madness.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Is she coming over here?”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">My mother consulted the student phonebook again.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Her parents are divorced,” she said in a hushed and excited voice. Despite considering herself more open than the average wife and mother on the block, divorce! was still a predicament that was out of the ordinary for our particular block back then, especially if any kids in such a family hadn’t gone to college yet.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">My mother got a hold of Sarah Berkowitz’s dad, who was the one who would have her over the weekend, when my mother was proposing what is now referred to as a playdate but which at that precise moment in time I was thinking of as a few select hours in the pit of darkest hell.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">We went to the movies.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Something animated that I can’t remember because the entire time I was wondering if someone from school might be in the theatre, too.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">It didn’t matter because Sarah Berkowitz seemed more interested in my sister.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And that felt right to me. Stay away. No sense in forming a friendship. What happens in the Burlington Mall Cineplex Stays in the Burlington Mall Cineplex.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Hopefully.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">After the movie we went back to my house, where whichever parent who hadn’t dropped her off was going to pick her up. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I got the impression Sarah’s parents weren’t too keen on each other, but it was just a hunch. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">It turned out, from what I could tell after the movie, that maybe Sarah Berkowitz liked some of the same things as my sister and I. Maybe. It was hard to tell for sure because when we got home, Sarah Berkowitz slid herself under our large dining room table and wouldn’t come out.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“PLAY!” My mother commanded. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“I’m <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">trying</i>,” I said under my breath, so as not to call attention to the obvious, which was that Sarah was coming in a close second to Chris Ziembab as one of the worst comer overs in the universe.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“May 21<sup>st</sup>!” Sarah Berkowitz called out from under the table, which was draped with white lace and plastic. “Let me think, let me think: November 21<sup>st</sup>! NOVEMBER 21<sup>ST</sup>!!!!!” </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">My sister Kerri peered out from under the table with her large, glassed in eyes. “It’s my half birthday!” </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Let me do yours!” Sarah Berkowtiz practically screamed.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“That’s okay.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Then Martin Luther King's?”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Kerri and I looked at each other. This was obviously commentary on us being black.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Why don’t you come out of there?” I said it the way my mother told us we were only embarrassing ourselves when we acted out in Stop and Shop.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But she didn’t. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Under there Sarah Berkowitz stayed until the other parent came and got her.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">As our parents talked, as Sarah Berkowitz got her coat on, I squeezed out, under my breath: “Don’t tell anyone about coming over here. It’s a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">secret</i>.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Going under people’s tables is weird. Calling out Martin Luther King’s half birthday is also weird. Over my dead body was she gonna let it spill out that she’d been inside my house or with me at the movies. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">A little part of me felt badly I could not be nice, but a larger part of me realized what little popularity I had was being severely compromised by Sarah Berkowitz standing in my living room while our parents shot the breeze. Why was my mother being so nice to these people anyway? </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Monday Morning Share Time came and went and Sarah said nothing. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Phew.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">It wasn’t until a few weeks later that that little part of me began to start to feel something more than extreme fear.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Nobody liked Sarah Berkowitz. Her hair was stringy and dishwater brown, he skin pale with green veins around her eyes and forehead. She wasn't cute or funny. She was sad and annoying.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">As the year progressed, girls in our class began to talk more openly about just how much Sarah Berkowtiz got under their skins. She had to be stopped. From what, we weren’t sure. And how? We still weren’t sure. But soon.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The plan became that each of us would bring in to school a little of that very cheap little girls perfume drug stores used to sell. Michelle and I had the Holly Hobby kind. During snack it would be so easy to pour little bits of our perfume into Sarah Berkowtiz’s unsuspecting paper cup of milk.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And it was.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Although I never brandished mine—I believe my mother saw me put my bottle in my school bag and told me the glass would break and to leave it in my jewelry box and why was I bringing perfume to school anyway only big ladies wear it so put it back, I watched in sick fascination as more than one girl snuck out hers and poured teeny amounts into Sarah’s milk.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I watched, too, as the cup sat there on the table, waiting.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“That milk doesn’t look very good,” I said.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Sarah Berkowitz didn’t seem to care.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But she listened. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And she didn't drink that milk.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And I was relieved. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">At not only the fact she did not die by ingesting Holly Hobby perfume, but at what I realized I had after all, after the movies and my ugly threat: that my conscience was not as thin and measly as I thought, that somewhere, although I did not want my mother calling either Berkowitz household in the near future, I was not, in my eight year old mind, a murderer, and I did have some compassion for Sarah Berkowtiz, whose parents pulled her out of our school after that year, and we never saw again.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">When I mention Sarah Berkowitz now my mother always says “that poor girl, her parents going through that divorce like that, she couldn’t even come out from under our dining room table that time, that poor, poor girl.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">So this week I have been thinking about the Sarah Berkowitzes, the people other people think it is okay to “do things to”. And I think about the capacity for cruelty, and my mother, and how she acts as though we are each capable of helping better come sooner than later.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">To each Sarah Berkowitz, I hope your better comes sooner. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div>In Brief:http://www.blogger.com/profile/00125561697276633742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8756441810838167082.post-60094675633878281592010-10-01T07:39:00.001-04:002010-10-01T09:26:10.178-04:00You So Far From Heaven, Mistah Draper<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;"> </span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;"><div class="MsoNormal">I love the 50’s shtick. The clothes, the cocktails, the post war-pre-shit-hits–the-fan wholesomeness of it all. I’ve loved it for decades, when I was probably one of Oldies 103’s youngest voluntary listeners as a kid. I kept loving it when I moved to Connecticut and gleefully discovered Connecticut radio is almost <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">all</i> Oldies stations, or was in the 1990s. Maybe what I love about this time period is this wholesome image that glosses over what we know was going on at the lunch counters and the voting centers. Which is why I love MADMEN. I mean, I really love it. I watched seasons one through three on DVD this summer and felt an overwhelming sense of loss when I got through it and had to wait for season four on television. I can forgive some of the less sophisticated dialogue (and believe me, having Don Draper go to California and meet up with the conventionally well read co ed was bad writing) because the camera angles and story are so spectacular. And I can also usually forgive the lack of non-white characters. Unlike FAR FROM HEAVEN, MADMEN does not promise it will give voice to the cadre of serving class characters that it introduces to Don Draper’s world, who also happen to be the only black characters the show offers up. I won’t even go in to the Chinese family the ad guys use to welcome Pete Campbell back from his honeymoon as a joke. Ballsy television in this post PC world, but not that funny when you are actually of the colored variety. And I get the joke. I repeat, it was not that funny when you are actually of the colored variety.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Despite all my love and forgiveness, a little part of me felt neither of these emotions when Lane’s new girlfriend showed up this past Sunday. My sister and I had high hopes. I had to check myself the week before because the way we were talking about it, we sounded like my grandparents when a black actor was about to make an appearance on TV. Their delight was palpable when the “black soap opera” began airing in the 80s. It took a few days of staying home sick at their house and watching TV with them to realize the show was not black, but simply had more than a few black characters on it. They were so proud.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And so once we got word a black character was coming on our beloved MADMEN and was signed up to do more than one episode, we were also ready to be proud. But here is my sister’s Facebook Wall post from last Monday, and I quote: “Black Playboy Bunny?!? WHA?” That’s what she said. You can look it up. And it rings true.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I have nothing against Playboy Bunnies. I used to want to be one. My mom got offered a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">job</i> to be one. And I think probably only turned it down cause she wanted to help deaf and blind kids in state institutions whose parents just left them there alone all their lives (she was good at it). I just don’t understand why this particular character had to be one. And Lane? I will put my feelings aside, because I find Lane more than oogie, but I find it curious that Don Draper will sleep with anything with a vagina except for black women with vaginas. And we have them, trust me.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">When I have brought up the lack of black characters on this show with anyone except my sister (who loves it just as much as I do), their eyes don’t exactly roll, but their voices do. But the show’s not about that, it’s about Don <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Draper. </i>Don’t you just <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">love </i>Don <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Draper</i>?<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>And I do. I love Don Draper. I don’t understand it cause he is a horrible person, albeit a brilliant character. But, I find it interesting that this world only has black people in it when those black people are doing things for white people. Or when they are in black face. And even the black face was not problematic to me because in 1963 it makes perfect sense, that at a Kentucky Derby party this would be an acceptable and “funny for the white people” type of thing. Even though the party was not in Kentucky and none of those people are Southern. Cause who doesn’t like a good darkie joke? I am supposing the same people who don’t mind a good Chiney joke. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">What I find so dismaying about the Playboy Bunny insertion is that this was a chance for MADMEN to give this character some texture. And I don’t mean by mentioning Freedom Rides or fried chicken or Harry Belafonte. Maybe by giving the character an arc and interior world just as rich as the Jewish store lady we saw Don hit it with. Or maybe even like the nice pretty teacher he semi lived with whose <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">brother</i> even got a life story of having epilepsy. They gave that guy whole scenes! But there is still hope, she only had about ten lines this go around. Maybe she, like many of the actual Playboy Bunnies, is working her way through medical school or law school, or is doing it to stick it to her parents who own on the Vineyard and are snootier than Lane’s cane wielding father. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I suppose I just find it hard to believe that the only black people these MADMEN guys keep running into are part of the help. In New York. In 1965. And I also find it hard to believe that in a show that is mastering the art of story telling in a world where storytelling is not as valued as it used to be, that it can’t think of any way black people might enter this world when they aren’t taking care of these people’s kids (Carla) or pushing elevator buttons (the elevator guy. I liked him. I do not see why we couldn’t have more of that guy. Just a little bit. Maybe if he had epilepsy or something) or carrying a tray (Lane’s girlfriend who didn’t even have some high gloss clever way of greeting Lane’s Dad after he embarrassingly has her serve them drinks at the Playboy Club. Yeah: wha?)</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But Kirsten, the show isn’t <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">about</i> that. Um, is it not about <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">people</i>? In our country in nice clothes in (now) 1965? Cause um, yeah, black people were around. There’s evidence, there’s pictures of us there. And we had nice clothes and there are pictures of us in them, and not just pictures of us getting hosed down or chased by German Shepherds. And yes, I get the joke: proper Lane goes for a black cocktail waitress. Ha ha. And then Daddy beats him with a cane. More Ha Ha. I just don’t see why the cocktail waitress could not have more of an interior life that was skillfully shown in less than ten lines, which MADMEN seemed able to do so skillfully with every single other character in its cast—the whites ones, the women, the gay ones, the kids. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Wait for it, wait for it, you say? After all, the actor’s signed up for more screen time. To which I say: it’s been a long time comin’, and it shoulda done been here by now. This show is not reality. People write it. And in this case, they can write better.</div></span></span>In Brief:http://www.blogger.com/profile/00125561697276633742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8756441810838167082.post-64512560012837213962010-09-30T08:06:00.000-04:002010-09-30T08:06:31.650-04:00A Letter to a Dear Friend<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #222222; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15px;"></span><br />
<div style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Dear Time Out,</div><div style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">I wish I could use you just for obnoxious behavior without having to give reasons or a time limit or ask the "do you know why you're in time out" end of time out question. She knows why, despite her claiming otherwise.</div><div style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Instead I will use you the way you are intended. Supernanny will be proud.</div><div style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">I know there is a method called time IN! Where the parent sets up a nice place for "someone" to chill out and relax with books and pillows, given the theory that when "someone" acts up and out, it is because she is feeling stressed and out of control. But that seems rather swank when that someone has just spat in my "general area", whimpers and whines, and willfully chases and pushes her brother, who is learning to count early because said "someone" gets lots of 1-2-3's to self correct and yet we are still always using 1-2-3's. </div><div style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Dear Time Out, I shudder to think you will be with us for a long time to come, because the boy-boy has started to yell and stamp is feet at me.</div><div style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Have a nice day, Time Out. It is 8 AM and we have already seen you this morning. I am sure we will see you again soon. Until then, Time Out, until then...</div><div style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Yours,</div><div style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">A. Mommy</div>In Brief:http://www.blogger.com/profile/00125561697276633742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8756441810838167082.post-12225591579999929112010-09-27T21:14:00.000-04:002010-09-27T21:14:03.658-04:00Hey, Grumpy Troll, this is America!<!--StartFragment--> <br />
<div class="MsoNormal">Tonight we had roast beef. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I was determined to roast SOMETHING, seeing as it was a damp chillier than I would like day, and these are the days when roasting something seems appropriate.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Dinner went how it usually does:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the table is always a little bit sticky, food or drink is always in some form of falling to the kitchen floor, and I don’t sit down very much.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">After dinner I was racing to clean up (I run a very tight ship in the evenings around here) and Katia and Hunter were playing around me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As Ron entered the kitchen from the back porch, Katia blocked him like the Grumpy Old Troll from DORA THE EXPLORER who lives under "the bridge":<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“You can’t come through unless you have money.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">To which my husband replied, “I don’t need money to come through here.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“You can’t come through unless you have MONEY.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Well, suffice it to say, if this were truly the case, my husband and I would be separated by a kitchen length and a tiny three year old for years, because neither of us have any money.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I could see the gears turning in my husband’s head.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“No one needs any money to come through here.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Sure you do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You need some money.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Anyone can come through here.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It doesn’t matter if they have money or not.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And I could see gears turning in my daughter’s head, too, trying to figure out exactly what my husband was really talking about.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She’s a sensitive three.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While she doesn’t always understand the plurality of a situation, she is in tune enough to realize plurality does indeed exist.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Daddy means any one can walk through here.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">More gears.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I didn’t want to use the term rich, because the can of worms that could open would be just too large to put back together as I was trying to wipe gravy, cucumber, and ice cream off the tile floor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But the moment felt charged and deserving of more time than someone who is wiping gravy, and cucumber and ice cream before dreaded bedtime would probably have at her disposal.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And I guess the moment was charged by the fact that this is most definitely America, and it is an America where the promise of prosperity has withered before everyone’s eyes, including those who can shop at Whole Foods, buy enough to last a week without having to go to a Stop and Shop and STILL not blink at the bill.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I think the promise was already pretty crinkly for me, since my family experienced its own “recession” in 1989, when my parents separated and there wasn’t enough money for my mother and my sisters to live “on our own”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I watch the Today show do spots on multi generational households and think, yeah, that was us, but without the camera crew, the experience was one that felt more as if we were the homeless relatives come to stay during the 1930s, than one filled with festive family dinners and walks with Grandma and Grandpa through the subdivision.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While we’d always been scholarship kids at each of our private schools, my sister’s and I did not feel the real blister of “no money” until those years in the late eighties and early nineties when we all of a sudden qualified for food stamps (which we used) and free school lunch (which, being fifteen, I would have rather eaten my own hand off than used) and shopping for school supplies became the dreaded ordeal it remained for all of us for decades to come.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">When we finally were able to move out of my grandparent’s house, while I was elated, I was all of a sudden hyper aware of how much things cost.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How much food costs, how the phone bill costs, how much furniture costs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I can say that while many kids my age were hoping for a new car for graduation, what made my heart sore was the rental couch my mother got so guests could have somewhere to sit for my graduation party.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">You mean we can keep it?</i> we asked my mom.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Yes, we can KEEP IT. </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And for one of the first times in three years, we felt as if we were finally part of the American Dream once again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And this couch, let me say, was ugly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A strange multi colored, fabric-pill-intentionally sewn in the material type of late eighties masterpiece.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We kept it for nearly a decade, we were so proud.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">So, I sit back with wonder as I watch people who can afford couches talk about clipping coupons.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am guessing they are the same people who, when and if laid off, take some time to work on their resumes, maybe spend some time working on that novel they started in college.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They live on their unemployment and don’t worry <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">too</i> much because they have Cobra and they can always sell something like their house if it gets too bad. And they believe this is what it is to be poor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They are between the having and the not having.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But it is the not having that I think is still foreign to most.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Because what eventually ends up happening when you are part of those who do not have is you begin to feel as though you do not deserve.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I just spent over a year talking myself up and down and up and down about buying a bookcase and a desk.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am chagrined to say that while I am a writer for a living, I have written my last handful of plays sitting on our couch (which we bought in cash.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Outright.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We’ll not mention it is now threadbare and desperately needs a steam clean.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am still just very proud I have two 2! Couches no matter how stained they are).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And I must admit that in a way, what I was doing, was telling myself I do deserve a bookcase and a desk.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perhaps this is materialistic but also, perhaps, this is the by product of living amidst capitalism, amidst kids at those private schools whose parents never worried about if they had enough gas to get to work or enough in the bank to renew their license even.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am pretty sure those kids, all grown up, do not talk themselves into buying things this way because they do not worry that they do not <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">deserve</i>.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And I know this is why my husband was refusing to let this money thing go.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">While we may not <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">have</i> all of these things and assumptions those who do enjoy, what we <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">are</i> able to give our daughter (and her brother, too) is the sense that each one of us deserves because we are human.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Period.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>End of story and let me walk across the freakin kitchen before I give you a time out.</div><!--EndFragment-->In Brief:http://www.blogger.com/profile/00125561697276633742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8756441810838167082.post-82249732442689521212010-09-22T20:47:00.000-04:002010-09-22T20:47:11.569-04:00Mommy Wars: Just Some Thoughts<!--StartFragment--> <br />
<div class="MsoNormal">There is a book called MOMMY WARS that is on my reading list.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Since my current book weighs in at about six hundred pages, on that list MOMMY WARS will stay for a long time, but I am still more than intrigued by its premise, which is that there is a huge amount of strife between two sides of the same coin: stay at home moms (SAHMs) on one shiny side of the coin and working moms (or, as everyone on my mommy websites like to clarify: moms who work outside the home, so as not to make SAHMs feel as though what they do does not equal work.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Because it does.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you’ve ever hung out with one or two or six kids at home, and had to feed them, clothe them, and entertain them, not to mention pick up after them, you realize pretty quickly that staying at home with kids involves a shitload of work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And it is rather lonely.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A three year old who just filled the in-hallway potty seat, making your home smell like some circus animal’s been visiting is just not equipped to discuss the war in Afghanistan, Bristol Palin’s turn on Dancing With the Stars, or the mid term elections, no matter how much network news you leave on during the day.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Days with kids can be grueling, now matter how fun it may seem when you play hooky from work and yank your kid out of daycare to do it once or twice when you just can’t take the office anymore.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And those of us who work outside the home—which really brings to mind women in business suits and heels crouching on standing briefcases, clandestinely typing away on a laptop amidst the hydrangeas—know that work and kids is not a juggling act, it is a three ring circus, the kind that we cringe at when we see the ads for tickets on TV.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You are constantly on and constantly tired and constantly feeling stretched and guilty and a little hungry, as your day is spent being spent.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I occupy both sides of the coin, so I instantly get rattled when SAHMs get characterized as people they probably aren’t: lazy (in terms of having a “real” job), entitled, out of touch….and I get equally rattled when I hear “working” moms get characterized as people they probably aren’t: lazy (as in “she’d know how to deal with her kid if she spent more time with him”), entitled, and out of touch….</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">All of this came frothing to a head recently when I heard of a new dance studio devoted to children.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This seemed wonderful, and I emailed the link to my friends who have small kids.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Very quickly one of my friends emailed back and commented that there were only two (2!) Saturday classes, and they were geared towards tweens, not toddlers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This seemed unbelievable. Saturday morning is primo kiddie time in the “let’s<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>pile on the extracurriculars so my three year old does not end up at community college” race to the top of the food chain.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But it was true.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And odd.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So I do what I am always telling my husband I will do, and I wrote an email to the studio, which is run by a mom, a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">working</i> mom, and so the answers I got back were dismaying.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">‘We’re adding Monday classes at 4:30, which seems to work great for our working moms.’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I swear to God I felt palpitations and my blood went cold the way it does when I want to attack something, the same way I supposed it does in a lizard, when it is going to lash out with its tongue.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And I suppose that is because I just don’t know very many full time working adults who are able to take a class at 4:30 on a Monday afternoon.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And I also felt the urge to point to the gaping wide hole in her schedule that is Saturday and say: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">this THIS is when most adults are FREE!</i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And it got me thinking about the idea of revolution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The book I am reading posits that “[i]t is cliché that revolutions in societies occur not at the point of maximum misery but during periods of rising expectations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The same can be said of individuals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Those who are taught to expect things often wind up thinking that they deserve whatever they have, and that they have a right to expect more” (Gordon-Reed, 329.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I know, I know.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Citations!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In a blog!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What is surprising to me, though, is that I am using this quote to discuss mommydome, when I was planning to use it to discuss those Tea Party people, but this dance studio schedule really got me flipping riled up).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And so I can’t help but start to ruminate about how these mommy wars and feminism relate to the idea of revolution.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I suppose, in a conventional sense, I could say: after the revolution there will be no more mommy wars because in a world after the revolution something will finally be done about the fact that the majority of our work force is women and the fact that over ninety percent <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">of </i>women eventually have children.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yay for childcare.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whoo Hoo.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But if we were to shirk convention, perhaps, after the revolution, there might also be a way to reconfigure the assumptions we make about parenting.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Because, implicit in the decision to offer a working mom’s mommy and me at 4:30 on a weekday afternoon is the idea that a certain type of working mom would be available at a time when, well, most people are still working, and that a certain type of working mom, well, wouldn’t be in the market for this type of class anyway, so why market to her in the first place?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And I guess what got me hot and bothered under my collar is that the person creating this schedule is a woman.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Who works.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And so it is not so difficult to see how a Sarah Palin could voice such strong opinions about restricting Choice, or healthcare or tax cuts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sure that is a leap, but I’m leaping it, watch me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And I am sure this person would be horrified to be likened to Palin.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am sure this person’s blue state of mind would be very disgruntled to be compared to Palin even for a nanosecond.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But I guess what I am hoping is that as our culture evolves (we’re evolving right?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>we’re getting better at this shit, right?) we start to ask more of ourselves even in these little moments, and reach towards inclusion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Work Cited:</div><div class="MsoNormal">Gordon-Reed, Annette.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Hemingses of Monticello</i>. W.W. Norton & Company, New York: 2008. </div><!--EndFragment-->In Brief:http://www.blogger.com/profile/00125561697276633742noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8756441810838167082.post-70775662331308198612010-09-14T21:01:00.000-04:002010-09-14T21:01:22.858-04:00You Speak Truth, Ms. Benning<!--StartFragment--> <br />
<div class="MsoNormal">One of my favorite lines from a movie is when Annette Benning’s character in AMERICAN BEAUTY screams at her daughter who has grown up in affluence and is seemingly what most of us might consider “spoiled”: “when I was your age I lived in a duplex!”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The line is funny and heart wrenching, because despite this movie family’s affluence, they are all miserable.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Similar feelings seeped up as I forced my husband to watch REVOLUTIONARY ROAD.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My husband does not much like any movie made after about 1974 or so.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think he only agree to watch that one because I had just had my second baby and it was a way to spend time together and the week before we’d decided to throw a birthday party for me one week after my c section and despite smiles during the party, that was perhaps an ill planned idea, as washing wine glasses and high ball glasses and cheese plates isn’t really something you delight in as incision pain runs up and down your sides.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I loved REVOLUTIONARY ROAD, as Kate Winslet probably can do no wrong in my eyes, but I must admit my husband and I sat there a little, well, annoyed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And that is the point, to be watching this young, beautiful couple living the dreamy 50’s American dream in Connecticut fumble around being unhappy despite having so much to be not unhappy about.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I think it is safe to say that we would not mind living in Annette Benning’s old duplex.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That we would not mind the PTA or the Rotary.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Right now I am in the midst of planning a Black History Month event for the Historical Society in our hometown.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is supposed to match the theme of the year for the society, which is: A day in the life of____________.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In devising the program with my mother, one thing we agreed upon that was an integral part of a certain brand of African American middle class life oh so long ago was being on committees, belonging to associations and groups and societies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And when talking to my husband, he has agreed life was similar in his own family.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His mother and father belonged to things.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">This is something that is a little bit foreign to us.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Because to be part of these groups that meet, say, every Wednesday at eight or every other Saturday at three, you must say to yourself, yes, these are people I can meet with every Wednesday and every Saturday, and you must also agree with yourself that you would like to convene with these people in person, for a cause <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>for which you you’re willing to get a sitter to be able meet with people in person.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And herein lies one critical issue:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>in person.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not online.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In a room where you can actually see and hear and feel another person next to you, where you know how that person actually pronounces her last name, or if he uses the paper cups provided for his coffee or brings his own mug from home that has his college insignia on it because he wants everyone to know he did, indeed, go to college.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And while I guess you can put your college affiliation on your Facebook profile, it’s decidedly different to see a forty year old sip Maxwell House from home in a thermal mug that reads Brown in crumbling letters on the side.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Yesterday I read an article that talked about creativity and technology.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Its premise was not revolutionary—primarily that the same things happen in our brains when he hunt and gather for an idea as when we hunt and gather for say, the best price on the Ashton Kutcher camera that we really want and really deserve because our one years old got so much baby slobber in the one we already own that one day the flash on it putted out now it is only good for sitting in the everything drawer in the kitchen, screen smeared with something sticky that said one year old spread over it once you realized it was rendered useless.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And that by spending oh, say, the equivalent of days searching for Mr. Kutcher’s camera, we are wasting our creative processes on technology in a way that only those of us who have comparison shopped on Overtock then Target then Amazon then oh what the hell I am broke anyway Walmart know about all too well.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But what it got me thinking about was letters, those hallmarks of a good, safe, middle class well made play.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At the heart of many a good story is some sort of article of documentation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That someone wrote.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not a link.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not a cut and paste job.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And what that got me thinking of was how much time we spend click click clicking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not revolutionary either but what <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">that</i> got me thinking of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>was how this program I am to be giving in February really does belong in the brochure for a historical society.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How Thursday at eight and Saturday at three are now often spent click click clicking, as opposed to smelling the soap waft towards you from three seats down at a meeting you got a sitter special to attend.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And even if you do make that meeting, if you smell that soap, you are probably using an app to tell you what kind it is, where to get it, and how to buy it for yourself at a store you can get to with a GPS.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When you could ask in person.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Instead.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Because although a duplex seems painfully un American as a life’s goal (unless it’s a condo, then maybe), there is kinship in it, there is another family, another group of people who might like to meet on Saturdays at three, on the other side of the wall, instead of the other side of the cul-de-sac.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And maybe you’d like each other’s soap.</div><!--EndFragment-->In Brief:http://www.blogger.com/profile/00125561697276633742noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8756441810838167082.post-52421603533039154362010-09-08T20:46:00.000-04:002010-09-08T20:46:51.922-04:00Yes, VR Crazee<!--StartFragment--> <br />
<div class="MsoNormal">Every few months or so, I try to coerce my husband into going RVing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Back when we spent hours together alone without cutting other people’s meat or fetching sippy cups of apple juice, we used to watch RV shows on Sunday nights.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The shows usually consist of older wealthy men with rather young and botoxed wives, who often decorate the RVs themselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Everything is very shiny and in muted, pastel type colors, like the inside of Foxwoods.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sometimes these kinds of couples also shared the insides of their boats, too.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“You can rent them with baby seats.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Yeah.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I really don’t like driving that much.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“We can pick a theme.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>See everything in the country that relates to that theme.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Like Frank Lloyd Wright.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Wouldn’t that be cool?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To see everything related to Frank Lloyd Wright?”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Crickets.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Sometimes he will half agree to it, especially if we were to travel on back roads that do not have a lot of traffic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Like this would be okay,” he said recently as we drove past Walden Pond.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But we both worry a lot about the Klan, so back roads are out.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It sounds funny, but we did once get invited to a private party when we were playing pool with a guy in a bar in Kentucky when I had a play at Humana.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And then there was the time our GPS took us—mysteriously, since we were going a straight shot to Manhattan from Medford—into the wilds of Connecticut, which, I learned from going to school there, has a rather high level of Klan activity. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m talking dirt road, in the dark, with our race mixing family inside our Toyota, with us wondering two things: why did our GPS fuck us over like this and when was the guy with the machete going to come and chop us up?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I don’t think the Klan uses machetes, but I know it hung out in Connecticut in the 1990s, when they used to demonstrate sometimes at the supermarket during graduations and parents weekends.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or so went the myth and the reason one guy I met during undergrad insisted he needed to walk around with something akin to a prison shiv in his sock.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“I’m ten times safer in New York City than I am in Middletown!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I wouldn’t walk around here without it!”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I guess RVing speaks to the American in me that yearns for that perfect family vacation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The problem with trying to capture the perfect family vacation as an adult is that you, as an adult, are in charge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of the driving, the hotels, the food, and any shivs needed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And for most parents, being in charge of a trip kinda sucks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s the packing and the laundry before the packing and the yelling from the back seat and the dropped snacks on the floor and the nasty rest stops that only serve McDonalds.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or worse, Roy Rogers, which is just disgusting.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But still I dream:</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“I wouldn’t say we should get a Tear Drop*.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But at least something big enough to bring my mother.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">If not Frank Lloyd Wright then maybe stuff that deals with baseball?”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Nada.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not a bite.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Looking back I guess, by classic American standards, our vacations were a little bit lame.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There was camping, but not the forge out your own campsite kind, the kind where there is an outhouse somewhere nearby and the place to build your campfire is the place where hundreds of other people who paid for the campsite before you put their campfire.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There was the time we were warned mountain lions had been attacking campsites, which is kinda wild westy, but probably should have been a sign to go home for my parents, who were camping with us who were maybe <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">maybe</i> two and four at the time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But, for some reason it did not deter my parents and for some reason they kept bringing up <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">in front of us</i>. For the most part, though, camping was, well, pretty much like a hotel except with more dirt (horrible for me and my desire for cleanliness and great for my sister who had PICA and liked to eat sand).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">There was Niagra Falls, where we went on a whim as we took my middle sister to college one summer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Stateside our tour guide was very nice, saying we would surely get back in time before restaurants closed and ensuring we’d get to know everything possible about Niagra Falls.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On the Maple Leaf side that guy revealed his true cheesy self, although I guess the tip off was the very cheesy limo bus he was manning.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He refused to answer any of our historical questions and instead directed us to listen to the piped in recording overhead.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Which was not very historical at all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What really ruined the relationship was that he let the rest of the tour decide if we stayed in Canada for fireworks or not, while the Greenidgegirls’ stomachs rumbled in our rainbow-beam-decorated seats.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You just don’t mess with our feeding time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We’re like bears.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">There were countless trips to the Cape and Maine and StoryLand, and North Conway and while many of them did not have the zeal of Disneyworld or ClubMed or Aspen, looking back, they were fun enough.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And substantial enough to try to build upon them in my imagination as I plan trips for my “own” family.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“I’d <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">love</i> to see everything Frank Lloyd Wright.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Chirp.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Chirp chirp.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Wouldn’t you?”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“If I didn’t have to drive.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“My mom can drive.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Maybe.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“So next summer.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“There’s a reason that show was called RVCrazee.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Okay, so next summer it is.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">*A tear drop is the kind of motor home experience that is very tiny and only has a bed and everything folds up into it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You drag it along behind your car.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Which doesn’t have to be a truck, cause the “Tear Drop” is so dainty.</div><!--EndFragment-->In Brief:http://www.blogger.com/profile/00125561697276633742noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8756441810838167082.post-44035793581817150532010-09-07T22:41:00.000-04:002010-09-07T22:41:10.770-04:00Unplug It, For Reals<!--StartFragment--> <br />
<div class="MsoNormal">Perhaps I will regret writing this.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I am proverbially and chronically always late to the technology party.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ipod?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have one in my desk drawer and another, newer, sleeker one that my husband bought me for our anniversary that mocks me as I wonder how to make a musical theatre mix to listen to on it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I know it is not that complicated, it just takes time I usually use to do the dishes so I am not writing amidst filth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And while I know my smart phone is much smarter than I am, I am kinda content to let it stay that way.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">So you can imagine I was not exactly excited to see, upon taking the kiddos to the Boston Public Library’s Children’s Room for the first time, that there is, in that room, a computer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For preschoolers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Complete with a plastic Playskool console.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I was not excited at all.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Our first trip to the Children’s Room was a hot mess.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Until this summer I have kind of avoided the library.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">While I am a semi functioning adult, my sisters and I harbor similar thoughts about the idea that we each might fall on the Spectrum. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For those of you without kids in the 21<sup>st</sup> century, that is The Autism Spectrum. I kid you not. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My younger sister thinks closer to Aspergers, but sometimes I am not so sure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One of us can’t stand rugs, while another feels compelled to travel with her own cleaning supplies. (Maybe that is more OCD, but anyway).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We have issues with texture and sound and routine and all three of us have thinly veiled social issues that can seem quirky and charming at first but then twist into something a little removed from that once you spend time with us and realize that No, we really Are That Way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(try staying in a Super 8 with us and you will probably end up shooting yourself). So, while I love books, I also think libraries can be dirty places where I honestly could not see myself selecting germ ridden volumes to bring home to my toddler no matter how much Purell I have in the pockets of my diaper bag.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But we live on a budget.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And I have banned myself from Amazon for a while.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And my daughter’s attention span has outgrown many of the books that are sitting in our playroom, spine up like the mags say to do, in their bins.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">So.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">On a slight whim, when I woke up one morning and decided I could not chase my one year old around Porter Square Books’ Story Hour again without buying myself a book as a treat for putting up with it all, I’d decided we were going to venture in to the Library.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I looked up the activities for the day (Sing A Long! Yay!), and called my sister who practically lives at the Library as a PhD Candidate in American Studies to see if she’d like to meet up with us, and away we went.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Our family loves the BPL.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We’re also snobs who smirk at the idea of seriously visiting any of the libraries that are more local to us.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Instead of partying on Friday nights, when I was home from Iowa and my sister from Oberlin, all four of us would head to the BPL as a family.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Once a Security Guard, when realizing we all looked a little alike as he saw us traipsing around separately, said to my mom: “They each got they own STYLE! <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One kinda funky, one kinda bookish, one kinda real petite sophistiCAT!”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But the BPL feels onus to no one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You often can’t find what you’re looking for, get treated badly by librarians especially if you look like a high school student which I did until these two babies aged me twenty years, and if you want to get any real work done you have to plan research time around when the smelly people are in there.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And a lot of smelly people visit the BPL, not all of them homeless, there are some pretty ripe rich people strolling around there, too.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">True to BPL form, the supposed Sing A Long was not <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">that</i> day, but only on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Fridays</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Um, yeah, that was not what the website said, but I have encountered so many surly BPL librarians since getting a card there two decades ago, that I was barely phased. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The fact that there was no sing along, however, was the least of my problems.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Despite my bookish tendencies, the BPL did not have the soothing quality people might think it would have on kids whose mom is a writer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rather, my two lovelies completely went nutter on my sister and I.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Each skimpered off in a different direction and neither seemed to realize the place was filled with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">books</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That each might <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">like</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And this was doubly so when they discovered The Computer.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">As I tried in vain to look up some of the books I loved as a child, my 2.0 kids gravitated towards The Computer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">They even went so far as to squeeze their way onto the multi child bench with other kids whose nannies weren’t sure how to kick them off of there politely.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And so The Computer really began to grate on my nerves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What the hell was it doing in here with the slimy germy books I had finally made peace with enough to contemplate bringing in to my home? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And if it was truly necessary as a teaching tool, couldn’t it live in its own room?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Away from kids whose parents had taken them to the library precisely to get away from screens and animation in the first place? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I could have just put The Little Mermaid on repeat and saved the Parking Garage money.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While I know that many kids do not have access to computers at home and limited access to computers at school, I just can’t make my mind stretch and embrace this Children’s Room Computer.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Today, on our second time at the Library, to return our first stack of books and get more, I was even more disgruntled when that became the first place my daughter walked towards once we’d parked her sleeping brother in a corner next to a very loud babysitter and her even louder charges in the hopes that all the chatter would simulate Boylston Street and I’d be able to keep him strapped up longer.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">While I was able to distract her enough to get a good fifteen books in our library bag, I had to come to the realization that mine was a losing battle.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Once my son got loose, and I was then expending my time chasing after him instead of serenely reading Beatrix Potter to my daughter, said daughter felt the only thing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">to</i> do was to get on The Computer and push buttons, since she can’t read yet anyway. (This is a very sore subject for her. She is very upset she can not read and gets very mad at the idea others, like me, can).</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I suppose my point is—and I do have one—that The Computer in the Children’s room makes me sad.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was not the only adult in there doing battle with it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even the librarian came over at one point to turn its volume down, chirping: “it just does what it wants and gets louder by itself all day long.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Well then <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">unplug it.<o:p></o:p></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I know technology can be our friend.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I know our kids will live in a world where they will have no choice but to embrace it and their Ipods will not mock them.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But I want that librarian to take her room back.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And quick.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><!--EndFragment-->In Brief:http://www.blogger.com/profile/00125561697276633742noreply@blogger.com0