Oral Hygiene Queen

A Silver Lining to the Looming Kardashian Cloud

2012-01-03T11:45:00.001-08:00

Remember when I complained about how painful it is to witness the outsized and vapid fame of my former student Kim Kardashian? And how I wished ardently that she would just go away, somewhere out of the public eye? Well, she has only gotten more famous. There was that little wedding thing. Of course, she and her sisters are constantly on the covers of magazines from tabloid to popular-but-not-quite-trashy magazines. But I don't actually pick those up. What's really awful is that she's penetrated the world of media I actually consume. I've read more than one reference to her in the New Yorker and heard her discussed on The Daily Show, among other (many many other) references in the print and visual media locations I frequent in my relatively small media world. The other day my Old Man and I went to see Young Adult and scenes from one of the Kardashian reality shows were used prominently to establish the patheticness of the main character's daily life.

The more famous she gets, the more I seem to feel the need to admit that she was once my student, a fact that I almost never mentioned in the relatively modest days of her early "fame."

This morning in my new Poetry class, as I was passing out notecards for students to fill with relevant bits of personal information, I joked that I would read them carefully and cherish them always. "Or sell them on ebay, in the event that you become famous," I added. But then I had to admit that it was an unlikely scenario, given that I still hadn't figured out how to cash in on the seventh-grade photograph of Kim Kardashian I have in my possession.

"So if anyone knows someone who might want to pay big bucks for a picture of Kim Kardashian when she was in seventh grade, give me their contact information," I announced, mostly but not entirely joking.

"I'll give you fifty cents," one of my students offered.

"Hey, I'm also in the picture," I added.

"Okay, eight-five cents," he said.

And then one of my new students, who has clearly not heard my ambivalent claim to near-fame, asked, a bit confused, "Ms. Queen, did you go to junior high with Kim Kardashian?"

Aww. So sweet that my student thinks I might be anywhere near the same age as Kim Kardashian. Granted, I was a young teacher when I had her in class, but not that young.

So, a tiny silver lining. Ever so tiny. Hardly worth it at all.

But if I could sell that school picture, on the other hand....

Generic Halloween Sexiness

2011-11-01T19:11:00.000-07:00

Checking out PostSecret a couple days late, I saw this Halloween secret, which really resonated with me this year. I am beyond tired of generic "sexy" Halloween costumes for women.

Those "sexy girl" Halloween costumes have been around for awhile. Long enough that they played a role in the 2004 movie Mean Girls, where the likable Cady becomes more likable when she wears a freaky and very unsexy monster bride costume to a party where every other girl there is dressed as a sexy leprechaun, a sexy vampire, a sexy kitty cat, etc.

They've been around for awhile, but this year, for some reason, I have reached my limit with them. Living in a college town, it seems like about three quarters of undergrad women feel the need to wear a "sexy" Halloween costume. And I put "sexy" in scare quotes, because they're so formulaic that they're not actually sexy. This year we even had a couple at the high school where I teach. A sexy sailor and a sexy musketeer. Really? A sexy musketeer?

This is the formula: take a costume, any costume, and make its accessories small, cute, and preferably glittery. Then turn the core clothing that makes up the costume into a tight dress with a very short skirt and cleavage. And presto! You have a "sexy" Halloween costume.

I have nothing against people looking sexy on Halloween. I myself have rocked a few pretty hot costumes over the years. But this prefabricated, totally predictable, sexiness-as-defined-by-short-skirts-and-cleavage version of sexiness is so un-Halloween. Halloween is about the strange, the surprising, the scary, the unheimlich. It's not about getting to be a barbie doll for a day. Or getting to be more of a barbie doll than usual for a day.

Is there anything redeeming about these costumes? I just find them boring, and I think they take the fun out of Halloween, turning it into some kind of generic male fantasy. What do you think?

Wear What You Like

2011-09-10T20:53:00.000-07:00

For the last few months, I've been chewing on the question of whether there's an "appropriate" way to dress once you hit your 40s, your 50s, etc. Or more accurately, if there's an appropriate way for women to dress, since the "what to wear now that I'm X age" question seems much more live for women for a variety of reasons (women being under more scrutiny, women having a lot more sartorial options in general, women having to deal with all manner of aging-related cultural bullshit that men seem much more free from).

Thus far, I've pretty much felt like everyone should wear what they want to wear and fuck the rest of the world if they don't like it. The tarted-up rebel gang who went by the name Sluts Against Rape was one of my favorite aspects of the annual Take Back the Night March back in grad school, and I've always been annoyed when people tsk tsk at hem length or cleavage depth. When bare midriffs became status quo among teenage girls back in the aughts, I was rather pleased to see girls with round bellies letting their round bellies hang out of their shirts. And I don't recall ever looking at a middle-aged woman when I was in my twenties or thirties and thinking Hm. That's a bit young for her.

But in the last few months, partly as a result of conversations I've had with various friends, thought-provoking questions brought up over at DoctorMama, and random overheard comments, and partly because I'm now in my 40s and finding my self questioning whether I can still pull off spaghetti straps, I've begun contemplating whether there are sartorial lines that can't in good taste be crossed by women of a certain age.

And I've pretty much decided that no, there are not. Women of whatever age should wear whatever the hell they want, and if anyone doesn't like it they can piss up a rope.

I have, however, come up with a few guidelines, which I've developed mostly for myself as I continue on toward a middle-age I intend to make as funky, fun, and sexy as I can while still meeting my basic responsibilities as a mother, teacher, and citizen, but which I will also share with you:

* Don't worry about what other people think of what you're wearing. If you love it, go for it. If someone says something snarky about your look behind your back, there's probably more going on than their disapproval at your choice of clothes. (I've noticed that the women I'm close to, who are mostly not "what not to wear" types, only really lay into another woman's choice of clothing when they dislike her or have some other issue with her. I have also found that I am quite capable of sneering at another woman's look, despite my generally laissez faire attitude toward other people's clothes, if I think she's an asshole.)

* Wear what you're comfortable in. If you feel good in it, chances are you'll look good in it. If it's physically uncomfortable, forget about it. And if it exposes a feature that you don't really like to have exposed, don't wear it, even if you find it cute or sexy in theory.

* If you end up wearing something you're not actually comfortable in, try to fake it 'til you can change. I always feel sad for actresses who go on talk shows wearing really short skirts or low-cut tops then spend the entire interview pulling at their hems or fiddling with their necklines. If your skirt feels too short, keep your hands off it and attempt to relax and pull it off for today or tonight. Then get rid of that skirt so you don't end up going out again in something you're not actually comfortable in. (Note: the "rock it for tonight" strategy does not work with high heels. Nothing looks less sexy than someone hobbling down the street or wobbling across the room. I personally don't like to wear shoes that I couldn't run in if I suddenly had to, but if you love heels, just make sure you can actually walk in them.)

* Create your own individual style. One thing I've noticed since I've been contemplating this age-and-clothes issue is that women who wear clothes that may seem in some superficial way to be "too young" for them (because they're too form-fitting, too skin-revealing, too flouncy, too cute, whatever) seem to pull it off when it's part of a look that seems distinctive. Whereas women who look like they nabbed their entire outfit off a mannequin at American Eagle Outfitters tend to look like they're trying to look younger than they are, rather than just wearing clothes they like and feel good in. Note: I'm not saying don't shop at American Eagle Outfitters or the Limited or the juniors section at whatever department store you frequent. But when you do, go in there with your own wordly, nuanced sense of style that you've been developing over the years, and pick individual items that can work with your style. One way to say this is that younger women have the luxury of being cookie-cutter cute if they want to. It works for them (if they're willing to settle for pretty boring, or boring pretty), whereas older women don't so much have that luxury. But another way to say it is that those of us who were born before 1976 have more aesthetic experience and a deeper sense of lived fashion history to draw on. Let's not just settle for whatever crap the mall is offering up this year.

That's what I'm thinking right now. What do you think?

Whither August?

2011-09-02T09:24:00.001-07:00

Gentle Readers,

Damn. I can't believe I let all of August go by without posting. As I know I've said here before, for every post that makes it up, there are at least two or three substantive and ten potentially amusing but relatively lightweight posts that take form in my head but never make it to my qwerty little fingertips.

I had one going in my brain for awhile there that revolved around facebook statuses, and why there aren't more really interesting ones. I think it's largely because we all have way too many "friends" and thus much too wide an audience, which tends to put a damper on actually saying what's on your mind much of the time. And that makes the truly funny or actually interesting facebook status all the more enjoyable, when people manage it. Everyone, I think, has at least a few friends that are masters at the art of the hilarious, striking, and/or keenly observant facebook status update, and it's worth contemplating what makes a great status update great.

There was another one that would've been entitled "Vasectomies are Sexy." I won't say any more about that one, because I may actually write it one day, and I don't want to blow my wad (so to speak) right now.

The one that's currently on my mind is "Are Adult Boring?" Again, I won't say more because that's one I actually want to write. I'm chewing on it, and it may show up before too long. Tune in tomorrow (in other words, in a week or two) to see what develops.

xo,
e.

From Real Siblings to Imagined Grandchildren

2011-07-30T22:23:00.001-07:00

In the midst of our fifteen-hour drive from New Jersey back to the midwest a couple weeks ago, I heard the following conversation quietly conducted in the back seat between Roo and O.:

Roo: O., you are a nice brother. I love you so, so, so much.
O.: Yeah, Roo. You're a nice sister. I love you so much, too.

My heart swelled with almost unbearable joy at hearing this. And though I grabbed my planner to write it down, I didn't say a word, not wanting to kill the moment by letting them know I'd heard them. Nothing makes me so happy as my kids being sweet to each other. When Roo willingly shares a treat she's gotten from a neighbor with her brother. When O. patiently teaches her how to play a game. These ordinary scenes are what I hoped for when we decided to have a second kid. And the rare but intensely adorable moments when they spontaneously express their love for each other with words go far beyond anything I ever imagined.

Lest you think my kids' relationship is all roses and rainbows, however, the very next day Roo accidentally broke the lego front-end loader that O. had recently put together, and he berated her 'til she cried. Then he called her a "crybaby" in a very mean voice, which is the worst thing he can do to her. I held her as she sobbed inconsolably for ten full minutes, my own heart heavy with sadness at her little heart breaking. It seems that no one can hurt her feelings like her brother, and it kills me when he yields that power against her.

I feel very lucky that O. and Roo get along well most of the time. Despite their more than four-year age difference, they play together a lot, and often go for hours busily working on some pretend scenario they've cooked up together. Right now, it's mostly positive, and the squabbling and hurt feelings are only occasional. But I wonder how their sibling relationship will change as they grow older. I've already seen the conflict increase bit by bit as Roo gets older and her will gets stronger, which makes the old pattern of O. as the planner and leader and Roo as the follower less and less the default mode. I have a feeling that they'll always retain that basic connection they've had since she was a baby, though, even if there are also more rough spots and moody moments. I hope I'm right.

Right now, O. and his dad are gone with my stepdad on a five-day river rafting trip in Idaho, while Roo and I hang with my mom. It's been interesting to see Roo's reaction to being the only kid. Last year, when they went on a similar trip, she was a little droopy and complained a lot of missing O. This year, although I can tell she misses having him to play with, she's pretty damned perky. She's really soaking up all the attention from me and my mom, chattering constantly and excitedly making plans for the three of us.

She's also been taking over a role that O. usually plays: bedtime talker and question-asker. Usually, when I say goodnight to O. and Roo, it's O. who takes the opportunity to get in five minutes of eight-year-old philosophizing or hypothetical-question-asking, while Roo just listens. Since O. has been gone, Roo has been asking me some tricky questions in that mellow pre-sleep time together.

Last night she hit me with this one: "Mama, how do women get babies?" I gave her a simplified answer that involved more heteronormativity and less complexity than I'd usually be satisfied with (but she is three, so it's not an easy question to field). Somewhere in there I mentioned finding a man who you would want to be your baby's daddy. After I was done, she told me "I don't want to find a daddy." Okay, I said. There are ways for women to have babies without finding a man. But I noted that it is nice to have someone to help you take care of the baby. Roo thought for a moment, then said "Maybe you could help me take care of my baby."

Whoa. This was getting deep. And, of course, I was hoping she’d be asleep by now.

I have only recently begun even contemplating the reality that some day my children might themselves have children. At this point, I'm not at all invested in the idea of grandchildren. I just want to get the kids raised up without losing too many of my marbles. But I guess if Roo decides somewhere down the line to have a baby on her own, I would be willing to help out.

So we made a deal: I will help her with her baby if she promises to wait to have a baby until she's at least twenty. She balked at this. Twenty seems a long time away for her. But I assured her that she'll want to wait that long, and probably longer. ("Remember, honey, I was thirty-four when I had my first baby," I said. "That's fourteen years older than twenty." After we established that most people live well past thirty-four, this seemed to give her some reassurance that it's not extreme to wait 'til you've got a couple of decades under your belt to begin reproducing.)

When I told my mom about this conversation, she wondered that I didn't establish an older minimum age. I don't know why I said twenty. It was spontaneous, of course. I guess I could have said "'til you finish college." But I'm not sure I regret picking a slightly earlier minimum age than I would truly prefer. Because I want to be realistic, and I also want to remain aware that the way I did things is not the only way or necessarily the best way. It's one way that works. There are other ways. Maybe I picked twenty because my own mom was just shy of twenty when she had me, and I've never regretted that timing.

In any case, now I've made the deal. Roo just better keep her end of it.

Creeping Out with the Kardashians

2011-07-07T14:40:00.000-07:00

Please, Kim Kardashian, please go away.

I know I'm not alone in wishing that Kim K. would go back into relative obscurity and take her whole heavily-made-up, blinged out, attention craving family with her. But I have a special reason that intensifies my desire to see Kim Kardashian's star wane.

I was Kim Kardashian's teacher.

It's true. At my very first teaching job at Our Lady of Perpetual Privilege in Los Angeles, I taught Kim seventh grade English. I also taught her now-famous sister Kourtney eighth-grade English. And there's something really unsettling about having my former students become so famous. And for so little.

I think it would help if Kim were talented in some way. I'm not a fan of Christina Aguillera, but if I she were my former student, I think I could stomach her fame. She obviously has an amazing voice and knows how to use it. And she can dance. She has earned the spotlight. I'm still not sure why Kim became famous in the first place. And it's my understanding that Kourtney is famous because she's Kim's sister, so... It's all very confusing to me.

In some ways, Kourtney's fame bums me out even more than Kim's. Kim, as a seventh grader, was snotty, perpetually bored, and not especially bright. Kourtney was actually a sweetheart. She was smart and engaged in school. She was a normal, likable kid. (Kim was a pretty normal kid, too. Just not likable.) I'm not sure what I would have imagined Kim doing as an adult, but I wouldn't have guessed it would be anything especially impressive or important. Kourtney, on the other hand, could have done something meaningful with her life.

Actually, from the little I've seen of Kim on the four minutes or so I've caught of Keeping Up with the Kardashians, she's gotten a lot nicer since she was in seventh grade. So that's good to see. Either she outgrew her snotty, aggressively blasé attitude or she figured out that snottiness is unattractive and learned how to hide it, at least while the cameras are rolling (which, when you're a reality TV star is more or less always, I guess).

It seems to me that Kim Kardashian's moment in the sun has been a long, long, long one. When she first started getting television and magazine attention, I was icked out, but I figured it couldn't last long. But she just keeps getting more and more famous, it seems. I can't go to the gym without seeing her face staring out at me from at least two magazines on the rack near the door. Needless to say, the check-out line at any grocery or drug store is even more Kardashian-rich. Just yesterday, I was enjoying Tina Fey's hilarious and smart new book, Bossypants, and Fey made a reference to KK. That was perhaps the last straw for me. As Dr. Seuss might say, Kim K. Kardashian, will you PLEASE GO NOW?

It's bound to end some time, the media reign of the Kardashian clan. I'm sure at one time some former teacher of Paris Hilton winced daily at the sight of her former pupil's media antics (Paris Hilton must've gone to school at some point, right?) and wished Paris would just go the hell away. And it happened, more or less. I just hope it happens to my former student soon. I wish her the best, really. But I want her career (if you can call it that) to chill out just enough that I don't have to look at her famous ass on a weekly basis.

'Til such time, if you have any idea where one might be able to sell the school portrait of a really famous, not very talented Armenian bombshell, drop me an email at oralhygienequeen@gmail.com. Thx!

It's (Almost) Always a Good Time to Floss

2011-06-25T20:03:00.000-07:00

I support flossing. I advocate flossing. I floss daily, and encourage my loved ones to do the same. Occasionally, I even floss in public. (Oh so discreetly, of course. Or not. But whatever.)

I recently witnessed a public display of flossing, however, that I disapproved of. Strongly. Flossing behind the wheel. DWF - Driving While Flossing. No!

A few days ago, on the first leg of my family's annual trip out to the Jersey Shore to spend three weeks or so with my beloved in-laws, we were sailing down Interstate 70, my Old Man in the driver's seat and me riding shotgun, kids throwing stuffed animals back and forth in the back seat, when I turned to my right and witnessed this atrocity: A dude flossing his teeth while driving. As anyone who cares about oral hygiene and has ever had a really bad paper cut on one index finger can tell you, you need two hands to floss. This guy was flossing, both hands off the wheel and busily engaged in what would otherwise have been a wholesome exercise in healthy teeth and gum care. I was appalled.

I beg you, good people: when you're behind the wheel and feel the need to floss your teeth, pull over. The same goes for texting, downloading ring tones, applying make-up, or eating tacos. All you should be doing while you're driving is concentrating on the road and conducting your one-ton vehicle down the highways and byways that other motorists are also using. Our lives are in your hands, dude.

Let me say it again: our lives are in your hands.

Things I Do that I'd Like to Do More

2011-06-05T18:03:00.000-07:00

When I think about my overfull life, I sometimes try to think of things I could cut out of it, to create more breathing space, more time to do the things I really care about. I can never come up with anything to cut. Everything "optional" in my life seems essential in some small but important way to my wholeness (playing guitar, reading and writing poetry, writing in my journal and in this blog, and doing yoga are examples that spring to mind). When I think about giving these little things up, I fear I would stop being me, or at least being me as fully as I need to be in order to be happy. As much as I love my job, I would cut that out (or at least cut it back significantly - teach half as many classes as I currently do, say). But of course, I can't do that. I'm actually the primary breadwinner here at Casa Oral Hygiene (the Old Man teaches half-time, wrangles children and cooks a lot of the time, and fits as much freelance editing as he can in the remaining spaces), and we need my whole salary to pay the bills. I don't want to spend less time with my family. In fact, I'd like to spend more. But I'd also like to spend more time alone.

Actually, time alone is probably the one thing I have really and truly given up in my quest to fit everything in. And that is sad. But as important as it is to me, it's the hardest thing to create and the easiest thing to let slide. In order to be alone, I have to make space and time, space and time with no immediate goal or end product. That means enlisting the help of my Old Man, and luckily he is very supportive whenever I do say I need time alone. But it's very abstract, this business of spending time alone. It didn't used to be. It used to happen all the time, naturally. And then we had O., and it seemed like I rarely got to be alone. But as he got older, it became more and more possible to make that time. And then we started thinking seriously about another baby. And I knew, as I grappled with that huge, difficult decision, that one thing I'd probably be giving up, for all intents and purposes, was time spent alone.

And I was so right. Now I'm the mother of two small children and it seems like I'm never alone. Of course, I'm alone sometimes. I drive places alone. I go to the gym and work out without interacting much with anyone. I grade papers alone in the office or at the kitchen table after the kids are in bed. I walk to or from school by myself. But none of those count. Time in the car is not time for reflection or time to let my mind wander, and lord knows time at the gym isn't. Time out walking by myself could be, but not when I'm trucking as fast as I can to make it to work on time, or trucking home as fast as I can so I can pick Roo up from daycare on time or get O. to soccer practice. The one time I'm really alone anymore on a semi-consistent basis is when I go to the library or shut myself in my office to write poetry. Then, I'm by myself, I can let my mind wander, and reflection is part of the process. But that time is so limited anymore, and I sometimes feel like the need to sit and just think is so great a prerequisite for actually trying to begin a poem that I spend an inordinate chunk of writing time just sitting and staring off into space.

It used to be that I'd get an evening alone sometimes when my Old Man was at band practice. But then I joined his band. And I love that - it's fun, fulfilling, and challenging, and it gives me something I'd really missed not playing music with other people for so long. But it's something added to my life. And it eclipses alone time that I didn't even think that much about 'til it was gone. I could certainly just not hang out with my man some evenings when we're both home, and occasionally I do that in order to work on a poem or submit poems to journals. But I like spending time with him, and I feel like I don't get enough of that either, so I don't always think of that as something I want.

At this very moment I'm stealing a few minutes alone to write this post, and I can hear my Old Man and my beloved kids downstairs. And I need to go. It's nearly time to get the kids ready for bed. Its funny: I began this post intending to talk about sleep as one thing I prioritize in my life, but would still like to prioritize a lot more (something I'm especially aware of now that it's summer break and I'm actually getting eight hours of sleep most nights). But I realize that of all the things I value and cling tightly to in my life, one of the ones that is most crucial to me is the one I've really let slide. And it's the easiest to let slide because when it's gone, it becomes nearly invisible. But I sometimes think I can't let it slide much longer and hold on to the relative degree of sanity I currently enjoy.

Thankfully, summer is here and time is more free, so I guess it's time to start working time alone back into my life. Maybe by the time school starts I'll be able to remember how important it is to make it happen, whatever else is also going on.

You Can Have It All, Part II

2011-04-24T19:41:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I can't have it all, or rather can't do it all. I know. But I try to do as much of it as I can. And, as I mentioned in my first post, that was seeming fairly manageable. And then suddenly it began to seem less manageable.

What happened?

Well, first of all, this guy I'm really into talked me into joining his band.

It's sort of a long story, but my Old Man has been playing in various permutations of nascent rock bands for the past two years or so, having fun playing music again but frustrated that no particular lineup seemed to be gelling. Flakey, drunk drummers and flakey, overcommitted bass players seemed to plague him. But he's been playing with a reliable drummer for awhile, and a couple months ago he began encouraging to come down to the basement and play bass with them. Finally I found a little "extra" time to do it. So now I'm in a band again. A very low-key, low-pressure band, to be sure. But a band takes a certain amount of time, even a low-key one. It also takes energy, and though my main issue is the scarcity of time, I'm still a teacher and mother of two in my early forties: energy is also a precious commodity in my personal economy.

The other thing that happened is that my Old Man and I started cleaning our own house again.

For a bit over three years, we've been having a paid cleaning crew come in and clean our whole house once a month. This was begun at my insistence, inspired by the time issue. We never seemed to have time to clean the house adequately. And having someone else do it once a month was really nice in some ways. I loved the feeling of the whole house being clean all at once, a feat we could never seem to accomplish when we were doing it all ourselves. It was also great to just have it done without having to put in the time. But there were problems. The first cleaning crew we tried kept canceling. We'd spend two harried hours tidying the night before and morning of a house-cleaning day, only to come home to a dirty house that afternoon and an apologetic message on the answering machine. There were always good reasons. Car accidents. Sick children. Surgeries. Asthma and high pollen counts. I don't doubt a single one of the excuses given for any of these missed cleaning days. But the fact was that these cleaners seemed to be coming maybe one in three times they were supposed to come. And straightening up our whole house for no reason again and again was getting old (as was coming home from a tiring day and finding that I had to sweep and mop all the floors like now, before the kids turned them back into a zone of toy chaos).

So we tried another service. They were more expensive, but they came every time. And that was great. For awhile. Then they started missing things. They didn't mop the floor. (Ugh. So now I'm coming home from work and mopping the floor again.) And when I called to tell the owner of the service this, she apologized and took twenty bucks off our bill. But then it happened again. And then we came home to find a damp rag sitting on top of my Old Man's laptop. (WTF?!?, in the parlance of our times.) And then they not only didn't mop the floor, but failed to sweep or vacuum significant areas of the floor (like, behind every single door). I am not a boss lady by nature, and I can only call and bitch about shoddy work so many times. My Old Man, who has never really liked the idea of strangers coming into our house when we're not home, nor of other people cleaning our toilets, suggested maybe we save ourselves the cash and the hassle and go back to doing it ourselves. And so we have.

And, actually, it's great. We clean our house more thoroughly than any service we've used would, and we can tidy and clean when it works for us, not on some preordained day that always seems to be the most hectic time. And I actually like cleaning my house. I'm such a grown-up. It's satisfying and theraputic, and I can blast my ipod and lose myself in the zen of scrubbing. But I don't have time! It's really hard to find a weekend that is not crazy packed with obligations, and/or grading, and/or enticements. And yet, of course, we make the time, just like we make time to have band practice or to record a new song. But it comes at a cost. And I think something else has to give.

I just haven't figured out what yet.

Interlude: tickle = torture

2011-04-10T20:25:00.001-07:00

I was hoping to return for another installment of my post series on too much to do and not enough time, but I'm too busy. (Ironic, non? C'est la guerre.) But I've got a word to say about tickling.

My Non-Fiction Writing students are keeping blogs this semester, and today one student's post was on tickling, how it's really no fun at all if you're truly ticklish. I couldn't agree more. I honestly think it's torture to tickle a kid for more than about one second. Seriously.

When I was a little kid I used to be subject to this torture of being tickled for long, agonizing minutes, and it was so horrible and such a chronic problem that I consciously worked on a way to get grownups to stop it. The maddening dilemma of tickling is that you want to say "No, you asshole! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!" but all you can do is laugh, which seems to send a message along the lines of "Oh, what fun I'm having!" It makes the tickling so much worse, this way that your own body seems to be betraying you.

And so, as a very young child, I taught myself to convert the involuntary laughter my body produced when I was ticked to tears. There's a switch in there somewhere, and if you can trip it, you stop laughing and start crying. It was the only way I could get my uncle Joe to stop tickling me for torturous minutes at a time. I know he didn't mean to be cruel, but it was cruel. And he felt terrible the first two or three times I cried when he tickled me hard after I figured out how to cry while being tickled. But I didn't care; I was just so relieved to be able to stop the torture.

You Can Have It All, Part I

2011-03-27T20:22:00.000-07:00

I wrote in a recent post about my desire to figure out a way to "do it all." I know I'm not alone in this. Most of my friends have a similar feeling, as I think many creative, intelligent people with wide interests do. And when it comes right down to it, I know that I can't do it all and that it's probably a recipe for insanity to really try. But I'd like to do most of it.

I've been thinking on this perpetual desire I've had to do more than I can really do, something I've been struggling with since I was in college, but which has gotten a lot more pressing since I've become a mom. Lately I find I've made a certain kind of peace with the limited but still pretty massive amount of stuff I do manage to do. I have a very full life and play many roles, most of them reasonably well, and in my clearer moments I feel proud that I pull it all off in spite of the fact that I'm not naturally very organized or efficient (it's amazing how long it takes me to clean my desk, for example) and the fact that I insist on trying to get eight hours of sleep a night (and actually succeed at getting seven most nights).

In my clearer moments, I look at my life and think I'm really lucky to have a lot of different cool stuff going on and so much stimulation in my life, and I know that even if I'm not able to spend as much time doing any one of the dozen or so things I really care about, still, I manage to spend a decent amount of time doing most of them and some time doing all of them. And, hey, that's really not too shabby.

In my more befuddled moments I think Shit! I'm not doing (or I'm hardly doing) X, Y, and Z thing I want to do! And on top of it all, I think my life is on the verge of being totally out-of-control!

Those more befuddled moments tend to become the norm rather than the exception during periods of my life when I suddenly have something new and time-consuming added to the already precariously balanced load that is any given week of my life. Like last spring when I found myself heading up a contentious search committee at school and when O. joined a little league team that had two ninety-minute practices a week, plus games. That put me over the edge and I really felt like I was losing my mind for about six weeks there. And during that period, I had to give up many of the things I usually like to do at least a little bit each week; my guitar gathered dust, I wrote no poems and read few, I neglected my journal aside from the occasional five-minute pen-scrawled kvetch, I allowed my typically somewhat messy house to devolve into domestic disaster mode.

That was bad, and I felt very harried and harassed for an uncomfortably long stretch. In my normal life, I feel harried and harassed on a pretty regular basis, but usually for about five or ten minutes (in some scenario involving one or both of my children) or occasionally for an hour or two (in some scenario most likely connected to adults at my school). And I can handle those short periods.

But suddenly, just as I've begun to feel that I'm making peace with what I manage to fit into my life and what I can't really fit in to the extent I'd like to, I find myself taking on new stuff, or (perhaps more accurately) reincorporating stuff I'd either consciously chosen not to do or things that had fallen by the wayside. And a meditation on those things, their allure, and my inability to give anything else up in order to accommodate them will follow in a future installment of this post.

In the meantime, tell me your story of balance or lack thereof. (Then watch an adorable performance of the song to which my post title alludes.)

Hollywood? Meh.

2011-02-27T16:07:00.001-08:00

I usually get pretty excited about the Oscars. Even though it's always on Sunday night, the busiest school night of the week, I watch every year. Sometimes I watch with a stack of essays in my lap, grading during the commercials and technical categories while the TV is muted. This year, I'm just not that excited.

Part of it may be that I haven't seen many of the nominated films. My Old Man and I actually made it out to the theater to check out the creepy, dark, but well acted and beautifully twisted Black Swan. (I recommend it, especially if you've seen The Wrestler, also directed by Darren Aronofsky. I see them as companion pieces.) And we rented The Kids are Alright, which I found a compelling portrait of a family in transition and a basically good marriage in crisis. (I also appreciated that the fact that it was a lesbian marriage was simply part of the story, not the main point.) But as much as we wanted to see True Grit, The King's Speech, The Social Network, and 127 Hours, we just didn't make it to any of them, nor any of the other films that got the big Academy nod. We made a point of trying to get out to see more live theater and music performances this year, and I think all those tickets bought in advance to edifying cultural events ate up most of the evenings of babysitter-scored.

(We did take the kids out a few nights ago to see all the animated shorts nominated this year - Thanks, local art theater! Long may you thrive. - and I'm rooting for Madagascar, Travel Diary. O. and Roo are both hoping that the hilariously depressing Let's Pollute wins.)

More than the lack of having seen many of the movies that are going to be in the spotlight tonight, however, I think there's not room in my head and heart this week for thinking about movies, actors, and scripts. My mind has been straying toward Madison, Wisconsin in pretty much every free moment I've had for the past couple of weeks; keeping up with events there and trying to spread the word to my networks of friends and acquaintances about how to support the fight against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's anti-Union, anti-democratic budget bill has taken up all my extra thought and energy. I feel like the future of the American labor movement - and by extension, American democracy and the American middle class - is hanging in the balance. With all that's going on in Madison, I just can't get it up for Hollywood tonight.

They tell me LA's beautiful when it rains...

2011-02-16T19:39:00.000-08:00

But I don't believe them.

My title comes from a poignant and beautiful Neko Case song called "In California,"* which is in my head because I'm going to California in a couple days. Specifically, I'm going to Los Angeles, which is California. But it's also a world in itself.

I've been very excited about my trip to LA, mostly because I'm going to visit my dear friend Feral Mom, and I'm really looking forward to seeing her, Mr. Feral, and their adorable six-year-old twins. But, I have to admit, a smaller but still significant part of why I've been anticipating my LA visit is because after all the snow, ice, and ass-freezing cold we've endured here in the Midwest of late, I want some perfect weather.

Let's check the forecast, shall we? The weather in LA this weekend: around 60 degrees with a 70% chance of rain. The weather in Champaign-Urbana this weekend: around 50 degrees with a 20% chance of rain.

Not the marked contrast I was imagining.

I lived in LA for three years back in the early nineties, and your likely assumptions about the weather in that fabled city are correct. It's 70 degrees and sunny approximately 354 days out of the year. Why do two of the ten or so days that it's going to rain in LA this year have to fall on the two full days that I'm going to be there?

Now, in reality, LA is beautiful when it rains, because rain in LA provides a lovely contrast to the unrelenting sunshine that can, truth be told, get a little oppressive day after day after day. When I lived in LA, I always felt strangely elated when the skies turned gray and poured buckets.

But I don't live in LA now. I live in Central Illinois, where we've had this brutal winter, and I want my two days of balmy sunshine, damnit!

I will settle, however, for seeing my good friend, eating at some amazing restaurants, revisiting my favorite paintings at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and having a latte at the first cafe where I was a regular. And I will still take a walk on Venice Beach, even if it ends up being a walk in the rain.

* Actually written by Lisa Marr, formerly of Cub, who (coincidentally) my and Feral Mom's band played with at the Metro in Chicago. But it's a Neko Case song in the sense that she's the only one who has recorded it (as far as I've been able to ascertain).

Five Things

2011-01-30T08:46:00.000-08:00

Last week I gave my Non-Fiction Writing students a prompt: write about five things you want to figure out in the next five years. After the writing time was up, I was giving students a chance to read their lists aloud, and one of my students asked what my five were. I'd been spending the writing period trying to catch up on paper work, so I hadn't thought about it. But I promised my students I would.

Five Things I Want to Figure Out in the Next Five Years

1. How to keep my desk clean. Make that how to keep my desks clean, since I have clutter disease on both my desks - the one at home and the one in my office at school. It takes me forever to clean my desk, and then when it's finally clean, it seems like it gets cluttered again within a week. Why? One word: paper. Cleaning up clothes, toys, dishes, tchotchkes - that's all relatively easy because they're different colors and shapes and sizes, and I can quickly decide what I use regularly and need to store, and what I don't use and need to get rid of. Provided that I have the time to keep on top of it, keeping that stuff in order is possible. Paper tends to be 8 1/2 by 11, and it tends to be white. And it tends to pile up and pile up, and I can never decide if it's worth recycling or if I need to keep it for future reference. And once I decide to keep it, I can never figure out where to file it, or if it's worth creating a new file folder just for this one piece of paper.

2. How to improvise on guitar. I started playing guitar when I was twenty, so I never had all those hours of noodling around that all my guy friends who began playing when they were adolescents seem to have had. (For some reason all the guys I know who play guitar started when they were fourteen, or younger. All the women I know who play started when they were twenty or older. Pre-teen and teenage girls, if you want to play guitar and haven't started yet, get on it!)

3. How to do it all. I want to be able to do my job well and be a good mom. And I want to read novels that have nothing to do with school. And play my guitar. And exercise regularly. And spend time alone with my Old Man. And write poetry. And go out with friends. And keep my house tidy enough to promote my own sanity. (And clean my desks more often!) I want to spend more time with my kids, and I want to spend more time by myself. And, realistically, I need about 73 hours in a day to get all of this done. Especially since I want eight hours of sleep every night too, please.

4. How not to let crazy people take up my time and energy. One thing I've learned in my years of being an adult is that you can't avoid crazy people. They will show up in almost every area of your life at one point or another. You will have to work with at least one, and chances are you'll eventually have to work closely with one. They'll show up in your family, and if you get married, there's bound to be at least one in the family you marry into. My problem is that I can't just say "Wow, that person is crazy. I think I'll try to ignore him or her to the extent that it's possible." I always have to try to fix things. Thus, time and energy sucked into the gaping maw of insanity. And that makes it harder to figure out how to do all the stuff I want to do up in #3.

5. How to listen to my kids. Before I had kids, I always assumed I'd listen to my kids very intently, once I had kids. Now that I have kids - kids I love to pieces, whose perspective on things I truly care about - I occasionally find myself only half listening to them. Not because I don't care, but because I'm a very busy and distracted adult with a lot going on. And because, although my kids usually say funny, interesting, endearing, or amazing things, sometimes they go on and on in great detail about things that I'm actually not that interested in, and then it's a bit of a struggle to listen. Especially if I'm also trying simultaneously to figure out where I left my keys or what needs to go on the shopping list before my Old Man leaves for the store. But I know that as my children get older, listening will only get more challenging, because as children become more and more their own people, their parents sometimes have to struggle to hear what they're actually saying through the filter of what the parents want to hear (or are afraid to hear). And that, I think, must be when the listening thing gets really challenging.

I Do Not Love My Kindle... Yet

2011-01-06T14:25:00.000-08:00

My beloved aunt who tends toward excessively generous gifts got me a Kindle for Christmas. It never occurred to me that I might want a Kindle, but I do read a lot. I'm an English teacher for Christ's sake! So, fine. I'll own a Kindle.

Still, I was ambivalent. When I saw the commercial for the Kindle (or maybe the Nook... it was on mute) I watched attractive, thin people tossing their Kindles into their backpacks and bike baskets and purses - so convenient! - and thought "Yeah! Compact. Portable. Just like a book." It seemed unnecessary.

If I felt the Kindle might be superfluous, my Old Man was sure of it. His comment on learning about my aunt's gift? "Don't open it. It'll be worth more on eBay if the packaging is intact." And, yes, it's true that we did sell the digital picture frame she gave us on eBay a couple years back. But that gift was really ridiculous. A Kindle's not ridiculous. I'm just not sure it's me.

But it's a gift, so I'll try it. That was my attitude. I opened it. I set it up. I started browsing around for books. But I quickly realized that ebooks are only a few bucks cheaper than actual books. And I had a hard time coming up with a title of a book that I was willing to pay almost full price for without actually ending up with a physical book. I like books! And for those books I don't want to own, my local public library is just down the street.

Part of my problem is that I'm married to a fairly voracious reader. My Old Man reads four books for every one I read, and I'm continually trailing after him, picking up one of his recent reads that he's sold me on. This makes it really hard to think of a title I want to spend twelve bucks on that I couldn't get at the library for free or at my local used book store for way less than an ebook.

Does anyone out there own and love a Kindle? And why should I love mine?

Five Minutes' Worth of Kid Quotes

2010-12-11T15:27:00.000-08:00

Five minutes ago, overseeing Roo washing her hands, I admonished her, "Honey you don't need to use so much soap! That's wasting."

She looked up at me with stern brow furrowed. "Kids gotta do what they need to do!" she informed me emphatically.

Now I'm sitting at the dining room table as O. makes imaginary scenarios on the living room couch with his thirty-six (but who's counting?) silly bandz, and he calls in to me "Mom, come admire what I did!"

It's their world. We just live in it.

Where Are All Those Posts I Wrote?

2010-12-08T20:10:00.001-08:00

I can't believe I haven't posted in over a month. I could swear I've posted at least three times since this last "update on my pukey family" post. That's because I think so much about a post in my head, convinced I'll get fifteen minutes sometime soon to transpose it from my brain to the internets. But then that (apparently) does not happen. Ah, the posts that never were.

Hopefully, I will be posting in earnest soon. In the mean time, here's 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence for you, to still the craziness of this modern world:

......

......

......

......

..

(That's my visual representation of 4 minutes and 33 seconds. Now wasn't that lovely? And avant-garde?)

When It Rains...

2010-11-07T19:52:00.000-08:00

it either rains really really hard or for a long time.

Around here, it's been raining hard for a long time. Or, raining hard, then letting up for a few minutes, then raining some more.

It started with my Old Man getting the stomach flu on Halloween. And Halloween happening to be on a Sunday. Now I know why my Old Man is prone to saying "Damn, I hate Sundays." I sort of thought it was just a teacher thing. He hates Sundays like I hate Sundays - it's a school night, and we have to work to prepare for the week ahead. But the fact is that my Old Man does both the grocery shopping and 90-100% of the laundry on Sundays. And last Sunday, with my man laid up, I did the grocery shopping. (Do you know what it's like to do the grocery shopping for a family of four when the last time you did the grocery shopping was ten years ago, in the pre-kid days, approximately seven store-floorplan rearrangements ago? It's like running a 5K through a giant maze stoned out of your mind on benadryl.) And I did the laundry. OK, I did half the laundry. Poorly. And I got the kids ready for Halloween and took them trick-or-treating. Which was fun and the highlight of my day, but exhausting. Especially since Roo the Lion got tired after an hour and needed to be carried the remaining hour, carrying which involved a lot of putting down and picking up because of course she also wanted to keep trick-or-treating. And of course, we had to hustle to keep up with O., dressed up as Rodrick from Diary of a Wimpy Kid and booking ahead with a gang of neighborhood youth. Roo was an adorable lion, but that made all the picking up and putting down and carrying no less exhausting.

(Break for gratuitous Halloween picture.)

So, after the Halloween Sunday from Hell, I appreciated my dear Old Man in a whole new way, the poor nauseated fellow.

Then, just as my Old Man was getting back on his feet, O. came down with the stomach flu, reminding us that he has not yet learned to aim when he pukes. He only puked twice, but ended up hitting all of his bedding, as well as the futon cover and quilt from the living room. More laundry.

Then, Friday night, just as I started to get beyond the paranoia of interpreting every stomach twinge as my turn in the bed of nausea, I began to feel really wiped out. I went to bed at 9 PM, slept like a rock all night, and when I woke up breakfast smelled terrible and I didn't feel so hot. I'll spare you the rest of the details of my restful weekend.

But enough about my week. How are you?

Poop P.S.

2010-10-16T19:13:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to let curious readers know the happy ending to the poop saga: Roo is fully potty trained, at long last. She poops in the appropriate place with little ceremony and no need for bizarre rituals involving submersion in warm water. She likes to announce her success loudly, usually characterizing her output as either a "big snake poop" or an "elephant poop," and she still gets a treat whenever she drops a deuce. But aside from that, it's just routine.

She did ask me today, "Why don't you and Daddy and O. get a treat when you poop?" I told her that when you get to a certain age, you just don't get a treat anymore for something so normal. Then I added, "At a certain point, pooping is its own reward." (I refrained from saying "My reward is that I get to be alone and unmolested for five whole minutes!")

"I still like to get a treat when I poop," she told me. Of course you do, little Roo. Of course you do.

The Poop Saga, Part II

2010-10-01T19:00:00.000-07:00

OK, for those of you just tuning in, you need to go back and read part I of the Poop Saga first.

So, we had threatened to withhold dessert unless Roo started pooping in the potty. (Please remember my disclaimer about the word poop - I hate this word! Which makes all of this that much harder. But it's a little to squalid to be constantly talking about your child "shitting" or "dumping" when you have to talk about it so damn much, as you do when you have a toddler. Especially one who refuses to get her shit where all human shit must eventually get.) But now we were ready to actually do it.

It's amazing how hard it is to imagine eating dessert while my barely-three-year-old daughter goes without. Note the subjunctive mood there. My Old Man and I have not actually inflicted this torture on her as of yet. The closest we've come is saying "Well, I guess no dessert tonight." But to actually sit and fill our faces with ice cream sundaes or poppyseed brioche while she looks on, crying inconsolably. No, we haven't had the heart to actually do it yet.

Now DoctorMama sagely comments that no dessert does not in any way approach child abuse, and that is true. But first of all, Roo is only two weeks past her third birthday. The whole "if you don't do this, an unwanted consequence will ensue at some later point" thing is beyond her. Plus, she's totally fucking adorable and the thought of her crying in anguish while watching me do the thing she wants to do more than anything in the world at that moment just makes me lose my appetite, even where chocolate Häagen-Dazs is concerned.

Basically, I just can't say no to this face:

Or, at the very least, I have a really hard time saying "No ice cream for you. But ice cream for me and your dad and your brother!"

Okay, so this brings us to the other night, the night of the "breakthrough" poop. I frame that in air quotes because it was sort of a breakthrough poop for Roo, but more a poop midwifed with much patience and work on my part. So who knows if it is truly the dawn of a new day here at Casa Oral Hygiene.

Okay, the "breakthrough" night. Basically, the Old Man and I had decided Yes, this is it. We will sit and eat dessert and Roo will have none, and this will inspire her to get it in the john where it belongs, and soon! So as dinner ended and we prepared to move on to dessert, Roo, who was well aware of our plan to have dessert without her, proclaimed that she had to poop. Okay, fine, I thought, Maybe she'll be moved to actually make this happen. So we went upstairs and she sat on her little red Baby Björn potty. And she sat. And sat. And it became clear to me that this was not going to happen. She wanted to poop. It had been three days - she undoubtedly had something to work with in there. But she had developed this thing about pooping, and now she really couldn't make it happen.

I've never been so tempted to give my three-year-old a strong cup of coffee.

But then I had a thought. Roo needed a bath. And it had gotten to the point where if she sat in a warm bath for a bit, a turd would emerge without fail. What if I put her in her bath and just waited for a sign, then whisked her out of the bath onto the little red potty? Here we see what a weak soul I truly am. While I should have been downstairs enjoying some dessert to the tune of childish wailing, I was upstairs cooking up a plan that risked yet another terrifying encounter with RMS Turdtanic.

I won't give you a detailed blow-by-blow of the next half hour, but suffice to say that I put Roo in her bath, with the red potty on the bath mat nearby, and we proceeded to do a little dance of in-the-bath, out-of-the-bath-and-on-the-potty, repeat, rinse, repeat. Finally, tired of the back and forth that was getting the floor more and more wet (and determined to avoid another poop-fishing incident), I just set the potty in the bathtub (the bathwater thankfully rising to a point below the potty's rim), and she sat on it while I washed her hair. And, finally, she pooped. And we clapped, and I flushed her turd down the toilet and wiped her ass and finished washing her, and we went downstairs. And we all had dessert.

And I couldn't decide whether I deserved to win some kind of award for parental patience and support, or whether I deserved to be committed.

The Poop Saga Continues

2010-09-28T19:27:00.000-07:00

Yes, you read me right. It's been another couple months since I first blogged the shit and piss storm that is our attempt to potty train our daughter, and things have not yet resolved.

Or maybe they have. We had a breakthrough this evening. But I'll get to that.

Okay, so there have been steps in the right direction. We put Roo back in pull-ups and after a couple of weeks of a carefully calibrated combination of a. pretending we didn't care where the hell she peed, and b. giving her stickers on a chart that added up to gummy worms every time she did pee, she started keeping the pull-ups dry again. But she resolutely refused to poop in the potty. And we tried to pretend we didn't care. But that was hard. Too hard. Both my Old Man and I found ourselves encouraging and cajoling and remonstrating.

And pretty soon, it wasn't just that she wouldn't poop in the potty. Now she just wouldn't poop. At all. She just held it.

Now, no one can hold it forever. But she held it as long as she could. And finally it would come out at some time when she was relaxed and caught off her guard. Where and when is Roo relaxed and off her guard? Two places: when she's in a deep sleep and when she's in the middle of a warm bath.

Cue the bone-chilling theremin music.

Yes, it soon came to pass that my Old Man and I were alternately getting up in the middle of the fucking night to change poopy diapers. Or fishing turds out of our toddler's bath water.

Yes! I know it's horrible! It's a fucking nightmare.

So now we're afraid to bathe the poor girl, and we go to bed each night with the uneasy feeling that we'll be woken mid-REM to deal not just with a poopy diaper, but with the big-ass poopy diaper of a small child who's been holding it for three days.

Desperate measures were called for. We had tried coaxing. We had tried incentive programs: Dora undies, promises of double scooped ice cream cones. Now it was time to try tough love.

We finally told Roo that she would not get dessert 'til she pooped in the potty. That we would sit at the table and eat dessert without her until such time as she pooped in the damn potty. (I am not proud of this measure.) We knew she was capable! She'd done it for three weeks straight back in early summer! And we were desperate. Desperate.

Okay, I know I said I'd tell you about tonight's breakthrough, but I'm getting too worked up remembering the middle-of-the-night and middle-of-the-bath horrors. I need to go watch a Jane Austen movie for a bit, escape to a world where no one poops.

I'll be back to tell the rest soon.

Whippy Cinema

2010-09-05T20:40:00.000-07:00

We had family movie night last night here at Casa Oral Hygiene, watching the new film of the Wimpy Kid diaries, which O. has giggled his way through this summer. Roo is still under her pronunciation misapprehension with regard to the title of those books, and so all day yesterday, excited at the prospect of movie night (and especially, I think at seeing a version of the stories her brother has talked so much about lately), she kept asking me, "Are we gonna watch Diarrhea of a Whippy Kid?"

I didn't think it was possible for that Roo-ism to sound more squalid, but somehow with the verb "watch" preceding it, it does in fact become ... more squalid. Not only is there a kid around here who has diarrhea of the "whippy" variety, but we're actually going to watch said diarrhea. (Then of course, I find myself wondering what exactly that would entail. It seems to suggest watching the whippy kid in the act of... Okay. I realize I'm taking this too far. I'll stop.)

The movie was funny, and I'd recommend it as great family fare.* But I thought the books were actually much funnier, and I wouldn't see the movie 'til you've read at least the first couple of books. (What do you expect? I'm an English teacher.)

* There's one scene that might be scary for little kids - a dark woods on Halloween with a local scary story attached. Roo was unfazed, but I think O. would've been freaked out at her age.

An Open Letter to Victoria's Secret

2010-08-17T15:23:00.001-07:00

Dear Victoria's Secret,

Please go back to making comfortable cotton bikini undies that cover a woman's butt cheeks.

Last summer when I came in for my yearly purchase of new cotton bikinis, I discovered - to my horror - that you had changed the edging along the leg holes and that they no longer covered my butt. Instead, they climbed bit by bit up into my crack as I walked.

Despite the fact that I hate your catalogue and your ads, and despite the fact that I'm uninterested in 99% of your merchandise, I am a loyal customer. For nearly twenty years - twenty years! - I counted on the quality of VS cotton bikinis to cover my butt cheeks and not crawl into my crack. Now, you've changed them and made them just like every other pair of cheap panties out there.

And so, for the past two years, I've been on a sisyphean search for a decent pair of underpants. I've tried numerous different boyshorts that look hot as hell but lack the elastic edge to keep them from crawling into my butt crack. I've confronted and been driven from racks of bikinis sporting silver and teal zebra stripes, proclaiming their affinity for happy hour, or cracking wise about a would-be seducer's chances with the wearer. I've attempted nylon-spandex blends and been reminded of why I began buying cotton undies in the first place. I've tried Hanes cotton briefs that are pretty damned comfortable and cover my ass, but that veer a little too close to the shape of granny panties and only seem to come in atrocious colors.

I want cute undies, but first and foremost I want comfortable undies that I don't have to pull out of my butt crack all day long. I'd rather buy fugly Hanes and be comfortable than buy your new and disimproved panties and be uncomfortable.

Please return to making panties that stay put (like the panties of roughly 1990 to 2008). I'll never buy another bra from you if you don't, because I really come in for the panties. (And I'm getting pretty tired of having your name on so many of my bra straps, anyway.)

Let me know if you return to your former glory, panty-wise.

Sincerely,
E.

Control

2010-08-03T19:41:00.000-07:00

Whoever said that potty training is easier with girls can kiss my ass.

(I'll bet it was the same person that said that your labor comes early with your second pregnancy. I believed that shit, watching my due date approach and fade into the distance, growing bigger and hotter every early September minute.)

At first, it seemed like things would be easier with Roo. When her brother O. was a toddler, he dutifully sat down and peed on the potty his first experimental try at 18 months, but after that wouldn't go near the thing again 'til he was fully three. Once he decided he wanted to go for the big boy undies, however, he never looked back. He never once had an accident. (Okay, never once 'til he got cocky at age five, held it too long, and peed his pants in the back yard.)

Roo started showing a sincere interest in the potty in April, at the tender age of two-and-a-half. By May, she was in pull-ups and peeing exclusively in the potty. (Let me pause here to say that I never used the word "potty" before I had kids, and I fully intend to scrub it from my vocabulary as soon as Roo is using the big toilet full-time. As the daughter of a man who used "potty" as both a verb and a noun well into his fifties, I must announce this resolution to anyone who will listen.) In June the big moment came: poop in the potty. We celebrated and moved her into undies. Everything was awesome. Girls are easier!, I thought to myself.

Not so fast.

After a few successful poops in the potty, the first red flag: Roo shit her undies. What the hell? I was at a loss. I had never experienced this with O., but I figured that accidents happen. I threw out the poopified undies and considered it a fluke. Then it happened again. And again. And again!

As truly horrifying as it is to clean up, you can't really yell at a little kid for shitting her pants, nor can you punish her. We just went back to pull-ups and figured the poop part would work itself out if we continued to encourage her. Which we did. We even let her wear undies once in awhile when we were reasonably sure a poop wasn't imminent.

Then, a couple weeks ago, she started peeing in her undies.

Shit! I mean piss. I mean shit and piss! Fuck.

Part of me was tempted to see this as a case of parental error. We just started her too early. Except we followed her cues. And she did great for weeks.

Now I see it as an issue of control. The potty drama of the past few weeks has been accompanied by bed time drama. Our little girl, who we successfully trained to be an easy and solid sleeper, has started playing crazy-making games at nap time and bed time. Since she was a baby, she's been a snap to put to bed. Lately, though, it's taking my Old Man and/or me 45 minutes to an hour, with lots of negotiating, to get her down to sleep. Hit me with whatever advice you will, but know that we have tried letting her cry it out. She's mobile and tenacious and talented. She will not be kept down.

So, I think it's a control thing. She doesn't have a whole lot of power in her little world, but she can control where she pees and poops, and (to an amazing extent) whether and when she sleeps.

She's back in pull-ups full time now, and we're just letting her use the potty when and if she wants. Hopefully if she gets the idea that we don't really care that much whether she uses it, she'll start to want to use it again.

As far as bed time goes, wish us luck. I just hope this toddler weather blows over before school starts in two weeks.

Frolicking with the Feral Family

2010-07-28T13:21:00.001-07:00

I have about a dozen small post ideas inchoately floating about in my head, and perhaps one or two of them will emerge as actual posts soon, but today the news is that Feral Mom is in town with her excellent family, and the Oral Hygiene family and the Feral family have already gotten together twice in the past 24 hours, and Feral and I have grown-up plans tonight, then more family hanging tomorrow. Woo! Tits! (As someone I love very dearly might say.)

Wimpy Kid P.S.

2010-06-27T19:45:00.000-07:00

As O. makes his way through the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books (we're waiting for number four to become available at our local library), Roo has come up with her own toddlerspeak way of asking her brother to read this particular title to her. Since "diary" means nothing to her, she replaces it with a near-homophone that does have meaning for her. And since her pronunciation of certain consonants is still under construction, she drops the "m" from "wimpy." Thus, in Roo's mouth, Diary of a Wimpy Kid becomes

Diarrhea of a Whippy Kid.

So vivid. So squalid. One shudders to imagine the illustrations in that series.

I'm Kvelling. Just Kvelling.

2010-06-12T14:25:00.000-07:00

I couldn't have been happier or prouder the first time I came downstairs and found O. in this attitude:

I've been waiting. And suddenly, here it is: my kid is reading, and totally absorbed in his own book, lost in another world. It's awesome.

(It's also pleasantly quiet around here. Ahhh....)

The first chapter book O. finished on his own was Diary of a Wimpy Kid. And as soon as he finished it, he turned around and started reading it to Roo. I'm sort of amazed that she can sit still for the adventures of a sardonic middle-schooler. But it's a graphic novel, so there are lots of drawings to look at.

I must report, though, that O. is not the only kid around here who reads to littler kids.

It's contagious.

R.I.P. Sonicare

2010-05-22T16:26:00.001-07:00

Well, my good old space age toothbrush finally died, after eight good years. Actually, it didn't technically die; I put it down. I won't go into too much detail because it's a fairly disgusting tale, but suffice to say it got too gross to keep. This eight-year-old version of the Sonicare had an empty chamber in the area where the replaceable head attached. It seems that small amounts of water began to find their way into this chamber, and after awhile things began to grow in there. I tried a regular cleaning with a Q-tip and tea tree oil, but little bits of mold kept returning. So finally I stopped using it, and just let my Old Man use it exclusively so that we wouldn't have to switch the heads and the dastardly material could be sealed away within until a new electric toothbrush could be purchased. In the mean time, I just used an old fashioned toothbrush with bristles powered by me and me alone.

When I finally got a bit of time to go out and buy a new electric toothbrush I decided that, rather than get a new Sonicare, I would make a bold move and defect to the Braun-Oral B camp. I'd been fascinated by Braun electric toothbrushes for awhile because, while the Sonicare's bristles just vibrate back and forth really really really fast, the bristles of the Braun electric brushes actually whirl in circles really really really fast. This reminds me more of having my teeth cleaned at the dentist, which kind of excites me. In a totally non-sexual way (as far as I'm consciously aware.)

I had planned to go out, bite the bullet, and buy one of the nice expensive Braun-Oral Bs, which run between $70.00 and $100.00. This is in the neighborhood of what I paid for the Sonicare way back when. (I would never in a million years pay $100 for a pair of jeans, but an electric toothbrush is another story.) When I got to the dental care aisle at Walgreens, however, they had a $20 Braun out there for anyone to grab, but the really expensive toothbrushes were in a locked plexiglass case. (Weird. Who shoplifts an electric toothbrush?) Because I have a full-time job and two small children, I run any and all errands within a window much too small to actually take care of the task in a considered and thorough way. The five minutes it would've taken me to find a clerk would have put me behind my schedule, and so I made a quick decision to try the $20 toothbrush. I elected not to buy extra heads for it though, in case I hated it and wanted to return it.

When I got it home and tried it, I regretted my decision to go for the Braun Vitality, the cheap version. It was really loud, even louder than the fairly noisy Sonicare, and it was rough. Its action reminded me a bit of the grinder attachment on a dentist's drill. (And however much I may love going to the dentist, I do not love the drill in any form.) The first time I used it, it made my gums hurt, which seemed bad (even though the accompanying material noted that this might happen, and suggested that it would be a temporary effect). I planned to repackage the toothbrush and return it at my next opportunity, opting for the more expensive version, which I assumed would be more suave.

The receipt was inadvertently thrown away, though, and a scramble to find it in the dumpster ended in frustration. And so I ended up keeping the cheap Braun, and I continued to use it, and over time began to get used to its loud, rough ways. After a few days my gums stopped hurting. But since I hadn't gotten extra heads for the Braun, my Old Man had to keep using the Sonicare. I figured I'd eventually go out and either get more heads for the Braun Vitality or spring for one of the more pricey Brauns. (I also entertained scenarios where I tried to parlay my Oral Hygiene blog brand into a free pricey Braun, but a woman who does not have time to go out and buy a new toothbrush has no time to write letters trying to weasel a free toothbrush out of corporate America. So far none of my free oral hygiene swag has included an electric brush.)

The other day, though, I grabbed my old Sonicare out of habit, twisted open the replaceable head, and was met with a horror show inside. Yech. Not just a bit of something shadowing the edges, but a full on mini-zoo of fungal disgustingness. I chucked the thing immediately in the trash, feeling guilty that I'd let my husband use a toothbrush that had that horrible stew slowly brewing within.

So now it's time to either buy an additional head for my rough and ready new toothbrush so I can share it with the Old Man, or shell out for the expensive version of it. Or I could go back to the Sonicare family. What's an oral hygiene queen to do?

"Fat" Is Not a Dirty Word

2010-05-03T18:59:00.000-07:00

Have you seen Joy Nash's "Fat Rant"? If you haven't, you should. It's funny, it's brilliant, and for the majority of the American public, it's crucially educational.

There are so many important things the beautiful and talented Joy Nash has to say here. But one of the most radical things I realized when I first saw her rant is that "fat" is not an insult. Well, not necessarily an insult. As used in our culture, it usually is an insult. But when used in a neutral way, it's simply a descriptive word, as Joy points out.

But most of my life, I think I've been afraid to use the word. What other word should I use? Describing people is part of life, and we call people "tall," "short," "skinny," "petite," etc. all the time. But for many people "fat" seems like an insult. What's a better word? "Overweight" probably seems more socially acceptable to some people, but it's terrible, implying that the person being described is the wrong weight. Would I rather be called "skinny" or "underweight"? Um, I'll take "skinny," thanks.

(I am, full disclosure, skinny by most people's measure, and have always been skinny except when I was a kid and was, objectively speaking, scrawny.)

Without a word that's not an inherent judgment ("overweight") or a patronizing euphemism ("plump"), it's hard to talk about body size in a way that's not charged with the fat phobia that runs rampant through our culture. I'm not saying I'm the enlightened one who is leading the way. Introducing Joy Nash's "Fat Rant" to my Gender Studies class today, I was struck by the fact that even though as a teacher I'm actively trying to promote body acceptance for people of all sizes (and as anyone who's suffered through adolescence can attest, feeling good about your body can be a challenge no matter where you fall on the body size spectrum), I still find myself at a loss for words sometimes in real life situations that involve talking about actual people's body size. I realized today that I don't use the word "fat" because it carries with it so much negative baggage. But is this a word that only fat people can use positively? I think if I actually used the word, it would help me to better live the values that I espouse, and to teach my kids to accept people's body size and not feel like they have the right to make assumptions about how people live based on their body size. I want to start using the word "fat" in a way that is free of judgment. But I'm still a little afraid to use it at all.

Am I a Bitch?

2010-04-16T19:52:00.000-07:00

My sister-in-law is pregnant. I'm excited for O. and Roo to have their first cousin. And I'm happy for my sis-in-law and her husband, who are understandably really psyched to be having a kid.

But I'm sick of hearing about it.

I'm sick of hearing every detail of every single doctor's visit, I'm sick of hearing about every pregnancy-related symptom my sister-in-law has, I'm sick of hearing in detail about her shifting moods and about the jerk who remained seated on the subway while she stood for her whole commute, I'm sick of hearing about every damned craving she has. Really, cravings? What is this, 1958? This woman has a full-time job.

Okay, let me just say that she is in the beginning of her second trimester. How the hell is the poor guy on the subway even supposed to know he's refusing to give up his seat for a woman undergoing the beautiful mystery of gestation?

If we were close, I would not mind hearing lots of detail about her pregnancy. I might still think it was weird for her to email me a copy of every single ultrasound picture she's received to date (which she has), but I'd be happy to listen to her talk about this stuff. It's exciting, I know. I'm totally into the whole pregnancy thing. Yes, it is beautiful, it is a mystery, and there's this new life being created, and blahdy blah blah. Yes!

But we are not close. At all. I am close to my other sister-in-law, but not so much my pregnant sister-in-law. We have a perfectly civil relationship, and I wish her well. But, no I don't want to join the baby pool (as I was invited via email to do today). What the hell is a baby pool? Aside from a little plastic trough that tots wade in?

I blame it partly on facebook. This is a woman who updates her status about eleven times a day, on average. (And that's not even an exaggeration.) And these days 95% of her status updates are pregnancy-related, either explicitly or implicitly. (Cravings, anyone?) So when I get an email or a phone call with details about the pregnancy or the baby, I'm already kind of saturated.

Am I an asshole for not opening the newest set of ultrasound photos? I mean, I'll be totally into seeing the baby once she or he is actually out of the womb, I swear! But at this point, I'm more than happy to wait.

The Cleanest Tongue in the Midwest

2010-03-24T13:50:00.000-07:00

Last night my Old Man and I watched the movie Julie & Julia. He hated it. I thought it had its merits. I actually loved the Julia part. I've always had a deep affection for Julia Child, and Meryl Streep really captured her good natured, exuberant joie de vivre and her big boned, robust grace. And the film effectively conveyed what was exceptional about her relationship with her husband, Paul. The Julie part was less captivating. I found Julie herself annoying, albeit in a somewhat sympathetic way, and didn't really see what she saw in her man or what he saw in her. That part of the movie could have been more of a frame, as far as I'm concerned, rather than half the flick.

My view of the movie in general is neither here nor there, but I bring it up because a particular moment in the movie struck me. Julie wrote a blog, of course - an initially unknown and underread and ultimately famous and lucrative blog. But even before her blog became famous, her readers began sending her stuff. Food. Speciality food items, which apparently she had blogged about having trouble getting in her area. (Though since she lived in Queens and worked in Manhattan, it's a bit hard to imagine what ingredient she'd be unable to find.)

My blog, humble as it is, and unlikely as it is ever to land me a book contract or a movie deal, has also earned me certain items in the mail. Specifically, toothbrushes and tongue cleaners. Sometimes an oral-hygiene-related business will come across my blog, email me, and ask if they can send me their toothbrush, toothpaste, or special tongue-cleaning device. Not one to turn down free shit (and, yes, a little flattered by the attention paid me as a bona fide oral hygiene expert), I'm always happy to receive these items. But, so far, none has inspired me to write about them.

In fact, I sometimes forget about my oral hygiene swag, which languishes in some drawer in the guest bathroom. I'm reminded when O. says "Mama, are you ever going to make that commercial about that tongue brush?" (When I got the tongue brush in the mail, O. asked about it and somehow my explanation gave him the impression that I'd been given the task of creating an ad for the thing.)

None of the tooth brushes I've been sent have impressed me as worthy of special note. They're all just ... toothbrushes. I think just about any soft-bristled toothbrush you buy at your local grocery store or pharmacy will serve you fine. I'm also a fan of the Sonic Care electric toothbrush, but I've never been sent one to review. (Attention Sonic Care, Braun, and Oral B representatives: send me your newest electric model, and I'll happily try it out and share my impressions!)

The one tongue cleaner I've been sent is actually a tongue brush (with the dubious brand name of "Tung"), and I must sadly say that, even though their tongue brush is pretty fancy looking and has a cool angled head, and even though they sent me a special tube of tongue cleaning gel to go with it, I am not an advocate of tongue brushes.

Here's why. According to my sources, "Brushing the tongue does little more than mash the bacteria and plaque deeper into the filliform, without addressing the real problem at the posterior part of the tongue." Yech. Apparently, it's the back area that really needs scraping. This anaerobic part of the tongue is the hiding place of most of the "bacteria and other debris that are the primary source of gaseous volatile-sulfur compounds (halitosis), hard plaque (tartar), and mineral leaching acids (tooth decay)." And scrape it you must, with some sort of hard and relatively sharp edge. A spoon works, apparently. But I prefer a simple tool designed especially for the task, and my favorite tongue scraper is the snow-shoe shaped variety that scrapes off the whole tongue one one goop-swoop.

My aunt recently asked me how to clean her tongue cleaner. I just rinse mine well with hot water after I use it each morning. I suppose if you're really fastidious, you can clean it the way you'd clean a toothbrush after a bout of sickness. A nice long soak in hydrogen peroxide is one way, or a run through the dishwasher. I don't recommend the microwave. (Ask my long suffering Old Man if you're curious about that one.)

But whatever tool you choose to use, I do recommend cleaning your tongue. (Especially if you've recently eaten a saucy meal of French cooking...)

Happy St. Patrick's Day. Now Go Brush Your Teeth!

2010-03-17T11:01:00.000-07:00

Back to Our Regular Programming: Oscar Edition

2010-03-08T17:27:00.000-08:00

As I watched the Oscars last night, sitting on the couch surrounded by a pile of student essays that I graded while the television was muted during commercials and technical categories, I was struck by several things:

1. Sarah Jessica Parker's hair. That sort of bird's-nesty halo of frizzy escaped hair I get when I've had my ponytail in too long and have been pulling my knit cap on and off? SJP's stylist pulled a mean one on her by giving her that effect on purpose. Go Fug Yourself focused mostly on her weird-looking and unflattering dress, but I think the hair was what really killed her look. I know the "messy ponytail" and the "messy bun" are popular looks that have attained a status worthy of formal events, but the "Audrey-Hepburnesque bun that looks like it's been worn under a ski cap then slept on" might be taking the carefully-crafted-casual-hairstyle thing too far.

2. Sandra Bullock's speech. Maybe she deserved to win. I can't really say, because I haven't seen The Blind Side (though it's hard to believe that her performance in that was truly superior to those of all of her heavy-hitting co-nominees). And I liked the fact that she gave props to the real family the film was based on, and adoptive and foster moms all over the world. But I couldn't decide what I thought of her sapphic inside-joking with Meryl Streep. When she called Streep "a great kisser," I was amused and appreciative. But when she ended her speech by wrapping up her list of people to thank by adding "my lover, Meryl Streep," I got kind of weirded out. I was trying to figure out why, and it struck me that it reminded me a little of the way my adolescent male students sometimes engage in exaggerated homoerotic behavior as a form of joking clearly intended to distance themselves from any possibility that they could be gay. Would Bullock's quips about Streep have been funny if she weren't firmly established as a straight, femme woman? Was it lighthearted pro-gay quipping or subtly homophobic? I'm not sure, but it struck me as really weird.

3. Helen Reddy? Really? I was excited when Kathryn Bigelow won Best Director for The Hurt Locker, only partly because Bigelow is the first woman in the history of the academy to win this high honor (beating out her ex, big boy James Cameron). But when the orchestra began to play an instrumental version of Helen Reddy's pro-feminist AM radio anthem "I Am Woman," I just about hurled chunks all over the couch and my students' papers. As I writhed and kvetched about this cheesy choice ("I am woman, hear me roar, in numbers too big to ignore..."), my Old Man paused in folding the laundry to observe that it was tantamount to the academy playing "We Shall Overcome" a few years back when Denzel Washington became the first black man to win the Oscar for Best Actor. Except as lame and insulting as that would have been (cementing the "Hey look at us, aren't we progressive for finally fucking getting around to acknowledging the talent of black actors?" vibe that was already implicit in the awards that year), at least "We Shall Overcome" is still a powerful song that we all take seriously. While "I Am Woman" is just funny, and can only be palatable when deployed with a huge dash of camp. Helen Reddy was a goddess, as Uncle Bonsai so eloquently reminded us, but come on! That song is about as dated as "Harper Valley PTA". Not that a more tasteful and contemporary paean to the power of Woman would be appropriate, either. Nobody else gets special "identity politics" music as they leave the stage.

And that's the way it was on Oscar night here at the Oral Hygiene homestead.

Had a Dad, Part the Last

2010-02-28T20:05:00.001-08:00

So no one got why I writhed so much in my dad’s presence. Perhaps I could convey some element of the basic suffocation, but not the egregious things that really made my dad more than annoying and sometimes even alarming. “Asking too many questions” doesn’t really begin to convey the one-sided and prying nature of most of our conversations. It would start innocently enough with a basic parental inquiry, but as he questioned and I deflected his questions, we would begin a tortured dance of teenage passive resistance and increasing parental determination for some sort of meaningful information:

Dad: So, you went out with Amy and Mia last night?
Me: Yes. You know that.
Dad: What did you three do?
Me: Nothing. We hung out.
Dad: Where?
Me: At Mia’s.
Dad: Where are you when you’re at Mia’s house?
Me: We’re at her house.
Dad: No, I mean are you in the living room? In Mia’s room? Do they have a family room, a rumpus room in the basement?
Me: A rumpus room?
Dad: Where do you spend time when you’re at Mia’s?
Me: …
Dad: Well, what did you do at Mia’s last night?
Me: I don’t know. Nothing.
Dad: Did you play records?
Me: (Lying) No.
Dad: Did you watch TV?
Me: No.
Dad: Did you just talk?
Me: No, Dad. We just sat in silence the whole night. God.
(This whole time my dad is smiling this blithe smile he has, like everything is right with the world and this is just a completely pleasant, not at all tense heart-to-heart between dad and kid.)
Dad: Well, honey, I’m just curious about what you and your friends like to do when you’re together.
Me: Well I don’t even remember what we did. And I wouldn’t want to talk about it if I did.
Dad: (giving up that particular tack, but not giving up) So, are Amy and Mia your best buddies these days?
Me: No.
(Pause.)
Dad: So who is your best buddy?
Me: No one. I don’t have “buddies.” I have friends.
Dad: So who’s your best friend?
Me: (Lying) I don’t know. No one. God.

Is this normal? Are all parents of teenagers this persistent, this impervious to their kids’ indications that they don’t want to talk? And if so, do any of them have a kid who can’t bring herself to just say “Shut up and leave me alone”?

I don’t know if this conversation, in itself, seems chilling to you. Maybe it was the context. Something about the way my dad walked through a closed door without knocking, then wondered why I was always locking the door to my room. Something about finding him reading the postcards my first boyfriend had sent me, which I’d stored in a shoebox under my bed. And then, when I reasonably got angry with him for invading my privacy, hearing him argue that he was perfectly justified in reading them, since they were, after all, postcards. (Stored in a covered box. Under my bed.) Something about the way any bit of information I shared about myself might be used to wage yet another battle in his ongoing effort to give me detailed advice regarding every possible aspect of my life.

At that point I thought everything would get so much better once I went away to college. Instead, everything with my dad – and everything between me and my dad – just got weirder and weirder. Perhaps in a few weeks I’ll share with you a few of these later moments. (Watch as E’s dad moves to California and decides to become a homeless environmentalist canvasser! See him create for himself an almost unpronounceable acronym! Look on in astonishment as Dad harasses E. long-distance via the telephone, and witness her decision to cut off all communication with him for almost three years! ) But for now, I think this story has gobbled up enough of my blog. (Or bloggled up enough of my gob.) So, soon we’ll return to the regularly scheduled program of lighthearted musings, scatological anecdotes, and the occasional advice on matters orally hygienic.

Thanks for reading.

Had a Dad, Part VIII

2010-02-10T16:44:00.000-08:00

The move from Chicago to Sheboygan, Wisconsin exacerbated an already bad situation. In his Chicago life, my dad had a certain amount of sophistication, though sometimes he moved in a rather riff-raffy crowd. In Sheboygan, he had no peers. No one was weird like he was weird. He started golfing. He joined the “Y’s Men” at the local YMCA where he and I both spent much of our free time. He tried to do boring, normal adult stuff, but he was just too odd to really pull it off. He was out of his element. Nothing stuck. We moved to Sheboygan in the middle of the school year when I was in sixth grade, and stayed there ‘til I graduated from high school, at which point I moved on to college and then jobs in other states, my dad stayed in Sheboygan for another ten years. During that entire time – sixteen years – I don’t think he made a single close friend.

In Chicago, my dad had good friends from way back. Bill Byrne, Bruce Durant, Joe “Screams” McQueen. These were “buddies,” as he called them, who he’d play chess with, or meet at the park or the JCC for pick-up basketball games. Sometimes my dad’s friends were a bit shady. He had to bail Bill out of jail when he got picked up by the cops for selling pot on a public beach. Our apartment was robbed when I was seven, and when I was a bit older my dad told me that he thought it might have been Screams McQueen, who dropped off the scene not long after the robbery. Then again, my dad wasn’t always the most trustworthy friend. I know for a fact that my dad made out with Lorna, the live-in girlfriend of Screams, while they and their infant son were staying with us between apartments. Screams was working a Saturday shift at the vacuum cleaner factory, the baby was sleeping in the living room, and I was supposed to be cleaning my always messy room, but I caught my dad and Lorna going at it in the kitchen. I have no idea if it ever went any further than that between them, but that was far enough.

But while there was a certain level of sketchiness with some of my dad’s Chicago friends, at least he had friends. In Sheboygan, people just did not get him. There were really no freaks there. Or if there were, they were really freaky, messed up, beyond what my dad was willing to put up with. It seems like all the functional freaky people abandoned this small, German Protestant city for somewhere more interesting, and left behind only the freaks too far gone to escape. So while I was on the verge of needing to create some distance in the very close relationship between me and my dad, he was newly in a situation where all he really had in his life was work and me. Thus, the suffocation began.

The suffocation. How to describe it? It consisted of things that in themselves were troublesome but not huge – him giving me too much advice, asking me too many questions, always seeming to be in the same room as me, talking way too long to my friends when they came over – but all of these things together added up to an increasing feeling of just wanting him out of the room, out of my hair, out of my business. My dad never seemed to pick up on my cues that I wanted him to leave me alone, or he just willfully ignored them. And it made it worse that no one else seemed to perceive it. Incredibly, my friends didn’t mind my dad always hanging around and chatting incessantly. They thought he was funny. And I guess he was, in small doses. But his eccentric superfriendly demeanor and goofy sense of humor wore thin for me. I felt guilty rolling my eyes and hinting more and more strongly that I wanted my dad to scram, especially since all my friends were standing around laughing and joking with him. When he’d finally leave, one of them would invariably say “Your dad is so nice,” or “Your dad is so funny.” And I didn’t want to correct them. I knew my dad was a freak, but I felt pretty ambivalent about anyone else understanding the true extent of his oddness.

In one sense, it would have been a relief to have someone understand the reality of my life as my dad’s daughter. But when I was in high school, I cherished the perception of normalcy. I was not normal. My dad was by no means normal. My family was unconventional in various ways – I lived with my dad and stayed with my mom during school breaks, I was an only child, and our household shifted to include my grandparents and sometimes my young aunts, who were much closer in age to me than to their brother, my dad. All of these things made me feel like a curiosity. In Chicago, many of my friends’ parents were divorced, and unconventional family arrangements weren’t uncommon. In Sheboygan, the classic intact nuclear family was the rule. I’d never heard the phrase “broken home” ‘til I moved to Wisconsin. And as I got older, I began to perceive that my home was broken in more ways than one.

Had a Dad, Part VII

2010-01-25T19:54:00.001-08:00

I’ve thought a lot about what happened between the time I was eleven and calling my dad at work every day at lunch time and when I was sixteen and would barely respond when he spoke to me. My dad was a great dad for a young kid. He was patient, involved, caring, sympathetic, and fun. And he loved having someone to hang out with and goof off with, someone who respected him and took his advice and never challenged his wisdom or authority. But after about twelve, I started to grow up. I no longer wanted to hang out with my dad all the time. I found his corny humor less and less funny. I began to tire of his constant advice, and his habit of reinforcing and reminding me of his advice. And the more I grew up and tried to pull away (the way every kid needs to), the more he held onto me and tried to keep things the way they were.

It seemed like it happened fast. Maybe there was an intermediate period in eighth grade, ninth grade, where I was getting irritated with him but held my tongue, tried to hide it. I have always been naturally filial, inclined toward showing my familial elders affection and respect. But by my sophomore year in high school, my dad was pushing it. I wanted my space, my privacy. I wanted to stop being such a kid. My dad ignored every cue I gave him. I’d say “Good night. I’m going to bed now,” and he’d chime “Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bed bugs bite!” And there was a long period when I’d say, in the most bored and patronizing voice I could stand to inflict on him, “And if they do, with your shoe, beat them ‘til they’re black and blue.” It’s kind of amazing, actually, that I continued to participate - even in a bored teenager voice - in this ritual that we'd been doing since I was four. Any other teenager would have said “God, Dad! I’m not a baby anymore. Can we drop that shit?” But I kept responding, I guess because it seemed less cold to respond in a snotty voice than not to respond at all. And I just wasn’t capable of actually slapping him with an honest slam. Eventually I just stopped responding with my half of the cutesy rhyme. But I never said “Dad, face it: I’m not a little kid anymore. You have to let go of the bedbug thing.” And so he kept saying “Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bed bugs bite,” in spite of the ringing silence that followed.

Maybe I was part of the problem. Maybe if I’d been more of a normal teenager, capable of supreme harshness (the way many of my friends had no problem saying what seemed to me the coldest shit to their parents), I would have broken through the cocoon of denial my dad surrounded himself with. Maybe he would have been forced to face up to the fact that I was growing up and he needed to move on. Maybe not. This is a man who is capable of deep denial, who continued to answer the question “How are you?” with his pat sunny answer, “Above average,” even when he was unemployed, living in his car, and missing his two front teeth.

That all happened later. I’ll get to that.

Whatever the potential of my dad waking up and realizing that he needed to let go of me, I was not capable of sending him that wake-up call. I have a deep-seated propensity for social guilt, especially familial guilt. I hate to make someone feel bad, even if I do it unintentionally, or even if the person actually deserves it. And more and more, my dad deserved it. Maybe even needed it. But I couldn’t bring myself to hit him full in the face with that slap of reality.

Had a Dad, Part VI

2010-01-20T19:53:00.000-08:00

My friends liked my dad. Often he’d take me to the movies with a friend, and rather than just dropping us off and picking us up again, he’d go to the movie with us. I never minded this, and my friends never seemed to either. This was probably partly because my friends were all basically geeks like me. My bad-kid phase was very short-lived. It came to an abrupt halt when we moved from Chicago to a small city in Wisconsin, a move that struck me as the perfect time to recreate myself in a role I was more comfortable in. I had realized that I wasn’t very good at being bad. I always seemed to be the one who got caught. I would lie, then forget that lies require confident follow-up lies, but I’d forget to maintain it and give myself away. It was too much work, and I was starting to realize that many of the things I loved to do – like reading books and drawing pictures of horses – didn’t really help me fit in with the crowd of precocious ruffians I’d fallen in with. So in my new town, I quickly went back to being just a simple bookish dork, with bookish dork friends who saw no problem with my dad tagging along, even though by sixth grade all of my other friends’ parents just dropped us off at the movies and punctually returned again at the end of the show.

My dad was different than the parents of my Wisconsin geek friends, though. While some of my Chicago friends had young, hip parents along the lines of my dad, or even old, hip parents like my friend Andrea’s vegetarian chef dad and beatnik painter mom, my Wisconsin friends all had very staid, predictable parents. My dad was the “fun dad,” the “cool dad.” He made jokes that seemed funny to us at the time and enjoyed the dumb comedies we wanted to see (Airplane comes to mind, as does the Jerk). And, though we weren’t rich, he was generous with me and equally generous with my friends. He’d pay for everyone’s ticket and buy us all candy and a big tub of popcorn to share. My dad was always popular with my friends. He was charming; he made them laugh. And this was great when I was eleven or twelve, because I wanted my dad around and would’ve felt terrible if my friends hadn’t. But later, in high school and college, when conflicts between him and me became the norm and I mostly just wanted him to leave me alone, the popularity of my dad among my friends was sometimes hard for me to take. I would complain to them about how corny and embarrassing he was, how he pestered me to follow his constant advice, how he didn’t respect my privacy, and they’d just look at me in disbelief. “Your dad? But he’s so nice. He’s so funny!” I felt like there was no one I could unburden myself to with regard to my mounting dad frustrations.

Had a Dad, Part V

2010-01-11T20:56:00.000-08:00

The fact that I still adored my dad in an unambiguous and uncomplicated way when I was eleven is perhaps more remarkable. I was no longer completely obedient. I had fallen in with a bad crowd at my Chicago grade school, kids who had starting to smoke and wear thick black eyeliner back in fifth grade. Now I was in sixth grade, and I’d begun dabbling in shoplifting, experimenting with skipping school when I thought I could get away with it, and lying to teachers on a semi-regular basis. But none of these experiments in juvenile delinquency translated into rebellion against my dad. I rarely lied to him, at least not on purpose, and I never talked back to him or strained against his authority. His was, of course, a particularly gentle brand of authority. But I don’t think that matters. When kids are trying to be bad, they don’t need an especially strict or harsh parent to rebel against. Still, I never rebelled against my dad. When I was caught slipping a lip gloss into my pocket while I was at the drug store with my dad, and we had to go to an office in the back of the store and be interrogated by the grim-faced store detective in his shiny-kneed polyester slacks, I wasn’t sure what my dad meant when he said, “You can be sure that E. will be punished when we get home.” This time, I thought he might really mean it. I was punished, but not much more harshly than if I’d gotten caught stuffing clothes under my bed when I was supposed to be cleaning my room. I merely got fifteen minutes of “sitting on a chair,” and a short lecture. It was the lecture that got me, though. My dad didn’t yell. He didn’t don his clench-jawed mad face. He just said, “That was not smart. Don’t ever do that again,” then added, “Don’t you know that if you want a lip gloss you can just ask me, and I’ll buy you one?” He seemed tired and sad with disappointment, he seemed to assume this was the first time I’d ever done something like this, and I felt terrible. I remember resolving never to shoplift again, then thinking maybe just never with my dad. Then I realized that if I got caught again, my dad would hear about it whether he was with me or not. So I resolved never to get caught again.  

But even in this brief period where I was toying with the idea of being bad, my dad was still my best friend. I went home for lunch to our empty apartment, and while I ate my sandwich and apple, I’d call my dad at work and we’d talk on the phone. I did this every day. When I was in sixth grade. I have no idea what we talked about, but we talked. For ten minutes, maybe fifteen. And then we’d hang up, just like that. Later, when I went off to college and talking on the phone with my dad became an exercise in discomfort and trying to get off the phone with him an exercise in frustration, I looked back on these little daily phone calls with amazement.

We still went to the movies. Maybe I was a little embarrassed if I saw a kid from school there with a bunch of friends while I was there alone with my dad. But I just felt that flush of social mortification, then moved on. Once my schoolmates turned to go into their theater and my dad and I walked on to ours, it was over and I didn’t think about it anymore. I didn’t consider that I might just stop going to the movies with my dad. That was not an option.

At some point during sixth grade, I heard some sad story on the news about someone dying, someone with kids, and the story focused on the family’s loss, the kids left behind without a mom or dad. It struck me that my dad could die, a thought that was too horrible to contemplate. Like all kids, I worried about the people I loved dying. My mom had been a chain smoker, and when I was seven or eight I essentially badgered her until she finally quit smoking. In fifth grade, my grandpa had come down with some mysterious illness that made him fall asleep without warning, once while he was driving. I worried a lot during that period that he would die. But I lived with my dad most of the time, he was the one who was there every day, and he was always healthy and had no particularly dangerous habits. It never occurred to me that he might die, until I heard this story that day in sixth grade. It made me feel so awful to think about losing my dad, about him dying without knowing how much I loved him, how much I really really loved him. My family has always been very demonstrative, and my mom and aunts always told me they loved me, and I told them I loved them. My dad and I said “I love you” every day, probably multiple times a day most days. But still, I had this fear that my dad would die and I wouldn’t have expressed to him just how much I loved him. So I started hiding little notes all over the house, in places where he would find them, that said “I love you, Daddy!” or some variation on that. Back then, I almost always addressed him as “Daddy.” I’d hide these notes inside his dress shoes, in his vitamin bottles, tucked into his folded t-shirts toward the bottom of the pile.

My dad taped those notes up over his dresser and his desk. When we moved into my grandparents' house later, when I was in high school, he transplanted a couple of them to his new room in their basement. They stayed there for years, the construction paper fading and getting soft around the edges.

Had a Dad, Part IV

2010-01-04T19:43:00.000-08:00

When I was five I wanted to marry my dad. I look back on that now and in addition to the thoughts anyone might have meditating on such a memory (Wow, how cute. Wow, how weird.), I think “How the hell did we get here from there?” How could I have been so uncomplicatedly, unambiguously affirming of my dad then, and how did things get so complicated, so ambiguous, so absolutely not affirmative?

Maybe every kid adores their dad at five. When I was five I figured out that everyone pretty much has to get married, and that girls have to marry boys. I know now that neither of those things are true, but at five that’s what the world I was busy figuring out told me. This was bad news. The idea of marrying a boy did not appeal to me, not at all. I recall wracking my young brain for a boy I’d be willing to marry, and none of the boys I knew qualified. Then it occurred to me that my dad was a boy. What a relief: I’d just marry him. I told him about my plan as we were driving west on North Shore Avenue in his big gold Buick, before it got the dent in the front left fender. He smiled and told me he loved me very much but that girls can’t marry their daddies. I’m sure I asked why and I’m sure he explained it somehow, though I don’t recall his explanation. But I do remember that as we talked about it, he figured out what inspired my idea, and he told me that someday I’d probably like boys better than I did right then. And I recall vividly that he said, “And, E., if you don’t want to get married, you don’t have to.” What a relief.

And what a great dad. This was classic Daddy. He listened to me. He did not laugh at me. He took my thoughts, my worries, my hopes seriously. He always seemed to find a way to explain things that helped me make sense of the confusing and sometimes frightening world of grown-ups. People often romanticize childhood, and though I had a happy childhood, I don’t look back on it wistfully, wishing I could return. A big part of childhood was getting in trouble for breaking rules I had no idea existed. My teachers, my grandparents, my babysitters were always taking me to task for doing something that no one had yet informed me was wrong. My dad didn’t do this. He seemed to have a very clear sense of what I knew already and should be held responsible for and what I didn’t know and should be taught before I was scolded. And he erred on the side of teaching me something I already knew a second time rather than scolding me for something I didn’t know was wrong.

But five is a pretty easy age, as far as a daughter adoring a dad goes. It’s probably not that hard to be a great dad to the kind of affectionate, obedient, and cute five-year-old I was. The fact that I still adored my dad in an unambiguous and uncomplicated way when I was eleven is perhaps more remarkable.

And that is where I will begin next time.

Had a Dad, Part III

2009-12-26T11:15:00.001-08:00

One thing that was remarkable about my dad was that he almost always took my side. If I got in trouble with a teacher, he would listen to my side of the story. And he believed me. I remember hearing him say to teachers or other grown-ups, “E. told me X, Y, or Z, and she doesn’t lie to me.” He said this even though I sometimes did lie to him, which he must have known. But when it came to my word against some adults, he always erred in favor of believing me. I don’t ever remember feeling alone, with my dad on the other side, in league with the other grown-ups. There would be times he would say to some other grown-up, “Well you can be sure that I’ll deal with this when we get home,” which to the other grown-up meant “She’ll be punished,” but which I knew really meant “We’ll talk it over, and my dad will listen to me, and he’ll take my side of the story seriously.”

I don’t know if I realized then that my dad was crazy. A little crazy. I don’t think I realized that. When you’re a little kid, your parents are the status quo, the definition of “normal grown-up.” There were signs then, though. Even then he would go through these phases, hard-core phases. The four-hours-of-chess-every-night phase, the flax seed phase, the “electric zapper” phase, the stand-on-his-head phase, the root beer float phase. Then there’d be a no-sugar phase, and we would have no candy, no ice cream, no sweets of any kind in the house. And he’d talk to anyone who’d listen about sugar and why it’s terrible and try to get them to read Sugar Blues and insist to them that the whole profession of orthodontia would collapse if only people kept kids under five from eating sugar. But after the no-sugar-at-all phase, there was the Friday night candy binge phase.

When I was about seven, my dad had a girlfriend named Susan, and her five-year-old daughter Aubyn and I quickly became good friends, almost like sisters. Susan had also read Sugar Blues and was a big proponent of sugar-free kids. But somehow she and my dad decided that no sugar ever went too far, was contrary to the spirit of normal childhood or something. And they decided that a lot of sugar every once in awhile was better than a little sugar every day. So my dad and Susan bought a big old bag of candy, a Halloween- or Easter-worthy bag of candy. And, though we were barred from eating any sugar at all other times, every Friday evening Aubyn and I were allowed to eat as much candy as we wanted. It was amazing – a dream come true. And, in a way, this is an indication of what a great dad my dad was, that he allowed me to have that dream-scenario experience of all the candy I cared to eat. But, at the same time, hauling down a big brown paper bag full of candy for your otherwise sugar-free kid to gorge on for thirty minutes of pure confectionary excess. It was also kind of crazy.

Had a Dad, Part II

2009-12-15T20:03:00.000-08:00

I had the best dad. When my dad took me out for ice cream, he always let me get two scoops. He never spanked me or even yelled at me. He brushed my long hair, starting at the bottom and working his way up so it wouldn’t snarl or tug. He let me pick out my own clothes when I was four, even if I picked crazy combinations. When I got older, he took me to the movies all the time, and we got popcorn and milk duds. When we saw Meatballs with Bill Murray, we both liked it so much that my dad suggested we stay in the theater and watch it a second time. We sat in our dimly lit plush seats and talked ‘til the next show started. That’s the kind of dad I had. He didn’t have somewhere to get to, things he needed to do; he was content to spend his whole day off with me.

He encouraged me. I don’t think I ever remember him saying anything critical of me. He told me I was the prettiest girl in the whole world. He insisted that red hair was the prettiest color of hair. He always reminded me how smart I was, saying that I could do anything I wanted to. “You could be a ballerina and the president of the United States if you want to.” I don’t recall him ever adding, “if you work hard enough” or “if you really really try.” He seemed to feel that I would do wonders, just by virtue of being me. And believing in myself as much as he believed in me.

He did yell sometimes. I remember now. Not often. And almost never when I was little little. But as I got older, sometimes he’d yell. And when he yelled, it was scary. His face would turn red and his lower jaw would jut out and he’d grit his teeth. Sometimes he’d shake his finger in my face, and that scared me. He never struck me, but he’d shake that finger so close to my nose, it seemed like he was about to thwack me. And then, I guess, he did say things that were critical, when he was really mad. He’d sometimes call me a “little shit,” I remember, and I knew even then that it wasn’t right for a father to call his kid that. And sometimes he’d say “why don’t you use your head for something besides growing red hair?”

But that was rare, the exception. When he wasn’t apoplectic, he was gentle and smiling. Even when he was annoyed with me or I’d done something wrong, he was usually patient and he’d smile as he gently explained what I’d done wrong or how I could do better. He gave me time outs (though we never called them “time outs” – it was just “sitting on a chair” – “Now you need to go sit on a chair for ten minutes”) and he talked to me for a minute first and then said, “While you sit here, I want you to think about what you did.” My dad had a lot of patience and talked to me like I was a person, not a pet or a baby. He had patience and patience and patience, and then when his patience ran out, he lost his shit. I’m a lot like that myself.

So, he was human, but he was still the best.

Had a Dad, Part I

2009-12-08T20:01:00.000-08:00

Here begins my posting of bits of an unfinished memoir, begun as a NaNoWriMo project. I have an impulse to introduce, but I think that's best resisted. Let's just jump in, in no particular order:

It’s a dark, cool, late summer night, and we’re sliding through the streets of the north side in my dad’s gold Buick LeSabre. He’s just picked me up from Grandma and Grandpa’s house, where I go after my day at Busy Beaver Nursery School when my dad has to work late, where I’ve eaten dinner and my grandma has forced me to finish the cold chop suey I hate and that makes me gag when I swallow it. We pull up in front of the synagogue on Pratt and Greenview. Holding hands, we go inside and enter a big hall with high ceilings that have bright tapestries and huge, colorful paintings hanging from the rafters. The room is crowded with grown-ups, little packs of kids threading their way around the clumps of tall people, who talk animatedly and hold pale drinks in short plastic cups. I’m not sure exactly what this even is or why we’re here, but I know it has something to do with a school, a new school that I might go to for kindergarten. Whatever this is, it’s exciting. There are rich colors and strange, beautiful things to look at, and all the grown-ups seem glamorous and confident and the kids remind me of the smart, creative kids with striped shirts and hair in their eyes on Zoom. My dad tells me that the kids from the school – the Gestalt Free School – painted the long, banner-like paintings hanging above us. I know this will be the perfect school for me. My dad found out about it, and now we’re here so he can talk to the teachers and some of the parents.

We go upstairs and look at the classrooms, and they are full of impressive and interesting things. Lots of overgrown plants, macramé wall hangings, life-sized hand sewn dolls dressed in real kid clothes, a little kitchen in one corner with big orange pottery containers on the counter, a rug area bordered by couches and a stereo with tall speakers. It reminds me more of the cozy apartments of my dad’s hippie friends than Busy Beaver Nursery School, which smells like sour milk and disinfectant, and is full of scuffed toys, and where there is no stereo, just a little faded red record player with Donald Duck painted on the lift-up cover. The teachers there don’t talk animatedly or let us paint giant banners in bold colors. They feed us PB&J on white bread and tell us not to scribble when we crayon and show us film strips on gun safety that give me nightmares.

Busy Beaver Nursery School is my grandparents – old, reliable, kind but stern, full of rules. The Gestalt Free School is my dad – vivid, hip, idealistic but unpredictable, making it up as he goes along.

The Scary Stuff Soon, and in the Meantime: Poop Humor

2009-11-30T19:01:00.000-08:00

Well, thanks to kind and encouraging commenters, I am planning to post excerpts of my dad-memoir-in-progress. I just have to figure out which chunk to start with. You'll see something here soon. And then I may actually start posting more than once every seventeen days, since I'll have a backlog of material. Things could get pretty crazy around here. Wait. I'll be talking about my dad. Things will certainly get crazy.

But before I begin with the heavy stuff, I have to share a wee poop story. (Heh heh. I said "wee" and "poop" in the same sentence.)

Tonight I was changing Roo's diaper after her bath. Just as I was slapping on the Pamper*, Roo let out a forceful fart. I laughed. She laughed. I said "Did you fart?" And she said "My poop barked!"

You can't make this shit up. And it seems to run in the family.

* We actually use Huggies, but "slapping on the Pamper" just sounds better. Don't come to Oral Hygiene Queen for slavish verisimilitude.

The Me in Memoir

2009-11-21T16:51:00.001-08:00

So, I'm writing away every day on my dad-centric memoir during my Creative Writing class, as my students work on their novels or short story collections or poetry collections. It's going well. My word count is nowhere near where the official NaNoWriMo site says it should be, but I'm pretty much ignoring that anyway, just as I encourage my students not to worry about it. The important thing, I tell them, is that we write every day, even if it's just for a few minutes. But Monday through Friday, I give them - and me- at least forty minutes every day.

It's going well. I'm struck by how much writing is learning, figuring shit out. I know this. I tell my students this all the time. "Writing is a form of thinking. Writing is a way of gaining understanding about whatever it is you're writing about." But, despite that, it's still a revelation how much I figure out about myself when I write about myself. And though I'm focusing on my dad, this thing I'm working about is also about me.

And for that reason, I'm nervous. I have told my students that I'll share what I've written come December, just as I'm asking all of them to share what they've written. And I'll give them the option of sharing an excerpt, if they don't feel ready to photocopy every false step and hastily-worded metaphor. So I guess I have the option of sharing only an excerpt of mine. But that would feel very unbrave for the mentor-figure of the group. Plus, I'm proud and I'd hate to have my already paltry word count reduced by my reluctance to share.

What am I worried about? Mostly that this stuff, which is so fascinating to me, will be boring to everyone who's not me. Why should anyone else care about my "I remember this and I remember that and then this happened and then I felt like that." I try to recall that in my view Joe Brainard's I Remember is one of the most vivid, compelling, and hard-to-put-down books I've ever read, though it's just two-hundred-some pages of brief paragraphs (sometimes only a short sentence) beginning with the words "I remember" in no particular order and with no plan or structure. But he was a New York School painter and neurotic bon vivant living in sixties Manhattan. And I'm just me.

I've also been sort of meaning to post excerpts of the memoir-in-progress on this blog. And perhaps I will. Soon. But I'm nervous. I'm apprehensive, for the reasons I mention above, and also because I'm afraid the conflicted, expansive, befuddling dad story will open up it's maw and swallow my blog. I'm afraid I'll have to change the name of my blog from Oral Hygiene Queen (a name that identifies me as my mother's daughter) to "My Dad Issues" or "Good Daddy Gone Bad" or "Turned Around, Man, Found My Daddy Gone."

I think I'll post some bits anyway. I hope I do.

NaMeWriMo

2009-11-04T17:56:00.001-08:00

I've never done NaNoWriMo before. I'm a poet. Once in awhile I bust out a short-short story and send it off to Quick Fiction and feel fine when I get my rejection letter because, after all, I'm a poet. (Though I actually feel fine getting rejection letters from poetry journals, too, since the chances of getting published are so astronomically small that I expect to get rejected, and only really react on the rare occasion a poem is accepted, or if I get that strange and wonderful thing, the form rejection letter with a bit of encouraging editor ink: "No way in hell will we publish this, but it was more interesting than most of our slush. Keep trying! Send us something else in nine months!")

This year, though, I'm doing NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month, for those unfamiliar with the acronym - or is it an abbrevianym?) because I got the bright idea to make my Creative Writing students do it. (I told them they can adapt the challenge to whatever form inspires them, which began a plethora of exciting acronymizing - National Short Story Collection Writing Month = NaShoStoWriMo, National Poetry Collection Writing Month = NaPoCoWriMo, and National Graphic Novel Writing Month = NaGraNoWriMo). Then one of them said "Are you going to write with us?" And what else could I say but "Of course."

So my version of NaNoWriMo is National Memoir Writing Month (NaMeWriMo, appropriately enough), where I am grappling with the enigma of my father and my relationship with him, trying to figure out how the mensch I adored so much at ten turned into the prick I finally had to cut off all ties with for several years at thirty. Actually, the real enigma is the reality that these two dudes are the same dude, at least in many ways. It will be interesting to share some of this with my students, given that I often use stories of the more innocent and hilarious aspects of my dad's insanity to amuse and inspire my students. But I never go to the dark places in my dad's personality, and to write a memoir, this I must do. I'll leave out some stuff. The porn, definitely. The copious quantities of midwestern weed, probably.

I'll let you know how it goes.

[Oh, and for those who are curious, a postscript to the lice thing: The lice thing was a PAIN in the ASS. They returned three times with Roo which was the worst, because she was the family member least able to hold still and deal with the treatment (or understand why we kept torturing her). As I've explained to several people who've asked why lice seem like such a bigger deal and a thornier problem than when we were kids: it's so bad now b/c lice have become superbugs, so the usual pesticide treatment (active ingredient: permethrin) is 50% effective or less. We ended up trying that (failure), then a horrible home remedy with Cetaphil cleanser (smelled nauseating and also failed on Roo). The thing that finally worked (and the one that was actually the least toxic) is "Licefreee," essentially a saline gel that dessicates the little fuckers and their eggs. I hope we're done with it, but the whole thing was such a fucking pain. God spare you from being lousy with lice.]

My Lousy Sunday

2009-10-26T10:32:00.000-07:00

Normally I love it when my Old Man runs his fingers through my hair. Yesterday morning, as he sifted through my hair with gentle, searching fingers, I held my breath in tense anticipation. When he untangled his hands from my hair and said "there's nothing there," I breathed a mighty sigh of relief. For the rest of the day, I felt a bit elated every time I reminded myself of the fact: "I do not have head lice."

My kids, however, did have head lice. This was already an established fact. With O. we had to search and search to find a critter that confirmed what we'd feared ever since we got the news that one of his little buddies had cooties. When we finally found something, we all had to hold still to ascertain that, yes, the little white fleck was actually moving. It must have been a young one, because when we went to check Roo, her hair was positively alive with unmistakable bugs, gray and crawling, little legs clearly visible.

Am I grossing you out yet?

So we spent the morning giving our kids insecticide shampoos, engaging in some literal nitpicking, and washing load after load of laundry with hot water. It was not pleasant. O. was heroic in his acceptance of the stinging shampoo, the fact that we had to leave it in for ten minutes during which he couldn't move much or touch his head, and the fact that we had to rinse the thick, goopy shit out for what seemed like another ten minutes to finally get rid of it. Two-year-old Roo was less understanding. Finally I just had to resign myself to the fact that she was going to cry in a most heart-rending manner the whole time. During the nitpicking part we got her to stop for awhile by allowing her to eat an unlimited quantity of Elmo cookies. It was a trial.

Even though I've been cleared by my resident nit-checker (after three separate checks), my head still itches like hell. And I have a whole new appreciation for the gravity of the word lousy.

Bless You, Dear

2009-10-18T20:02:00.000-07:00

Friday night I went to an art auction benefitting my school. An alumna who owned an art gallery in Manhattan left the school twenty-five framed pieces, and so a gala event was arranged to convert those art works to spendable currency. It was a rare chance for me to dress up and stand around eating chi chi hors d'oeuvres and drinking wine with my colleagues.

At one point a young woman approached me with a look on her face that said I am seeking information. I assumed she was an alumna from before my time, since she looked on the young side to be a parent of a high schooler or a rich donor-type. I expected her to say "Does the English department still teach [insert name of favorite or most hated novel]?" or "When did [hugely popular teacher who taught at the school for thirty-plus years] retire?" Instead she made my brain do a one-eighty flip in its pan by asking, without any preamble, "Where did Beezus play its first show?"

Beezus was the band I was in back in grad school. I lived then in the same town where I live now, but in many ways it seems like a totally different place. I was childless, I was scruffy, I was a carefree gradual student. My days tended to begin around ten AM and end some time in the wee hours of the morning. I was in a rock band (and at one point two rock bands). I spent a lot of time in the university's research library and a fair bit of time in bars, and I didn't know very many people who weren't associated with the university. Now I'm a full-time teacher and mother of two, what little rocking I do is all done for the pleasure of my immediate family in my basement, and I know a ton of people in the community and relatively few at the university. My days begin at 6:00 or 7:00 AM and I try to hit the sack at 11:00 PM. I don't spend much time on campus, but I know my town's parks, public libraries, and other kid-friendly spots intimately.

Which is to say, this woman was harkening back to a time and place that seemed very far away, even though Beezus had once played in the very building where we were standing.

I stood there for a minute trying to wrap my brain around the shift in context and finally answered. "Um, Mabel's. Though we hadn’t come up with the name Beezus yet at that show, and we had a different drummer. Let's see ... our first show as Beezus was at the Library." While my mouth was saying all this, my brain was thinking Who are you? How do you know Beezus? Why do you care where we first played? What's this combination of extreme befuddlement and warm excitment I'm feeling?

"Oh, I guess I was wrong," the woman turned to her companion (her husband, as I later learned) and he gave her an "I told you so" look. They proceeded to inform me they were both big Beezus fans as undergrads back in the day, and that she'd been sure she was at our first show. "I still play your record sometimes," she said, and I enlightened her to the fact that we'd recorded two more after that, news that seemed to genuinely excite her.

"Thank you so much for making me feel like a rock star," I said to her as I excused myself to get more chutney-encrusted brie. And she had made me feel like a rock star, momentarily yanking me out of my current life as teacher, mom, and responsible member of the community and back to that giddy role of a fledgling musician insanely excited to hear that someone likes the band. And that made me feel really young and really old, all at the same time.

Roo is Two!

2009-09-20T19:50:00.000-07:00

This was my baby girl a year ago, all pudgy cheeks and sleek black baby hair.

Now suddenly she's a year older, more kid than baby, with long curls all lightened by the summer sun. Our little Roo is two.

No, she's not old enough to drink yet, but she is apparently mature enough to help us inventory the beer selection. And as with everything she does, she has a grand time doing it.

Happy birthday, my sweet girlie!

Salma and Me

2009-09-13T12:57:00.001-07:00

I just had my first full-on sapphic dream last night. Perhaps there's been a little girl-on-girl action in my dreams before, but if so, nothing so clear and cinematic as this one, and nothing that stuck clearly in my memory in the morning. (It was my morning to sleep in this weekend, and dream occurred in that magic window between 7:00, when Roo got my Old Man out of bed, and 9:00, when I finally got up. Just long enough to get in some REM, but short enough that I can actually remember my dreams vividly.)

I was at some big fancy hotel somewhere in Mexico, and there was a wedding going on in the grand, majestic lobby. The food was all out on a buffet table, looking delicious, and I wondered if it was legit for a non-guest to help herself. The desert table was filled with baked goods from the real-life French bakery in our town where we buy our bread and I thought "Our bread's getting low and La Madeleine won't be open 'til Tuesday. I wonder if they have any bread I could buy." (What does it say about me that details of my day-to-day often intrude upon even my most interesting dreams?) All this time I was walking around with Salma Hayek, who was looking quite fetching in a saffron-colored strapless dress.

Salma and I made our way outside and began slow dancing to the strains of the wedding band wafting out into the street. I kept having the urge to put my head on her shoulder, but she was shorter than me and finally I figured out that I was in the dude role, dancing-wise, so I gently moved her head to rest on my shoulder. Then, suddenly, we were making out! It was full-on wet kissing with lots of tongue, and I could feel Selma's impressive breasts pressing against my more humble ones (which was, I must say, rather nice). Soon we were rolling around on the ground, really going at it. Be still my heart.

I'm sort of impressed that I was able to score such a smoldering hot specimen of feminine loveliness on my very first foray into lesbian dream love. I would not have pegged myself as Salma's type.

And of course, I told my Old Man about the dream this morning, grateful that the Salma-and-me scene didn't go any further than first base. One only wants to have to confess to so much after a morning of sleeping in.

A Few Quick Questions for the Universe

2009-08-26T19:40:00.000-07:00

1. Why, despite the fact that 95% of my pants/shorts/skirts are black, dark grey, brown, or dark red, do I always seem to get my period on a day that I'm wearing off-white capris or powder-blue cords?

2. How is it that in the afternoon I can have a tender moment of appreciating the fact that my bonny almost two-year-old daughter still nurses, then in the darkest hours of that same night she can appear to me to be a little blood-sucking parasite because she still nurses?

3. Why is it that my six-year-old son can remember everything he learned about the life-cycle of a bee last year in kindergarten, but still can't remember to wash his hands after he pees despite being told seventeen times every single day for the past three years?

4. When are they going to perfect teleporting technology so that I can spend more time with my loved ones who live way too far away?

5. How can it be that I love teaching so much that I'm always going on about how much I love teaching, yet I love not teaching so much more that I always get a little heartsick at the end of August?

6. Will my desk ever remain clean for more than two days?

A Good Nose for Business

2009-07-31T21:35:00.000-07:00

One thing that's always sad about the annual long summer visit to my in-laws' place is going downtown in their Jersey Shore hamlet and seeing which of my favorite businesses has gone bust and given way to some ridiculous chi chi boutique I'd never patronize in a million years. Their town used to be a hip but somewhat rough-around-the-edges place, with punk rock teenagers loitering on Broadway, lots of funky little stores, and a higher-than-average number of head shops. But as the town has gentrified more and more over the last ten years, the funky elements have given way to high-rent ventures.The cool health food store went under a few years back, making way for a fancy dog grooming salon. The used book store turned into one of those clothing stores where you can get a pair of distressed jeans off the sale rack for a mere hundred bucks. The little hole-in-the-wall vegan restaurant gave way to a gourmet pet food boutique. (I shit you not. These rich Jersey Shore people take their pets very seriously.)

With the economy in a slump, the death of the downtown businesses has sped up. This summer I noticed a business that had apparently opened and closed since last time we were in town. A designer perfume and make-up discount store. Hm. That's strange. With all the perfume, cologne, and cosmetics that people on the Jersey Shore use, I'd think a place that sells the designer shit at a bargain price would be able to weather the current economic climate. But wait. The name.

"What's That Smell?" Really? That's the name you chose for your discount designer perfume shop? Why not "What the Fuck is That Smell?" or "What Cavernous Mouth of Hell Opened Up and Released That Smell?"

Don't these people have any sort of ear for their own language? "What's that smell?" is not a phrasal synonym for "Mmm, what's that delicate fragrance wafting toward my grateful nose?" It means "What's that foul smell?" It means "What's wrong here?" It means...

Notes on Bear Week

2009-07-18T19:27:00.000-07:00

I just got back from Provincetown, Massachusetts, where I spent a week with O., and Roo, the Old Man. They frolicked on the beach every morning while I was off at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center taking a poetry workshop. In the afternoons, my Old Man would take O. off exploring while Roo napped and I wrote poems to bring back to the workshop. Then we'd all go off to try to find a restaurant which would tolerate our children and not necessitate taking out a second mortgage on our home.

We've been to P-town twice before, both times so that I could take workshops at the FAWC. (I love the FAWC because people there actually call it the FAWC, which is pronounced "fahc," which starts to sound a lot like "fuuuck" when you say it often enough. Who wouldn't want to take a workshop in fiction, poetry, or painting at "the fuuuck"? It's kind of like "the shit," only better.) Provincetown has a long history as an artists' and writers' retreat, and is well-known for its many art galleries and its local literary giants. Located on the tip of Cape Cod, it's also a big old tourist trap. And, most impressively, it's one of the most well-known gay resort towns in the US.

Both times we've been to P-town before, we've heard people talk about "bear week." According to the Ptown Bears website, bears are "a subculture of gay men who embrace natural body hair." But that doesn't seem to sum it up entirely. Based on my observations, and conversations I've had and overheard in P-town, bears tend not only to have a goodly amount of body hair, but also observable facial hair, and a particular type of build. Bears are big. Even short bears are big. They're often muscular, but whether they're built or not, they generally have a belly. Many of them seem to favor leather. Motorcycles are not uncommon. Apparently, there are associations between bears and firefighters, I'm not sure why. Maybe because of Smokey? Only YOU over there in that body-conscious tank top with luxuriant chest hair tufting out can prevent forest fires.

Well, this year, we were in luck. The week we had planned to be in Provincetown? Bear week! My Old Man was a bit disappointed that he'd gone through the trouble of doing some extra manscaping (to make it more likely that he might pass for your average gay dad as he singlehandedly shepherded the children though the extra-queer-friendly East End). Why bother, when it's bear week?

Anyway, having observed bears in their natural (vacation) habitat for a week, I can report that although bears are not aggressive, they are not friendly, either. I smiled or said hi to every bear I passed during my stay in P-town, and I got not one smile back. I imagine they're probably friendly to other bears, but not to skinny tourist women in big hats.

Maybe part of the reason the bears in P-town were not particularly friendly to me is that Bear Week has become a well-known enough event that even the clueless straight people who vacation in Provincetown know about it, and thus the bears become something of a spectacle, perhaps in a way that gets annoying. Maybe a lot of silly tourist women were smiling extra widely at them during this last week. (I tend to be pretty friendly generally, but I was probably smiling a little wider at the bears. Who doesn't get excited when they're on vacation in a wild place and they see a bear?)

We always enjoy spending a week in Provincetown, but it has its annoyances and drawbacks. It's fucking expensive for one. If I hadn't had a fellowship for my workshop, I'd never have been able to afford the tuition and lodging, but trying to feed yourself and keep yourself in coffee and your kids in ice cream is a mammoth expense in itself. It's also a crowded tourist spot that has grown up in a town that was founded long before the revolutionary period (this is where the Pilgrims signed the Mayflower Compact , recall). So by the end of the week, we're ready to leave and get back to a less pricey and less jostled existence.

That's why as we were heading out of town, my Old Man cued up the perfect "Sayonara, Cape Cod!" song, "Walcott" by Vampire Weekend. Walcott, Don't you know that it's insane? Don't you want to get out of Cape Cod? Out of Cape Cod tonight? It's an especially perfect song for us, given our destination, back to the loving arms of the Jersey Shore. Walcott, All the way to New Jersey, All the way to The Garden State, Out of Cape Cod tonight

But when we came to the verse where they sing Walcott, Fuck the women from Wellfleet, Fuck the bears out in Provincetown, Out of Cape Cod Tonight, I couldn't sing along with as much gusto. I mean, I don't know any women in Wellfleet, so who am I to say? And although the Provincetown bears did not return my smiles and greetings, I don't hold it against them. I still salute their embrace of natural body hair (hey, we have something in common!) and their grizzly aesthetic.

But maybe I'm misreading that line. Maybe Vampire Weekend mean something entirely different when they say "Fuck the bears out in Provincetown." It's hard to say what "fuck" means after you've spent a week parsing out the nuances of poem after poem at the FAWC. Fuuuck!

You Wanna Bet Your Pretty Neck?

2009-07-09T18:50:00.000-07:00

My man hates show tunes. My man hates musicals in general. Keep this in mind.

So, here we are spending a month or so with my Old Man's family on the Jersey Shore. This year, it's more like three weeks, since we're going to Cape Cod for six days in the middle of the visit, but still. A long visit. Six people in a house that usually holds two. (Plus my sister-in-law is in town from Florida, and though she's not sleeping here, she's around much of time during the day and evening.) I've mentioned that this is actually harder on my man than on me. Let me explain a bit more about why that is.

Obviously, it's harder in some ways for my man to stay with his family for several weeks at a stretch because he has all this history with them and they push his buttons and everyone reverts to old modes and habits that drive everyone else crazy. Except me, who mostly finds it all pretty amusing (except when it occasionally makes me want to throw a potted plant at someone).

But there are other reasons that this is easier for me than him, and I'm just sort of starting to articulate those, here in our seventh extended summer visit. This is partly due to an epiphany I had at dinner last night.

Okay, dinner. It's me, my Old Man, his mom (who tends to go by the handle Gram), his dad (code name Pop-Pop), baby Roo (in her high chair), six-year-old O., and my Old Man's sister, Aunt A. Dishes are being passed every which way, debates are raging over whether the corn is undercooked or just bad, speculations are being made about when Jersey corn will finally be in season. Everyone is loud, everyone is talking over each other, and every adult-oriented comment is punctuated by an observation of something cute that Roo is doing, an extra-loud question intended to engage O., or a suggestion that O. eat more, use his napkin, or stop lurching into Gram to the beat of the frenetic, horn-heavy jazz that is perpetually playing in the background.

At some point Roo does or says something exceptionally cute, and this inspires Gram to begin singing to Roo a song from the venerable Broadway favorite Guys and Dolls, the corniest song in a show abounding in corny songs. I love you a bushel and a peck, a bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck sings Gram, and then Pop-Pop joins in, A hug around the neck and a barrel and a heap. Then Aunt A. joins in A barrel and a heap and I'm talking in my sleep, about you, about you. And, dangit, I can't help it (after all, I played the role of Sister Sarah Brown in my high school production of Guys and Dolls, and after all, these people are singing this song of love to my adorable toddler, who I actually happen to really love barrels and heaps, etc.). I just have to join in I love you a bushel and a peck, you bet your pretty neck I do.

"Your pretty neck?" Egad. But we keep singing and it just gets worse when we hit the Doodle oodle oooh doo, Doodle oodle oooh doo, Doodle oodle oooh doo doooooooo! And remember, this is all being sung over the sounds of frenetic, horn-heavy jazz.

Needless to say, my Old Man is not singing along, however much love he might have for his baby girl (love he'd more likely measure in kilos or assloads than bushels and pecks). He does not know this song, and if by some bizarre circumstance he did, he would never sing it. I don't even need to look at his face to know that he's in serious pain right now.

And this is part of the reason it's harder for him than for me to be here. In some ways, I'm more like his family than he is. I'm cornier than him, I'm less inhibited, more able to quickly and comfortably shift social modes and rhetorical registers. He and I have a lot in common. We're both ironic, we both love to read, we both cherish quiet time. But I'm more able to shift from irony to cheesy jokes without feeling a painful wrench, and I'm more able to temporarily forgo my need for quiet reflection and solitude when super-social chaos is the order of the day. My man is actually a very goofy dude much of the time when he's in the comfort of his own home, but his goofiness tends to run the order of absurdist humor and scatology rather than bad puns and cheesy ribbing.

Anyway, to his credit, he did not shriek or run from the table when this outburst occurred. I think he still likes me, even though I went there with his family of origin, to that place of unspeakable darkness, the spontaneous show tune singalong.

Six is Company - Six is (Still) a Crowd

2009-07-06T18:24:00.000-07:00

I'm back on the Jersey Shore for another Month With the In-Laws. We've been here a week and I have stories to tell, but I always like to write some sort of "intro to the whole concept of spending a month with your in-laws" post before I do any East Coast blogging. Reading back over the posts that served that purpose in years past, I'm amazed at how true my first-ever Jersey Shore Intro post still reads, despite the fact that it's three years later and we've had a baby in the interim. So I'm going to rerun that post below, and wherever I mention three-year-old O. you can fill in "six-year-old O. and baby sister Roo" in that blank. The the cons are still the same (down to the fact that my father-in-law still tries to talk to me while I'm reading and I still ignore him as politely as it is possible to ignore someone) and the pros are still the same (except with a baby added to the mix, the sleeping-in thing is even sweeter.) The wine rack is a little thinner in these economic hard times, but it still plays a pivotal role in my ability to maintain my patience during this blessed month-long visit. My Old Man and I still invariably end up needing to have a "talk" some time during the first week. Even the "six" of the title is still true, except my sister-in-law has gotten married and moved out, but her spot's been filled by little Roo.

So now, for your reading pleasure, an Oral Hygiene Classic Post:

So, here I am in New Jersey, spending what amounts to a month with my husband's family. Someone out there may be wondering Why in the name of Christ and all his long-haired friends would you do that? When I've mentioned our East Coast summer plans to friends or aquaintances, the response often amounts to that.

In fact, this is the fourth [nay, in 2009, seventh] summer that my Old Man and I have packed up the car, strapped O. into his car seat, and headed out to spend a month on the Jersey shore with my in-laws.

The why is a bit complicated, but basically simmers down to two reasons. One: my man grew up less than a mile from the ocean, and now we live in a landlocked part of the Midwest. He needs to spend time near the ocean in order to retain his sanity. I love him very much, and I know he needs this. Two: my Old Man's parents love their only grandchild to distraction and get to see him just a few times a year. I want O. to really know his grandparents in a way that you can only know people you've spent expanses of time with. O. is lucky enough to live near my folks (though, given that my mom and stepdad are hardcore Westcoasters, how that came about is a post of its own), and this trip gives him the chance to live with my Old Man's folks.

The actual visit is wonderful in some ways, and hellish in others. The pros outweigh the cons, or else I never would have come back after the first (and hardest) month-long summer visit. My mother-in-law is sweet and very easy to get along with, my father-in-law is completely well-meaning and annoying only in the relatively minor ways that make me realize how really petty I am for being driven momentarily insane by them. My Old Man's adult sister is warm, funny, and unabashedly weird, and over the years we've grown so close that she feels like a sister rather than an in-law. The advantages to having these good people in-house are easy to rattle off: the Old Man and I sleep in together almost every morning we're here, we have free childcare just about any time we want it from people who love our son, and people are constantly cooking for us (and if we're not careful, cleaning up after us). Add to that the perks of our location in a hip Jersey shore town: we're a ten-minute drive from the ocean, a 45 minute train ride from NYC, and close to more excellent dining than we could ever hope to (or afford to) enjoy in one month.

I admit that I also love the crowded chaos, most of the time. I grew up in the same house as grandparents and aunts, a house where it wasn't unusual to find second cousins sleeping on the laundry room floor because every available bed and couch was taken by some other family member. My family is loud and loving and sometimes pushy and annoying, and cramming a bunch of us into one house for an extended visit was always fun, even if tears were sometimes shed and doors slammed. Sitting around the overcrowded dinner table with my son, husband, mother-in-law, father-in-law, grandmother-in-law, sis-in-law, and brother-in-law-to-be, with everyone talking over one another and affectionate jokes competing with mildly cutting sarcasm - it all feels very right, more often than not.

But it's hard, too. This isn't my family, and that makes it easier for me. It is my Old Man's family, and that makes it much more challenging for him. These people do not push my buttons, but they ride his. I think the hardest thing for me about this set-up, harder than the relative lack of privacy, sharing a computer with four other adults, or trying to read a book while my father-in-law persists in making inane small talk with me, is seeing my beloved man at his most adolescent. Sometimes he's unrecognizable. And I get so irritated, at the same time that I do not blame him. I try to imagine spending a week under my father's roof, much less a month, and I know I would be so much worse. Still, it's a strain on our relationship. And that much more because we can't even have a decent argument in the privacy of our own home.

So that's when you have to fight adolescent regression with adolescent therapies. This evening, I found myself grabbing my Old Man by the hand and dragging him out the door for a long walk and a serious talk. It's only day three of the visit, but already we needed it. We ended up sitting in the grass in a field not far from his folks' house like a pair of teenagers in relationship-crisis-mode. We got the space we needed and reconnected. (But before we could do that we had to do something I never had to worry about as a teenager: ask his mom if she'd watch our kid while we went and dealt with our angst.)

After my man and I had worked shit out, I came back in and had a couple glasses of a very nice pinot noir. So let me end with props to the unacknowledged ingredient that allows us to pull off this marathon visit: my in-laws' well-stocked wine rack.

In the Argot of Our Local Storyteller

2009-06-23T19:15:00.000-07:00

Roo is an amazing communicator for one so young (21 months, for those keeping track). She gets her point across astonishingly well almost all the time, if you're willing to take the time to listen carefully and are familiar with the peculiarities of her vocabulary (where "yung" means music, "ah-doh" is water, and "die" equals "cry"). She's actually begun telling stories, which she repeats over and over to anyone who'll listen. "Mama voh dung" quickly became one of a series of "fall down" stories. "Mama voh dung, kitchen" ended up being a slightly more developed draft of the "Mama lost it" story. She also has an "O. voh dung, helmet" story to describe a memorable incident of her bro wiping out on his bike, and she also has a "Roo voh dung, bus" story, describing how she bailed and bonked her noggin on a manhole cover when we were all on our way to catch a Chicago city bus.

My favorite of the "voh dung" series, however, is the story Roo tells about her dad. A week or so ago, the Old Man asked me to pick him up an iced coffee when I was out running errands. He and O. were heading out to the movies and, having been woken by Roo a couple hours earlier than usual that morning, he knew he'd need it to stay alert in the cool, dark theater. I came home just in time for the guys to make their show, handing off the iced coffee to my grateful man. And in his sleep deprived state, he proceeded to drop it on the recently-mopped kitchen floor. As he watched the precious beverage escape from the broken cup, making a giant mess on the floor he himself had just cleaned, his nerves already frayed by lack of sleep, he lost it, shouting obscenities in a lively dance of livid frustration. Once the mess had been cleaned up and O. and his dad rushed off to make their movie, Roo narrated the event as she saw it: "Dada voh dung ah-do, die." Daddy dropped his water, and cried.

Poor daddy.

In Which I Am Beset by the Howling Fantods

2009-06-07T18:51:00.000-07:00

I'm not usually skittish about small creatures I come upon in my home, whether animal, avian, or insect. I've found live mice behind my toaster without losing my shit and have caught and relocated hundreds of spiders with nary a shudder. Once when a bird flew down the chimney and into the first apartment I shared with my Old Man, I calmly put on my dishwashing gloves, followed its panicked flapping from room to room, caught it between my outstretched hands, and released it off the back porch. (All of this while my six-foot-tall man kept his unnerved self as far from the bird as he could.)

On Friday I had a full-on, screetching and writhing fit in response to finding a dead mouse under the stove. I had dropped a wooden spoon between the countertop and range while cooking Roo some hot cereal, and when my Old Man moved the stove aside to allow me to get at the escaped spoon, there was a bunch of other crap in that narrow strip of no-man's-land, mostly vegetables that had jumped out of the frying pan and into the shadows. I decided to clean all the desiccated ghosts of dinners past out of this dusty zone, and had just begun nudging my wooden spoon handle at a prune that had somehow gotten wedged under the side of the stove when my Old Man, looking on over my shoulder, said "Uh, E. I don't think you should...." At that moment it came unwedged and I suddenly saw that the lifeless and mushy prune had a tail.

"It has a tail!" I shrieked. There is no font bloody enough to convey the horror with which I shrilly uttered those words. I immediately began a writhing and shuddering dance of retreat as far from the dead mouse as I could get, all the while jabbering an octave above my natural voice. I was losing my shit. My heart was racing, I could not stop the shivers running up and down the length of my body, and I couldn't seem to stop my screetching expressions of horror. If I had been wearing long skirts, I would have gathered them up off the mousey floor.

Later I tried to figure out what had made me lose it in a way I usually don't with classic "icky" stuff. Partly, I think it was the idea of a dead mouse, one I'd been poking, one that had just given way under the handle of a wooden spoon attached to my very hand. Even more than this, it was the surprising and uncanny aspect of it: a prune had essentially transformed into a dead mouse before my eyes, and that was very freaky.

What was really embarrassing about the whole dead mouse incident, however, was that the mouse ended up not being dead so much as inanimate. When my Old Man gathered up the nerve to remove the offending rodent, he was quickly relieved to realize that it was actually a toy mouse that we'd bought for our kitten when we first brought her home from the Humane Society over two years ago. She loved the thing and played with it nonstop for several days, 'til it got lost and was never seen again. Until yesterday.

So not only had I become entirely unhinged over a dead mouse under the stove, it wasn't even a real mouse.

Luckily, O. was at school and didn't get to witness his mother lose her shit. But Roo observed the whole thing from her perch in the high chair. It made a deep impression on her. For the rest of the day, she told my Old Man over and over "Mama fell down!" (which in Roo speak sounds more like "Mama voh dung!") What she really meant was "Mama broke down" or "Mama took complete leave of her senses." But "Mama voh dung" is apt. I do feel like I fell down, in a metaphorical sense. I certainly don't feel quite as tough as I did a few days ago. I'd feel better if the damn thing had actually been a real decaying rodent. At least the cat has her favorite toy back.

I Need My Neep

2009-05-22T12:04:00.000-07:00

I'm bleary eyed and draggle tailed, tired as hell despite the fact that most nights I spend eight hours a night in bed. But for the past week or so, too few of those hours have been spent asleep and too many spent coaxing my baby back to sleep.

Well, that's just the way it is with newborns, right? But wait: This baby is a year and a half old! She's been "sleeping through the night" for over a year. What's going on?

I don't know. My baby, my toddler, who used to be a great sleeper, now wakes up some time between four and five-thirty in the morning, raring to go. I let her nurse a bit (which always used to send her right back to sleep) and she finishes up and says "Up!" And my Old Man and I groan and say "No up. Go back to sleep." And she says "No neep" in that inimitably willful voice of hers. She eventually falls back to sleep, but only after much negotiation, whispered pleading, and plying of water or other sippy-cupped beverages.

Roo sleeps in our room, so no neep for her means no neep for us. We're planning to move her into O's room when she's old enough for a big kid bed, but for now, she's our roommate. And she's been a pretty good roommate, until a couple of weeks ago. (And for you Ferberizers out there, I'm not looking for advice. We're cosleepers, and we're not turning back now. Advice from cosleepers is, however, welcomed.) My Old Man thinks maybe she's getting a molar. If so, I hope it comes in soon. In the meantime, we're thinking of starting to sleep in the guest room. Except the guest room doubles as the office, and it's not uncommon, here in the last weeks of the school year, for one of us to be burning the midnight oil in there when the other wants to crash for the night. Maybe when school is over. Though hopefully by then Roo will be done with the "no neep" phase.

She says it every night, "No neep." Roo is talking more and more these days and it seems every little thing she says melts my heart with its cuteness and cleverness. But not this "no neep" shit. That is not a bit cute.

No Comment

2009-05-03T19:35:00.000-07:00

Most of the time, I appreciate the fact that my six-year-old can do so much for himself. He can dress himself! He can tie his own shoes! He can brush his own teeth, and even floss his own teeth! (I'm so proud!) But there are moments, when he's dawdling maddeningly or totally spacing out in the middle of a task and we need to leave in three minutes that I long for the days when I just put his damn shoes and socks on for him and we got the hell out the door in a (relatively) timely manner.

Yesterday was one of those days. We had somewhere to be, and while my Old Man and I got ourselves and Roo ready, we were expecting O. to be getting himself ready. But he was spacing out, then putting his pants on over his jammy pants, then spacing out, then dawdling, then taking a bajillion years to tie his shoes. The whole while his dad and I were advising him and verbally prodding him, a duet of parental patter that grew increasingly shrill as the minutes toward our desired time of departure ticked ever closer.

Struggling with his shoelaces while we tried to talk him through the process, O. finally just stopped altogether, screwed up his face in annoyance, and with measured emphasis said:

"Stop commenting on my actions!"

My Old Man and I just looked at each other, dumbstruck, in a mix of amusement and sudden self-awareness. We stopped commenting on O's actions, for the moment. But I thought to myself Oh my young dear, I'm afraid we're going to be "commenting on your actions" for the next fifteen years or so.

I just hope I remember to stop at some point.

Day of Silence

2009-04-17T19:06:00.000-07:00

Today was the Day of Silence at school, and as usual I wore my Day of Silence t-shirt and ribbon in support of all the kids who chose to refrain from speaking for one day to highlight how GLBT people are silenced in many ways on a daily basis. And as usual I gave all my classes my spiel about what forms that silence takes - how straight people can talk blithely about their spouses or significant others, about their partners in parenting or their former boyfriends, girlfriends, and crushes, without fear of reprisal or silent judgment, how they can express affection openly, how they can reap all the social and material benefits of heterosexual privilege, but those privileges aren't available to gay, lesbian, bi, or trans people, and those GLBT folks who choose to speak out and act out to claim the same rights as straight folks do so at great risk.

What I didn't do, what I've never done, is actually participate in the Day of Silence by being silent. It's hard to imagine how I'd swing that as a teacher, short of giving my students quiet seat work, which I never do for an entire period. I'm pretty jealous of my time with my students, and at this point in the year, every one of the dwindling minutes of time I have left with them is spoken for. But, when a colleague saw my shirt and asked if I was being silent today, and I made a performative utterance by answering "No..." I started thinking about what it would mean for me to stay silent for a day. And it would be hard for me, big mouth that I am. But I began to think about my own Day of Silence speech and recognize something that would be much, much harder for me than staying wholly silent for one day: staying silent for a week, or a month, or a year about my Old Man and everything related to him. That might give me a small inkling of what it would be to live without the unquestioned privilege that comes with being a heterosexual married woman, to have to verbally step around the partner with whom I share my life, who parents my children with me, who I wake with in the morning and fall into sleep with at the end of the day.

And that thought made me question the decision I've made every year since my school began participating in the Day of Silence. That one day of silence is merely symbolic, and yet perhaps the struggle not to speak at all can remind me of all the times I might have to struggle to decide whether to speak openly about my life if my Old Man were my Sweet Woman. Who am I talking to? Where do they stand? What might I have to lose by being open with them? Can I trust them? I felt like this one simple question my colleague asked me - "Are you participating?" - made me feel in my gut some of the points I'd merely been thinking with my brain (and lecturing my students on).

My colleague also mentioned a student of hers who was silent today and who, when it came time to do a five-minute presentation on a book, something she signed up to do months ago, came up to the board, wrote the name of the book and the author on the board, stood silently for five minutes, then sat down. I know this student, who is also in one of my classes, and she's sweet and unassuming and generally the kind of person who seems to try actively not to make others uncomfortable. I can only imagine that her silent presentation was uncomfortable for her. But I thought it was brilliant, much more meaningful than if she'd talked to her teacher earlier this week and rescheduled her presentation. It made me think I could surely come up with some way to teach without words for a day.

It's possible my silence could teach my students more than my lecture. Maybe next year I'll participate in the Day of Silence.

25 Random Things About Me

2009-04-06T18:49:00.000-07:00

1. I was born in Normal, Illinois.

2. I was relieved that my feet didn’t get bigger during either of my two pregnancies.

3. I believe in the value of 8 hours of sleep a night.

4. Despite my ongoing efforts to spice it up, my wardrobe consists mostly of solid-colored clothing in black, grey, dark red, and earthy greens.

5. I met Allen Ginsberg when I was a toddler, though I have no memory of it.

6. I like coffee, but I love tea.

7. I’ve been a vegetarian for twenty years (!), though I’m not especially strict. (I’ve been known to eat a slice of pizza after picking the pepperoni off.)

8. I have a committed and intense relationship with dark chocolate.

9. Every time I watch the complete first season of Freaks and Geeks, I have to go through a new mourning period, lamenting that there was never a second season. (You couldn’t let us have just one more season, you NBC bastards?!)

10. I love my job. I enjoy teaching about 96% of the time.

11. I think you’re either a natural at teaching or not, and if you don’t have it, it’s unlikely that any education class is going to help you become a great teacher. But I also know that lack of preparation can kill anyone’s teaching.

12. I once thought very seriously of getting a smiling tooth tattooed on my arm.

13. I have no tattoos.

14. I’ve kept a journal since I was 17.

15. My Old Man makes me laugh every day.

16. Speaking of "My Old Man," I'm currently writing a series of poems, one for each song on Joni Mitchell's Blue album. At this point, I've written drafts for nine out of ten.

17. I eat a carrot with my lunch every school day, but almost never eat carrots on the weekend. Or during the summer.

18. I think I look better with my glasses on.

19. I’m gratified that despite the clear trend to give kids quaint Old People Names, my son O’s quaint old-fashioned name remains only in the 900s on the Social Security Administrations recent lists of most commonly used names.

20. I haven't played chess on a regular basis since I was in high school, but I want to start again.

21. I don’t regret voting for Ralph Nader in the 2000 election. (I do regret that Al Gore watered himself down so much in the run-up to the 2000 election.)

22. I hate uncomfortable shoes and only wear shoes that I can walk a mile in. Except when I dress up, and then I’m continually taking my shoes off under the table.

23. I like my hair better short, but for some reason feel the need to suffer through growing it out every four years or so.

24. I’ve never had a manicure or a pedicure.

25. I read at least one poem every day.

(Note that there's nothing about oral hygiene on this list, because my oral hygiene facts are essential rather than random. Maybe next I'll do "Ten Random Oral Hygiene Facts.")

Five Words from Orange

2009-03-23T18:52:00.000-07:00

Orange gave me five words she associates with me. The deal is that I write about those five things and then if you want blog fodder yourself, leave a comment asking me to give you five subjects/things I associate you with. Then post this in your blog and elaborate on the subjects given.

1. Literature - Love it. Live for it. Shapes my whole life. I liked studying it so much as a young 'un that I couldn't think of anything I'd rather do than get paid to read and talk about it with a captive audience. I've been teaching for eighteen years in all, from junior high to college and back to high school, and I've never tired of talking about books and poems with kids of various ages. My students are sometimes surprised to learn that I reread a novel every time I teach it. I couldn't do otherwise - I'd feel like a fraud. But I never get sick of reading the books I love again and again. I find something new every time I read, and then invariably I learn something new from my students. My Old Man is a literature fanatic and an English teacher, and we talk about books constantly, and when we're not talking about books we talk about TV shows or movies like they're books. One of the things I love about my Old Man is that he reads incessantly, and makes reading a priority in his life, more so even than I do.

2. Teeth- Obviously, oral hygiene is very important to me. But in addition to my strictly hygienic interest in teeth, I do like them aesthetically. I appreciate a nice set of straight, white teeth, but I can also appreciate quirkier smiles. I have a weakness for the diastema, which is the space between the two front teeth. Think Lauren Hutton, Madonna, David Letterman before he got his fixed (the idiot), and of course, Chaucer's Wife of Bath. And while I do appreciate white teeth, I find it very unsettling when someone has teeth that are unnaturally white. In fact, I sort of hate teeth whitening in general because, in addition to the fact that it's one emblem of our vapid appearance-obsessed culture, it kind of ruins real white teeth. When I meet someone who has really nice white teeth, I find myself wondering if they're really white or just whitened. Sad.

3. Musicians - I like music. Musicians can be a bit of a pain in the ass. But then again, some of my best friends are musicians. I always feel weird when someone calls me a musician, because for me that word conjures up classically trained people who play more than one instrument and read music like breathing air. I just play guitar. And sing some.

4. Teaching- Well, I sort of got into that with #1. And then there's my why I love teaching post. Go read that. (Really. It's a pretty damn good post, if I do say so myself.)

5. Fashion (anti-patriarchy-wise) - The "anti-patriarchy-wise" is Orange's, but I think I would've had to go there in any case because how can you not if you're a feminist and someone asks you about fashion? I like to think of myself as rational when it comes to fashion. Which means I don't go in for the extreme stuff, femininity-wise, but I still live in my culture and am influenced by it in some ways. I think high heels are a mean trick played on women, but I can see their appeal. (Kind of like cigarettes - I'd never smoke in a million years, but I understand why it seems cool.) Myself, I try not to wear shoes I can't run in, if push comes to shove. And though I do have some two-inch chunky-heeled shoes I like and wear when I'm a bit dressed up, I really prefer shoes that I can walk a mile in comfortably (especially since I tend to walk a mile or more quite often in my walkable little college town). I don't judge my friends who like heels, but I do sort of enjoy hearing Twisty rant about why high heels are stupid and essentially a tool of the patriarchy. I also don't wear clothes that I find uncomfortable, but I will admit that my style of dress has changed with the times. Back in the 90s, I wore guy's jeans and big shirts. Over the past decade, my clothes have gotten less androgynous and more close-fitting. Part of this is because my life has shifted from that of scruffy grad student to high school teacher, but I know that part of it is because fashion has changed and I've been influenced by it. I try to resist fashion trends I find stupid, which isn't hard, but there are always some changes in fashion that catch my eye and end up influencing me, sometimes without me even realizing it. (For example, I've gone from finding flared pants silly and retro to having a pants wardrobe that's 90% flared. How did it happen? I'm not even quite sure...) It kind of goes without saying, but high fashion is silly and often blatantly misogynistic, and I find the cult of the fashion model one of the most disastrous facets of modern culture for the interests of girls and women.

New Directions in Family Rock, Part II

2009-03-12T20:21:00.000-07:00

So, how to incorporate the baby into our rock-and-roll lifestyle? That's been the burning question ever since Roo was born.

At first, it wasn't such a pressing issue. She was a tiny infant and took up so much of my and my Old Man's time and energy, the question of rocking out in the basement was entirely moot. And O. was on his drum strike, so all our rock equipment began to gather dust. But then my Old Man starting picking up the drum sticks, and slowly O. was seduced back down into the basement by the lure of getting to play chaotic noise rock on his dad's electric guitar. Then O. got his own guitar, and then he finally got back on the drums.

Just as I abstained from sex for a spell after Roo was born, I abstained from rock, and for many of the same reasons. I was tired. My breasts were too big and swollen to want to be touched by man or guitar strap. I just didn't have the right hormonal kick to work up the urge. I was tired - did I mention that? But my rock libido took much longer to come back than my libido libido. I was playing a lot of acoustic guitar, playing for the baby at bedtime, playing for myself during her naps. Somehow the sweet mellow tone of my Yamaha hollow body was just what I wanted. I got my fingerpicking back up to speed. I revisited my folk and country roots.

Eventually, I felt inclined to head down the basement stairs and pay my Fender Jaguar a visit. The Old Man was getting good on drums, and fun as it was for him to create gnarly noise with O., he also wanted the challenge of keeping a beat with someone who actually knows more than two chords. So we started to play again, and I started to play with O. again. Roo was such a champion sleeper back in those days, we'd often play while she was asleep, setting up the baby monitor receiver in the basement and keeping an eye out for the telltale red lights.

What I really wanted, though, was to get Roo in on the family rock action. By the time she was a year old, she was fully inculcated into music fandom, frequently requesting that we turn on music by pointing fervently to the stereo and shouting "gyung!", her made-up word for anything that makes sound and entertains her. She liked to dance and was particular about which music she'd accept, nixing anything with an inadequate beat with a "nah nah!" and an adamant head shake. It seemed like it was time to take her down to the basement and see how she liked live music. This experiment would have the additional benefit of allowing the Old Man, O., and me to all play together for the first time in a long time.

There was only one problem: we were too responsible to expose her tender ear drums to the cacaphony of basement rock, but too busy and/or lazy to get on the ball and buy her a pair of baby-sized noise canceling earphones like all the rock stars' kids have. We kept saying "well, we could all go down there, if only Roo had something to protect her ears." But she didn't, so we couldn't.

Finally, as so often happens in our home, I rigged a stop-gap measure. We have plenty of ear plugs in our home, but the problem with them is 1. they're small and babies can choke on them, 2. Roo would undoubtedly rip them right out, and 3. I'm not convinced they would protect her young ear drums sufficiently. But, I decided that if she wore her earflappy winter hat over the ear plugs, as long as we kept the volume low on the amps and the drumming relatively soft, she could come down and watch. The hat would keep the plugs in her ears and out of her mouth, and would provide an extra layer of sound absorbency.

So this has been the look Roo's been rocking when she's down in the basement to partake in the rocking:

And I actually did some research recently and found a pair of noise protection earphones for babies that cost $20 instead of $100 plus. They are ordered and on their way, so soon Roo will be rocking a look more along the lines of:

Except I got her the light blue ones instead of the pink.

What We Dream About When We Dream About Obama

2009-02-26T18:48:00.000-08:00

I had my second Obama dream last night.

My first happened back when Barack Obama was a mere presidential hopeful. He didn't even have the nomination yet. He came to my party wearing his iPod, behaved somewhat badly, and ended up being a Flaming Lips fan.

Last night's dream featured President Obama. I was having dinner with him, Michelle Obama, and a few other folks. Although everyone was quite dressed up, it was a casual dinner - a very regular room, with a modest table cloth, and the food just out there on the table, family style. I sat at one end of the table and President Obama sat on the corner, next to me, with his long legs stretched out and his feet propped on the edge of my chair. Somehow this made me feel rather special, like I was just one of the Obama gang.

It was a nice dinner. Everyone was witty and the food was good. The mood was jovial. I have no recollection of the particulars of conversation or cuisine, but I do vividly recall sitting at the table looking from Michelle to Barack to the aide in the sequined white dress thinking "I am so going to write a blog post about this!"

New Directions in Family Rock, Part I

2009-02-22T09:36:00.000-08:00

It's been awhile since I've posted about the rock that takes place in the Oral Hygiene household. As old-school readers may know, my Old Man and I both play guitar and are veterans of six or seven bands between us, and though neither of us is currently involved in any vehicle for public rock, we do have amps, a couple of electric guitars, and a bass set up in our humble basement for the purposes of private rocking. The basement rock space also boasts a drum kit, one that began as a kiddie set (bought for O. for his third birthday) and which, as the result of a series of broken cymbals and drum heads and a general desire to have more and better-sounding stuff to bang on, has grown to a full-fledged adult-sized eight piece kit.

So what's been going on in the past year and a bit with the family rock? When I got pregnant with Roo, my Old Man and I worried that having a baby would cramp our rock style in much the same way that babies inevitably seem to temporarily thwart a couple's sex life. (Or are we the only ones that happens to?) O. was more optimistic, offering an enthusiastic prediction that the baby would simply join the band, on keyboards. Eventually, perhaps. But we weren't sure how the three-piece family rock outfit that had begun to take shape would fare while Roo was an infant.

Another circumstance entirely was fated to throw a temporary wrench into the family rock. Three months after Roo was born, we bought O. the new tom drum he'd been requesting for his birthday. And, for reasons that are still mysterious to us, O. promptly went on an extended rock strike. At first it just seemed to be an odd lack of enthusiasm on O's part to try out the new drum he'd been begging us to get him for his birthday. We'd say "O.! Go try out your new drum," and he'd demur. Finally he went down and banged it a few times, seemingly merely to satisfy us. It quickly became clear that he'd developed a weird reluctance to play his drums.

For awhile, it bugged the shit out of us. For one thing, we'd spent hundreds of dollars on this drum kit that was going unplayed. For another, we (or at least I) had been cherishing this fantasy of our son as a drummer, of the family band with O. behind the skins. I began bugging him to play, bribing him to play. Needless to say, none of it worked. You can't force a kid to play drums, and it feels more than a little uncomfortable to try. I was acting like the worst nightmare of Suzuki-obsessed music-pushing parent. Finally, I just gave up. He's young, I thought, He'll pick up the sticks again on his own. Or take up another instrument. Or he won't, and that won't be the end of the world.

But the rock didn't stop altogether. With the drum kit sitting lonely, my Old Man started picking up the sticks sometimes when he was downstairs putting in a load of laundry. He looked a little funny, perched behind a full-sized kit whose only kiddie remnant was the miniature drum stool that made sitting rather precarious. But he sounded great (and impressed the hell out of me, who's never been able even play a basic 4-4 beat). After awhile, he was playing so often and getting so good that I bought him a full-sized drum stool for his birthday. Eventually O. began joining him downstairs and picking out some notes or strumming a noisy open chord on one of the electric guitars. The Old Man would encourage O. to get on the drums, of course, and occasionally he'd agree, but that always seemed to end in frustration, with O. fooling around rather than really playing, or giving up after a minute or two. He was much more into the guitar, and after a friend's older brother got a kid-sized electric guitar, O. began asking for one of his own.

So when O's early-January birthday rolled around, we decided a little Fender Squier Mini was in order, along with a little practice amp. O. was thrilled with his present, and he began playing his guitar on a regular basis. I was happy. OK, maybe he's not going to be a drummer, but at least he's not, like, uninterested in rocking.

The strangest thing about all this is that, just a few days after receiving his electric guitar, O. voluntarily got back on the drum kit and started playing for real. His beats hadn't suffered from his drum strike, which ended almost exactly a year after it began. Now he and the Old Man are rocking regularly, trading off on guitar and drums. And I've even begun heading back down to the basement to plug in every so often. And baby Roo is getting in on the rock action, in her own way. A keyboard prodigy? Well, no. At least not yet. But that's a story for another day...

Absentee Mom at the Dentist

2009-02-14T08:33:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I took my teenage cousin JD to the dentist. Ever since his mom, my aunt Kay, died twelve years ago, this has been one way I help out my other aunts in the impossible task of trying to fill the gaping hole in JD's life left by Kay's death. Taking JD to the dentist is always a trial for me, because his oral hygiene is terrible, and no matter how many times I lecture him, no matter how many times Dr. Diamond upbraids him, he just doesn't brush his teeth regularly or well. Or floss. Ever. And in addition to inheriting my whole family's cavity-prone gene, he has cerebral palsy, which makes his teeth even more vulnerable to decay and his gums more vulnerable to periodontal disease. So his mouth is a mess and every visit to Dr. Diamond is an exercise in frustration and dismay. I gnash my fastidiously flossed teeth and try to remember to take deep breaths.

Yesterday, however, my usual consternated focus on the usual bad report from the hygienist and the dentist was distracted by an instance of the worst parenting I've ever seen. Or, more accurately, the most egregious example of absentee parenting I personally have witnessed.

When JD and I were checking in at the front desk, a woman who'd just checked her young daughter in was negotiating with the child over whether she could handle being on her own for her appointment with Dr. Diamond. The girl was ten, at the oldest. She did not want to be left alone. The girl's brother was there, a boy of twelve or so. The mom said "Buck will stay with you, okay?" No, the girl insisted, she wanted her mom to stay. "Buck you stay with your sister. Be nice, okay?" And with that, she left, as one of the hygienists brought the long-faced girl and her somewhat sullen-looking brother back to the examination room.

This whole thing didn't strike me as all that terrible at first. I mean, I wouldn't leave my kid alone at the dentist with her not-much-older sibling when she was explicitly asking me not to, but I also try not to judge other people's parenting decisions, especially when I don't know them or their situation, and especially not using the "how I'd do it" model.

But then, as JD was getting his fluoride treatment, I saw Dr. Diamond and his assistant setting up to treat this girl, who was a couple of chairs down from JD, and I realized that they were getting ready to pull a tooth. They had numbed her up, and now they were fitting one of her molars with a stainless steel gripping tool. She was whimpering. Brother Buck was sitting on the nearby bench playing his Game Boy. As Dr. Diamond proceeded to wiggle her tooth out from the root, the girl cried and screamed. It only took about ninety seconds, but it was hard to watch. Harder to watch was the girl sitting and crying afterward as she bit down on a bloody wad of cotton, with no one to give her a hug or stroke her hair. Buck was useless as a comforter, completely ignoring her (no big shock, given that his role model of nurturance was this mom who took off, leaving her kid to get a tooth yanked solo). I had a strong urge to go up and put my arm around her myself, but wasn't sure comfort from an utter stranger would be helpful to the child, and I worried it might freak her out instead. Maybe I should have tried it anyway.

After we collected JD's new toothbrush and yet another flosser that will go unused, we gathered our coats to leave. Buck and his tear-stained sister were sitting in the waiting room as we left, and I wondered how long it would be 'til their mom reappeared.

Where was she during all of this? The family looked well-off. It didn't seem likely that it was a situation where keeping or losing a job was at stake. The woman didn't say where she was going, didn't make any speeches like "You know I can't leave Grandma alone at home, and she was too raving with dementia to get in the minivan, so this is how it has to be!" or "If your father wasn't in the intensive care unit, I would stay, honey!" I don't know. She must have had her reasons. I hope they were good. In any case, I feel for the kid.

I should have given her a hug.

The Ohs or the Aughts?

2009-01-29T18:47:00.000-08:00

It's finally seeming normal to me that it's 2009. And the fact that it's 2009 makes me realize this here decade we're living in is coming to an end before long. Things are going to get futuristic again for a time. Remember when "Two-Thousand-One" still sounded kind of space-aged? Or the most futuristic-sounding year ever, The Year Two Thousand? (Cue Richie "La Bamba" Rosenberg's falsetto and imagine Conan O'Brien with a flashlight under his chin.) But by now, "Two-Thousand-Nine" just sounds normal. "Twenty-ten," though. That's the future, man.

Anyway, what will this decade be called, when it's over and we're looking back on our skinny jeans and skinny lattes and crazy schitzophrenic relationship with carbs? When we're debating whether Justin actually brought Sexy back, or if it ever left at all? (Wasn't Prince just keeping it storage at Paisley Park?) Will we call these years the Ohs? Or the Oh-Ohs? I kind of hope they're the Aughts. I try my best to get everyone I know to refer to last year as aught-eight, but it's an uphill battle.

What's your prediction? (And, while you're weighing in, comment on the locale and lasting power - or lack thereof - of Sexy in recent years.)

The Holiday Party Toilet Overflow Debacle Continues

2009-01-09T13:27:00.001-08:00

Happy 2009, y'all. I'm still kind of stuck in 2008, because the flush that took the shine off our December holiday party has flushed all the joy out of January as well.

We decided to wait 'til after Christmas to get the toilet-water-damaged ceiling looked at. Then O's birthday party was coming up, so we put it off a bit more. When we finally got it looked at, the handydudes told us we had two options: replace part of the ceiling for twice as much as we thought it would cost, or replace the whole ceiling for four times as much as we thought it would cost. When they opened up the ceiling to be sure the visibly damaged area was the full extent of the water damage, however, they found plaster under the drywall. Damp, crumbling plaster that smelled of mildew and ninety-nine years' worth of urine.

This new development meant that we'd have no choice but to replace the whole ceiling, and that it would now cost five times as much as we thought it would cost.

The job was supposed to take two days, maybe three. The first day would be very messy, with moldy plaster dust flying everywhere. We thought maybe we should stay with friends.

That was a week ago, and we are still staying with friends. And it looks like we will be staying with friends for at least three more nights. But who's counting.

Luckily, we have friends in town, friends who are super hospitable, have a spacious and well appointed home, and are always up for hanging out. They have been amazing about making us feel welcome, and now that we've settled into a routine at their place, it's actually gotten easier rather than harder being away from home. It helps that they have two cool sons who adore O. and Roo, a well-stocked wine rack, and box sets of Battlestar Galactica and My So-Called Life. Still, we miss our home.

So, some free advice for you: if your toilet is the kind that's remotely prone to clogging up, keep a plunger next to the throne. We have a plunger, but I keep it in the basement because it's all germy and gross and stuff. But having toilet water descend through your ceiling into your living room is germy and gross, too.

So I've bought a brand new plunger, white and pristine with its own little storage dealy. It's our guest plunger. We'll still keep the mucky old plunger in the basement for when we clog the toilet. But if you're at our house and you happen to clog our toilet, please, feel free to use our special plunger. We bought it just for you.

The Six Stages

2008-12-23T21:06:00.000-08:00

The Six Stages of Coping When a Guest at Your Holiday Party Makes Your Upstairs Toilet Overflow, Sending Shitty Water Flooding into Your Living Room.

Stage One: Shock

You can't understand why the guest who just went upstairs five minutes ago, presumably to use the loo, is now running down the stairs at breakneck speed, whispering urgently to your husband, and running back up the stairs at breakneck speed with your husband close behind. Sitting amid your other guests in your living room, you are alarmed to feel water splashing against your arm and, when you turn your head, to see water running out of the ceiling and down the wall.

Stage Two: Frenzied Dealing

You are throwing every absorbent item you can find onto your flooded bathroom floor as your chagrined guest stands by, socks wet. Once you've gone through all the regular towels, the guest towels are the last to go, facedown in the muck.

Stage Three: Denial

You deny to your guest that this is a big deal, insisting that he has nothing to be embarrassed about. You stress that this is not his fault. You return to the party, putting the stew of soaking wet towels and toilet water upstairs out of your mind completely. You smile and chat amiably. You get up to wash your hands every five minutes or so.

Stage Four: Anger

Once the last guests have left, more dealing. As your spouse strategically places buckets to catch the toilet water still dripping from your living room ceiling and you don rubber gloves and haul two loads of towels sodden with shit water down to the basement, you begin to resent your guest. You think of your friends who have shy sphincters, unable to shit anywhere but home. Suddenly a shy sphincter no longer seems like a neurosis, but an admirable trait. You wonder what kind of a jerkoff deals with a clogged toilet by just continuing to flush until the thing overflows. You begin to resent the holiday season itself. If it weren't for the fucking holidays, you never would have had this party in the first place. Fucking shitty holidays!

Stage Five: Acceptance

You admit to yourself that no one is to blame for this situation. Your house is 100 years old. The toilets clog sometimes. Your guest had to take a shit. We all have to shit sometimes. The toilet clogged, and he dealt in a totally understandable way: Aaagh! Make this go away. Flush! Down! Down, socially unacceptable turd clog! You realize that you'd likely do the same thing in a similar situation. Now you have water stains and a few pucker marks in your ceiling. You'll have to call some sort of handyperson to come and fix the damn thing.

Stage Six: Inevitable Thoughts of Sedaris

You think of the David Sedaris story "Big Boy," where an embarrassed narrator tries to deal with someone else's stubborn turd in the toilet of a house where he's a guest. You can't remember how he ended up jettisoning it, but you recall a scenario involving throwing the turd out the window. You know that no toilets overflowed in this story. You wish somehow your guest could have just thrown his turd out the second floor window. It would've been gross, sure, but better than the holiday party toilet overflow debacle of 2008.

The Advent of Kidhood

2008-12-07T20:11:00.001-08:00

Two Decembers ago, I bought an advent calendar for O. He was three, going on four. It was a cardboard house with little windows full of chocolate. It seemed a little boring to me to have the same thing behind the door every day, and I wasn't crazy about the idea of my kid eating chocolate with his breakfast for twenty-four days straight, so I took out the chocolate from about half of the windows and replaced it with other stuff. It wasn't easy, since the windows were really small, but I found some little toys that fit, and put in other "treats" that fit, like little gummi bear vitamins and, for a couple of windows, single almonds. My Old Man laughed when he saw me putting in the almonds, but the first time O. discovered an almond behind the advent calendar window, he was excited. "Look Mama, a almond!" he said. He was just into the whole surprise thing, and it was so cute. I figured I'd only get away with almonds in the advent calendar for one year, though.

Flash forward past December 2007 (no almonds, O. still into his daily advent calendar surprise) to this year. My kid has gone from being a little kid to being on the verge of big kidhood. On December fifth, he opens his advent calendar window and exclaims "There's nothing there!" He speculates that perhaps the cats are responsible. I investigate, and opening the windows for December sixth and seventh, I find empty spaces. I proceed to open every window. All empty. Suddenly the fact that O. had been uninterested in breakfast the day before made sense: he had been gorging himself on chocolate, licorice, and gummi bear vitamins while we slept, having carefully closed each window to cover his trail.

Sometimes when O. is being trying in one way or another, I remind my Old Man not to take it personally, even though it can seem like our son is pointedly trying to drive one or both of us crazy. I am actually fairly good at not taking it personally. But, having taken the trouble to find all manner of small treats to fit in these little windows, then carefully crammed them in there and shut each cardboard door late at night on November 30th when I should've been in bed, this advent calendar thing felt personal. I was disappointed. I was pissed. O. got an unusually long time out and a lecture from Mama, then an extra two minutes of time out to sit and think about the lecture ("Now you sit and think about what I just said" - this is a move my dad used to love, and one that I rarely resort to). Then I told him that, in light of the purloined advent treats, I was throwing away the rest of his Halloween candy, which I proceeded to do. My Old Man felt this was unduly harsh, but the advent calendar was my project and so he left the response to me.

The punishment was done and O. was in a very contrite and eager-to-please mood. But I still had a dilemma: it was the day before St. Nicholas day, and I'd bought a bunch of stuff to put in all the stockings. Given the whole "naughty or nice" nature of the Santa/St. Nick thing, should I scale back on O's treats and stick in a small lump of coal? (Where does one get a lump of coal? Would a charcoal briquette suffice?)

Now, let me just say that as a tot I never bought the Santa thing for a minute. My family went overboard with it, arranging to have Santa appear in the flesh and bully me onto his lap, ordering me to sing him songs. It was all very strange and frightening, this big, loud stranger in his bizarre getup and obviously fake beard. (What was he trying to hide?) And so I was relieved at the tender age of three to figure out that Santa was really Uncle Hodge. I played along 'til I was ten in order to placate the grown-ups and milk the Christmas gravy train, but I never believed.

As a result of the lack of Santa magic in my childhood, I thought we might just skip it with our kids. Maybe we could sit O. down and say "listen, there's this thing called Santa, which is a load of bull, but don't tell the other kids, okay?" But when I suggested to my Old Man that we might forgo the Santa mythology, he looked at me like I'd just suggested we send O. out to work twelve-hour days at a textile mill. Despite the fact that he was a little skate-punk with almost no sentimental feelings toward his family from a young age, Santa was a sacred element of my Old Man's childhood. I respected that. And, being metaphorically minded, I could totally get onboard with the whole "Santa is the spirit of Christmas" angle, so we agreed that Santa would be part of our Christmas tradition.

But part of the Santa thing is the whole "naughty or nice" idea. This isn't something we dwell on a lot, but O. knows about it. (Hey, we're not above trying to get a little more cooperation out of our kindergartener in exchange for that stocking full of goodies and the extra few presents under the tree.) Would it be sending the wrong message if jolly old St. Nick hooked O. up with treats galore on the very night after Adventgate was busted wide open? I didn't want to stint in my role as St. Nick, and I did feel that O. had been punished enough. But, still, I was conflicted.

I talked to my Creative Writing students about it later that day. Like my Old Man, they found the Halloween candy move harsh. I asked them for their advice about what to do about St. Nicholas day. They were unanimous: I should just stuff his stocking. Santa was a forgiving old Saint, in their book, and O. had been punished enough.

One of my students suggested that we get a different advent calendar. Her family has one that has a little ornament or other tree-trimmer behind each door, which they put up on a fabric tree to count down the days 'til Christmas. I ran the idea by O. when I got home from school, expecting him to object to the no-candy version of the advent calendar. Instead, he was excited. "That would be like having two Christmas trees!" he observed. He liked the idea. And my Old Man noted that it would probably circumvent conflict once Roo is old enough to participate and she and O. begin to share the honor of opening the December door of the day.

I ended up stuffing O's stocking with everything I'd bought for him before the discovery of Adventgate. He was very good about waiting 'til the Old Man and I got up on Saturday morning to check out his stocking. And the next day, when my mom and Mr. B. were over for dinner, he wanted to share the candy from his stocking with them. So he's back in Christmas season favor. And even though he's clearly a big kid and capable of sneaky doings, he's still a little kid, too, and sweet as ever. Most of the time.

Ice, Ice, Baby

2008-11-26T18:52:00.000-08:00

My Old Man and I had to turn down an invitation for a night of child-free bowling and beer drinking with some good friends last Saturday night. I had agreed to chaperone the annual ice skating party at school, and I would've felt like a heel backing down at the last minute. But, as is usual with chaperoning events such as dances and lock-ins, I was not especially excited.

Okay, maybe I was a little excited. I spent many days and evenings in my Wisconsin girlhood on the ice, both indoors and out. Every park in my Northern hometown had a rink during the winter months, and our local indoor rink was a hot spot for teenagers who'd already seen the movies at the two movie houses in town. (This was back before the mega-plexes hit small towns - it was a huge deal when a four screen theater opened up toward the end of high school.) I loved ice skating back then, and even had my own pair of white ice dancer skates with plaid flannel lining. (Where did those go?)

But even though I put "ice skating" on my list of Things to Do on the Prairie when I moved back to the Midwest after my LA stint (as careful readers will recall from my last post), in actually I haven't skated much since I've lived here. In fact, it had been almost ten years since I'd put on a pair of skates.

So I was a little excited. But I wasn't prepared for how much fun I was going to have. Chaperoning the skating party was a fucking blast! First of all, there was just the old exhilarating feeling of whizzing around the ice, the cold breeze pinking my cheeks and the fear of landing hard on my ass adding excitement to my every skate stroke. Then there was the vibe. It was so wholesome and cute and friendly! Everyone looks cute on ice skates. The wobbly people look cute. The confident people look cute. And all the kids were being so nice and congenial. Seniors were holding hands with freshmen, girls were holding hands with girls. Boys were even holding hands with boys. The dorkier kids all seemed really comfortable on the ice, and many of the cool kids were fairly unsteady - there was something so sweet about seeing that reversal. And watching the abler skaters advise and help steady the less able skaters was heartwarming.

I ended up skating the whole two hours of the event. The next day my thighs ached with the exertion, though at the time I was feeling no pain. As I left I was concocting plans to return with O. to teach him how to ice skate, and wondering whether they make strollers with blades instead of wheels so that Roo can come along too.

And today, the first day of my five-day Thanksgiving break, in between lunch at my mom's place and a trip to the bank, I popped by the ice rink and skated by myself for about 45 minutes. I just had to go back and get some more of that wholesome-ass fun.

These May Come In Handy Later

2008-11-19T13:18:00.000-08:00

Okay, another meme. Some details altered slightly to protect my real identity, but mostly this is the real deal.

WITNESS PROTECTION NAME: (mother's & father's middle names)
Patricia Gordon (Dude! I know someone named Patricia Gordon!)

NASCAR NAME: (first name of your mother's dad, father's dad )
Gordon Patrick (Sounds more like a professor)

STAR WARS NAME: (the first 2 letters of your last name, first 4
letters of your first name)
Elmeja (pronounced “el-mAY-hah,” I believe)

DETECTIVE NAME: (fav color, fav city)
Burgundy Madison (Very swank)

SOAP OPERA NAME: (middle name, most elegant-sounding city you’ve lived in)
Anne Los Angeles (not bad)

SUPERHERO NAME: (2nd fav color, fav alcoholic drink, add "THE" to
the beginning)
The Green Cabernet (yech!)

GANGSTA NAME: (fav ice cream flavor, fav cookie):
Pistachio Mandelbrot (I wouldn't last a minute on the street)

ROCK STAR NAME: (current pet's name, current street name)
Catface Green or Blue Springfield (since I have two cats, I chose a former house street and my current work street)

PORN NAME: (1st pet, street you grew up on)
Daschund Albion (bow wow!)

Ten Things I Was Wrong About

2008-11-13T09:20:00.001-08:00

1. Beer: I thought it was pissy, bitter, and thin. But then I spent a year abroad in Ireland and discovered Guinness. In the little town where I lived, the three pubs were the only fun going most evenings, and I learned to love hot whiskey and room temperature stout. Guinness was everything that cheap American beer was not: creamy, full-bodied, and delicious. And it lacked one of the main things I realized I did not like about your average pilsner: carbonation. After falling in love with Guinness, it was only a matter of time before I moved on to porters, bochs, and brown ales. Yum.

2. Sleep: I used to be able to get by on 5 hours a night, at least for a few nights in a row, and I believed that less sleep equaled more life. Now I know that sleep is one of the best things about life and that I'm worthless without at least seven and a half hours. But I prefer eight.

3. Flared jeans: My favorite pair of pants in second grade were electric blue polyester bell bottoms that came with a matching butterfly print sweater. Though I loved them at seven, by high school, I had repudiated my seventies childhood fashion sensibilities and pledged my devotion to peg-legged Zenas, casting a cold eye on the flares of my youth. When flares started coming back in in the nineties, I silently resolved I'd never give in and go back to flared pants. But then I came across a pair of purple jeans at the local hipster thrift shop, and when I tried them on, I noticed that the hems were not merely boot cut, but a bit flared. They were six bucks, though, so I bought them anyway. They soon became my favorite pants. Since then many pairs of flared jeans have found their way into my closet and my heart. I know "skinny jeans" have made a big comeback, but I'm sticking to my flares. I love them because they're flattering to people of all body types. With skinny jeans you're taking your chances if you're too skinny, or not skinny enough.

4. My town: When I moved here from the big city to go to graduate school, I assumed I'd be bored and cloistered. I actually made a list of things I planned to do to while away my non-studying time. (It included: ice skate, make my own yogurt, bake bread, and quilt - all so quaint, so Midwestern. I did a bit of ice skating my first year here; otherwise, the list was a bust.) When I got here, I was pleasantly surprised to find it was a fine place to party and an excellent place to start a rock and roll band. Still, I definitely planned to move away some day. When I shacked up with my Old Man, I began to appreciate the town more. Then I found my one-of-a-kind teaching job, and my love for my town increased. Once I had a kid, I discovered so much more to love about this small but cultured, low-key, and affordable hamlet.

5. My dear: When I first met my Old Man, I thought he was arrogant. I soon realized he was just shy and socially awkward. Later, I figured out he was the love of my life.

6. Kimya: At first, her music drove me up a tree. Now, I think she's a brilliant songwriter with a sharp wit and a heart of gold.

7. Black licorice: As a kid, I disliked black licorice and would only eat red licorice. Now I realize that there's no such thing as red licorice. Black licorice is the only true licorice. Call the other stuff what you will - red vines, Twizzlers - but don't insult the pungent glory of real licorice by calling it red licorice. (White chocolate, same to you.)

8. Feral Mom: When I first met her, she appeared to be a soft spoken Irish lass with winsome curls and a collection of especially pretty sweaters, and I took her at face value. She just seemed nice. Boy was I wrong. When I got to know her, I found out that she was so much more than just nice: she was a foul mouthed, dirty minded, chain smoking, beer swilling hellion. I liked her so much more. She quit smoking and had a couple of cute kids, but she's still as raw and as rock as ever.

9. Yoga: I used to think that yoga was all about stretching, relaxing, and finding your happy place. Now I know it's about getting my ass kicked by a domineering woman who flies to India for two months out of every year to get her ass kicked by an eighty-six year old Indian man.

10. TV's Funniest Home Videos: I once considered this total time-wasting television drivel, lowest common denominator stuff. Then O. turned me on to it, insisting that we watch "that show with the silly videos" every time we were home and unoccupied during its magic time slot. Now I realize that this show is pure comic gold, a motherlode of slapstick humor and schadenfreude.

There you have it. This is a meme, so if you're so inclined, go forth and list.

Very good!

2008-11-05T09:39:00.001-08:00

I am a happy woman today, and a proud American.

Hopeful and Scared as Shit

2008-11-04T09:24:00.000-08:00

I don't bite my nails, but today I think I might start. I belive that Obama will win. All the indications seem to point that way. But I won't be able to breathe easy 'til it's all over. They say "once bitten, twice shy." Well, I've been bitten hard in a very tender place the last two major elections, and there's no telling how many uncorrupted elections it will take to make me feel safe in early November during even years.

With apologies to my Republican brothers and sisters, it's not just that McCain is scary. I actually used to respect John McCain, but as Feral Mom eloquently illustrates, he's sold out or gone mad or both. And it's not just that his running mate is so underqualified that she makes Dan Quayle look like Winston Churchill. (And so annoying she drives me up a wall. And I'm from Wisconsin! Some of my favorite people have folksy accents not unlike hers. It's not the accent. It's so much more.) No, the horror of an imagined McCain-Palin administration is just part of what's at stake.

What's really at stake is that we have an astoundingly good candidate in Barack Obama, someone who is intelligent, ethical, even tempered, thoughtful, and has a great deal of relevant experience. Someone who knows the Constitution. Someone who takes complex and realistic positions on difficult issues. Someone who has maintained his positions and his poise over the course of a hard faught primary season and campaign season. I could go on and on about why I love Obama, but I have a class to teach in fifteen minutes. But suffice to say, that if we don't elect him, I think I may lose all hope for the good sense and native intelligence of my fellow Americans as a group.

I voted. And now I'm waiting, rationing my fingernails so they last 'til the verdict is in.

What Not to Do on Halloween

2008-10-31T13:11:00.001-07:00

If you're a teacher and it's Halloween and you see a kid with a hilarious yet very realistic-looking wig, and it's a kid you don't actually teach or, come to think of it, even really know at all, think twice before you say to him in the hallway "Ha! Great wig!"

It may not actually be a wig.

(I'm not saying this happened to me today or anything. Just a word of friendly advice...)

Happy (slightly chagrined) Halloween!

My Swinging Weekend

2008-10-19T16:37:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, I drove to a nearby swing state with some friends, got myself fifteen minutes of training at Obama Headquarters, strapped my baby to my back, and hit the streets to canvas for Barack Obama. It felt good. It was heartening. I'm trying to figure out a way to go back and do it again before or on election day.

Gentle readers, Obama has to win this election. Has to. And I know all indications look good right now, but after 2000 and 2004, I'm not taking anything for granted.

If you live in a swing state, go out and try your damnedest to make that state swing the right way. Don't worry about having to argue with undecided voters; The Obama for America people won't send you to any of those. At this point, it's all about getting to the registered voters who are likely to vote Obama if they vote and urging them to get to the polls on November 4th, or preferably earlier. (With record numbers of new voters registered this year, every person who votes early will make it possible for four additional voters to vote on election day.)

And if you don't live in a swing state, consider a road trip. Better yet, a road trip with a few of your Obama-loving friends. Make yourself a mix tape, pick up some fresh donuts for the road, and let's try to make this election an unstealable landslide.

Roo's Birth Story, Finale

2008-10-03T21:11:00.000-07:00

[Read part two first.]

So it was time to push. And I was scared out of my mind. And I said so.

I knew that I would do it, but I had to speak that fear. Kristy and Rae both gave me encouragement, and Kristy said “E, your baby is about to be born!” in a very warm and supportive tone. I grabbed both of my Old Man’s hands and held on tight, and I started to push hard with each contraction.

Pushing went much quicker with Roo than in my labor with O. and required less strenuous effort. It was also harder, in a couple of ways. First of all, though the tub had been so helpful in the painful last part of my labor, now that it was time to push, I was having trouble finding my footing, bracing myself. I kept reaching higher and higher on my Old Man’s arms to find a dry spot to grab. (And, ultimately, I pulled him further and further into the tub with me. By the end, I had grappled him into a big, wet bear hug and his chest and shoulders were essentially in the water.)

And although the pushing didn’t last nearly as long, the pain was just as intense as my first labor, and in a way it was worse because… well, how do I put it? Rather than having a small human head stretching my cooter out for a contraction, then sliding back into my body, the way it worked with O., I had a small human head stretching my cooter out the whole damn time! I quickly discovered that I could just freeze after a contraction and hold the baby’s head in place between pushes, which seemed like a good idea because it presumably made the pushing phase faster. But damned if it didn’t hurt like arickinfrickinfrackin’! (At the time, I saw holding the baby’s head clamped mid-cooter as a choice I made. Now that I look back on it, I wonder if that’s just how it is once that path of resistance has already been pioneered. A question for the midwife next time I see her. Or perhaps other moms who’ve squeezed more than one human being through your vag can weigh in.)

Can we just pause here and say how fucking insane it is that we squeeze people through our vaginas? I am not normally prone to the essentialist brand of feminism, but this whole baby-having experience gives me a serious new level of respect for myself and all other moms. (And cesareans count, needless to say. Having a human lifted out of an incision in your lower abdomen is no cake walk either, I feel fairly certain. And then there are moms who’ve done both, like Feral Mom . Well, let’s just bow our heads for a moment as we think of their feats.)

(And, as a side note, to just stretch this tangent out a bit further [ow. I said “stretch …. further”], adoptive parents have my respect up and down and all around. I’ve recently seen my best friend from high school through an international adoption, and I think it’s fair to say that the experience strained and stretched her in ways I’ve never dreamed of.]

Anyway, back to me in the tub with my vagina stretched over a small human head: As the baby’s head was crowning, Kristy leaned in and said to me “I can see the top of the baby’s head. A couple more pushes and her head and shoulders will be born. At that point, I want you to reach down and grab her, and you can bring her up to your chest. Okay?” I was so out of my mind with pain and thrashing around at that point that I wasn’t 100% sure she was talking to me, and I actually said “Who, me?” And she said “Yes, E, you. Do you want to do that?” And I said yes, I wanted to.

My memory of this part is blurry, but the baby’s head was born fairly quickly, then I pushed out the shoulders, then reached down through the water and grasped her under the arms and pulled her up to my chest. It was a very weird sensation, feeling my hands take hold of my baby for the first time, and at the same time feeling her body slip out of me. She was warm and slimy with vernix and blood, and she had lots of dark hair. She was reddish purple, and Kristy held an oxygen tube under her nose to “pink her up,” then clamped the cord so that my Old Man could cut it. The baby lay on my breast, all puckery and wet and alien-looking. It was really my first experience with a gooey newborn, since O. had been whisked away and cleaned up before I could hold him (due to his having meconium in his amniotic fluid). She was not beautiful to me at that moment, wrinkled and mucus-covered and crying, but she was miraculous and beloved. And I was just so glad to be done with labor. I vividly remember lying there in the cooling water, my slimy little sweetie on my breast, and thinking “Thank God I never have to do that again!” Then Sharon the labor and delivery nurse took the baby off to weigh her and do all the newborn routines. My mom left to pick up O. and bring him back to meet his baby sister.

At that point my Old Man, Rae, and Kristy helped me out of the tub, wrapped me in warm towels, and led me over to the bed, where Kristy would deliver the placenta and check me for tears. Once I was on the bed, Sharon brought the baby over and gave her to me, all swaddled and clean and exuding an amazing newborn scent all her own. She was now officially beautiful, just breathtaking, with a round moon face, a little rosebud mouth, and alert black eyes that blinked up at me with astonishing calmness. Rae helped me get her started nursing, and she latched on and began sucking like a champ. This suckling should have brought on more contractions and helped birth the placenta, but so far there was no sign of the placenta, nor any new contractions. Kristy asked if I was feeling any cramping and I said no. I was marveling at my little daughter, her completely distinctive face and her thatch of thick, black hair. But it was clear that Kristy was becoming concerned about the placenta not coming, and I was getting concerned by that and becoming distracted.

Now, after a completely unproblematic natural birth, when the baby is healthy and doing well, comes the crisis. Kristy lets me know that we need to get that placenta out soon due to the risk of infection – the clock is ticking and if the placenta isn’t delivered once a certain amount of time has gone by, drastic measures will have to be taken, removing the placenta “instrumentally.” Kristy explains that this is basically a D & C without the D (since I’m already dilated). I will be wheeled off to surgery, intubated and put under general anesthesia, and my uterus scraped. When I hear this, I cry out “No! No way!” I have just gone through over twelve hours of labor, without any drugs or interventions, and now I’m looking at being separated from my baby, knocked out, and operated on, then recovering from general anesthesia (which always makes me nauseated and royally hung over) while my baby waits in the nursery? All to deliver the placenta? No way.

Kristy says if I can manage to pee, it might help the placenta come out. My Old Man takes the baby. I squat on the bed, bloody and shivering. I pee into a pan. No placenta. Kristy gives me an injection of pictocin. No new contractions. No placenta. Fuck. I am starting to freak out. I just want to be with my baby.

“There’s one thing we can try” Kristy says. (Almost the exact words she used before she performed the miracle during O’s stalled labor. I trust Kristy.) “I don’t think I’m strong enough to do it,” she says, “and there’s only one OB on staff who would be willing to try this before surgery, and I think she’s on duty today.” And so Kristy goes and tracks down Dr. W., the doctor in question. But first she warns me, “This will hurt a lot.” And just as I’m being readied for this painful, crucial procedure, O. arrives with my mom and stepdad, Mr. B. They’re waiting in the hallway. We wanted O. to meet the baby as soon as possible after birth, and this should be a great time for him to do that. She should be in my arms and my Old Man at my side. But I have to do this thing, which will be painful, and bloody, Kristy tells me. Should someone go out in the hall and tell them to wait? “No, no,” I say, “Bring him in to meet the baby.” I don’t want my little boy standing out in the hallway with whispering adults, getting the sense that something is going wrong in there, where his mama and daddy and the baby are. But my Old Man is concerned about the blood, and the pain. Won’t it be worse if I’m yelling in pain than if O. is out in the hall? I tell them to drape me up as best they can to shield the blood from O’s view, and I resolve not to yell.

Dr. W. comes in, anonymous in scrubs and a surgery cap and mask, but I can see her determined eyes, which never look at my face, just focus determinedly on my pelvis. Those eyes have a look of demonic purposefulness. Kristy comes and takes my hand, whispering to me, “Her bedside manner is horrible, but she’s great with her hands.” Dr. W. then proceeds to pummel my belly. She just slams her fists into me again and again, up and down, then kneads me ferociously. It’s hard to really convey how hard she’s punching me in the gut, the gut that is tender from birth, the gut that’s extra vulnerable due to muscles spread out by pregnancy. It hurts so fucking much. And I have absolutely no resources left – I’ve spent them all on labor, then let any remaining bit of strength and resolve slip away during the few illusory minutes when I thought I was done. I’m out of my head, flinching and writhing, clenching my teeth. It’s all I can do not to yell out, but my four-year-old son is five feet away. I shoot a glance over at the corner where he is, forming a little triangle with his dad and his new baby sister. The scene is so sweet, and it contrasts so starkly with the grisly agony of my scene, and I want so much to be there instead of where I am.

But then the placenta comes forth in a warm gush, thank God and Dr. W. I feel like kissing her. I thank her profusely, so relieved I can be reunited with my baby, so gratified not to be on my way to the OR to be intubated and put under…

Suddenly, the crisis was over and the pain was subsiding. My Old Man brought O. and the baby over to my bedside, and put the baby back in my arms. It was getting late and my mom and stepdad moved to take O. back to their place to put him to bed. I was famished and ready to order some dinner. But just as O. was about to leave with my mom and Mr. B., I realized that we had yet to name the baby. We had chosen two names, Roo and Lu, and had decided to wait until the baby was born to see which struck us as more suited to her. I had been leaning more toward Lu, and I figured that post-labor I’d have the right to make the call if there wasn’t complete consensus. But as I looked down at this new and completely distinctive person, I suddenly couldn’t decide. We had told O. he’d get to weigh in, and so before he left, I asked him “Which name do you think we should pick for your new baby sister?” Without missing a beat, he said “Roo.” Though I had been favoring the name Lu, hearing O. say the name “Roo” with such calm confidence clinched it for me. And so my Old Man and I began calling our friends and family to tell them about our new baby girl, our Roo.

Roo's Birth Story, Part II

2008-09-20T14:50:00.000-07:00

[Read part one first.]

I started having contractions at midnight on Saturday, and by about 2:30 AM, they were regular and getting strong. I tried to rest for awhile, but as I felt my contractions get strong and regular, I got out of bed to labor in a less painful position, and also to get some things done before labor really got intense.

I labored alone in the mostly-dark house for much of the night. I lay down next to my Old Man for brief spells to try to rest up a bit, but I knew I wouldn’t be going back to sleep. My contractions were already too painful, and I was much too excited. I decided not to wake my Old Man to tell him I was in labor because I knew once he knew, he wouldn’t be able to sleep, and I figured it would be better for him to be somewhat well rested. Some time in the wee hours, however, I accidentally woke him up trying to unjam the printer while printing up our “people to call” list. (Given that I was almost a week past my due date, you might think I’d’ve had all of these little things done already. But no.) He called to me, asking if everything was OK, and I came in and told him that I was in labor, but encouraged him to stay in bed and try to get some more sleep. I said I’d let him know if things started getting intense. Soon after that I called Rae (the amazing doula who shepherded me through O’s birth) on her cell and got her voice mail. I left her a message. Then I sat down at my computer and wrote a very quick blog post, during which I had to pause to have a contraction.

Laboring on my own in a dim and sleeping house was surprisingly lovely. It was quiet and peaceful, and I felt a contented excitement, savoring this bit of solitary time before the impending rush of crucial teamwork I knew was coming. My contractions were manageable, and I rode them out in various positions – bending over table-pose-style, on all fours on a yoga mat, or squat-sitting on a big therapy ball. Catface was my only company; she followed me closely wherever I went, clearly aware that there was something momentous in the works.

After an hour or two of laboring and puttering between contractions, I went back to bed to get some rest. My contractions were 8-10 minutes apart and getting stronger. I had been a little bit bummed by the midnight start time, partly because of the no-sleep issue but mostly because it seemed to preclude Kristy being our midwife. She’d given me her cell number and her home number, and all but said “call me when you go into labor,” but I certainly wasn’t going to call her before 8 AM on her day off. But as I lay there in bed, dozing lightly between contractions, and the hour neared 4 AM, it began to seem like calling her at 8:00 might turn out to be an option.

I called Rae the doula’s cell again at about 4:30 AM and she picked up. We talked about my contractions, and she suggested I go back to bed and try to rest as much as possible until they got closer together. So I went back to bed and rested, sometimes sleeping lightly for five or ten minutes between contractions. O. came from his bed to ours during this time, and my Old Man told him that I was starting to have the baby. “Does that mean the baby will be born today?” O. asked, and I said “Yes, probably. What do you think of that?” and he said “Good.”

Around 7:00 AM, we all got out of bed and the day began. I ate oatmeal between contractions. My Old Man and O. got breakfast, and O. began playing on the floor. It was a bright, beautiful day and everything felt positive and charged with happy anticipation. At one point O. came up to me as I was eating and, between contractions, we talked about labor, what was happening and why it hurt. I explained that the contractions squeeze the baby downward so she can come out, and I mentioned that before long she would come out through my vagina. O then made this observation: “It would be really hurting if men could have babies,” (thoughtful pause) “through their butts.”

I called Rae around 8 AM. She was taking her kids to Hebrew school at 9:00 and said she’d be over right after. Mom called and said she’d be over to take charge of O. after she and my stepdad looked at some furniture at a yard sale on the east side of town. That was fine with me, since nothing seemed urgent at that point. I also called Kristy the miracle midwife to let her know I was in labor. She asked about the timing of my contractions and said she was taking her sons to church and would be back around 11 AM. I took a shower at 8:45, not so much for theraputic purposes, but because I was due for one and god knew when I’d get to take one again.

Rae came over some time between 9:30 and 10:00 AM. I labored in various positions with Rae’s coaching. My Old Man puttered around and read the newspaper (or tried – later he said he’d been too nervous to actually concentrate). My mom came by and got O to bring him over to the playground for a bit. At about 10:30 Rae needed to go home briefly (she had gotten her period – it was a festival of womanly events), and my Old Man hung out with me while I labored. This was a nice chance for him to step into a central role for awhile, which he would do again later when I was pushing the baby out. It was then he admitted how nervous he felt. I was still mainly excited, not really nervous. Rae had been writing down the timing of my contractions, and my Old Man took this over for a bit and generally soothed and encouraged me during contractions.

When Rae returned, she and I went out for a walk, which was one of the highlights of my labor. The day was superb, and it felt wonderful to be out. I found that walking through my contractions was a good thing. It hurt less than standing still, and felt more productive to be moving (which Rae averred was the case). It was hard the first couple of walking contractions, but I quickly got the hang of taking slow steps while breathing deeply through a contraction. I learned, though, that it’s dangerous to walk around my neighborhood with Rae the doula while you’re in labor because she knows everyone and stops to chat. In addition to various passing conversations, she had a lengthy talk with a friend of hers working in his yard, Rae asking him in great detail what he was planting and making general conversation. Finally I just began to walk on because standing around listening to other peoples’ small talk is not something I do when I’m in labor! But, thankfully, Rae took my cue and moved on with me.

When we got back from our walk, a bit after noon, my contractions stalled, though I’d been having good, strong ones the whole time we were out. Rae and I were both concerned (I remember thinking “This is too familiar” – that had been an issue during my labor with O, and I didn’t want to repeat the marathonesque aspect of that labor). We called Kristy and she said “just keep me posted.” Luckily around 1:00 PM my contractions kicked back in, coming evenly every 4-6 minutes, and strong. We called Kristy again and Rae joked that my uterus heard her talking about its slack performance and stepped up to show us all. Kristy offered to do a manual exam at her house (two blocks from our house) to give us more information about whether/when to go to the hospital.

So Rae, my Old Man, and I walked over to Kristy’s (and found her in the process of washing the exterior of her house, a project she abandoned to join the progress of my labor). My Old Man played with Kristy’s two sons in the living room, while we went into the guest room, where I got naked and Kristy got her gloves on. She checked my cervix, which was 6 cm dilated and “very mushy,” and she said that if she broke my bag of waters, she imagined I’d be fully dilated and ready to push within two hours. Was I ready to go to the hospital? I said yes, very psyched that Kristy would be attending the birth of our second baby.

So, while my Old Man and I drove to the hospital, our midwife dropped her kids off at a neighbor’s and rode her bike there. Our doula rode her bike there and met us outside the parking garage. (Where I had a mild contraction on the bumpy car ride up to the top and a gnarly long one walking to the elevator.) Rae led us up to our room on the 10th floor, where we had an amazing view of the nearby lake and surrounding park. Kristy was already prepping the water birth tub in our room. The mood was warm, comfortable, and altogether positive, with the sun lighting up the room.

Kristy fitted me up with EKG-type thingies and various monitoring devices. I sat on a therapy ball and rocked through my contractions, and in between my Old Man got me my “energy drink” to sip from and gave me some pita chips. I got up on the bed so that Kristy could break my water. She snagged the bag with the knitting-hook device, and out it rushed. The amniotic fluid was clear – good news. (It meant that the baby was not showing signs of distress.) The tub was ready by then, so I got in, and as I labored in the water, the labor and delivery nurse, Sharon, asked me a bunch of questions to get my paperwork out of the way.

I had really loved laboring in the Jacuzzi when I was having O, but I was finding the birthing tub harder to manage because it was so big and I was so floaty; I was having trouble finding a good position where I didn’t feel like I was bobbing around. I needed to feel anchored to be able to really manage my contractions, which had gotten stronger since Kristy broke my water. Before long, I landed on a position that worked: kneeling with my feet together and my forearms on the seat of the tub, sometimes switching to sitting “criss-cross applesauce” style on the floor of the tub. Rae, Matt, and Kristy were all gathered around the sides of the tub.

Kristy asked me if we had music. I had actually put together a labor mix that my Old Man burned for me entitled “This Woman’s Work,” after the first and last songs (the first Maxwell’s cover and the last Kate Bush’s original). As the CD was nearing the last song, I opened my eyes and my mom was right there, having left a napping O. with his grandpa.

Kristy said pushing time was near and asked if I wanted to be checked internally before I began pushing. That would have required me getting out of the water, but at that point I still thought I might want to push sidelying on the bed, since that was how I birthed O. I said, yes, I wanted to be checked. But as my contractions continued, I began to feel this strong pressure on my rectum. I’m not sure how I phrased it, but I basically told Kristy I felt like I needed to push out a turd, and she told me to go ahead and try to push it out, that it was no problem.

Well, that of course was my urge to push out my baby. Amazing how similar it feels to needing to take a big and urgent dump. But much more intense, of course, and with the waves of urgency traveling throughout my laboring core. So, I just did what felt right, and pushed into that rectal itch, and soon Kristy was saying “I can see the baby’s head crowning!” So, forget about the exam, it was time to have the baby, and I was going to push in the water. Decision made.

Here, for the first and only time during my labor with my baby girl, I felt trepidation. Until this point, there was no anxiety or fear, and I felt completely on top of my labor. When I had O, I was able – with great effort and focus – to remain relaxed through most of my contractions, but toward the end (and especially after my water broke), I felt like the pain was slipping beyond my grasp. Rather than me riding my contractions, I felt like my contractions were riding me, and I was out of control. In this second labor, no contraction ever really got the best of me, even though they got progressively more painful. Partly this was because I was more experienced and confident, and as a result I was more willing to try different positions rather than clinging to the one that worked best for me. Also, there was this moment while I was still at home, as my contractions were getting more intense, that I had a serious talk with myself, consciously adjusting my attitude toward this pain, willing myself for this one day to approach pain in a more distanced, philosophical way. I still had to work through each contraction, but there was never a question of losing my grip.

But now, facing the prospect of pushing this baby out – the idea of pain being philosophical and trying to experience it from a distance, I knew none of that applied. I had done this once before, and I knew that the pain of pushing was a whole other animal than the pain of contractions. Contractions are essentially a very intense ache, extremely painful, yes, but still a form of aching. Pushing is fire, cutting, a searing, sharp sort of pain. I remembered how painful it was during O’s birth, and I was openly afraid to go through it again. When I began pushing with O, I had no idea what I was getting into, and it required so much effort to push that big egg-shaped head out of my profoundly unstretched vagina, I had to lock into an inward focus so tight, there was no room for fear. Now, I knew exactly what I was getting into, and my focus was much more diffuse, in part because I was floating rather than on a solid bed, as I had been with O, braced on all sides by my support team. I spoke my fear out loud, saying “I’m afraid to push.” And I truly was afraid. In fact, for a moment I really felt like No, I can't do this. It's too hard. It's too scary. There I was, naked and scrabbling around in a big tub of warm water, looking for something to grab onto.

Next time: I find something to grab onto, Roo is born, all's blissful for five minutes, then a crisis that ends with a scary woman punching me in the stomach.

Interlude

2008-09-16T19:20:00.000-07:00

Happy birthday, Roo!

Since I didn't get a chance to finish your birth story today, as I intended, time will stand still on this blog and it will officially be September 16th until I get you born in black and white (or in black and tan, as it were). Hopefully that will be soon.

Stay tuned...

Roo's Birth Story, Part I

2008-09-15T20:30:00.000-07:00

On Friday, September 7th I had a midwife appointment with Kristy, the miracle-working midwife who delivered O. We hoped fervently that she would be on duty to deliver our baby girl when the time came. But since there are five midwives in the Midwife practice at our hospital, and since Kristy had a chunk of time-off coming up soon, the odds of having her attend the birth seemed slim. Kristy examined me and said I was about three centimeters dilated. Then she gave me her cell phone number, something that is not common practice for our midwives. She stopped short of saying “call me when you go into labor,” but that seemed to be the implication. I left the office feeling like a high school girl who’s just been asked to the library by the hot Senior she’s been dreaming about: Is this a date? I hope this is a date.

A big pregnant week went by with no action, aside from losing little bits of my mucus plug. (Appetizing!) Friday, September 15th I had an appointment with Jen, a very capable midwife with a somewhat terse and chilly bedside manner. At the start of my appointment, Jen had introduced me to a midwife-in-training, Sophie, and asked if I minded if she performed my exam. I said that was fine, and Sophie palpitated my belly and did the audio sonogram thing to listen to the heartbeat, then stepped back while I talked to Jen. At this point, I was five days past my due date and quite hot for my baby to be born. I asked Jen to strip my membrane in the hope that it might help get labor started (and if you’re unfamiliar with membrane-stripping as a form of natural labor induction, read on for the gory details). Jen turned to Sophie and said “would you like to strip the membrane?” Sophie looked a bit taken aback but said “sure.” I thought to myself “With all due respect to the importance of training young medical professionals, there is no fucking way I'm letting a trainee strip my membrane!” I knew it would be uncomfortable, but more importantly, there was a risk of breaking the bag of waters, thus potentially creating the need to actually induce labor, something I hoped to avoid. I wanted this procedure done by someone with as much experience as possible. I was just about to speak up and be the difficult patient, insisting that Jen perform the procedure, when Jen asked Sophie if she had ever done this. “No,” she said, and when Jen said “Why don’t you let me do this one, then,” Sophie looked as relieved as I felt.

Jen then reached a gloved finger into my effaced and partly dilated cervix and made a vigorous circle, snagging the membrane attaching the bag of waters to my uterus and separating that area of membrane from the uterine wall. It hurt a lot, but I was already in the “ready for labor” mindset, and I just breathed and bore the pain (and the gross and uncanny feeling of something ripping within), which was easier knowing that this might well jump start the labor I was so ardently anticipating. After the initial pain was over, an ache remained in and around my cervix, which was now much more tender.

“If stripping the membrane works, it will work within about thirty-six hours,” Jen told me once I was out of the stirrups and sitting up. “Having intercourse will improve the chances of this procedure initiating labor, due to the high prostaglandin levels in semen.” I thanked her for the advice and told her I’d see what we could do, what with the four-year-old at home and other complications. This didn’t satisfy her. “I would really like to see you go home and have intercourse,” she said with straightfaced insistence. Okay, okay, doc! I’ll go have sex! I gave Jen an explicit assurance that the sex would happen, and she shook my hand and wished me luck.

We had our homework laid out in no uncertain terms: “Go have intercourse.” But my Old Man and I had a faculty meeting in the afternoon, so the sex had to wait. O was at my mom and stepdad’s place, so I called and said “can we pick up O. a little bit later?” Usually I’d give an explanation, but this time I decide to just make the bare request and only say “The Old Man and I need to have some hot, labor-inducing sex” if absolutely pressed. Luckily Mom just said “Sure! What time do you want to get him?” So we went home and had sex. The intimacy was nice, and it was even fairly sexy, despite my hugeness. But once the actual intercourse began, it was flat-out painful. That tender cervix did not enjoy the intrusion, and I was grimacing and bearing it and hoping my Old Man would… arrive. And, once I’d made it clear he didn’t need to wait for me (no way was I arriving in this particular circumstance), he did. Prostaglandins received.

Jen had said our window for success was thirty-six hours. My labor did not begin that evening, nor did it begin the next day. I was having regular Braxton-Hicks contractions, but no actual contractions. Saturday night at 10:00, with that thirty-six hour window about four hours from closing, my Old Man and I decided to have sex one more time. I got to bed about 11:00 PM, hoping things would get started before dawn. And things did.

(To be continued...)

Big, Pregnant Fridays

2008-09-12T08:19:00.000-07:00

Or: Prelude to a Birth Story

A year ago at this time I was pregnant. Very pregnant.

I was due on September 10th, and because this was my second baby, I assumed she would probably be born before the due date. That was a mistake, because by the time the due date came, I was already antsy. Perhaps there was no avoiding that impatience. After the ten weeks of nausea subsided, my first pregnancy was basically pleasant and comfortable right up to the end. During this second pregnancy, I began carrying the baby very low about the beginning of my third trimester, and my perineum began to bulge uncomfortably and (I thought) rather alarmingly. Toward the end of August, I started getting charlie horses in my groin on a daily basis, and the itching that had begun on my belly some time before began to spread ‘til I felt itchy all over. By my due date, I was ready to have this baby, and had been for some time.

My impatience for labor to begin was heightened by the fact that, after a summer of leisure, I resumed teaching a couple of weeks before my due date. When O. was born in January of 2003, I taught ‘til a couple of weeks before his birth, giving me a bit of vacation before labor actually began. With Roo, I vacationed ‘til a couple of weeks before she was due to be born and then, on the verge of parturition, went back to teaching full-time. So, there I was: huge, waddling, impatient, and – accustomed to lazing around in the same pair of maternity capris and one of three well-worn tee-shirts – having to cover my swollen form with reasonably professional-looking clothing (different clothing each day!).

Not wanting to use up a day of my maternity leave before the baby actually came, I joked to my students and my fellow teachers that I planned to teach ‘til my water broke. As my due date passed without event and I kept having to get up every morning and drag my big-bellied self to school each day, I came to rue that joke. The smile on the face of the Number 10 bus driver got more nervous every day I mounted his bus for my ride to school. None of my colleagues seemed to have anything to say to me but “What are you doing here?” “You’re still pregnant?” and “When are you going to have that baby?” Fridays especially the jokes flew: “I hope we don’t see you Monday!” But I came back the first Monday after school started, and the second, and the third.

(To be continued…)

DoctorMama Mia, Part II

2008-08-30T10:00:00.000-07:00

As DoctorMama headed off to the bathroom, I sat infused with midday light from two windows at a corner table in a nearly empty Mexican restaurant. I was actually sort of glad that DM had to pee, because it gave me a moment to be alone and regroup. I realized I was still a bit nervous, even though all the things I had to be nervous about (What will I wear? What if I'm late? What if she's late? How long will I wait? What if she's on time but has to drive around for an hour looking for parking due to the nearby street fair I neglected to take into account? What if the park is crowded and there are seventeen E. lookalikes to confuse her?) were now resolved. So I took a breath to dispel residual nervousness and began to look around me. Just as I was about to peruse the lengthy menu, I noticed not one, not two, but three fat flies dancing along the window and battering themselves against it. It didn't make for a pleasant nor appetizing mise en scene. I wished the flies would be gone, both because I didn't want their nasty, buzzy presence to be part of my lunch, and because I didn't want them to gross DoctorMama out.

I decided to take matters into my own hands. Acting quickly, I took aim at the flies, one by one, managing to kill all three with a few deft whacks. (The menu I was using as my fly swatter was huge, and that helped.) But then, of course, there were macerated fly carcasses smeared on the plate glass window next to our table. That was actually more disgusting than the live flies. So I unfurled the large napkin swaddling my cutlery, gave the window a firm and broad sweep, folded the fly guts into the center of the napkin, and strode to a nearby bus tub, chucking the napkin into it. Then I wiped my hands with a wet wipe from my purse stash and threw that away. Finally, I grabbed an intact napkin/silverware bundle from a nearby table and returned to my chair. Throughout all of this, I was sure DoctorMama was going to reappear at any moment, and I wasn't certain what I was going to say if she did. ("What am I doing? Oh, just killing flies and/or disposing of fly carcasses and/or hastily wiping any microscopic traces of fly guts off my hands. Let's eat!") Luckily, though, she came back to our table only after all the stages of my insecticide were complete.

Lunch was fun. I soon found out that DoctorMama loves avocados and cilantro. As she scoured the menu for a dish heavy on both, I felt a glow of shared proclivity. (I'm not sure why I get excited when someone I like is passionate about the same foods as me, but I do. I always feel broken up in some small, crazy way when I discover that a friend isn't that into chocolate. Or, less disheartening but still a wee drag, that they prefer milk chocolate to dark.) We easily filled the time between ordering and eating with a steady flow of entertaining conversation, DoctorMama filling me in on some of the astonishing habits and notions of her bad in-laws that haven't yet made her blog. One surprising thing about lunch was that we didn't talk about our blogs at all, nor really anything to do with blogging. (That came later.)

As we left the restaurant and walked to DoctorMama's car, I was struck by how petite she is. Her blog voice is bold and she doles out advice with great confidence, and somehow this led me unconsciously to expect her to be a larger physical presence. It then occurred to me that DoctorMama herself is not intimidating in the way I expected her to be. It dawned on me that some of my nervousness about this meet-up was occasioned by my perception of DoctorMama as supremely confident and in command (of herself and consenting others). This was a little exciting (I think I had the notion that at some point DM would set me straight on some essential point of living or thought), but also a bit scary. In person, however, DoctorMama is quite approachable and unassuming. She is recognizable as the author of her blog, certainly, a level-headed person with a clear self-perception and firm opinions, who is witty and articulate. But for all that, she's not the least intimidating. And thus, she is an excellent companion.

Though I found that she was not looking to advise or correct in a general sense, I did experience a DoctorMama moment when the topic of running came up. (Of course!) I mentioned that I was thinking of taking up running again, and described my history of running, which basically consists of a couple of brief spells of running, ending in one injury and then another. "You were running too fast," she said, with decision and a hint of constructive admonition. I felt an electric thrill run up my spine.

There's not a whole lot more to tell that's anecdote-worthy. We drove to a nearby state park and took a long walk, and talked and talked. I found DoctorMama unfailingly interesting and easy to converse with. She also proved herself exceptionally gracious by lending me her sunhat when mine kept blowing off. Hers had a chinstrap, which mine lacked, and my extreme paleness must have cried out for aid.

It was telling that when we ran into a snarl of construction-related traffic on the drive home and were stuck at a crawl for thirty minutes, we never ran out of things to say, even though we'd been talking for about four hours. I enjoyed hanging out with DoctorMama, liked her abundantly, and was not disappointed in any way by our meet-up.

And, let me add, she looked great. Her look was colorful, hip, and fun, but not fussy or overdone. She likely just threw on the first thing she saw in her closet. I know I did. (And I was very gratified to learn that she really likes the color orange, since the favorite tee-shirt I just happened to put on - without giving it any thought at all - happened to be a lovely shade of pumpkin.)

DoctorMama Mia, Part I

2008-08-23T20:23:00.000-07:00

I am a real blogger now: I have had my first blogger meet-up. Not long ago I got an email in my oralhygienequeen account from the illustrious DoctorMama , completely out of the blue. She would be traveling near my town soon, she informed me, and if I was free, maybe she and I could actually, like, you know, meet up?

My first reaction was to be immensely flattered and excited. My second, to check the date of her email in a panic. Given that I hadn’t looked at my blog email account in a couple of weeks, I could well have missed or bumped dangerously close to the edge of her window. Nope, I lucked out. She had sent the email that very day, and so I pounced, replying forthwith that I would love to meet up. We sent a flurry of emails back and forth, setting up a time and place.

The prospect of meeting DoctorMama filled me with a giddy anticipation I rarely feel in my stable adult life. It was akin to figuring out some amazing person I’d had a crush on liked me back, or learning that my band had landed a gig opening up for a more established band whose music I adored. Of bloggers I regularly read, DoctorMama is without a doubt in the top three I most wanted to meet. She is witty, wise, and a great writer, and I love the perfect balance of bullshit-free self-confidence and humorous self-deprecation she strikes in her blog. She has a powerful voice, full of authority and insightfulness, but because she’s honest about her own doubts and the challenges of her life, she comes off as endearing rather than imperious.

As the date of our meet-up approached, I grew pleasantly nervous. I felt like I was going on a blind date, but with someone I already knew a ton about. The question of what to wear began to itch at the edges of my consciousness whenever I thought of our impending date, and I faced a dilemma that’s quite familiar to me: trying to find a combination of clothes that make me look cute, cool, and like I don’t give a shit how I look all at once. A couple of days before we were to meet, DoctorMama signed off an email saying “Now I just have to obsess over what to wear to create the illusion that I'm really, really hip but never think about what I should wear, just throw on the first thing I see in my closet.” I loved her already.

The day came. Because my in-laws (who don’t know I blog) were visiting, DoctorMama and I had arranged to meet at a park near several good lunch possibilities. I decided to walk, and left myself plenty of time to get there, so I ended up arriving about five minutes early. Anyone who knows me remotely well understands what a feat this is, me arriving somewhere early. I think I’ve been early twice in my adult life. (Five minutes late is more usual. Ten or fifteen minutes late is not unheard of.) So I sat and basked in the glow of being early. I people watched, and no one in the sparsely populated park looked like they could be DoctorMama. Then, five minutes or so after the time we’d arranged to meet, I saw a slim blonde figure approaching in my peripheral vision. I knew it must be her. I got up from my bench and met her halfway, and in the nervous energy of the moment, reached out and clasped her in that sort of bumpy hug that two skinny women hugging creates.

Walking to the restaurant, we made slightly awkward conversation, mostly revolving around parking tickets we’d gotten in various cities. That feeling of being on a blind date was in the air, but I sensed pretty quickly that it wouldn’t last long because we managed to keep the conversation going. It felt just a little bit manic, but we were making each other laugh here and there, and I could feel the social grease of talking doing its work on the gears of our little date. By the time we got to the restaurant, things were starting to feel more comfortable. As soon as we got our table, DoctorMama excused herself to go the can.

Next time: I am inspired to kill for DoctorMama, she lends me her hat, and we get stuck in traffic.

First Day of School

2008-08-20T20:36:00.000-07:00

Today was the first day of school. Can you believe that? It's so early, and the summer has gone so fast.

Even after all these years of teaching, I'm still always nervous on the first day of school. I'm making a first impression, trying to get students excited about my classes, but also trying to remember to mention all the tedious nuts and bolts stuff they need to know to succeed in my classes. It's the one day of the year that I do most of the talking, and I don't like it. I can't wait for the second day, for the back and forth to begin.

On the first day, each class is a blank slate, and not in a good way. There's no rapport, yet. I almost always manage to create a good rapport with my students, but on the first day it's at zero. They don't get my sense of humor yet. I don't know who among them is funny, who's deep, who's strange in a way I will come to love, who's strange in a way I'll never quite figure out.

And, of course, it's a busy week. In addition to getting our shit together for our teaching gigs, the Old Man and I are getting childcare for Roo nailed down. And we're getting O. ready for kindgergarten. (Kindergarten!)

When all this start-of-school dust settles, I'll be much happier and more comfortable. The routine will begin to feel normal. The rapport will grow. And I'll have a time to tell you all about my recent blogger meet-up with the amazing DoctorMama.

O.P.P.

2008-08-11T19:21:00.000-07:00

Other People's Perfume. I am not down with it.

The eloquent Miss Manners once remarked that "a gentleman's cologne should never occupy a room that the gentleman is not occupying." Gentlemen, please take note. Guys, too. And ladies and women everywhere, be assured that this guideline need not be gender specific.

I myself do not wear perfume. I bathe regularly and wear deodorant. (Though even my deodorant - Tom's of Maine - is so mild mannered that I need to apply it several times a day to feel confident giving hugs to anyone but my intimates.) But back when I wore perfume, I tried to use discretion in applying it. I was always a fan of the "light spritz then step through it" school of perfume application.

Lately it seems like I'm beset by people who wear way too much perfume (or cologne). Kindly relatives who hold my baby for five minutes and leave her reeking of their favorite scent until her next bath. Men who make elevator rides an exercise in breath control. Female acquaintances who, when gathered in groups of two or more, create a war of the perfumes, leaving me a nauseated civilian casualty. I've decided that - short of hard core alcoholics or addicts (who tend to exude a toxic odor) or people who rarely bathe - I would rather smell someone's B.O. than their cologne or perfume, and I'm not exaggerating. At least people don't leave their B.O. behind after a hug. I'm aware, however, that mine is a minority opinion. We live in a culture where smelling like a human being is very scary for most people. Cologne, perfume, body spray, smelly hair products, and industrial strength deodorants are all here to stay.

Last week, though, someone went too far. It's bad enough when people douse themselves with too much perfume, thus compromising the air quality in shared space or leaving their mark after a consensual hug. But last week some woman I don't even know enacted a sneaky ploy to make me smell like her perfume.

I ordered a cool handmade necklace from Etsy, thinking to wear it when my Old Man and I went out for dinner on our anniversary. The necklace arrived on the very day of the celebration, just in time. When I opened it, I was momentarily delighted. It was beautiful, just what I wanted. But then I sniffed a funny smell. Perfume. Strong perfume, coming from the necklace. This skilled artisan had made a lovely necklace, then fouled it with a big dose of her perfume. Or some perfume of her choosing. The necklace was too stinky to wear that night. I hung it up on the back porch to air out and went out bare necked.

I can't be too pissed at the necklace maker. I'm sure spraying the piece with perfume was intended as a nice gesture. But it seems like a stupid one. Even if I liked her perfume (not a safe bet), I still might be annoyed that it was competing with my own, right? Assuming I wore perfume? Which I don't.

Lord, please guard and keep me from O.P.P.

Nine Years

2008-08-07T14:22:00.000-07:00

Every year the Edge Foundation poses a question to an array of elite scientists and leading intellectuals, then publishes their answers. Reading through The Best American Nonrequired Reading for 2006, I came across the answers to the 2005 question: "What do you believe is true, even though you cannot prove it?" The answers were all engaging and stimulating, but the one that struck me the most came from David Buss, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin. Buss's reply? True love.

I've spent two decades of my professional life studying human mating. In that time, I've documented phenomena ranging from what men and women desire in a mate to the most diabolical forms of sexual treachery. I've discovered the astonishingly creative ways in which men and women deceive and manipulate each other. I've studied mate poachers, obsessed stalkers, sexual predators, and spouse murderers. But throughout this exploration of the dark dimensions of human mating, I've remained unwavering in my belief in true love.

While love is common, true love is rare, and I believe that few people are fortunate enough to experience it. The roads of regular love are well traveled and their markers are well understood by many—the mesmerizing attraction, the ideational obsession, the sexual afterglow, profound self-sacrifice, and the desire to combine DNA. But true love takes its own course through uncharted territory. It knows no fences, has no barriers or boundaries. It's difficult to define, eludes modern measurement, and seems scientifically wooly. But I know true love exists. I just can't prove it.

I know that true love exists because I am lucky enough to have it. Whatever difficulties (fairly minor) that my Old Man and I have, and whatever ways (small and relatively trivial) I might wish he were different or he might wish I were, we have a deep, abiding, growing, and life-affirming love. There's no one I'd rather be with, no one whose opinion of me matters more, no one I enjoy talking to more, no one I feel more comfortable with, more "got" by. After all our years as a couple (thirteen and counting), I like him so completely, enjoy hanging out with him so much, feel such affection for him, crave to touch and be touched by him. And beyond all of these descriptions, beyond anything I can say to express my feelings for him, my love for my Old Man simply is, deep and pure hearted, vital and unquestionable. I see him from a distance and my heart still makes a little leap. I sometimes still smile involuntarily at the unexpected sound of his voice.

We got married nine years ago today, and I love him more and more. From being friends to becoming boyfriend/girlfriend, from being married to sharing the joyful and exasperating experience of being parents, this thing we have together has gotten cooler and cooler.

Happy anniversary, my dear.

The Bride Wore Botox

2008-07-24T13:55:00.000-07:00

And so did the bridesmaids. Holy shit, y'all! Did you see this truly horrifying story in the New York Times today? Last summer I experienced my one and only bridesmaid experience in an honest-to-god traditional white wedding, and being a bridesmaid was, at times, quite trying. But I guess I had no idea how much worse it could have been.

I'm not a fan of big white weddings for a host of reasons that I won't go into now, but there are relatively reasonable big white weddings and then there are crazy, out-of-control big white weddings. Unreasonable expectations of bridesmaids is one way to tell the latter from the former. While I personally would advise anyone who sought my wedding-planning advice (and, sadly, no one yet has) to just skip the matching dresses thing and let their friends and family wear clothes of their own choosing, if a "bride" (in the parlance of our times) can't live without a string of her closest female loved ones lined up in identical dresses, then she should at least exercise restraint. For example, she should not ask them to spend inordinate amounts of money on their dresses, unless she plans to foot the bill. She should also stop at the matching dresses, not going so far as to ask her attendants to wear identical hairstyles, jewelry, and/or bras. (And, yes, I have friends who have been asked to do all three.)

But I'm clearly living in a wonderland of naive and outmoded thinking. Now there are actually women out there, "brides," who are asking their closest female loved ones to undergo cosmetic surgery and in various other ways submit their flesh and skin to the machinations of "aestheticians" (a title that is, as I write, making Oscar Wilde spin in his grave.)

When my dear sister-in-law got married last summer, she gave me and all her other bridesmaids the chance to participate in a "pamper party" with facials, mani-pedis, and whatnot. She arranged for a hair stylist and make-up artist to be available to help us with our hair and faces, if we so chose. This all seemed a bit much to me, but, she did not require these things, thankfully, and she did not set up botox parties, group boob jobs, collective tooth whitening, or spray-on tanning sessions to turn us all the same shade of orange-brown. And, for this, the New York Times tells me, I should be very thankful.

If this exact article had been written on April 1st, I would have read it as a hilarious send-up of Bridezilla culture and a critique of the cult of feminine-beauty-at-all-costs, rolled into one. But this is no joke. There are actually women out there, in our very own land, telling their friends and family that they need to go under the knife or the needle in order to be presentable to appear on their wedding altar and in their photo album.

And, as the Times tells it, this is A-OK with many women:

For Karen Hohenstein, who held her party at [unnamed Spa] in Chicago, convincing her friends was as smooth as a Botoxed forehead. “It wasn’t me saying, ‘Hey, we all could use a little something,’ ” she said. “It was, ‘I want to do this,’ and a couple of people said, ‘I do, too.’ ”

There are, however, a few crazy dames who, for some unimaginable reason, balk at having cosmetic surgery in preparation for a stint as a bridesmaid:

But for every accommodating pal, there’s another who feels going under the knife is beyond the duty of bridesmaid. Becky Lee, 39, a Manhattan photographer, declined when a friend asked her — and five other attendants — to have their breasts enhanced. “We’re all Asian and didn’t have a whole lot of cleavage, and she found a doctor in L.A. who was willing to do four for the price of two,” said Ms. Lee, who wore a push-up bra instead.

Well, thank God for push-up bras! Jesus H. Christ. If any friend of mine asked me to get my tits done in honor of her nuptial day, I would not only say no, I'd refuse to take any part in her wedding and cut off all contact with this maniac. What the fuck!

The Times, on the other hand, is downright chipper about these interesting new developments in the multi-billion dollar wedding industry (This is, after all, the "Fashion and Style" section), going so far as to offer advice to anyone who might want to take a running jump at this festering bandwagon:

Just as timing matters when it comes to securing a hall, it’s best that brides-to-be don’t delay scheduling appointments, aestheticians and doctors say. “You wouldn’t get a cut and color the week before,” said Dr. Jessica Wu, a dermatologist in Beverly Hills who advises coming in three to six months before the big day.

Ms. Meyer of [another unnamed spa] suggests that a bride contact her the minute the question is popped. “Brides really appreciate the fact that we put everything in a regimented schedule for them,” she said. Since February 2007, she has staged more than 30 bridesmaid parties and has 18 planned so far this year. “If you have to do eight treatments, six weeks apart, that could take up to a year,” she said.

The Times does admit, though, that these batshit crazy pre-wedding rituals can cause some tension between brides and their buddies:

A bride’s request that you whiten your grayish teeth can strain a relationship. Samantha Goldberg, a wedding planner in Chester, N.J., recalled a bride who asked her attendants to get professionally spray-tanned for a Hawaiian-theme reception.

Alas, two women were claustrophobic and couldn’t bear standing in a tanning capsule. “They asked the bride if they could use regular tanning cream from a salon,” Ms. Goldberg said. The bride refused; she wanted everyone to be the same shade. The women ultimately declined to be bridesmaids. “Friendships of 20-plus years gone over a spray tan?” Ms. Goldberg said. “Sad!”

No, actually, it's probably for the best. When you have a friend who has been driven insane by a combination of her wholesale acceptance of the sickest standards of feminine beauty currently in circulation and her monomaniacal devotion to a wedding ideal that features friends and family in matching, medically-perfected bodies, it's better to find out sooner rather than later so you can run as fast as you can in the other direction from the evil pod person who has taken over your friend's body.

I can just imagine this bride looking through the photo album years after her wedding. "It's too bad Kathy and Cindy couldn't have been there. But damnit! they just weren't willing to paint themselves the right shade of brownish-orange!"

Oh, well, sometimes big life events like marriage show you what's really important. And what could be more important than having a friend with the right shade of skin, a pornstar-worthy rack, ivory white teeth, and a face smoothed by strategic paralysis induced by a reaction to botox, also known as botulinum toxin? And let's remember that botulinum toxin, the bacterial neurotoxin that causes botulism, is one of the most poisonous naturally occurring substances in the world and the most toxic protein in existence.

Kinda makes you feel a little bit sentimental, doesn't it?

I Heart Kimya

2008-07-15T19:00:00.000-07:00

For some reason, I often have a rocky start with people I end up loving deeply. When I met my Old Man, he seemed arrogant to me and I seemed a bit disdainful to him. It turned out later he was just socially awkward with strangers and I had a temporary bug up my ass about guys who played guitar. I was fifteen the first time I met my best friend KGU at rehearsal for the play Fiddler on the Roof, and she just rubbed me the wrong way. She seemed over-dramatic and a bit haughty. It turned out later that while she was over-dramatic (like the rest of us in the room that day, duh), she was not actually haughty, just striving for more than she was finding in our little Wisconsin hometown. As we became friends, I discovered that we were very much alike in many ways, and this was probably the main reason why she bugged me at first. When I met my beloved Feral Mom, I liked her fine but I got kind of a weird vibe from her. I later discovered that we were dating the same guy at the time, and he'd informed her of my existence without telling me about her. Needless to say, we surmounted this hurdle to become fast friends, bandmates, and eventually godmothers to each others' kids.

Last fall, my Old Man introduced me to a new friend of his, Kimya Dawson. He brought home her CD My Cute Fiend Sweet Princess and, listening to it on his own, immediately liked it. He thought I'd like it, too, so he put it on one night as he was cooking dinner and I was playing some board game with O. and wrangling Roo. The CD immediately began to grate on me. The guitar playing was primitive, every song sounded the same, Kimya's trembly voice irritated me, and the one line of lyrics I caught - "the cum on your face is really just mayonnaise" - made me writhe in six different ways. When dinner was done and we sat down to eat, I found it hard to concentrate on the conversation with the noise of this new CD in the background, and I finally just got up and turned it off.

It's unusual for one of us to really like music that the other hates. Part of what brought us together is the almost total compatibility of our respective eclectic tastes in music - for example, the fact that we are both equally passionate in our fondness for the Beastie Boys and Joni Mitchell. So Kimya Dawson became a source of humorous tension between us. She'd come up in conversation and my Old Man would say "Oh, E. hates Kimya Dawson," and I'd say "No, I just don't think her music is good as background music to anything. It seems like the kind of music where you really have to listen to the lyrics closely to appreciate it." And I mostly believed this; Because my man had assured me that her songs were witty and rich, I trusted that if I listened closely, I'd find a lot to like about Kimya Dawson. But having had the hell annoyed out of me the first time I heard her music, I wasn't in a big rush to take time out of my busy-ass life to sit down and give her a close listen. Even seeing Juno over Christmas break, where Dawson's songs are used to excellent effect and I really got to hear some of her clever, inventive, and sweet lyrics didn't make me rush home and put on headphones for her. I had other music demanding my attention, and it just wasn't the time for me and Kimya.

Then summer came, and I started spending more time out on walks with Roo in the stroller and the iPod hooked to my head. We'd gotten a more recent Kimya record, Remember that I Love You, and I chose that as my first concentrated Kimya Dawson listening experience. I was very quickly won over. Kimya is one of those songwriters whose lyrics not only make you like her songs, they make you like her. They are indeed witty and inventive, with lots of great plays on words and acrobatically surprising rhyme choices. But they're also so honest and unpretentious, so emotionally warm and whimsically wise, that they make me feel good and make me just like people more. Kimya sings a lot about people she loves, her family and friends, about stuff she loves about the world, and about the importance of believing in yourself and doing what you need and want most to do in the world. That makes her music sound cheesy, but miraculously, it's not at all. She manages to sing about her favorite kids and her mom's terminal illness and why her friends are important to her and how and why she overcame her own self-doubt to become the person she was meant to be, all without a moment of wince. I'm not quite sure how she pulls it off. Partly it's because she's just a great poet. Her lyrics are deceptively simple and unsheened, but underneath their playfulness, whimsy, and unguarded honesty, they're dense, rhythmically relentless, and full of images that are unexpected yet completely apt. She's also funny and strange, two of my favorite qualities in friends and lyricists.

So I love Kimya Dawson. As I've come to love her, she's come to occupy a similar place in my musical heart as my other favorite completely inimitable singer-songwriter, Jonathan Richman. Jonathan is totally different from Kimya in many ways, but their music shares a certain worldly innocence that borders on childlike (but childlike the way an incredibly smart, observant, and slightly jaded kid is childlike). I love Jonathan Richman's music, and I love the Jonathan that comes through in Jonathan Richman's music. If he's a terrible person in real life, I don't want to know. And if I love you and you hate his music, please just don't tell me.

I'm not quite to that point yet with Kimya Dawson, but if we buy a couple more of her records, I might soon be. And now that I think about it, I have some vague recollection of my Old Man's initial Kimya recommendation including an observation along the lines of "she reminds me of Jonathan in some ways." Hmm.

I still don't think Kimya Dawson makes good background music in any way. If she comes on the iPod shuffle in the car, I want to either skip the song or stop and just listen (usually the latter, especially if the song happens to be "Underground," The Beer," "I Like Giants," or "Caving In"). But next time my Old Man recommends some music to me, I'll make a point of sitting down and giving it an attentive listen. He hasn't led me astray yet.

Chez In-Laws '08

2008-07-06T18:35:00.001-07:00

Here we are on the East Coast for our sixth-annual July with the in-laws on the Jersey Shore. A whole month spent with my Old Man's family always has its pluses and minuses (and for an explication of the many pluses and several minuses, and a basic explanation of just why we spend a whole month every summer under my Old Man's ancestral roof, see a relevant post from the summer of '06). This July, however, I'm appreciating the visit more than usual.

The main reason for this, I think, is that there are no wedding-related activities or events planned for this summer. Let me repeat that, just because it sounds so sweet: there are no wedding-related activities or events planned for this summer. No bridal showers. No bachelorette parties. One of my sisters-in-law was married last summer and the other the fall before that, so the past two summers have been dominated by preparations for these two big, white weddings. No fan of big, white weddings (mine was a small, merlot-colored wedding), I found all this wedding frenzy trying, to put it mildly (despite being quite a good sport about all of it, up to and including being a big, pregnant bridesmaid last summer). So, no weddings. Glory be. I am reveling in the mellowness and the relative lack of small talk, make-up, and perpetual smiling.

The other thing I'm appreciating this summer is, simply, the opportunity to relax. Having a kid and a baby is one thing, but having a kid, a baby, and a house and yard is just a bit too much. When I'm home, I can't sit down. In the month after school let out, I realized that I was much more exhausted at the end of a day of "vacation" (read: round-the-clock parenting, yard work, house projects, and errands) than I had been after a day of teaching and an afternoon/evening of parenting. When I'm at work, I get to sit down. And during the school year, my yard is not exploding with weeds and tasks to be done.

Here at my in-laws' place, however, there are no tasks dogging me. Aside from parenting my children - when I can wrest them away from their grandparents and aunt - and occasionally helping out a bit in the kitchen, I'm pretty much free. I actually find that I'm mildly, pleasantly bored at times. I'm reading a lot, playing guitar, sleeping in most mornings. ("You go back to bed, Mama," is how my mother-in-law usually greets me as she takes Roo off my hands on mornings when it's my turn to get up with the baby.) This is actually a vacation.

So, here's to vacation. I'll let you know if we have any interesting excursions to the local nude beach.

Heir to the Throne

2008-06-23T19:47:00.000-07:00

We've been out of town for the last couple of weeks, and in our sunny travels, we've begun a campaign to get baby Roo to love her sunhat. She does not. She tries to take it off the moment we put it on, chin strap be damned, and the only way to get her to leave it on is to distract her with something she finds especially fascinating. These days the category "things Roo finds fascinating" includes many objects, none of which are age-appropriate baby toys. On a recent jaunt through the mid-day sun in downtown Spokane, Washington (where my mom and stepdad live when they're not in our town doting on the grandkids), in a desperate bid to get her to focus on something besides ripping her sunhat off her head, I gave her the toothbrush I carry around in my purse for use by big brother O. She spent the next forty-five minutes gnawing it with intense concentration, not once throwing it on the dusty ground. Clearly, it's in her genes. I don't like to use the word "princess" (damn you, Disney, damn you to hell!) but I think it's safe to say that we have a female heir to the throne.

Oral Hygiene Nightmare

2008-06-03T21:40:00.000-07:00

I had a dream last night that Roo banged her head into me and whacked my left front tooth. Actually, this didn’t occur in the dream. As often happens with really vivid, realistic dreams, this dream had history, a backstory. Roo had head-banged my left front tooth, hard, by the time the action of the dream began. In the dream, I was in a diner trying to get something to eat despite the fact the overhead menu board was obscure and hard to decipher. As I was grappling with the obstacle of the opaque menu, I could feel that my tooth was loose. I realized that it was because of this thing that had happened earlier with Roo, and I began to worry about it. Would the tooth die, remaining in my mouth but turning a sickly dark gray? Would it fall out? Just as I was beginning to get really worked up, I felt it come loose from its toothy moorings and descend onto my tongue, attached only by a few meaty threads of gum tissue. It was gross in a very familiar way, the way losing a tooth always was as a kid, but it was also new and alarming, because this was an adult tooth; it wasn’t supposed to fall out.

Needless to say, I got very sad very quickly. I pulled the tooth out and began to examine it. At this point a montage of action of the kind that only occurs in dreams or cinematic drug trips ensued. I was talking to the waitress behind the diner counter about my tooth and simultaneously consulting with a dentist. I mourned my ravaged smile to the waitress, holding up the fallen soldier to the gap in my mouth where it used to reside and saying, “I don’t know if you can tell now, but I have really nice front teeth.” (Which, in all humility, I do.) I grilled the dentist about options and possibilities for rectifying the situation. Was it possible to save the tooth, to reinsert it somehow? And if so, could he fix the tiny chip at the bottom (which inexplicably appeared during my last trimester when I was pregnant with O.)?

At this point the dream morphed and I was transported onto a beach, where the sun was setting and some sort of party was winding down. My tooth was still missing, but I became distracted by the pretty colors and the intricately festooned drink someone had pressed into my hand. Then I woke up.

The dream is obviously rich with symbolism. The question is: how to interpret it? There’s a school of thought that dreams are just the detritus of your subconscious, sort of an artful housecleaning your mind does at night. From this perspective, people, objects, and events in your dreams don’t represent anything per se, or if they do, they represent anything but the things they stand for in real life. As someone who interprets literature for a living, I have to reject this approach. Not to mention that my dreams often seem to connect to live issues in my life, to have some kind of clear relevance.

So, another approach would be a more Freudian analytic tack. From this perspective, my dream represents deep and hidden anxieties and wishes. The people and events in my dreams are symbolic of crucial issues relating to my identity, fears, and desires. A Freudian interpretation might posit that my left front tooth represents a foundational aspect of my self-concept, and my baby knocking that tooth out of my mouth is an expression of the threat that my children pose to my personal identity and my ambivalence about the self-sacrifice inherent in being an involved parent. Clearly, I’m afraid that having children is dangerous to the person I am, have always been, and want to be, the Oral Hygiene Queen. (The fact that my dream self expresses a wish to rectify the tiny chip in that tooth that I got while pregnant with O. – a chip my real-life dentist speculated might have occurred due to pregnancy’s temporary weakening effects on a woman’s teeth – only adds evidence to this interpretation.)

On one hand, this seems totally obvious. Of course my children threaten my identity and freedom. I can’t live the life I lead before O. was born, and I have maintained significant aspects of my pre-kid life and identity only by making a concerted effort and accepting the fact that I’m going to be a busy juggler for a considerable stretch of years.

On the other hand, reading this deeply into the dream is a bit too metaphysical for my tastes. I’ve never really bought Freud. And anyway, if I can unravel the symbolism of my own dream that easily, it’s probably not a good Freudian interpretation. I’m sure anyone who really knew their Freud would say that the dream is about oral sex. Or a nascent Elektra complex. Or both.

So I’m inclined to try a compromise between the above-mentioned interpretive strategies, something along the lines of the way my Old Man always interprets my more richly symbolic dreams when I bring them to him: look for an interesting and relevant meaning for the dream’s symbols, but don’t stretch it too far or read too deeply into it. Clearly the tooth is important, and I’m willing to assume that Roo actually represents Roo. So what does it all mean? Well, I’m aware that my brushing habits have not been as vigilant in the last few busy months. I still brush three times a day most days, but there are times when the brushing occurs well after a meal or snack. Needless to say, this relative laxity in matters orally hygienic is pretty unusual for me, the woman who keeps toothbrushes in my purse and backpack, in my office, and in the medicine cabinet at my mom’s place. But at home these days, I get distracted from timely brushing by any number of tasks, many of which revolve around Roo. I’m temped to see the knocked-out tooth dream as a memo from my unconscious mind to my waking brain: “Hey! Just because you have a baby doesn’t mean you get to slacken the rigor of your oral hygiene regimen. You can brush your teeth while holding a writhing infant! You have a rep to protect!”

That’s my interpretation, and I’m sticking to it. Unless, of course, you happen to have a more interesting one.

Unconventional Undergarment Redux

2008-05-29T13:42:00.000-07:00

Let’s say you are a teacher, and you’ve been at school all afternoon and now have a formal-ish dinner event to attend nearby, and you’ve brought a dress and shoes to change into for the formal-ish event, but then you realize that the dress is rather sheer and you’ve neglected to bring a slip along. And let’s say you make this realization five minutes before you’re supposed to arrive at the event in question. Do you:

A. Say “formal, schmormal” and go, wearing the red capris and pocket t-shirt you’ve been wearing all day.

B. Call your spouse and beg him to rush over with a slip, pronto.

C. Go in the see-through dress, hoping no one will notice the outline of your black underpants against your fishy white thighs.

D. None of the above.

If you are me (and given the fishy white thigh description, I’d say chances are good that you are), the correct answer is D. I am in my office, holding a black patterned vintage dress that is much more sheer than I realized. I put it on, just to check, and sure enough: the contrast of my black drawers with my white flesh is quite observable. I can handle a bra outline, but at an event where students will be present, the panty outline is unthinkable. My response? I'm sure I can find something in this office to craft a makeshift slip out of! I have five minutes. I can do this.

Three minutes into my search, I’m getting desperate. I have rejected an orange plastic bag, a cardigan sweater, and a ream of white paper as possible materials. I have even picked up a single sock and contemplated it for a split second. I am starting to think I might have to give up and actually call my Old Man to rush me a slip when I find an abandoned t-shirt languishing on the back of a dusty bottom shelf. Color: teal with yellow lettering celebrating a fundraising event of yore. Size: large. Status: never worn. I feel a rush of adrenaline. I know I can make this t-shirt work as a slip.

I rip open the neck to make it roughly waist-size, turn it inside out, cut off the tag, and stretch the thing up over my ass. When the dress falls over the t-shirt “slip,” no trace of teal is visible. It looks black. However, the t-shirt’s sleeves are creating a decided poofing effect on each of my hips. I hike the skirt back up and cut off the sleeves of the t-shirt. This solves the poofing problem, but creates a two little gaping spots that reveal white thigh flesh, destroying the whole slip effect. The skirt is again hiked, and I grab my handy Swingline stapler and staple the gaping closed. Skirt falls back down, and from above, all looks fine. Put on shoes, speed to the bathroom, check in the mirror. I definitely look legit.

I attend the event, receiving many compliments on my dress. No one seems to be staring at my hips or my hemline. I do believe that I have pulled this shit off. And wearing an inside-out teal fundraising t-shirt in lieu of a slip has somehow made attending the event much more fun. A supreme MacGyver moment.

***

(And yes, for the old school Oral Hygiene fans among you: this is a rerun from two years ago at this time. I attended this same annual event last night, wearing a complete complement of appropriate undergarments. Somehow it just wasn't quite as fun, even though I wore the knee-high boots I love but almost never wear due to the fact that the heels go beyond my skill level. That's just not the same as knowing you have a torn and stapled t-shirt where your slip should be...)

It's That Time Again

2008-05-21T12:15:00.000-07:00

Laying in bed nursing Roo a few minutes ago, I noticed how strange it felt to be awake and not running around crazily doing something, either with or without a baby on my hip. These days, it seems like nursing is the only time I actually get to sit down without feverishly typing, grading, or prepping for class, or to lay down without thinking "OK, I've got 6 hours and 40 minutes in this bed, and I'm going to get woken up at least once in that time by a hungry baby. Time to sleep! One, two, three, sleep damnit!"

It's not uncommon for me to feel stressed and hectic at the end of the school year, but there's something special about adding the demands of mothering a baby to the mix. Of course, at this time last year I was unloading about how busy I was, and I was indeed busy. But even though I've divested myself of a number of responsibilities I had this time last year, I'm still feeling a bit berserk.

And yet, I'm giddily happy. Sometimes I feel like a love-crazed nineteen-year-old who, despite lacking sleep and burning her candle at both ends (the love end and the work end), is chipper and energetic due to all the endorphins and other miscellaneous love chemicals coursing through her system. I was that love-crazed nineteen-year-old once upon a time, and this feels very familiar. But instead of simply being in love with a boy (and with the new fact that orgasm could be a shared rather than a solitary experience), I'm rather complicatedly in love with my man, my little boy, and my baby girl all at once (and feeling happy despite the fact that orgasms, be they shared or solitary, are proving somewhat hard to fit in with all this parenting, working, and logistical whatnot going on).

In any case, I am so, SO looking forward to summer break. Which begins in approximately a week and a half. Have I ever mentioned that among the many things I love about teaching, I dearly love summer break?

Hopefully summer break will bring more extra-lactational relaxation. And more regular blog posts.

And more orgasms.

Neglected!

2008-05-06T22:50:00.000-07:00

When my Old Man and I debated and debated whether to have another child, one thing that ate at me was the thought of neglecting my first child because of the demands of a baby. Or neglecting my baby because of the time and energy I needed to devote to my first child. Giving O. anything but my full attention as a mother seemed unthinkable. And, remembering how absorbed I was with O. when he was an infant, it seemed impossible to imagine caring for another baby when I had O's needs to consider, too.

Somehow, miraculously, this has all worked out. We're busy and crazy and chaotic, but somehow there is enough of every emotional resource to go around. Sure, I had to put up with having a gangly boy on my lap sometimes when I was nursing newborn Roo. (Luckily O. got over that phase, in all likelihood because I never forbade him from joining us.) And Roo has definitely spent way more time just sitting on the floor watching other people play board games than O. ever did. But she seems to dig it, and of course, she doesn't know any different.

Moreover, O. has Roo and Roo has O. They both find endless delight in the other and entertain each other on a daily basis. Sometimes too much, like when I'm trying to nurse Roo and she keeps popping up to check in on the progress of her brother's Lego city (while I sit by waiting, spraying breast milk all over the room).

No, the kids are not neglected. But, sad to say, someone in our home is neglected. Badly neglected.

The cats.

These are our cats. The black one in the back is Blue, fourteen-year-old hypergroomer and neurotic sweetie. The gray beauty is just-beyond-kittenhood Catface, O's present from Christmas 2006, as playful and affectionate as she is attractive.

Both of these beasts have forgotten what it's like to feel the touch of the human hand. With all of our time and attention absorbed in taking care of the kids or taking care of business, and any extra physical affection we have left over after cuddling and holding our two little ones reserved for each other, the cats are animales non gratae. Even O. seems to have forgotten about them in his enthusiasm for his baby sister. They get no pets, no scratches behind the ears, no play time with their various cat toys. Occasionally Roo reaches over and grabs a fistful of fur. Other than that, they get no action.

I feel guilty about this, especially since they've begun developing odd new habits. Catface bolts up the stairs every time she hears me sit down to pee, knowing that I'm seated with my hands unoccupied and that this is her best chance for a bit of human love. Pathetic, isn't it? And Blue has begun harassing me when I'm trying to squeeze in a couple of yoga poses at the end of the day, butting her head into me while I'm in viparita karani. It's not conducive to good yoga form, I tell you.

Luckily, they have each other, and despite the difference in age, they have become close friends, sleeping in proximity, chasing each other around, and wrestling affectionately. And we keep feeding them, and filling their water dish, and cleaning out their litter. So they're still getting a free ride, even if they get no love.

A New York Minute

2008-04-22T22:20:00.000-07:00

Time is going way too fucking fast. It’s been going a bit too fast most of my adult life. But then I had a kid, and it seemed to speed up. Now I have two kids, and it’s sped up more. When I mention this “Wow, it seems like time is going faster since Roo was born” phenomenon to people with older kids, they invariably say “Oh yeah. And just wait ‘til they’re both in school. Then it will really start flying by.” Please don’t say that. You’re scaring me.

Events that occur once weekly make me feel keenly the vertiginous speed of my life. My Saturday morning yoga class is here again. Wait. Head under knee over other knee. Wasn’t I just in this bizarre position a few days ago, on this very spot in this very yoga studio? Who is stealing days from my weeks? Where are they taking them, and can I have them back?

In the last few weeks I’ve realized the worst culprit in this time-stealing conspiracy is not my children, nor my weekly schedule. It’s the New Yorker. That’s right: Conde Nast is somehow making my already speedy life go by even faster.

My Old Man and I subscribe to more magazines than we should, but we tend to stick to monthlies. Except the New Yorker. It’s our only weekly, and it has always come once a week. Or less often. And this has always given me plenty of time to enjoy the magazine in the order I love to consume it: first, skim through and check out the cartoons; then read the light, short bits toward the front; then pick one of the longer essays and savor it in all its lavishly detailed and elegantly written glory. Then, if there’s time, maybe read the fiction.

Lately, though, the New Yorker has started arriving with fewer and fewer days separating the last issue and the new issue. Lately, I swear, it’s been coming every three days. I feel like I’m in my own private periodical Twilight Zone. Somehow, despite the fact he has the same number of children and other periodicals to deal with as me, my Old Man seems actually to read each issue as it comes down the pike. (He also manages to complete the Sunday Times crossword every week, while I, despite my perpetual promises to help him on those couple of tricky clues up in the right corner, never find a minute to so much as look at the thing.) Lately, this New Yorker onslaught has gotten so bad that I can’t even fucking keep up with the cartoons.

I have, however, found time to look at each and every cover. That will just have to satisfy me until the overachievers at Conde Nast return to their regular publication schedule.

The Little Posts that Couldn't

2008-04-11T23:47:00.000-07:00

It’s been two weeks since my last post (Bless me Father, for I have sinned), and for some reason two weeks seems like the longest I can go without my blog seeming abandoned. So I’m dragging myself over to my dashboard to click that “new post” button and try to work up some magic. Having a baby and being back at work full time, there’s just so little extra time and energy. I always feel like I’m a little behind at work. I always feel like I’m a little behind at home. (Where are those fairies )?) And now I’m feeling behind on my blog. I admit it. I’m blogging out of a sense of obligation.

But no, not entirely. Because so many cool little post ideas have come to me in the two weeks since I creamed my drawers (see below), and at various points in the last week I’ve been really excited about writing one of them. But I haven’t had an extra twenty minutes. Here’s a brief list of the germs of posts that have grabbed my coat, ridden around in my brain, but never had the luck to get any keyboard love. (My apologies to those germs of posts that came and went and have been totally forgotten.)

1. A post about the sentimentalization of babies: how it annoys me when people uses images of babies or the idea of babies to promote some program, position, or ideology that I mistrust, and yet how spending time with a baby makes me understand why people are prone to sentimentalizing these appealing, needy creatures whose crying we’re hardwired to find distressing and whose laughter we go great lengths to elicit, and who in a real sense personify innocence and trust.

2. A post about femininity and its discontents, inspired by Orange’s musings on Twisty’s post on the pitfalls of feminity. How extreme femininity of the kind Twisty excoriates is clearly problematic and limiting, but how for those of us who aren’t hobbling around in high heels 24-7, getting our breasts fashioned into flesh basketballs, or applying and scraping off inches of make-up daily, femininity is still a fraught terrain given that every choice we make related to personal style is coded either as feminine or masculine. And even though masculinity likes to sneakily pretend it’s invisible and merely human (rather than artificial, as so many aspects of femininity clearly are), it too is culturally constructed.

3. A post about teaching creative writing and how some days commenting on my students’ creative work is invigorating and I feel like I’m connecting with their writing on its own terms and giving them useful advice, while other days I’m saying something insipid and generic in order to avoid saying “This is lame. Write something better,” or (worse?) “This is great! Good job!”

Those are the ones I remember. And those are the short-term germs, whose neglect is less haunting than the several long posts I’ve been chewing on but not getting to (partly because there’s so much to say) about my two kids and their relationship to each other, my feelings about having two kids after agonizing over the decision of whether to have a second child, my gratefulness at my good relationship with my amazing mom, and my sadness at my broken relationship with my messed-up dad.

I sometimes toy with the idea of euthanizing this blog, simply due to the scarcity of time and personal resources in my current life. But clearly there’s a lot I want to say. And I sort of assume I’ll have a bit more time and a few more resources to do so at some point in the future. Summer is coming. Roo will continue to grow and develop and get less needy. Eventually both my children will go to college. Stay tuned. (And let me know if you catch any typos.)

Not Safe for Work, Apparently

2008-03-28T12:29:00.001-07:00

I am in my office, pumping milk from my pornstar-full left breast into my little handy Avent manual breastpump - where you'll find me every weekday during my seventh period free period. Busy-as-hell working mom that I am, I am multitasking. I am pumping with my left hand and checking my email with my right, scrolling through long work-related messages trying to figure out if I'm required to respond, scanning messages from the various lists I'm on trying to decide whether to delete without reading or save to possibly read in some imaginary future where I will have more time. I am so engrossed in my email triage that I fill my little Avent pump beyond its "full" level, so that when I set it down the creamy milk that has risen to the top begins to leak all over my desk. Before I'm able to grab something absorbent, that milk begins to make its way down the slight incline of my desk, over the edge, and into my slightly-ajar desk drawer.

Egad. I have inadvertently creamed my drawers.

Bring on the Fairies

2008-03-14T16:05:00.000-07:00

I remember this. This I-have-an-infant-and-thus-I-have-no-time time. I’ve been known at various points in my life to say “I’m so busy” or “I just don’t have enough time.” But when I have a needy little sweetie constantly demanding my attention – either by crying, pooping, or just being so damned cute and lovable I can’t stay away – the words “I have no time” take on new meaning. And the busyness of the mom o’ baby is so much more overwhelming when there’s an older sibling in the picture. At least when O. was a baby, I got something done while he was sleeping. Now while Roo is sleeping, I’m playing Chutes and Ladders with O. or reading him a book. And I do so gladly. But it seems like there’s just no time to do all the things I need to do, much less any of the things I just want to do.

So I want some help. And for some reason, I find myself wishing for help of the variety no other person could really give. Sure, it would be nice to have someone come and clean my whole house for me. But that costs money. And it also involves getting my whole family out of the house at a preordained time for a couple hours or more, which is merely another thing for me to plan, organize, and make happen.

No, the tasks I’d love to foist off on some imagined helper are too idiosyncratic, intimate, and constant to foist off on an actual paid human helper. So I’ve decided I need a fairy or two to assist with those little tasks that never seem to get done, or else must get done but seem never-ending. I’m looking for at least two types of fairies.

One, I need a pump fairy. This fairy would flit in as soon as I’m done pumping breast milk, whisking my breast pump kit off to be cleaned and sterilized. Whether at school or at home, it seems like I’m constantly washing my pump kit, boiling or steaming my pump kit, drying it, or reassembling it. If I could just have some little winged helper to deal with that, I feel like I’d have about two extra hours of time a day.

I’d also love a laundry fairy. I don’t even need him or her to actually do the washer/dryer part of the laundry. My Old Man and I are usually able to stay on top of that, more or less. The thing we can’t seem to manage is putting the clean laundry away once it’s washed and dry. It sits in the basket until it’s time to do more laundry (which, granted, comes around pretty fast these days of muddy knees and poop explosions ), and then and only then do we finally put it away. Actually, that’s not even the worst-case scenario. There are times, heaven help us, when we take the lovely clean laundry out and just stack it somewhere in order to free up the basket. See? We need that fairy.

So if you know any good fairies who are looking for part-time work, tell them to flit on over.

And before you go, tell me: what kind of fairy would you like to have around your home or job?

The Turd to End All Turds

2008-02-28T20:30:00.000-08:00

I often look with wonder on my young son. Sometimes I look at him and think “How can someone so young be so complex, perceptive, and articulate?” Sometimes I look at him and think “How did he get so big? How did these five years go so fast?” And sometimes I look at him and think “How can such a small person create such a huge amount of shit?”

About one out of four times that O. poops, his dump is so colossal that it clogs up the toilet. (A note on vocabulary: there was a time in my life that I did not use the word “poop.” Now that I have kids, those days are over. I have, I am proud to say, held out on the word “potty,” which I refuse to use for fear that I might wind up like my father, middle-aged and saying “Hold on, I just have to go potty.” Horrifying. But it’s gotten to the point that “poop” rolls off my tongue like grease through a goose. So to speak.) Part of O’s toilet-clogging habit is due to the fact that he holds on to things, tending to poop every couple three days instead of on a daily basis. (Don’t ask me where he gets it. My Old Man and I are both extremely regular.) But part of is just because he has these enormous dumps. You wouldn’t think such a skinny little scrapper could hold that much dookie.

For whatever reason, I have fallen into the role of official toilet declogger. Part of it may be that my Old Man takes care of most of the other dirty jobs: garbage, recycling, cat boxes. Part of it may be because, thanks to my Grandma passing on her plunger techniques to me, I’m just very good at it. In any case, when O. clogs the toilet, I’m the one who heads down to the basement to retrieve the plunger from its dungeon under the stairs. As a result, I always wait with an air of tense anticipation to hear the toilet flush successfully after O. poops.

Clogged toilets are now a commonplace, but the other day O. created a new kind of toilet emergency: the turd that will not leave.

Now if you’re squeamish, here’s where you need to stop reading. (Though, hopefully if you’re squeamish and not a masochist, you’ve already abandoned this post.)

So, O. jumped on the pot for his every-other-daily dump. And when he jumped off, I noted a monster of a turd in the bowl. It was long. It was thick. It was robust. I was nervous. There’s no way this thing is going down, I thought to myself. But, in good faith, I flushed. And it spun around a couple of times and promptly lodged itself in the opening at the bottom of the bowl. It was a little bit bent, but not the least bit bowed. It looked like it was there to stay. I waited a minute and tried flushing again. It bent just a tiny bit more, like an old man with a beer gut straining to touch his toes, but it did not budge. I tried one more flush. Nothing. That turd was going nowhere.

As the resident toilet declogger, I have great faith in the power of water to relax masses of fecal matter. If you just wait it out, sometimes the shit goes down on its own. I decided to let this one relax in the pool for awhile, and perhaps then it would slide down without assistance.

I told my Old Man about it. “We could break it up with something,” he suggested. Ah, yes. The domestic we. “We could break it up with something” translates to “You could break it up with something, resident toilet declogger.”

You’ve heard the expression “I wouldn’t touch him/her/it with a ten foot pole.” There are some things you don’t want to touch, not even with a stick. I was banking on the soak method. I’d give it a half an hour or so, then try again.

And then I promptly forgot about it. It was in the guest bathroom and easy to put completely out of my mind. The next morning I awoke from pleasant sleep with a panicked start: the stubborn turd! I was horrified that I’d left it stewing away in the guest room toilet all night. I jumped out of bed, hoping against hope that a its night soak would have left it pliable and ready to flush its way out of my life. I opened the lid, and flushed. It gave a bit more, bending into the space of the toilet drain, but stayed lodged. Fucking hell! I was just about to go put on shoes and head out into the freezing morning air to find a turd-poking stick, shuddering at the thought, when I decided to give it just one more try.

I flushed. It bent neatly in half, as if bowing graciously on its way out the door, and slipped down into obscurity.

Hallelujah!

(File under: Way more information than I wanted, thanks.)

Sweetness and the Lunar Eclipse

2008-02-21T20:45:00.000-08:00

I had been gearing up to write a post about a turd. But then something really sweet happened, and I have to spend a moment on that first. So tune in later for the turd (if you’re into that sort of thing).

I am fortunate to have my mom close by during these early years of my kids’ lives (and how it is that she and her husband are close by here in the Midwest when really they live on the West Coast is worthy of a post of its own). One of the many wonderful things about having O. and Roo’s grandparents close is the joy of swapping everyday observations and anecdotes about my kids with people who are as crazy about them as I am. This is a story I didn’t experience first hand, but heard from my mom.

Last night, my mom and stepdad were over for our weekly Wednesday night family dinner. She had spent the afternoon with O. and had been getting him pumped up about the lunar eclipse, which we were able to view from his bedroom window. When Mom and O. went up after dinner to check on the progress of the eclipse, she tried to convey what a relatively rare event a lunar eclipse is, telling him it wouldn’t happen again for another two years. “You’ll be seven the next time,” she said. Later, she and O. were updating my stepdad on the newly observed phase of the eclipse. “I’ll be seven next time it happens!” O. told my stepdad. Mom observed that Roo will be two. “She’ll be walking and talking by then, O. Just imagine that!” According to my mom, O. got a faraway look, and after a long pause he looked at her with a serious expression and said, “I will miss that little baby!”

This just about knocked me over. The fact that my little guy is thinking complexly enough to be able to look ahead and anticipate missing his little sister being a baby is such a striking testament to how far he’s come since he was a little baby himself. And it’s very poignant, the thought that he will miss her babyhood, when of course we will miss her babyhood, too, just as we miss his.

But not too much. I’m always surprised at how little time I spend feeling wistful for O’s earlier days. I can’t miss those baby days too much, because he’s always charging off into some new and amazing version of himself. The fact that I can talk to my kid is a continual delight, more and more as he gains greater complexity of thought and command of language. And the more complex he gets, the greater the chances that he’ll say (or yell) something that doesn’t delight me. But that stuff is the exception rather than the rule, and it doesn’t tend to be what sticks in my mind at the end of the day.

I’m assuming that it will be the same with Roo. I love her so very much as she is, cuddley and babbling, mewling and drooling in my arms. But I’m also looking forward to her words, to seeing her dance and jump and run. And I hope that O. enjoys the ever-changing versions of his little sister. I think he will. But it touches my heart that he likes this wee version of Roo so much that he can envision missing her baby self.