A Good Day

I woke up this morning to four or five minutes of the most stunning sun rise. I watched it amazed, through a bit of a hangover acquired last night around the fire pit. I'm not sure if I need to remember much of that.

Today, my son revived my faith that the children will be okay. He had been counting the days on the calender for close to two weeks because today was the day that he was getting a game he had been wanting. At the check-out counter, his brother wanted some legos so he instantly put back one of  the card decks with his game so that his brother could get the legos.

We need those moments more often, but when they come, they are bliss.

And now it's been nineteen hours since that sunrise, just more than a day since we sat by the fire pit drinking wine and roasting marshmallows. It's all covered with snow. An eerie orange light fills the sky, and I've  opened the door several times to listen to the silence, silence only broken by the intermittent sound of cracking as limbs weighted with snow fall from their trees.

Petulant Whining

A) I'm surprised if I don't already have a post with this title. B) If you have anything to do, I would suggest just by-passing this and moving on with your life.

I'm just going to admit it. I liked the part of adulthood that was about beer and cocaine. I liked the part of it that was all about holding little babies. This part where I am compelled to scrub carpet stains even though two kids are at grandma's, one kid is sleeping, and one man is at work is tres yucko.

A few weeks ago, I was feeling overwhelmed trying to balance being a good mother (decent is probably a better word not sure that I ever hit the good mark), being a not-bitchy wife (ok, that never happens), keeping the house (reasonably) clean, working from home two to five hours a day, and cooking (constantly it feels like-- by the time I've finished washing the dinner dishes, the mouths are open again), and then when that's all done, I have my project that I'm working on and if I don't work on that at the end of the day (if I for instance read or watch a movie instead) I feel a horrible dose o' guilt. Mostly I was feeling overwhelmed by all of those things a couple weeks ago becuase the man was working a ton o' hours and extra days, and I'm the only one for the kids from the moment they open their little eyes to the moment they finally close them. Anyway, overwhelmed has come and gone, and now, I'm just feeling whiny.

And I think Virginia must have been around before carpet because otherwise she would have written, "A Room of One's Own and a Damn Tile Floor". So now, Imma gonna scrub my nasty carpet, think of whiny crap, and that's it, I don't want to overtax myself or anything.  

Note to Self

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is our latest bit of bedtime reading, and we all love it. I think my kids were meant to live in the 1800's. Tom does all the things that the boys love: warring, frolicking naked, catching bugs, playing pirates, meditating, smoking, and although they have never swung a dead rat from a string, I wish they would...  it seems like a sad bit of boyhood that no one's doing that any more. 


Okay, technically, they do not smoke. Even yesterday when I tried to diffuse a little kid anger by handing them all pretend peace pipes and inhale, exhale, let the anger smoke rise up to the ceiling and float away, they still refused to smoke. This parenting tactic, by the way, was a massive failure. Boy One was twitching on the floor apparently dead from smoke inhalation. Boy Two was still mad. Boy Three just pulled out his junk and suggested they have "wiener time" which seemed to calm them all down. But the fake pipe definitely soothed me, and I'm pretty sure that's the most important thing.


My mantra for the last week or so has been: "Minger, don't be an asshole" because in the inimitable words of Tom Hank's character in Apollo 13, "We're not doing this, gentlemen. We are *not* going to do this. We're not going to go bouncing off the walls for ten minutes, 'cause we're just going to end up back here with the same problems!" 


So that's it. I can be an asshole (to the kids) and ten minutes later, we'll all still be here, or I can not be an asshole, and ten minutes later, we'll still be here...  probably in a better head space to boot. So I guess, note to myself: walk away, grab your fake peace pipe, and re-approach the kids when you're ready to act like an adult non-asshole. These little mirrors (the kids) reflect all of my faults so I may as well try not to have so damn many.


P.S. Here is my favorite line from Tom Sawyer so far. The line refers to a boy that Tom is approaching and Tom is criticizing the boy's too fancy looks (keep in mind that my poor kid got pulled out of Karate to wash his feet which I hadn't noticed were black and it was Saturday and he probably hadn't worn shoes since Monday): 


He had shoes on --  and it was only Friday.

Like A Phoenix

A few years ago, we started making a chocolate cake when I realized we were out of flour. In my opinion, only a moron runs out of flour. I had to lock myself in the bathroom to escape the howling of my oh-so-emotionally wounded kids, but while I was in there, I had a glorious epiphany:  "fudge does not need flour." Then, like a phoenix from the ashes, this housewife arose triumphant from the bathroom.

I was reminded of that tonight when once again in the bathroom with my head under water to block their complaints, I again had a glorious revelation: "I have bread dough from yesterday in the fridge, I can slap some cinnamon in that bitch, and make cinnamon rolls. That will quell the hunger pains of my kids who apparently have hallow legs."

Two minutes after dinner (chicken flavored with five-spice, honey, soy sauce, spring onions from my garden and egg noodles which is exactly what the young d-bags ordered), one of them said, "What's for dinner? I'm starving?" Seriously? Seriously, little d-bags, where do you put it all?

Well, hopefully, they'll like the cinnamon rolls which would be caramel rolls if I hadn't run out of brown sugar. In my opinion, only a moron runs out of brown sugar. And when we're done eating, we can all go to bed fat  and happy.

PS. Here's the transcript of an old conversation:

Me: There was an old lady who lived in a shoe. She had so many children she didn't know what to do. So she fed them some broth and some bread, whipped them all soundly and sent them to bed.
Max: How many children did she have?
Me: Three.

Stripped Legs and Spotted Back, Don't be a Hater

I frequently pop into the grocery store between 10 pm and 1 in the morning, and I am enamored by the people who are there at that time. There's a good mixture of  overnight stock boys and stoners with the munchies, and inevitably, there is at least one family with a kid or several in tow. It is these people, the working poor who have no option but to shop for groceries late at night that always garner a friendly nod or a sympathetic look from me.

A few nights ago, I was ready to shoot an empathetic look at the family in the ice cream aisle, but when I turned to look I realized that it was my sworn enemies, the old neighbors who called social services on me and then spent a year bullying my kids before they finally moved away.

I stood in the ice cream aisle pretending like I didn't notice them or their cart full of six bags of cheap sugary cereal, but I really would have liked to say hi to that eleven year-old in the dirty shirt with the ridiculous pink braid attached to his hair. I wasn't so keen to say anything to his nine year-old sister with the constantly smug look and the glasses that never stay up. I could tell in the particular way that he was ignoring me that the eleven year-old would have liked to say hi to me too.

I left with my ice cream and a rather heavy heart, and I was reminded that I don't hate often because it's not an emotion that I'm comfortable with.

As I rode toward home, I spied a medium sized frog on the sidewalk. I would have taken him home cupped in my hand, but the boys were sleeping so I didn't. I just dismounted my bike, and watched my little striped leg and spotted back friend until he hopped away  to the safety of a bush in the landscaping of the bank.

And that's it. I hate to hate, but little frogs sure makes me feel better. I'll just say hi to that kid the next time I see him.

  

Princess-O'dilia and the End of My Crisis

It was the children, of course, who really introduced me to Kipling. Somehow, we ended up reading Rikki Tikki Tavi, a story that I have always hated. They absolutely loved it so we followed it with the Jungle Book and many of the Just So Stories. He's lovely, like eating chocolates as the Evangelical house wife said once. It's Kipling and Joan Didion right now. They are where my heart is:

…she resolved to reconstruct the details of occasions on which she recalled being happy. As she considered such occasions she was struck by their insignificance, their absence of application to the main events of her life. In retrospect she seemed to have been most happy in borrowed houses, and at lunch.--Democracy, Joan Didion. 

But I'm too busy to tell you about beautiful things now. I was just going to quickly tell you how my mid-life crisis ended.

It was Princess-O'dilia (no last name, multi-syllabic dashed and hyphenated first name) who first introduced me to this idea of giving birth to something, to an idea. I didn't have time to explore this metaphor with her because I was more interested in hearing about how she had left Christianity at forty to become a new-age spiritual birthing coach. People's conversions out of Christianity are terribly evocative to me.

But the metaphor itself helped me to realize what was going on. The whole thing actually started with a metaphor. I don't often feel in metaphor, but last Spring, I started to feel like I was harboring an un-danced song.

And I went through this whole emotional thing. At best, there were moments of euphoric mania. At worst, I was chasing away Sylvia Plath moments with vodka tonics. Look though my previous posts, if you can't see crazy written over a lot of them, you're blind. (Technically speaking, I haven't had a Sylvia Plath moment since the nineties, but I was very blue quite a lot of the time. It was much worse than that winter where The Man worked all the time, and I had no friends except that canister of hot chocolate powder that I used to keep in my closet. I would nip from it when the kids weren't looking and when I was down.)

And now that the birthing pains have passed, what's left? What did I give birth to? Part of it was that I had to realize that a shift away from the ideologies that I held most dear was not an admission of failure but rather a realization that sometimes we need to have paradigm shifts. (I know. That's a totally simple idea to be preceded by months of crazy, but I am a horribly ideological thinker. I cling to them. If I were religious, I would be banging a tambourine at best and being a suicide bomber at worst.)

And another thing that happened was that I started working on a project. It's an important project, . It'll be meaningful, hopefully, but the process will be meaningful for sure so that's fine.

I have nothing to lose, and in the meantime, I'm going to wrap myself in Joan Didion and see where it goes.

The Importance of Donna Reed and Why Too Many Pillows Causes Global Warming

I've been spending an absolutely glorious afternoon vacuuming, and well, I have a few thoughts on the matter:

A) One of the reasons that I haven't vacuumed lately is because I have recently run out of vacuum bags. I am eagerly awaiting the UPS man to bring me some new ones. I normally vacuum ever day or every other day (this is certainly not a sign of how clean we are but rather a sign that we are so slovenly that I am forced to daily adress the visible debris that covers our floor).

In "Nickled and Dimed", Ehrenreich says that the threshold of house size where a family ceases to be able to maintenance their own home is 3,500 feet. Sorry, Babs, but my threshold is like 800 square feet or maybe 600.

Anyway, (and hopefully this doesn't come across as crass but it wouldn't be the first or last time), I just think that if my dad had realized he was going to kick his metaphorical bucket just two months after buying my vacuum, he would have probably bought me a Dyson. I'm sure right now he is kicking himself in heaven or purgatory. But, hindsight is 20 or 20 so there's nothing I could do but borrow the neighbor's vacuum which brings me to point number B.

B) I'm using my neighbor's vacuum. She has used many of my things. It's great. However, people tend to borrow less and less. In fact the other day, my son told me that if I borrowed the neighbor's "slip and slide" for his birthday he would die of embarrassment so I boycotted my Walmart boycott and spent my last twenty bucks on a piece of crap that will be in a landfill in less than a year.

A few months ago, I was watching Donna Reed to mentally prepare myself for a trip to my mother's. Season One Episode Two: what happens? First of all, Donna wears pants thus proving that Mary Tyler Moore was not the first housewife to wear pants on television. However, if it's possible, there's even a more important point than that, and that is this: Donna, who is by profession a doctor's wife, wants to take her son camping, and she does this with a tent from the neighbor.

Borrowing, it's essential. Here's how it works: one neighbor buys one well-made item, and the other neighbors borrow it. As a result, we don't all buy crappily-made items that have been manufactured in China. Thus, we save our manufacturing economy and we put Walmart out of business. It's a beautiful plan, seriously. We just all consume way too much. Which brings me to number C.

C) A few years ago, the Man said that too many throw pillows cause global warming. I, of course, got all huffy as I do when he says something ridiculous. But, I've realized that yes, over-consumption, in the form of pillows or anything else causes global warming.

It's a sick cycle, but my carpet looks good so I can't get too upset about such things.