i obsess.

It's All Relative

I blame my parents for my nutty brain, I do.  I blame my dad in particular.  I've known I bore his thumbprint from the time that I was in my mid-teens; I said as much to mom when we were on an airplane bearing us to the South of Brazil and I was reading Catcher in the Rye, one of the several English-print books I'd discovered at a kiosk in the small, blue-green, dusty airport of Porto Alegre.  Having an English book to read, a fresh one, after nearly a year in a place where all the books were in a language foreign to the one you were brought up to know, or in your language but already read in triplicate, a treasure trove.  Lands untraveled.  All the more exotic because your experiences with the exotic life of a year abroad had formed in you a sense of - what else is there ishness.

And to read such a book, with all its established rebellion, in such a place, at such a time, such a time in your life, and to have traveled a solid wall of days with your parents in tow, the parents who had already worn you thin before a year had drifted between you like a curtain made of rows and rows of frowsy, nubbled fabric, where you could possibly lift a row or two but then, confused, you look for a way through and there are only more layers of the drifting, vague, waving sheets, where the only thing you can make out of your parents are indefinable shapes that shift just when you feel sure you've nearly reached them.

And my mom nodded, she just nodded in agreement when I said, "I'm just like him, I'm exactly like him, aren't I.  I don't like to do anything for very long and I'm hyper and also lost to time and space sometimes where you go to fetch me and I'm - gone, poof, and then suddenly all too much there and too avidly participating and too close to everything and wild with remorse and misery for the horrors of it all, of the allness of life, of it, and then all at once I'm happy, happy like a buzzing, joyful thing, lost to the joy, dancing, and it's as if I never lived in a dismal moment not once.  And I hate to work, and I hate to commit, and I am loathe to love and to be loved.  And I am just like him."

(And maybe I said some of these things and maybe I didn't.  Possibly I only said what a middle-class seventeen year old would say in that kind of a moment, to her middle-class mother, on an airplane over the sea, about her middle-class father, and maybe I only said the first sentence, but definitely not verbatim though that seems unimportant, what is important is the quality, the feeling, of such a thing, and that she nodded her assent, her aquiescence, and it was the best and worst part, her nodding, her face in a line, neither joy nor sorrow evidenced there at such a moment.)

What do we want from our children?  Why do we want it?  Why are we nothing more than rhapsodic when they evince their capacity to live and love and hurl themselves bodily or to refrain from hurling, when they are themselves, complete, perfect in their imperfections?

I know why.  (Be wary of the blogger who answers her own riposte, for it is a dangerous row to be jaunting along, woe to the reader who accepts carte blanche such an easy out-and-out.)

It's because we love them so.  For the nervous system and blood and entrails tell us so.  Our guts ache as we spend our days waiting and waiting for that awful, horrific accident that may never come to pass before our terrified eyes, but it's a lottery, and we worry and we twist our hands as we are twisted by every capricious potential disaster borne aloft on every breeze, and our souls are wrecked, and all we want is for them to survive, survive, survive, and we think we know best, but only because knowing best is safe, and knowing nothing is worst, and knowing something is more worst yet.

Our children - safe!  Survived!  Alive!  To what end, it matters not, so long as we bear them into their adult lives sans an overwhelm of bruises or cuts or scrapes, exo- or intra-skeletal, we needs must witness their transition and where do we stand, how close, how far, when to step back, when to step forward, doe-si-doe, whirl your partner into harm's way because you didn't see it coming, you wack them in the face with a cutting board and cut their eye the night before their fifth birthday and you were holding a giant knife in the other hand as you turned quickly to drop all of the wares in the kitchen sink and you didn't see him coming, and all you can think - OH MY GOD IT COULD HAVE BEEN THE KNIFE as your chest heaves and you coolly examine his face and then spew a lightning-speed lecture at his head of how he can't run through the kitchen because people could be holding dangerous objects LIKE WARRIOR-SIZED KNIVES and GODDAMMIT and then you hold him close and the blood wells and your heart wells in symphony and FUCK IT ALL HOW ARE YOU SUPPOSED TO DO THIS, and you do it, you just do.   You are the ferry, where at first the baby lived in a glass tower in your belly and then, after awhile, you paraded him around in the warm cabin and then, after a long while, outside, on the deck, where the wind whipped at you both and he cawed and laughed, delighted, and gloried in the light and the wind and the sharp, bullying, beautiful air, and then down to the landing where the cars were all parked and he ran heedless and you beckoned him back, back upstairs to the deck and the cabin and the high high glass tower, safe, safe, warm, quiet, and he could not come back up the stairs because he would not fit any longer, he could only run about on the landing and then *pop* he was inside a car and it was driving out of the hull of the giant boat and there, there like a bright speck, off, outside altogether, away, away, gone in the distance, shimmering.

And you ask your gut, why can't you let go faster, slower, easier, harder, and you want to.  But today, you don't know how.

Swimming

He leaps, he cavorts, he bobs up, then down, then back up, one of the bright orange buoys that dot the gray-blue edge of the swimming holes in lakes and along the rims of the no-swim zones, gulls calling, wind rippling the uppermost layer of tossing waves.  He is a blur of wet and of trunks and of lime-green goggled joy.  He aims with all sincerity to be part of the group, yet his taste of the water and its allure, that slippy excitement, that floating and that weightlessness, it proves too much.  He is unable to heed any but his own joy.  He is a moist, alive, fish creature.

And now, now he is zealous.  He is avid, he is desperate to win the admiration of his instructors and his peers, it is all-consuming.  His kicks as the instructor draws him around in a circle from behind and just below his head and neck, they are surprisingly fluid, impressively steady.  His mother, her third eye blinking, now loosened from its capacity as recording device, wavers.  She is taken out of her reverie, and suddenly even more so, as he has finally at nearly five years of age jumped without aid into a pool.  Splashing down, head beneath blue waves, fully immersed, and as he rises back up, he is, no, not sobbing, not choking, nor gasping, nor grimacing -- he is smiling.  Smiling a big, voracious, wet-faced grin.  A beam, a Ray himself, that Ray, shimmering in the shiny splashes of water leaping about him in an age-old dance as new and ancient as the things that have always been and will continue on being.

As is she.

Authoritize.

Tonight at dinner, while my husband and I discussed details of a matter between himself and a person with whom he and his company does business, Jack tried to join in as often as possible.  Finally, he informed his father, in clear terms, that he should write a letter, and what it should say.  I couldn't help taking the dictation.  (I'm a born secretary.  Don't question it.)

Here's the letter:

Hey!  Man!

You are not being nice.  You are not the Captain of anyone.  You are just a man.  You are not the King.  Stop acting like the King of the Wizards.  Please don't act like a mean old wicked Wizard.

Signed out by Jack.

I had to keep kicking my partner under the table to keep a straight face while reading the letter back to its author.  I failed at getting all the way through it without laughing, I'm ashamed to admit.  After all, he composed the thing with sincerity.  Who am I to criticize, even find humorous, such good intentions?

Do NOT Get Me Started.

I mean it.  I'm like a bad engine, all full of smoke and exhaust and things to be impaled upon.

I had my phone stolen yesterday, right from beneath my nose, and I spent all of these countless, never-to-be-regained hours at the phone store, buying the wrong phones, because MY BRAIN, IT HAD BEEN THIEVED, and the stale bits still rattling about under my hair are useless, FUCKING USELESS, I am vexed.

Vexatiously.  (Far less sexy than it sounds.)

But beyond that, Jack has begun asking these ridiculous questions lately, questions like, MOM, WHAT'S THIS?, and it's the blueberry jam we use every day, no, seriously, daily, it's what he eats for lunch without end, peanut butter and jam, and he's made his own sandwich several times when we've been home together and he wanted a sandwich, HE KNOWS WHAT IT IS, is all I'm saying.  He knows it's the blueberry jam, so why's he messing with me?  When I just had my phone stolen and I've asked, NEARLY BEGGED, to be allowed to write my husband an email to let him know that I'll be temporarily out of reach, that I might be graced with a modicum of silence while I write, Jack starts up the whine machine, and gets into my face with this incessant repetition about the jam, and I'm like, ARE YOU FOR REAL?, which is I think what bothered me most.  I couldn't discern why he was asking the question.  Was he just saying it over and over because it was funny to him?  I mean, he knew the answer.  What was the point?

And this morning, with the supposed tooth pain, the pain that was SO AGONIZING he couldn't finish - get this - a banana.  You know.  Bananas.  Those rock-hard, cumbersome, flavorless, torturous items of food packed into a rotting carcass, those things that devastate the mouths AND LIVES of young people, HOW COULD I ASK SUCH A THING OF HIM, WHEN HE WAS IN SUCH PAAAAAIN?  And, oh, dear heavenly father, the tears.  And the sobs.  And the horror of it all.

And when I told him he could chuck the banana but that he wouldn't be able to have any fruit at Grandma's later, he said, oh, but I don't think strawberries will hurt my tooth, mom.  I don't. 

WELL, OF COURSE YOU DON'T.  BECAUSE YOU WANT TO WATCH AS I BEGIN CLIMBING ON PRECARIOUS HOUSEHOLD ITEMS AND BUILDING A TOWER WITH THEM AND ATTEMPTING TO ESCAPE INTO THE ETHER.  Evidently, that's some funny shit.

But good golly, why?  Why must he do it?

And there's all of this, and it gets layered on top of other irritating morning elements within, say, a grump-laden span of time involving rushing about and not enough coffee and horrible hair and showers that just don't really quite do it, you know, IT, and clothes that ought to have been washed by the laundry wench but weren't, who sucks hard at getting the right things laundered in a timely fashion, and we shant point out her lameness in organizing the stuff she does manage to launder or her inability to get them into folded patterns (folding patterns?), we just shant, poor wench, she tries, honest she does,

and also there's the beginning-of-day spousal tension and the OH JESUS PLEASE GET OUT OF MY WAY in-the-kitchen Tango, IT'S A DELIGHT, and we're supposed to somehow, beyond all of that, beyond all of those items + having to face, in that half-peering way, the kind of sidelong, slit-through-a-plate, solar eclipse kinda way, where we will at some point have to do work, and talk to random assholes and pretend we're thrilled to do it, and face the boss, and deal with the minutiae of business, ALL OF THAT AND THEN ALSO WITH THE QUESTIONS, THESE SEEMING-ENDLESS, NONSENSE QUESTIONS THAT ARE PLIED ON OUR HEADS MERELY TO PISS. US. OFF (Or not.  But if not, then -- *whyyyyyyyyyy?* *soft soft whimper*), 

and,

?

Really?

Because, oh.  God. 

It's gonna be a  l o n g  summer.

Toy Story 3: After Which, I Am Left a Beautiful Wreck.

No spoiler in the title of this post for the film, unless you *haven't* seen the trailer, in which case, see the trailer, and then all will be made clear (the spoiler, yes, is that Andy, the kid from the original film, leaves for school as a grown-up boy).  My heart was smashed in the process of watching a little boy grow up and leave for college.  Smashed and made whole and smashed again.  And cycled.  But I didn't come here just now to tell you about the movie.  Instead, I must report on the viewing experience, *my* viewing experience of Toy Story 3.

Some background is required.

Toy Story was the first truly beloved Pixar film in our house.  Before my kiddo was born, my brother, in the Nineties, loved Toy Story.  He collected several film posters, which were all left behind with the rest of his things when he removed himself to crazy-people-who-hang-about-under-bridges lands.  My parents, when my son was very small, asked if we'd like to have the blue-and-white-clouded homage to Woody and Buzz art from the collection of posters.  I said, oh, lordy, yes, because Jack was already besotted with those two.  In fact, the only things we gave him for his second birthday were the Woody, Jesse, Buzz and Bullseye dolls I spent much time earning on ebay in advance of the day.  He was mad about them, too.  Still is.  Still plays with each of them.  Ironically, though we've been to Disneyland three times since he began his idolization of Woody, we have yet to encounter him.  Well, not entirely true.  The second trip brought us face-to-face with Woody and Jesse but the line for photos had been closed only a moment before we discovered them.  Disappointing, but we figure we have lots of times left to find Woody and get some photos with his kindly yellow-plaid Sherriff's arm draped about our kiddo's shoulder.  (And honestly, we were thrilled on our last trip to find both Buzz *and* Jesse and get some snaps.  And by we, I DO NOT ACTUALLY MEAN ME.  Please know that I haven't lost my mind to that extent.  Jack was the happy one.  I was only glad to participate in his excitement.  You believe me, right?

*sigh*)

So this movie.  I cried for about the first ten minutes, give or give ten + more minutes.  SHUT. UP.

It's good.  I know you've heard about the positive reviews on rottentomatoes.com.  WE ALL HAVE, LADY IN THE THIRD ROW OF THE THEATRE WHO WAS PROUD TO KNOW THINGS THAT GO ON ON THE INTERNET.

*ahem*

(The lady in the third row wasn't, in case you were wondering, me.  Probably.)

So after I got through crying and focused on the moment, because I did a quick mental check and realized I was doing what I already do in life, I focus so hard on how it will end and how I need to be prepared to feel about the ending I forget to be here, now, living it.  I kind of feel like I'm not alone, here, with this manner of dealing with how life comes at us, tsunami-style, but it's something I'd like to change nonetheless.

Then -- the movie.  The improvement on the art alone is worth the price of entry.  The story is, well, it's Pixar.  You need feel no less trust in their ability to take your heart and shine it up and then drive a freight train over it and then lovingly kiss and clean it and shine it back up again, good as new, no, BETTER, than you ever have had before.  

THEN I kept having to shush Jack.  He was randomly talking VERY VERY UNQUIETLY during the film.  At first I simply said, babe.  We need you to whisper if you have something to say.  But his stage-whispers shook the seats, they were so ALSO UNQUIET.  After a few repetitions of the whisper-requests, I simply started to say, also in not-so-quiet whispers, WE DON'T TALK DURING THE MOVIE.  But then, he said one thing more, one last statement, and -- I thought about it.  His comment was a reference to the film's action taking place.  After I shushed him, I heard, *really heard* his sentence.  It broke through.  It wasn't "MAY I HAVE PLEASE HAVE SOME MORE LICORICE PLEASE" and it wasn't "I DON'T WANT ANY MORE WATER THANK YOU" and it wasn't "I HAVE TO GO POTTY DADDY/MOMMY."  It was (and here I am refusing to spoil with recognizable plot line references) a comment on what was taking place in the film.  And he said it loud.  Not because, I slowly realized, he had forgotten to whisper. 

He was trying to reassure himself that everything was going to be okay.

After that, I took his hand and I said, "babe, everything is going to be okay.  Remember, Woody and Buzz and Jesse and Bullseye and the others are all smart and awesome and they love each other and they're GOING to BE OKAY."  (Guess who felt better after hearing that.  It wasn't the child whose ears were the objective of the statement.  *points with thumbs at self*)

Then I held his sweaty paw and we watched.  It got kind of scary, I suppose, if you're a little kid.  I mean, it *definitely* got scary if you are a little kid whose parents haven't let you see the Wizard of Oz yet, or even the old-school Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  (We are NOT that overprotective.  We're just waiting until we know he can handle seeing those images and still sleep that night and for the rest of the week's worth of nights after *that*.  What.  Okay.  We *might* be a little overprotective.  Of our nighttime rest.  IT'S JUST WE REALLY LIKE SLEEP.  DO.NOT.JUDGE.US.)  It's a wild ride.  A great, exhilarating, thrilling, SCARY wild ride.  During the most intense part I took Jack onto my lap and held him close while he sobbed and shook.  I wanted to be a part of the action for my own sake, in that moment, but I wanted more to care for him while he rode out the difficulty of it.  I let go of my own needs, my own desires, in that moment.  And cried harder than he did again at the end when I was still holding him and Andy was saying goodbye and leaving, though Jack sobbed quite surprisingly hard in his own right.

(It was also interesting and eye-opening and heart-saddening to think of my brother while I watched, because I know he loved the original Toy Story and I can't help thinking of his having left boxes of things at my parents' house, never to be reclaimed.  I would give anything to pass that poster on to *his* child.  A child I know won't ever exist.  So -- that's pretty sad.  It's also comforting, somehow, to know that at least I have the child who loves those films.  And that my brother can take some random, unknowing comfort in his presence on Earth fractalized and carried on by my kid.  Jeff, if you ever read this -- yeah.  That.)

And all of these epic revelations and epiphanies, it's because of a Pixar movie.  The Toy Story 3 film.  The one that took me beyond myself. 

If a movie can do that, uh, yeah.  It's a pretty good movie.  Go see it.

pictures make up for lost time, right?

If I distract you with some nice pictures, you'll like me better, you'll grow a new layer of fondness for me, you'll not be bothered by my inconsistencies and my lack of focus, you won't mind my irritating habit of shearing my mental wool and spreading it out across this page in a wild tumble of fuzzy verbal disarray, you'll be nice to me still and you won't hint to me by word or grimace or oh-so-slightly-raised brow that I have underwhelmed you at any given point in our acquaintance.

You'll take me into your arms and embrace me and be glad I'm alive, glad I made it through the rain, Barry-style, won't you.

   

Camping self-portraits are such a rite of passage.  At least the camping part.  For, indeed, we finally gave Jack his first encounter with tent-sleeping.  Explaining the mechanics of houses-without-indoor-plumbing is so ridiculously inferior to simply experiencing it, after all.

Check out the fish we ate for dinner after we got back from a four-hour tour of the lake via canoe:

And while you might be on the point of assuming we caught it ourselves, you're nearly right; we caught it once it had been aimed at us from another guy's boat, where the five, yes, FIVE fish he tossed at us had been formerly languishing, because he hadn't caught any terribly large ones, and he was at his limit, prevented by the rules from the REALLY big score, so we were helping him by taking those into our boat (and, subsequently, our bellies). 

They were delicious.  They tasted like fresh air and sin.

 

 

(Caleb cleaned them, laid them on a piece of foil, placed thin-sliced apples and heaps of butter slabs and hefty douses of salt and pepper over and in and around them, wrapped them in the foil and laid them over the fire to cook for somewhere between thirty and forty-five minutes, then pulled them off when the butter and juice began to forge its way out of the packet.)

 

This is Jack, before we got into our canoe.  He was kind of excited to venture onto the lake.

 

This is the cabin where the life vests are stored.  It reminded me of a J Crew catalog.  Without the fashion juxtaposed against the rustic colors.  Just raw and pink and faded.

See?  Those vests are begging for a lanky, sun-kissed poser to drape herself across the log for perspective.  They'd be so perfectly offset.  PLEASE KNOW I'M SORT OF KIDDING.

I mean, I am.  Sort of.

And I may have coaxed Jack to interact with the all-wood Bigfoot, but it was worth it for the resultant photos.

 

I kept insisting that he find out what that guy's deal was.  Naturally, he repeated me in parrot fashion.  HEY!  GUY!  WHAT'SYOURDEALMYMOMWANTSTAKNOW?  GUY!  HEEYYY!

Mom, he seems to be saying, I don't think that guy's gonna tell me what his deal is.

Caleb and I were unsure as to who to pitch to sponsor this series of photos; Coleman stoves?, Fat Tire Ale? (now!  IN CANS!), or The Agencies Who Represent Small Children That Stand and Mold the Disagreeable Faces of Old People Who Resist Smiling Unless the Hands of the Small Children Are Involved in the Manipulating of Said Disagreeable Faces.  See?  It's a true conundrum.  Bet you're stumped, too.

Or we could skip straight to a strategic pitch to Hansen's Junior Juice, a high favorite among the nearly-five set in our family, and beautifully featured in the above photo.  Sigh.  Hansen's, you're scoring free ad-space this time.  *shakes fist uselessly*

We didn't forget it was Memorial Day Weekend.  None of us are much for war, but that in no way interferes with our deep appreciation, admiration and respect for those who are willing to sacrifice all to protect us and our way of life.  Thank you, active and veteran troops and your families.

Remy the Rat is the only welcome rodent in our camp.  All others, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

The fish was scrumptious.  Totally worthy of desert.

Which he decided he didn't like.  Too burned for his palate.  He preferred to eat pale, raw marshmallows straight from the bag.  Shocking, I know.

But -- where's the rain, Debbie?  Where's this mysterious, supposed rain, you ask?

 

Let me assure you:  it came.  We managed to ensconce ourselves in our tent just after it began, and it commenced to rain for twelve solid hours.  I know this because I was awake for most of it.  We packed up and were on the road toward Hood River by 7 a.m., because that was when the tent finally quit holding the rain outside and began allowing liberal amounts of water to drip onto us inside.

But we survived.  Rain isn't enough to scare us away.  Not for good, anyway.

hunter-gatherer: does that apply to houses?

They decided to meet in the afternoon.  She and her family were planning to be back home from skiing by then, and the owners were scheduled to still be working on the yard of the home.  She called as they drove into town, just to be sure.  The woman answered.  They laughed a little as they spoke.  It was easy, comfortable, with no strange spaces in between sentences.  She sounded steady and adult, the drive blurring alongside her cheek in forest greens and cement grays, and she asked whether it had begun to rain in town yet.  She could see a bank of looming clouds to the north of the town, which corresponded with a prediction of scattered showers later in the day.  The woman said no, and reassured her they’d certainly still be outside, working on clearing the debris from the plants they’d cut back in the morning.  She was relieved, and ended the call, feeling fine.  The car smelled like socks.  Her son had first taken off his too-warm snow boots, followed by those socks, and now the scent mingled with the drying banana peels left from their pre-snowboarding snack.  She wrinkled her nose and cracked the window.  The wind was cool but the air was scented, heavy with the impending rain.  Breathing deep, she settled back in her seat, the homes along the roadside increasing in number as they approached the city.  It still stunned her to see such a mass of homes on what used to be farm land and trees, stripes of tilled land, trees bunched like a child’s sweaty handful of freshly-picked flowers, so close you’d swear there wasn’t room for even one fern frond, let alone the hundreds that shared the forest’s floor.

They arrived in front of the home just at the stroke of three o’ clock, arguing a little about the address as they popped open doors on the station wagon and climbed out, the boy hesitant.  “I don’t wanna move, though.  I love our house.  I love it!”  She explained as she took his hand to maneuver him toward their destination that a house was merely a shell, like a crab’s shell, or a snail’s.  Temporary.  What was inside the house was what truly mattered, she said, faltering a little, unsure whether she sounded at all convincing.

They started up the sloped drive toward the open garage, waving hello to the woman inside.  “Sandra?  Hi.  Nice to meet you!  I’m – this is my husband, Chris, and my son, Tristan.”  As Sandra warmly shook the hand of her husband and exchanged greetings with him, she exhaled and looked down on her son’s head, tousling his red-blonde hair, letting her hand come to rest on his shoulder, firm.  He leaned into her a little, his ski pants on one leg slightly hiked up from the sock she’d only just shoved back onto his foot as they’d gotten out of the car, his shyness suddenly like a sheath descended.  He turned his head into her side, feigning ignorance of having just been introduced.  She prodded him a little and then let it go, recognizing she wouldn’t have much success at this point.  Better to let him take a moment to feel more at ease in their current surroundings before she attempted to draw him out for the owner’s sake.

They ran through the house, she, fast on his heels, his laughter trailing back toward her, locomotive-like.  She bade him slow down, to try to keep the noise down, but this woman who was showing them around wasn’t bothered.  The air didn’t feel thick with impatience the way it would with someone who was annoyed by the four-year-old’s (totally normal) antics.  So she merely sank into the moment, playing with him.  Opening doors, peering into closets.  Pulling light switches up and down.  He had to pee, so she admired the bathroom’s nearly-perfect period details, the salmon-pink tiles and the still-lovely wood vanity, all that pink tile!.  As he washed his hands, she pushed gently on a flat, chrome surface and it spun round to reveal a combination soapdish/toothbrush-holder.  They both laughed at their newfound secret, the merry sound bouncing around the rose-tiled room in a celebratory echo.

They exited the room and caught up with her husband and the woman who were by now downstairs in the cavernous basement.  She and her son played hide-and-seek, after which he served her some imaginary ice cream from the wet bar.  She ordered dinosaur-flavored ice cream but he imperiously informed her that he only served chocolate.  He generously offered her a second scoop, his face serious and important.  She accepted, equally serious.  Then they both laughed as they each wiped the imaginary messy chocolate from their faces and subsequently smeared it all over each other’s arms and shirts. 

Upstairs, she peered into more cupboards, examined a few drawers.  Things felt solid.  She rested for a moment on a built-in bench in the formal dining room.  The window looked out toward the downtown portion of their city, the low clouds simmering just above the heads of the highrise offices and apartments and fancy lofts.  It was warm, there, on the bench, and the cushion, though fairly worn, was comfortable, still firm enough.  Still supportive.

They stood in the garage and chatted, after the owner had showed her around the backyard again, Sandra’s husband, Andy, newly returned from the city’s yard debris dump, discussing modes of employment with her husband.  She’d already offered them the home to rent, though they hadn’t filled out a rental application yet.  Said she had a good feeling about them.  The couples leap-frogged from renting to schools and children and suddenly, her stomach touched by a match, already full of eager kindling, she realized they’d been there too long.  They quickly discussed a few more monetary details, when she’d be dropping by the applications and a check, and they ran off, back to their car, away toward their home, windows shut tight now, droplets of water stinging the vehicle’s hood and windshield.  The four-year-old complaining of hunger.

They raved as they pored over the elementary school’s wonderful details on the website.  He drank beer and toasted to such an excellent situation for their son.  She drank wine and clinked glasses with his and their son’s milk cup, smiling, her stomach a twist of burning knots in tightly-wound ropes.  She spoke briefly on the phone with Sandra, about the school’s upcoming auction, about the date they’d begin to move in, about the dog’s cancer and how that was affecting everything and making things difficult (“So frustrating, when you can’t predict when she’ll actually die!”).  Cringing at her own lightness of tone.

The next morning after a restless, barely-slept night, she awoke and stumbled into a sweatshirt and down the stairs into the basement so as to not wake the family.  She tried to write, but nothing came.  She called her friend.  She explained.  The friend agreed. 

Later, she penned a winning email where she explained in heartfelt tones that they had been hasty.  Weren’t ready to move.  The woman, Sandra, understanding to a fault.  Lovely in her response. 

Her fingers flying over the keys, several days after, as she searched for the house where they would depart to.  Again, too early.  Her eagerness to seek their future so pressing, so heavy in her hands.  She ceased typing and closed the window, closed the laptop.  Lay on her side, hand pressing into her cheek, watching the images blur on the television screen.  Pleading with herself, wordless, to stop.  Stop being so strained, so impetuous, so ready to act.

The reds and blacks and grays on the screen all watched as she thought it over.  And then she got up, moved slowly up the stairs, the stairs creaking at her to knock it off, to think of something else.  Even the dryer boomed a monotonous refrain as she distanced herself from the basement, as she angled through the kitchen and through the dining room, the dryer’s “SHU-shush, SHU-shush, SHU-shush” at her heels.  Her glass on the kitchen counter in a ring of wet. 

The light from the main street behind their house shone orb-like, its alien eye piercing the charcoal-dark.

managing loss.

There's a coat of hair on every surface in our home.  (One of the maddening side effects of Ella's cancer is increased hair loss.)

I've never been good with her hair on surfaces where I cook or wash things or wash my face.  I've never really even been comfortable with her hair on the floor.  It bothers me so much.  It enrages me sometimes.  There are times when (usually coinciding with PMS, I've noticed more, lately) the hair drives me to physical action.  Not just cleaning it, which I do almost daily.  I begin to pace, and while I don't do this second thing, I ache to tear at my own hair, to pull it out of my head.  That's how unsettled I am at the sight of piles of dog hair.  (Not that there's an answer in adding to the accumulated piles with my own contribution.)

Finding a hair on my clothing, or worse yet, one in my food, disgusts me.  Getting them in my mouth is beyond the pale.  I rant.  I rave.  I get hellbent on destruction. 

She can't help it.  Last night, I inhaled draughts of nice red wine and scooped some piles of the hair on the floor into a small hill, telling Caleb how aware I am of what I predicted a few weeks before we were given Ella's prognosis; that when Ella is gone, every rotten time I find one of her hairs I'll break down and weep in sheer longing for the animal who was once in possession of those billions of short, wiry tresses. 

It's confusing, going through this.  Part of me continues to feel a subdued smolder of resentment toward the hair that I find daily, now, in my eyes, my mouth, covering my clothes, everywhere in our kitchen, the shower, the bathroom drawers, on linens and on dressers and insidiously tucked into every niche and nook and cranny.  Another part says I will miss her more than I currently loathe her scattered presence.  And that part wins the day, for now.  But this dying creature in our midst, her dying as much a physical punch in the nose with these reminders, her lumpy, swollen neck, and her lessening energy, and her looks that catch my breath, when it seems she's almost saying she knows, brown eyes hooded with lowering shades, daily lowering.

"What's wrong, Mom?" Jack says, playing around and over me with his Legos and his little-boy never-ending stories.  I can't explain to him that my head hurts today because of the wine from last night, that my body hurts from cramps because of yesterday's arrival of my period, that my chest hurts from the losing of our friend-dog, our family girly, that I'm simultaneously learning to possibly bid adieu to that child I was sure existed, that today it hurts with a renewed reminder in the form of uterine blood, and physical pain, and shards of iron in my chest, and there's all of this hair all down my front and arms and -- there, yes, one in my mouth.  So gross.  And there she is, looking at me as though she says, I know.  I know you dislike those parts.  But don't not love me.  Oh Ella, do I ever love you.  I dislike your hair in my mouth, but I love your whole self like you are my child.  I don't know how we'll manage without you, girly.

I'm so sorry it has to go down like this.  I don't know how to explain it to Jack.  Which isn't to say I'm not managing it.  The words come, they have to, and when I've said them, I realize there is no perfect way to bridge his understanding of death and loss and movement and change.  And his sensitivity on this and all other subjects -- my child who was bullied regularly at his old preschool and now, at his new school, was recently BEAT UP by one of the older kids, beat up, at four and a half, and he just doesn't react when someone physically assaults him.  He crumples into a heap.  We tell him, defend yourself.  It's okay.  If the teacher gets mad, we'll handle it.  Don't you worry about that.  Stand up to kids who try to hurt you.  Let them know they can't push you around.  But he doesn't understand.  He just falters in the face of being pushed and punched.  And I suppose, in a way, it's all the same.  That these things will come to him as they will, that I'm ultimately not in control of his finer comprehension of the world around him, or of his choice of response.  That he must find his own way to manage it (which SUCKS, because I REALLY WANT TO HULK-SMASH anyone who lays on a finger on my sensitive, too-sympathetic kid).  I'm reminded again.  And again. 

I'm not so in control of my own understanding, either, I guess.

But gosh, what I wouldn't give to understand better.  Where the fuck is my life's spoiler alert?

I gotta go.  I have to help Jack finish his latest book.  He draws the pictures and then dictates to me what to write.  Seems I have a new profession:  copywriter/publisher.  Then we're going to finish James and the Giant Peach, and discover some stories in an old fourth-grade reader that was my Grandpa Ray's.  The illustrations are pretty sick, and the stories, like Hercules and the Golden Apples, are old-fashioned and very woman-as-second-stringer, and other things besides, but he's gonna love 'em.  And Ella will lie at our feet and we'll stroke her and Jack will probably get distracted in the middle of one of the stories and begin chasing her around the house with a flashlight and I'll wander over to the computer and suddenly it will be past lunchtime and Jack will go into the kitchen and make himself his own sandwich because I'm distracted and doing some random unessential chore and I'll tell him it's the nicest-looking sandwich I've ever seen, and there'll be crumbs and jam droplets everywhere and Ella will be in the kithcen, too, trying to eat all of the crumbs and drops, and there will be more peanut butter on the knife and Jack's hands and chin than on the sandwich and he'll spill some milk when he pours it and I'll think, this is it.  This is my kid, and he's growing up.  Ella's nearly gone.  Our lives are ever-changing even in the midst of my ability to predict this small slice of already-disappearing time.

Will the mourning never cease?  Or, for that matter, the rejoicing in the achievements that preside happily over the mourning requirements (if I let them?  I want to let them).

WAHM v. SAHM smack-down: or, further evidence of my schizophrenia.

I had enough ideas for blog posts this weekend to keep me knee-deep in 'em for months.  (Especially at the rate I've been going, lately - it would have probably taken care of my quota through early fall.)

But -- time.  Time!  Where was that going to come from?  From my clear-out-the-dog-hair-sea allotment?  From the window of laundry-and-more-laundry?  From the oh, cripes, I don't want to list the minutiae, it's bad enough that I have to spend most of my "free" time doing it to begin with.

Mostly, I get really angry when I come up with something mind-boggling that I yearn to scribble down and just can't get the minutes to do so, because I'm too busy doing all of the mindless shit required of me, and never feeling adequately caught up, when I know these ideas, these beyond-myself thoughts are what make me feel alive, bigger than the laundry/dishes/grocer/bed-making, beyond the drivel of what I do at work, at what I do probably 7/8ths of the time.  

And I know I had more time when I was at home during the day, even though I didn't realize it then.  Because I work now, I get to see what my Fridays at home with Jack vs. my Monday-Thursday spent rushing about are like, via comparison.  And I get really resentful of people who try to unfairly occupy my precious minutes who aren't directly related to me or married to me.  I get ANGRY.  And then I want to delete these people from my phone directory and never speak to them again.  ESPECIALly when they don't work.  I'm thinking specifically of an old/kinda refreshed (thanks a BUTTload, fb) relationship with someone, a person who doesn't have a job aside from caring for her one kid, who recently tried to make me feel guilty for not leaping to respond to her request for my attention on some random fucking item, I just can't begin to elucidate my reasons for how irritated I get when this sort of thing goes down.  Even when Jack was newborn, I was working.  I worked all the time.  I was terrified of our not being able to survive financially and I labored after labor at money-making (the embroidery machine was my gauntlet, my master, its software my bullying Minotaur).  I rarely had a week free of some work requirement, especially once I began selling things for fadiddle (at which I mammoth-failed, *sob*, moving on, deep breath GO!), and it affected my focus on my child, affected my ability to be present with him, and lots of other things besides, BUT.  Even given that, I still had more time than I do now. 

Between getting the morning parade on the road, and the morning commute, and slamming as much work into the slice of time I have to get it all done (which is never, ever enough, and I'm rarely caught up) before I need to leave to pick Jack up by 3 p.m. (later than he or I like, as it's after the bulk of his friends have gone home and late enough that I don't feel like we have much time for anything), get home with him, possibly (probably) stop at the store for essentials, fight traffic, feed the dog, get Jack a snack, unload the dishwasher, fold some clothes, pick up junk on the surfaces, sort the mail, deal with bills/other daytime-specific phone calls to annoying call-centers, make other necessary appointments, get the dinner ready if I'm making it (Caleb and I try to trade off, when I'm in not-too-crippled-by-ADD mode, which can last for weeks and sometimes longer, hooray!), then wrap up dinner, get Jack into his bath, post-bath, etc., do dishes, clean kitchen, fold some more laundry, pick over Jack's current clothing and assess what needs to be got rid of (too stained/ripped/small) and replaced, or some other benign-yet-important task, and then possibly do a little more work or else fade into a pile of gray lumps on the sofa for an hour before I drag my sorry ass to bed, I'm lucky, LUCKy if I can find a few spare minutes to email/blog/tweet/chat with friends.  When I get the chance to leave the house and meet someone for a drink, which I do on a regular basis but ONLY because I have a really supportive partner who allows me that free time as often as I want it, and I generally want it at least twice a month, I almost always have to push myself to go because I'm dithering just before I leave, always.  It's that last ten or so minutes before I walk to the car.  I get so grossed out at the thought of leaving.  Leaving my family, leaving my husband to deal with the dinner/dishes/bedtime routine, leaving my kid for those last minutes before bed, and he's not getting any younger, this I know, leaving with those pants sitting strangely on my post-holiday-pudge bottom, with this new set of wrinkles under my eyes, around my mouth, with this permanent exhaustion in my chest and belly and wreathed around my shoulders and down through my arms and wrists and curled in my tired fingers.  But I go.  I go, I see, I hug, I cherish.  It's good to go.  To come home to the family I love.  To appreciate, to be new and fresh. 

But I don't like the strain on my time, and if people try to make me spend more of it than I like through the assy means of threatening me with guilt, by expressing to me that I somehow owe them something, they have just written their ticket to fuck-off-ville.  My family is the only entity to whom I owe ANYthing.  They claim me, and that's where I license the guilt-factory, if there were one. 

I'm not warning any one of you, my friends, who might read this and be timid with me henceforth through some confused sense that I was speaking to you.  I'm not.  I'm being very specifically upset with someone who really never did relate to me, but especially does not now.  I have always worked from home since Jack existed, but now I work *away* from home.  I was never really a true SAHM.  'S okay.  I don't mind.  I think it was beneficial for me, in a twisted, can't-go-back so-what-the-hell-anyway kinda beneficial.  But hell's bells.  If you haven't got any kind of job aside from wiping peanut butter from around mouths and wiping poop from tiny bottoms, I SERIOUSly don't expect you to compare your life to mine, and I'll dismiss you from my friendship ranks without so much as a quick backward glance if you threaten my ability to care for my family by taking precious time and energy from me with cunning use of guilt and machetes. 

But especially the machetes.

*This is not a -- oh, hell.  I don't care how you perceive it.  I work away from home.  I've also worked-at-home with a paying gig *while* being a SAHM.  I am a mom.  I have a right to think all of this stuff.  If you don't likee, fine.  Express yourself in comment-form.  Anonymous assholes, prepare to be disemvoweled.  Everyone else, have at it.  I guess I just don't feel like explaining myself any further.  I don't owe it to anyone. 

Though it does feel good to get it all said.  It's been bothering me for so long.  I feel guilt for not being a regular blogger anymore.  See?  Cunning use of guilt.  Way to go, BLOGS.  You're worse than Jesus for guilt-weight.

**Written while on coffee/lunch break at work, ftr, hence the rambling and general tangential incoherence, WIN

***This is really just a massively over-worded exhortation to remind people, me included, to not assume we know just what anyone else is handling, what's on their schedules/lists/plates, and certainly to not think that they owe us.  They don't.  Besides, real friends understand the rule of mellow with regards to communications in adulthood-land; we communicate our desire to hang, to chat, to be involved, and then we sit back and wait until the person we're communicating with reciprocates.  And we don't pressure, because -- why the fuck should we?  We're friends.  It's chill.  Trust exists for such times as these (that can last many months, I've discovered in recent years).  Our friendship will continue to exist for as long as we can stand it, so long as we give each other room to manage our families and whatnot.  Pressure is bullshit. 

I was not, and am not, judging harshly those whose only job is running a household/caring for kids.  That shit is exhausting.  Just -- understand that my life is different from yours, is all.  And the good ones?  You do.  You didn't even need to read this.  /blather

objectively tired v. subjectively sleepy.

I stomped back to the hotel, my stomps growing slower and my breathing slightly ragged, while my son clung more and more tightly to my neck (my appreciation for the clinging growing as we walked, my grip slackened, a result of my increasing exhaustion in Seattle's chilly mid-morning air).  After we arrived inside the foyer, I plopped him down and said, "Now, walk."  We trudged toward the bank of elevators and I silently pushed the buttons I'd allowed him to push earlier, back in the pleasant, sanguine slice of morning where I was patient and he was gleeful and not slotted in tantrum-sequence.

As we exited the elevator, he said, "Now we're on our floor, right, mommy?  Where the wind can't get us.  This is where we can walk to our room, mommy.  Mommy?  I couldn't smile before because my smile was sweepy.  It was tired.  It was sick.  It had a stummy-ache.  So it had to sweep.  I couldn't smile because my smile was sweeping, and it was sick, and it had a stummy-ache, so I couldn't make it wake up when you told me to smile."  The chuckle slid out of me, traitorously. 

"You know, that's funny.  The story about your smile being sleepy woke mine up."  I spoke while slipping the key-card into its slot, the green light blinking kindly at me as I did.

"Yeah, mom.  That wasn't a long story.  It was just a short one."

drowning Batman.

Jack:  "I'm dwowning Batman, mommy!  Wookit!  Wookit him drowning, go down, down, down into the deep, deep, deep bottom of da tub, mommy, see he's dwowning, mommy?"

me:  "Why is he drowning, though?  Batman's a superhero, honey.  He doesn't have to drown.  He could survive - he usually does, in fact."

Jack: "But no, mommy!  He's gonna dwown.  He's gonna hafta dwown, I think.  Batman's dwowned."

me:  "Is this because the fish were drowned yesterday and they died?  Is that why Batman's drowning?"

Jack:  "Yeah.  He's dwowning just like the fish."

me:  "Maybe Batman could play with that shark instead of drowning?  Maybe he could play with the shark and the polar bear?"

Jack:  "No!  Batman and the shark can NOT play together, mommy.  They are NOT friends."

me:  "Why can't they be friends?"

Jack:  "Because they're people, mommy, and people aren't friends."

me: (choking down laugh) "People aren't friends, Jack?"

Jack:  "No, mommy, they aren't.  They're just people.  And they sometimes just aren't friends."

As he sing-songed to himself afterward, I contrived to think of something, a vignette, maybe, that I could include with this, to write it as a post that referred to something else, something bigger, that could make the point so I wouldn't have to even comment on it. Which I sort of decided would be too easy.  Kind of a cop-out.  After all - the worst part of having that conversation is trying to determine any of its meaning.  Realizing, as I do, that there could be so many interpretations.  And each of them would be utter crap.  Because he doesn't even know what he meant by any of it, and when I ask him in several years about its significance, he'll not remember. 

And, yes, I will ask him.  It's the kind of annoying thing I do.

My mother would agree with that statement.

spiderman shirts matter tremendously.

The one Jack owns is imperative.  He must be clad in it.  At. All. Times.  Even if it smells like urine, because when he sat down on the toilet on Friday to pee, he forgot to lift the lid, and the shirt soaked up some of the pee, the rest of which spilled all over the toilet lid and down the sides and cascaded onto the floor.  Caleb didn't wash it yesterday (he did ALL of the laundry while I was at a trade show for a bunch of girl scouts while representing the ski resort I'm working for and - oh, my dear baby jesus, that's its own blog post which I'm considering, very delicately, the writing of - possibly today.  We'll see; because, as you and I both know, LIES: I TELL THEM), but this shirt remained unwashed, because this shirt, with its flashing, battery-operated flashy-thingy that emits red flashes beneath a plastic image of le spidey, must be cleaned - very delicately.  Maybe I'll try to wash it AND write the girl-scout post all at the same time.  Then I may possibly bring the proper amount of care to both requirements. 

But probably not.

He's insisting it's fine, now, though, in the meantime, because it's *dry*.  Never mind that it smells of urine.  No matter.  That the urine is no longer wet is all he's concerned with.

 

*raises eyebrow*

p.s. We got a kitten last week.  I wanted to name it something literary or possibly after one of my jazz heroes (I was kind of hoping for Webster, after Ben Webster, whose tenor sax is a dream and I wish my record player worked because I have this double album of his that melts me and, oh, why am I starting down *this* path?  I'm not.  'Bye, path.  Leaving.  Jazz begone!  *poof*).  Somehow, Buster came up and then I quickly went with Dickens, because a.) he's a little Dickens, and b.) I love Dickens.

Buster has remained.  Even our attempts to sway Jack with the alluring sounds of the name Dexter (after Dexter Riley, one of my favorite all-time childhood Disney character favorites; please tell me you remember any of them?  The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes; Now You See Him, Now You Don't; The Strongest Man in the World?  No?  *Sigh*) did not work.  (Also, Dexter's Lab was good and I wouldn't have minded naming a kitty after such a mischievously adorable cartoon child whose accent I very much enjoy abusing whenever I think to do so.  Alas, 'tis not to be.)

But the two gold fish we bought when we got Buster (see?  Slowly growing accustomed) have, sadly, passed into that long night.  May their water be less murky and poopful than it was here on Earth.  Sleep well, little fishes.  Sorry 'bout that whole *really brief existence* business.

p.s. Caleb just called from the store where's he's busily buying those canned cinnamon rolls for me because I begged indolently for them because I am a disgusting, spoiled monster, *this* is a hell of a sentence so far, ain't it?, to tell me that he did, in fact, wash the Spiderman shirt of great importance.

Oh.

minimal effort posting.

The dark-chocolate trim pops nicely against the new house color, I (would like to) think.  I'm a little bowled over by the fact that close to a G in paint and supplies for the overall job didn't really do much; it wasn't until the addition of the $12 can of trim paint and three dark brown plants placed in front of the window, at $8 per, came into play, making the entire effect pop beautifully.  I mean, damn.  $36 to blow it all up.  That's crazy.  But somehow always the way things work in design.  Accents!  Accents are key!  Or whatever.

I really dig the reddish mulch (we just tried one bag for effect, and will throw the rest on tomorrow night, in advance of the appraiser's visit on Thursday - curb appeal, or so they say, counts).  I don't generally thrill at reddish mulch; it reminds me too much of the pain of angry barkdust splinters from childhood days.  But this does so well because our chimney has remained true brick red, and requires a little color balance to pull it into the other elements.  I can't wait to see how the mulch will look around the new plants below the front window.

Caleb shaved Jack's head on Saturday, in hopes of staving off massive heat discomfort (our a/c quit on us on Thursday afternoon, just as the heat wave really got underway; our spoiled asses did NOT know what to do with the 89 degrees the upstairs portion of our house was registering).  Also, who knew?  Cookies and moisturizer don't hold together so well in that kinda heat, either.  Surprise!

Silly monster faces are the new smile.

The back route to the beach from my parents' RV spot at the campground near Tillamook, Oregon, where we stayed last weekend.

A few minutes' walk from our camp site; maybe fifty yards from the bay near our camp ground.

Caleb took this one.  I don't know WHAT he said to that bee, but DAMN.  Maybe he mocked his, uh, "wingspan."  Whatever the case, super glad I was hiding under a rock while this was snapped.  I believe in duck-and-cover.  I have ovaries of gelatinous goo.

Headless man is usurped by small parasite near coastal town!

Sand:  Toddler cryptonite.



Strawberry-headed.  Possibly an affliction resulting from overconsumption of massive quantities of late June Oregon berries?

 

Ocean attack!

Mom!didyouseeit?thatlittlethingyinthewateritwascomingandthenthewater cameduptomyfeetsanditwasso!cold!mommmy!mommy!mommmmmy!!!

This is certainly a look-back-and-sob-in-twenty-years'-time kinda shot, no doubt.

Finally.  FINALLY.  The boy/dog co-entertainment possibilities begin to unfold.  And not a moment too soon.  My (dying-to-be-sedentary) ass has been begging for this moment for three + years.

Idyllic.

A husband who can garden.  He did *all* of this.  I have, uh, real, REAL bad, uh, hay fever.  REAL bad.  *cough, cough, sorta-convincing sneeze*

And the husband pickled these *after he grew them and picked them*:  a mix of lemon cucumbers, pickling cucumbers, green tomatoes and sweet purple peppers.  At first I was all, what kind of girl are you?, and then I realized I may be damning the probability of his ever doing something so kick-ass again, simply because I couldn't let a shot-at-the-funny go, and then I realized I didn't care, because, DUDE.  WHAT A FUCKING GIRL.  THE BEST GIRL IN THE WORLD.  *MY* GIRL.  *swooon*

We gathered eighteen pounds of these bad boys.  Jack even helped.  By not eating what we'd picked.  Seriously.  My husband is a bad-ass.  He culled most of them.  I kind of mostly just grazed and thought about possible blog posts I'll never, ever write down.

"Babe?  This smile is starting to slide south (note gritted teeth) unless you deliver on that promise-of-beer, the one you gave me around an hour ago, back when the dinosaurs still roamed the Earth?"

It has begun.  For the record, I'm totally fine with that.  After all, we'll always have beer.  And that one summer -- which summer *was* that, anyway?  Alright, so maybe it was a weekend.  Or just one night.  Maybe it didn't even happen.  Here's to that possibly-made-up memory, babe.

Note the handy.  Caleb put the whole damn thing together.  It took two days, and saved us a G in installation costs. 

Guess who adamantly refuses to play in it.

Babe, it's a cheesy shot because you're so darn cute in it (but let it not be assumed that I refuse abjectly to post shots of my partner wherein he looks hot, because that assumption would be incorrect.  General apparent behavior of avoidance of deliberate highlighting of attractiveness notwithstanding, just for this particular post).  You almost make me want to have sex with you, you're so ruddy and kinda totally hot.  (It is like. walking. on hot. coals. to say this about my partner on the blog, btw.  I loathe and abhor verbal pda.  Dunno.  Guess I just think it's -- below me, somehow.  I'm a snob about the weirdest shit.  I won't overanalyze it.  He deserves to be recognized for the hotness.  The.  Fucking.  End, Debbie.  Jeeeeeezus.  Letitgo.)

Happy (fourth) anniversary on Thursday, babe.  You so deserve a toast.  What you don't deserve?  Me ditching for a week to attend the Convention while you hold down this end, and we cross even all of our smallest hairs in hopes that the refinance isn't a bust, and put off celebrating our anniversary, again, one more result of the purchase of this home (last year's awesome celebration being, lamentably, the day we moved into the hell hole in the first place, and we postponed our real celebration that time, too).  I'm sorry it's been such a rough go this year.  I'm sorry I pushed us into moving last year, and buying this house, and all the time and energy spent fixing it, and then my being such a mess because of finding out about the adhd, and just generally having too many breakdowns and epic fails to count. But I guess you're still sticking it out, after almost ten years together, and I promise to keep trying, trying my hardest.  Always.  You're so fucking worth it.

beach: 0, flu: 1

We bailed early yesterday from the rainy, yet far from bland, incredible Oregon Coast.  Jack has had a hacky cough for weeks - I keep waiting for it to abate because I really don't see the need for him to endure yet another round of antibiotics that repair nothing, and once it began raining as we tried to walk out to the sand for one more round of diggy/skippy/giggly, we cashed it in and drove home.  Neither Caleb nor I were feeling all too well, either, having both acquired whatever weird throat/raspy cough/icky chest thingy my mom was laden with, and after we got home, Caleb somehow turned feverish and punch-drunk within an hour or so.  I went inside from the back to find him sitting in the chair in our room, shivering, his face dark red, with several layers of clothes on.  He told me he felt weird and asked for a thermometer, but I insisted on just feeling his forehead, which was alarmingly hot.  He crashed downstairs on the couch and I tried to get things unpacked and all of the wet bedding into the wash (Jack had no fewer than *two* accidents during the night on Friday evening/Saturday morning; all while sleeping a few inches from me on a too-small pull-out large chair masquerading as a love seat, so awesome).  Jack ran around in circles, yelling and throwing things.  I solo-parented and hacked and tried not to put our wolf-child out on the sidewalk with a "free" sign strapped to his chest while Caleb slept. 

After I got Jack to bed, a mighty struggle in itself, I crashed for awhile, then watched this old film, Country Girl.  It left me thinking about feminist issues when I ought to have been sleeping, so I popped Groundhog Day in, just to stop the maddening spin-cycle in my skull.  Caleb woke up at some point, at which I, evidently, in mid-sleep, asked if he minded that I was watching, a la, "Is this okay?  That I'm watching this?," even though I was ASLEEP.  So, not really watching anything but the backs of my eyelids.  He was, naturally, confused.

Today was more of the same, and the three-year-old in my son richtered (I refer, here, to the "why" and the "no" and the "I don't waaaant to" fields of HOLY GOD JUST SHUT IT, SHUT IT BEFORE I AM REQUIRED TO RETHINK THIS WHOLE BUSINESS AND QUITE POSSIBLY SEW YOUR MOUTH SHUT *AND* REND MY EARS TO BITS, SIMULTANEOUSLY).  We went out a few times to a) give my husband a chance at a few winks of undisturbed sleep, and b) to fetch more acetaminophen and, yes, a milkshake for me, because it's the closest I can get on certain days to the hard stuff, and I needed it.  Don't question me.  I did.  This = truth.

Mostly, I'm grateful for the shower I got to take this morning, and for the fact that, just as soon as the quilt is dry (which, god almighty, who fucking KNOWS when that will be, it's been in the (granted, totally crappy) dryer for no less than three hours - it's kinda thick), I get to crawl into my beautiful, big, comfy bed of not-love-seat-pull-out-proportions and sleeeeeep.  Oh, and also, grateful for the incredibly delicious fresh crab we ate for dinner, a rare treat for me; we always had the imitation crab when my mom made something requiring crab in the recipe -- the real was way too $$.  Also, I got a lot of hugs and kisses from my terrifically bipolar-y child, and there was a healthy balance of laughter and giggles and general silly amidst the chaos, which must be noted, in fairness.

If you really narrow your eyes and squint, hard, at my day, it was pretty alright.

Pictures of beachy delights tomorrow.  Swears.  The nice, G-rated kind.

money woes don't pack so well into an old kit bag.

Am so stressed out about money.  We're waiting on a refinance that, if it doesn't go through, will ruin us financially.  And we didn't do stupid things with equity and all that.  We just picked a *really* shit moment to buy a house that needed work - and not the kind that was willing to wait for a few years (look for my next book!, about what to avoid when purchasing an older home, and how many cabinets and inch-sized niches to peer into using a micro-lens in order to best determine whether said old house is worth the duckets!).

Will be returning to a full-time position with the mountain resort, in their sales office, at first of September.  Jack begins preschool the same week, and I'll just be coming home from the convention the Friday prior.  He'll be in daycare all day, three days a week, as a pre-schooler, with the bigger kids, in a classroom of twenty children and two teachers.  He'll also be attending grandmacare for the other two days (and thank jeeeesus they can do that for us, although I have my reservations about it all, which are drowned by our need for me to be working full time, so, reservations be damned).

Today he cried so hard when I left him off at school, harder than he has since he began there last fall.  It was horrid. 

I am witless as to how to manage this.

And hopeful that the medication I'm waiting for a prescription on from the psych will ameliorate the scattered, dull memory issues, and general lack-of-focus/disorganization.  Because if I'm ever gonna need to be able to organize myself and my family, this is that time. 

today, minus three years.

I hesitate to do this; I have yet to write down anything about you that seems too convinced, convincing; you are a fluid, amorphous body of light and breath and giggles and scowls, and I cannot pin you down.

Would not pin you down.

And even while I note, to myself, that there is anything specific and seemingly concrete about your existence, you surprise me.  You spin and it is all fresh, the kaleidoscope has shifted and the beads have click click clicked into a new and terrifyingly lovely arrangement.  My sight accustoming more and more lethargically as your spinning increases in complexity and speed.

My love for you remains, throughout the sifting clicking spinning amorphous light-speed arrangement, my truth.  My bedrock.

And yours, I can only hope, in my non-religious fervor'd prayer.

You, born out of me by my straining and gasps and disbelief in my own body, that slithery-strange sensation, and the intense relief of pain ended, and an even more intense grappling with your face, the eyes, those fathoms-deep eyes into which I could have stared for an age (may have, indeed, done), that face, your face, and my singly uncynical response to your gaze, no larger truth have I ever encountered, that day, three years hence, than the one met in your wee bit of cheek, nose, eyes, mouth; that scowl, etched deep, that told me everything I could possibly need to know.

Your father - I blame him.  He bade me release that last millimeter of self-strength; I released my timeless grip on my own resolve to allow you to maneuver through your personal portico and onto the balcony of life.  I wooshed it away and as I did, you passed through into the sun.  With much crying and all the requisite goo allowed.

My sweet, incredible, willful, beauteous, loved sun.

Jackson Ray.  Happy day to us, boy-child.  Three years from the day of reckoning, I am only too glad to greet the hereafter.

Even if it does mean a road littered with tantrums along the way.  (Because there will also be cupcakes.  Chocolate ones.)

three.

She wipes the counter with the once-white wash cloth, the one that has acquired some smudgy, dark patches, even though she washes it in earth-friendly non-chlorine bleach.  She says, look, honey, this is the wash cloth they sent home with us from the hospital after you were born, although they didn't realize momma was sort of accidentally stealing it.  You say, oh, mommy?, Why you dood that?  And she shakes her head, laughing a little under her breath as she wipes quickly and with sure strokes.  You look quizzically at the cloth, for, while you understand "hospital," you only know one thing for certain, that is, that you have always been here.  You have always stood, with your sensitive skin and sensitive soul, in this place, this now, and the thing she speaks of, the time before you, it is incomprehensible. 

You run quickly out the back door and into the streaming sunshine, gliding through it, laughing, chasing the dog, your speed a lightning-quick accusation to her that the moments escape so quickly and she has no more capacity for their importance than a moth does the lurid, shimmering glow of the lantern's beams.

She puts down the cloth and runs after you just for a moment, chasing your little, sweet, precious body down as you scramble away from her, your laughter afloat, wafting to her like pollen, and she catches you up and kisses you abundantly on the full, soft cheek, her heart awash with the perfect beauty of the feeling of your skin, of your body, your lengthening body, and her scaled-down form as it grows leaner and less taut while yours sharpens, she rests you on the grass and dashes the quick-form'd tears from beneath her grinning lids, absorbing it.

This is your time, now.

blogger prom jitters. and a few extraneous photos. you know. for kicks.

Or maybe I'm already going through the post-prom anticlimax.  Which kinda blows, seeing as how I'm gonna have to fend off that particular suckitude on Sunday evening as well.

More likely, though, I'm just stupid-tired.  We (only, the "we" = not me) painted the house this weekend.  I did participate!, though, just not in the painting area of the task.  I helped apply the "caulk."  I'm super-good with "caulk," so it was logical to put some into my hands and get me going.

(I toldju I'z gonna brang the smut.  There.  There's your smut pie.  Eat!  Eat, ya fucking jackals!  If you get this not-thinly-veiled movie reference, I will hug you extry-hard at prom, possibly to the point of making you uncomfortable.

It's what I do.)

Jack has been such a pain in the ass lately.  There.  I said it.  He's borrowed from all buzzy creatures and created a whine so terrifyingly ear-paining, a noise that falls somewhere between fly/chainsaw, a noise that I can only listen to for s o  v e r y  l   o   n    g  before I snap and my face unscrews itself and is propelled with speed and agility toward the nearest precious, glass objet (and no, that isn't misspelled, it's *fronch*, people - le sigh) and both items shatter, only my face is slightly less the worse for wear, surprisingly.  Who knew they made faces so goddam durable?

Not me.  (Well, except that I'm kidding.  My face doesn't look so good after being busted up by glass.  Not that it happens.  It just sounded interesting in my head.  If you were in there, like you *should* be, you'd see what I meant.  So get in there and stop looking at me like that.  And while you're at it, please won't you bring me some cookies or something?  I don't think I can go on much longer like this without a flavorful snacky.

I love a good snacky.)

Want some pictures of our freshly-poo-coated, er, painted house?  (I realized after speaking with my good friend, Jen, tonight, who also happens to live in our neighborhood, that it resembles more poo-ish and less clay-ish, the intended color, only she didn't say it, I sort of blurted it, but she kind of agreed even though she tried hard not to, the good intention of which I totally respect and love her for, but dude, if it looks like poo, it looks like poo.  It isn't her fault I picked poo brown for the paint color.  Which is rad, and means that the neighborhood is probably laughing at us behind their oh-so-much-less-poo-ish walls.  So I'll be painting poo-color-downplaying trim, a very rich, dark chocolate, next week when I gits back from tha big cit-ay.  Super.)

Pitchers!  On with 'em already!

(What conference?  What packing?  I know not of this.  I have things to sew tomorrow, and a doctor's appointment, with the psychiatrist, to receive alms in the form of medicines that will make my adhd behave itself.  What fun to try out on unsuspecting roommates!  I mean, uh, on my family.  Because, I'll be here all weekend.  I'm not going anywhere.  Brain, that is all you need believe.  If you happen to hook up to your ocular tentacles, please ignore suitcases and makeup kits and the like.  It's all -- a ruse.  Practice for when I may actually go -- somewhere.  You know.  Places.  To do stuff.  And -- other stuff.  Hush, now, brain.  It's time to go back to sleep.  Here's your blankie.  Ignore the activity.  You needn't be involved.  You almost never are, anyway.  Why should this time be any different?)

Pitchers!  Yoo!

(Bonus feature alongside freshly-painted exterior; new, gorgeous maple door, w/sweet-ass stainless hardware, and - darn it all if they didn't throw in a buzzsaw in the form of a three-dimensional small child who insists on eating several-days-old hunks of refrigerated, hard-as-diamond bread and flips the buzzsaw on the "richter" setting if informed that said bread has been composted.  Iow, if you paint your house soonish, and they throw in a child for free, just let it have the hard bread.  It'll work the math out on its own as to why hard bread is the anti-delicious.)

(This child may also enjoy perusing the supple lines and details of the glimmering hardware.  Because doorbell ringing and mailslot-peeking are yesterday's cardboard box in the kick-ass kid-fun realm, evidently.  Especially when there's a dog on the other side of the door whose biggest thrill in life, aside from witnessing her blue bowl filling with small, mealy-brown, pebble-like objects that pass for food, is barking at passersby and the doorbell being rung.  It's entirely possible that she wrote the original line that inspired the song, "You can ring my bell."  Although, of course, in dog.  So, sort of this:  "Woof ow ow ow owwwww."  You get the picture.)

(Our bottom-of-the-yard veg garden.  It's even bigger, now.  This was like, a thousand years ago, aka, last week.  Or three weeks ago.  What-the-fuck-ever.  Like I care.  The garden is the MAN'S job.)

'Cause it ain't just gonna make itself, people.  Chocolate cake, btw, with crevices (heh) filled with freshly-canned strawberry jam, and topped with a chocolate whipped-cream icing that was supposedly a layering element, according to the recipe.  Pffft.  I make recipes bow low and prostate themselves -- wait, is that supposed to be prostate or prostrate?, because, I'm totally not looking it up.  Fuck you, correct-word fanatics.  Freaks.  Anyway, I make recipes nervous just looking at them.  (They're all, please don't try to make us.  You never read the directions carefully enough, you're all slap-dash and hurryupmusthavechocolatebrainpokingoutofear and rushrush and suddenly, you have a thing that *resembles* cake, only it tastes like a big, puffed-up pile of baked flour, or something that may have been alright if it weren't burned to an exquisite horribleness that even the dog is *almost* refusing to eat.  Well, except that she would never, because she'll eat bits of things that seem as though they *might* be food, so, yeah, no, she doesn't reject baked-pile-o-flour *nor* the burnty shit.  She's pleasant that way.)

And then he handed me back my beer, after I took the picture, because honestly, who paints a house and drinks beer at ten o' clock in the morning?, and I returned to caring for my child and sipping Pabst delicately through a tube connected to my hat.  I'm kidding.  I would never wear one of those hats.  They don't hold enough beer.

Those plants may even survive having been a) stepped all over while covered with a tarp to protect them from the paint, and b) planted, as shade-requiring plants, in a full-sun-exposure spot.

But probably not.

They tried to get me involved in their ridiculous bubbly shenanigans, but I explained that it's not nice to try to make mommy have to wear a beard anymore, ever since she finally got the old one surgically removed, and the flashbacks about the circus are almost completely faded.

(And then I caved.  I'm such a post-circus-member-bubble-beard suckah.)

i wanna be medicated.

Can't get an appt. to see a psychiatrist until the middle of July.  The 16th, to be precise.  Iow, the day before I leave for the SF BlogHer conference.  Prolly isn't a good idea to start dosing on something unknown the day before I reconvene with a thousand crazy-a$$ bitches and behave in the expectedly ridonkulous fashion that I will do.  (It's the hyper aspect of adhd - kicks in whenever I'm even mildly mentally stimulated by something in my environment.  Give me a thousand shimmery, brilliant stimulants?  And I'm dancing like a marionette on trucker speed.  For untold hours.  It's - annoying.  And embarrassing.  And tiresome.  And unpredictable.  Etc.)

I'm tired.  So tired.  I don't care anymore.  I don't.  It's all just so nuts.

Lying cuddled together with my kiddo a minute ago, because he had come into the room, suddenly, demanding a hug, and upon returning him to his bed, I discovered his playmates, some toys he's not allowed to go to sleep with - because he *doesn't sleep* when they're present - and then we sang some songs and snuggled.  And I felt his length, even with legs curled all pretzel-like around my knees, feet stuck randomly between my knees and thighs, hand curled around mine, and my breath halted, quick, brief, because - it's all happening.  So fast.  Too fast.  Blazes of light and *poof* and he's growing, growing, grown.

And I will have done nothing throughout his growth but bemoan my own beleaguered state, my own incapacities for things that - well, that I just am not, and cannot have, and cannot be, and yet I reach, I reach, waggling my fingers 'til they're outstretched to the point of pain, and my son, this beautiful, amazing creature, this creation, he is turning tricks and cartwheels and pulling rabbits out of hats all 'round me, and still I reach, and bemoan, and waggle, and pine for things.  Unknowable, invisible things.

And soon he will, too, be invisible, this smallness, this wee synapse of time, this sharp echo against the rocks of the ages, his once-tiny hands and feet and legs and elbows all crescendoing and I see its harmonic rise in such finite, too-fleeting, too-few moments.

Is nothing in life what it ought to be?

telephone game.

Me:  Jack, have you seen my phone?  

Jack: Yes, Mommmmmy.  *sing-songs the words while pounding on the wall with a play hammer and nails*

Me, trying to sound patient, because I know that I turned the ringer off so as to not disturb us during the naptime that wasn't, which means I am not going to be able to easily locate it simply by calling myself from the other phone:  Did you take my phone and put it somewhere?

Jack: Yeahhh... ? *looks slightly confused, but gets up and walks confidently toward his room, so I assume he's going to fetch it, which, I tell myself, signifies that he must have removed it, and it wasn't just that I misplaced it somewhere, like, in my bum*

Me:  So, you know where it is? *smoke curls trailing from my nostrils, but still clinging to a calm tone*

Jack:  Yeah, mommmmyyyy!!  It's in da office, mommy.  Let's go in der.  Because, it's pwobabwy in der.

Me: Jack, are you sure you know where my phone is?  

Jack: Yes!  It's downstaiws.  It's pwobabwy in my secwet spot.  Somebody pwobabwy put it der.

Me: *audible breathing, fingers clenched on pant legs, following child impatiently toward downstairs playroom*

Jack: Oh, mommy, it's not in hew.  Somebody pwobabwy took it.

Me: Jack, who would've possibly taken it?

Jack: Pwobabwy the monstews.

Me: The monsters?

Jack: No!  No, mommy!  Not the monstews.  The SPIDEWS took it.

Me: Jack, I need you to help me find my phone.  Can you please, Jack, please help me find my phone?  Can you try to remember where you put it?  Where did you hide it?

Jack: But, no, mommy, I cannot, because I do not know where it is.  Because I didn't take it, mommy! 

*child runs off, sing-songing*

Me: Ah, hell.  *hopes no one of mild importance calls, pours flagon of wine, begins drinking*

And then I console myself by thinking, "If I could just have these, it would all be alright."

(Told you this was a mommy blog.)