Ode to that Evangelical Housewife

Someone told me that I idealize people too much, and once the Evangelical housewife told me that our friendship couldn't be stable if I had her on a pedestal. The friendship endured none the less. Idealism, pedestals, whatever, the point is if I love someone, I'll love them unabashedly for the rest of my days.

There are certain people who have stuck above the fray, and although they are too numerous too mention, I'll plug the-best-thing-to-come-out-of-France-since-stinky-cheese and the one-that-I-told-on-in-High-School. But that Evangelical housewife.... She is my muse for goodness, and I love her.

One day about seven years ago, I was at the neighborhood park with my seven month old son, and there was also there a grandmother with her toddler and a young mother with her one year old. Good conversation ensued. Luckily, a few weeks later, I ran into that same young mother, and she said, "I've got homemade potato soup and bread at home if you'd like to come over." Fuck Yeah. And she fed me so I was never going to leave her. If you don't like me, don't feed me because it is the gesture that will make me abide by you forever.

It was kinda magical. If I had met her at any other time, we wouldn't have been friends. The year before when I was taking drugs until my eyes rolled back in my head and she was at Bible college, we may have not struck up such a friendship. But that Spring when our babies were little, and we both admitted that we "used to be smart" before the babies came, it was a match made in heaven.

Her husband was a waiter. Mine was a chef. In lieu of spending every evening alone, we spent many of them together. Cooking, talking, challenging each other to be better people. Well, she challenged me; I'm not really sure why she kept me around.

She would do all these fabulous things like make amazing crafts and read classics and then watch the movies to compare and contrast, and I would be like, "umm, when my kids go to sleep, I'm going to smoke a joint, watch the news, and go to bed."

We broke bread before the birth of our next three babies. She was at my place until The Man arrived home seven hours before Boy Two was born. She was at my fourth of July BBQ having little contractions until a few hours before her son was born. Then, later when she moved to Wisconsin and wanted to have the baby in St Paul, she stopped at my house on her way to the hospital.

I'm not an expert, but I think if someone is willing to come to my dirty mouse ridden home with their family in tow and let me serve them left-overs (although it was some pretty great homemade chicken dumpling soup) for lunch while they're in labor on the way to the hospital that it's a pretty damn good friendship.

She moved to Wisconsin to have her homestead and her giant garden, and since she's unwilling to ignore the children (there's four now, and we didn't get to break bread before the last one) while she talks on the phone, I don't talk to her as much. But the phone isn't the same anyway because it doesn't let me see her mother her children, and it certainly doesn't let her cook me dinner.

The first time that I ventured to her homestead with my now three children in tow, she said, and it was literally the greatest thing anyone has every said to me in my life, "I made croissants for Easter. I wouldn't call them an unmitigated success, but they're pretty good, and I've got an extra batch in the fridge that I can bake." We ate the entire batch of croissants all the while exclaiming that they really were much too buttery.

When I left her, my mom said that I would never have a friend like that again, and three years later, I am coming to the conclusion that the universe let me have a friend like that to share my life with for a few short years and that was it.

As I understand it, my mom had a similar friend. In 1965, she was hanging diapers on the clothes line and she met Mary. Mary ultimately introduced her to my dad so without Mary there would be no Minger. They moved apart from each other, and although they had other friends, they never had anything like that again. Mary just turned 70 so in celebration, they rode mules down the grand canyon together.

Although I may never have anyone like that Evangelical Housewife, you can bet that I will be putting her ass on a mule when I turn 70 and all will be right with the world.

Absense

When it comes to The Man, I'm not really an absence makes the heart grow fonder sort of person but more of an absence makes me want to pull out your heart, stab it with long knives and tap dance on it type of person. In case you're wondering, my favorite tap dance move is falling off the log which I do to the great effect of really looking like I am indeed falling off a log.

So after two weeks of not seeing him at all, I was ready to throw in the dish towel, punch him in the face, ignore him, and generally disregard him. (Yes, it was merely two weeks of limited sightings that were all fraught with grouchiness (from him obviously because I (yes I did just put a parenthetical thought within another parenthetical thought and now that I've started I could do this indefinitely) am always nice) but I'm a little on the over-dramatic side.)

Last night, the boys and I picked him up from work at midnight (after his 14 hour day) and made a quick trip to the grocery store. By one, the boys were tucked in and sleeping and our glorious weekend had started.

As is usually the case when I haven't seen him in the while, we had a great conversation that occasionally bubbled into an argument and I'm sure I cried a couple times because I'm prone to do that.

He's here now, and I've remembered that I actually like him so I'm going to just stare at his face for the entire weekend. Well, at least for today because tomorrow he has to go in to work and prep fancy shit for wine dinners and I have to go out for my Monday night festivities-to-guard-my-sanity (it's a new feature in my life).

But at least for today, I'm going to stare at his sweet face and follow him around like a lost puppy. We might even throw bits of dead pig at each other. I'm an dead pig round one so it's time to walk to the kitchen, flip some pancakes and cook some sausage.

Good Morning and Hand Me the Crack Pipe

Not today, anyway. That is a Facebook status I’m planning. Yes, I sometimes plan my Facebook statuses. Oh, and if you were planning on attending the Minger quit FB circle jerk, it’s been canceled because she rejoined.

I’m planning it for the day Holden is finally weaned. Ya’know ‘cause I’ll have my blood stream back for the first time in over eight years so obviously, I’m going to start smoking crack.  

Except that he will NEVER be weaned. By the time he decides to wean himself, social networking sites will have fallen by the wayside, the internet will be obsolete; I might even have to move to a desert island for it to happen. He loves boobies. For a while he was soothed by Beatles songs in the middle of the night, but last night he just shouted, “I need something special.”

Tonight, he was nursing, and when Robinson Crusoe found the gun powder in the old ship, he sat up and said, “Guy Fawkes used gun powder.” Um, you’re old enough to discuss gun powder and you’re sucking on my boobs? Really? (Subtext: a three year old just made a reference to Guy Fawkes. What a genius. Clearly, Mama Minger is THE BEST mother in THE WORLD).

But anyway, I don’t mind too much about the nursing because it’s Holden. And in a lot of ways, I credit him with saving our lives, and that’s probably too much credit to heap on a three year so maybe he does need something special.

The moment Holden was born was unequivocally, the best moment of my life. There I was naked on my hands and knees in a birthing tub. I had just pushed out his head, and although I couldn’t see it, I imagine that the head swaying under the water between my large butt cheeks was pretty amusing. I said, “I’m done. The last one came out in one push. Thank you.” And the nurse said, “No, you need to push the rest of him out.” I said, “I’m too tired. Couldn’t you just pull him out.” Then, I made a super funny joke about repopulating the world with my least favorite demographic category, white males, and I pushed the little fucker out.

…

He was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

No words can describe how I felt, but even thinking of it makes me close my eyes, stretch my back and tingle all over.

It was amazing.

We named him Holden which means keeper of the deep valley. Holden Caulfield suspends his cynicism and shows a serious longing for goodness when he says he wants to stand at the edge of the rye field and stop the children from falling over the edge of the cliff. Keeper of the Deep Valley.

We went home, The Man went back to work, and my mom came to stay with us. On day five of milk drunk baby bliss, my mom took Boy 1 to the grocery store because my dad had told her not to leave us with empty cupboards. Boy 2 who was almost three then and Holden and I took a nap.

I woke up to the sound of panic. Without thinking, I rushed out of bed with Holden in my arm (which is where he stayed for at least a year), and I expected to see Boy 1 dead in the living room. It was that kind of panic.

But my mom was on the phone, and she said, “Brad’s dead.”

…

And that was the end of my dad. It was pretty shocking.

We went to Colorado. There was a funeral. I inherited his socks. I cried every time I folded laundry for six months, maybe nine. Somewhere between the funeral and the sock inheritance, we moved to Colorado.

There was more, a lot more that happened in the next two and a half years. But there was Holden, quiet, in my arms while I screamed in rage-full fits at the other two as we packed to move across the country. There was Holden, walking, smiling, keeping all of us a little happier while we were in that horrible house in the suburbs where we had no friends and no jobs and nowhere to go besides the dark places in our heads.

I really do believe that he kept the deep valley for some time so if he wants to nurse until he starts Kindergarten or whatever it is that he’s doing, I guess I can give him at least that.

I mean, it’s good enough for the chimps.     

“What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff— I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all." Holden Caulfield 

Mary Magdalene, Red Eggs, and Zombies

It amazes me that I have managed to live this long without ever having heard these myths about Mary Magdalene and her red eggs. The story goes, apparently and I may have a lot of details wrong, that Mary told Emperor Tiberius that Christ had risen, and he replied something to the effect of, "You're nuts, he's as likely to rise  as those eggs in your hand are to turn red." Then, the eggs turned red.

Why was she holding eggs? Where was she going with those eggs? Were they a snack for later or was she off to market? Who knows, but I do love the intersection of Christianity and Pagan symbols.

I'm almost palpably excited to tell the kids this story next Easter. I'm so excited that I might crack (eggs, crack, ha ha) and tell them right now, but they've requested that I reread Robinson Crusoe (the James Baldwin adaptation) again, and they wouldn't be interested in a myth right now.

I wasn't interested in reading Robinson Crusoe again either. It was the most boring book on the planet when I read it at age ten, and it was the most boring book on the planet 22 years later when I read it to the kids a few months ago. They loved it and kept interjecting comments like, "Wow, this guy is really good at survival?" and "How do you think he did this or that?", and I would reply, "I'm not paying attention. This is the most boring book on the planet, and we're not going to take questions or discussions." The worst part, however, is that sometimes, they have me reread passages if they think they've missed a detail. It's sooo excruciatingly dull, and now I have to suffer through the most boring book on the planet again. (I'm actually secretly pleased that they requested it, although it is pretty fucking boring.)

(Also, Friday has the same voice as Doobie so analyze that as you will.)

So when I do, finally, get to tell them the Mary Magdalene, red egg myth next year, I wonder if it will change anything except that they'll want red eggs. Every year, we celebrate the first Sunday after the first Friday after the first full moon after the Spring Equinox. Howie and the kids call it Easter, but I try to spit the complete name out as much as possible. (Happy first-Sunday-after-the-first-Friday-after-the-first-full-moon- after-the-Spring-Equinox). Every year on that blessed holiday, the kids hunt for plastic fertility symbols, Howie cooks lamb, we drink too much, and I tell the kids every death/resurrection/springtime myth that I can think of. I know the message of why our ancestors have celebrated Spring is sinking in because I heard boy one explaining the matter to his friend. I wish not fighting for eggs during the plastic fertility symbol hunt would sink in.

Obviously, I have deep cynicism towards holidays, and I'm constantly looking at why we celebrate. Generally, I use the holidays to reflect upon the things I imagine that people would have reflected on during these times for millenniums. However, I think, sometimes, it would be nice to remove some of the cynicism and just have a beautiful festival, complete with the sort of meaning and passion that gets lost when you eschew absolute truths and live in a too post-modern world, something like this:


When Christ is Risen at midnight we proceed around the church 3 times after all the candles are put out, only to return to a well-lit marvel as we enter the tomb where Christ was laid on Good Friday to find He is Risen!!! I joyous canon of prayer ensues, with intermittent and raucous calls of "Christ is Risen! Truly He is Risen!" in any number of languages including, but not limited to, english, slavonic, greek, welsh, armenian, german and gaelic! The liturgy begins right after the canon and annual traditional Paschal Homily of St. John Chrysostom.

Or it might be nice to experience time go by in the lulling way that it did when I was a kid like this:

Every year we are there when the angel announces to Mary that she is chosen, when Christ is then born, presented into the temple, is baptised by St. John the Baptist, the sermon on the mount, entrance into Jerusalem, the betrayal, last supper, crucifixion and the laying in the tomb as we await the Resurrection throughout the night until He is joyously risen!!! We are there with Him as though time has not passed these 2000 years. Soon it will be the Ascension and Pentecost! 

I think time might go by in a lulling way for the boys, but this description above (from my friend's blog) is how it used to go by for me ages ago. 

And briefly back to the Zombies and things I didn't notice 'til this year (What in the world have I been doing; This is almost as disturbing as the 32 years that I wasted not listening to the Grateful Dead): umm, Mathew 27, 50-53 in which poor Jesus dies but then, a bunch of holy people rise from the dead and walk into the city. Ah, that didn't happen in Jesus Christ Superstar or Godspell or the Mel Gibson movie that I haven't seen. It's just been hiding in the Bible this whole time!!! What the heck?  How did I miss those verses for so long? There's no point to this; I'm just registering my surprise at something that has been around for quite a while, and I just happened to notice.

In case you didn't steal someone's pink Bible (like I did) and you don't have one on hand:

50And Jesus cried again with a loud voice, and yielded up his spirit. 51And behold, the veil of the temple was rent in two from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake; and the rocks were rent; 52and the tombs were opened; and many bodies of the saints that had fallen asleep were raised; 53and coming forth out of the tombs after his resurrection they entered into the holy city and appeared unto many

     

Coming to terms with some shit.....

I have a million and ten things I'd like to post, but this issue seems to be the biggest so here we go....

Two nights, two conversations with virtual strangers, a couple Bloody Mary's and too much sangria, and I've been talked into doing the things I've been avoiding for years.

I wasn't really talked into anything, but I allowed some ideas that I've been ruminating over to fully manifest and reify and otherwise take shape.

For a long time now, I've felt like everybody was looking at me and wondering, "when is she going to do something?" Every time I say anything remotely intelligent (which I do a lot), my mother makes this huge nasally sigh and says I'm wasting my intelligence [raising my kids and not having a job]. My response in general to that sentiment is as follows: when I see people show affection toward their kids, do I sigh and say, "You're wasting your mammalian instincts having a job and putting those kids in daycare"? Of course I don't, so why is the converse always imposed on me.

The point that I am slowly wending my way towards is that I've finally realized that this, all of this, is not working. It's not working for The Man, or for me, or for the kids. As much as I want to be one of those seemingly super happy moms, knitting in a circle while their homeschooled kids play peacefully, I'm just not.

All my dreams of eschewing institutions for the children and running around barefoot and making art and reading library books are not working. These kids have to go to school. This epiphany is new (two days old, five days at the most), but it's real. I've paid lip service to the idea for a while, but only now do I believe it. In addition, I have to do something so that we don't fester in a money-less abyss. So I'm looking into my options, and I'm sure they are plentiful as long as I can get back to school for a few years.

For a few days, I felt like a failure over it all. Luckily, I have friends that have consoled me through the fact that a paradigm shift is simply a paradigm shift not an admission of failure.

"I feel like I'm interviewing People to be my Friend"

The title is a quote from a cool cat, and it resonated with what I've been doing for the last three years.

Basically, this is how it all went down: I was in St. Paul where I had a very supportive group of friends. There were my ol' Catholic school friends, the vengeful sluts (they weren't really vengeful but I needed an adjective to make the noun "slut" sound a little polite).  And there was the cadre of  women that I met that time that I carpooled in a minivan to the suburbs to have lunch with a bunch of Christian housewives. I thought it was a total joke based on all the verbs and nouns in that sentence, but seriously, that time I carpooled to the suburbs in a minivan to have lunch with a bunch of Christian housewives kicked off a segment of my life that is only rivaled in greatness by every time that I ever sat in a London club and let my eyes roll to the back of my head.

I had the brilliant idea (due to extenuating circumstances) to leave all my friends in St Paul and move to hell, Colorado. Some people call it the suburbs, but I'm sticking to the moniker, "hell". Hell was horrible. HORRIBLE. I'm a pretty gregarious person, and I was at a total loss to make even one friend. Then, The Man lost his job, and we kicked off a year of depressed and friendless hell together in the oppressive place of hell. There were about five people (at the very most) that even deserved a second conversation in hell, and those second conversations were delayed or postponed or whatever due to the ominous cloud of existence that occurs when you're living with one of the long-term unemployed. Additionally, almost everyone (except three or four people) I met was worse than me, and I am an asshole. If I'm the best person in the relationship, it's really a problem.

I went through everything in my head. I ran through all my friends' demographic details in an effort to analyze what I required in a friend. As far as I could figure I had friends that didn't believe in evolution, friends that weren't that smart (not the same person, ironically), friends that loved church, friends that were prettier than me, uglier than me, eschewed meat, had kids, didn't have kids, and on and on and on. The only demographic thing that I could extract from all the analysis was that I had no black friends. So, maybe that was my criteria. Maybe, I just needed to avoid black people, but I knew that wasn't really the case because I have always wanted a black friend so we could braid each other's hair and read aloud passages from The Color Purple and sing Tracy Chapman songs together (that's what black people do all day long, right?). That's actually, what I used to do with my Jewish English friend so that's nice that some things are color blind....

Then, we moved out of hell to live in Fort Collins which according to my reckoning is the best place on earth, or very nearly close to it. First of all one of the vengeful sluts moved to Colorado so that was great, and after a year, I started doing this glorious thing called making friends. It wasn't always perfect. I tried to start a conversation with some women, and they just looked at me as if "Hi. My name is Minger, and my kid smells like a flatulent old dog" was not a normal way to start a conversation. I estimate that it is their loss besides their hair looked as if they had woken up in 1994.

Despite my inept and awkward first conversation with her, I have had my affections returned by the most amazing twenty five year old in the world. I am an age-ist and I usually resonate more with the post-menopausal crowd, but I serendipitously stumbled upon this woman whose maturity has been shaped by tragedy and who is probably the only twenty-five year old I have encountered lately who doesn't need to check her texts constantly. She's great. We have a garden together (shared effort, shared produce), she tolerates my kids, and she looks like a more fashionable, younger version of me (and the narcissist in me loves that).

Lately, I have met two women who make me want to tip my head to the side and drink in their awesomeness. One was an accidental and random encounter. The other is in a group with me, and I used to sit and stare at her and think, "she is so cool." Then, she asked me to go somewhere with her, and my head went "whoosh" (that's the sound it makes when it metaphorically explodes).  I am utterly besotted by both of them and by the whole world as a result of meeting them.

I'm a person that needs friends. Two years without identifying any potential kindred spirits (as Anne calls them) was HELL. Maybe everyone needs friends, but without them I'm lost. I need to love people, and even though I'm not the nicest bitch in the world all the time, when I love people, it's pretty total and absolute and nice and super and great and super great and super great awesomeness superness.

Looking for Work???

I've been trolling Craigslist lately looking for work, and I have realized that finding work will be no easy task considering that my resume is utterly abysmal, my degree isn't worth the paper it's printed on, and we're in a jobless recovery.

However, as a woman, I've always been acutely aware that I am a commodity that can be sold. Incidentally, I have never done that, but in the interest of full disclosure I should let you know that I once did some Lolita thing to a straw and accepted free jewelry from a Palestinian shopkeeper. (I really put the sin back into Holy Land, but that's a story for another day).

Anyway, I dance like I'm having a vertical seizure so dancing/striping is not an option. Most places that buy eggs consider me too old, and I frankly do not want my superior genetic material mixed up with investment banker sperm, stuck in an old lady, and raised Republican. If I could sell an egg for research purposes though, I would do it in a hot second. The third option seems to be surrogate mother. First of all, according to the article I read about it in the NYT Sunday Magazine, they don't accept people that are as poor as me because they don't want to subjugate poor women (speaking of subjugation why can I legally rent out my uterus but not crusty ol' vag?). Second of all, the whole arrangement grosses me out (I also read an article in the NYT Sunday Magazine that if you feel the icky factor, you should listen to it). I mean I had to yield to my reproductive fate which was repopulating the world with my least favorite demographic (white males), and I lost all bladder control in the process so these people should yield to their fate of adopting a kid or kidnapping a cute baby from a shopping mall. My point (if I had one) was that regardless of my opinion on surrogacy, I balk at it being described as part-time work which it was on the Craigslist ad I ran into. Telecommute, sure. temporary, sure. Part-time, uh, not really.

Speaking of working, someday if you're really good and you get me drunk enough, I'll tell you about that time I became a door to door salesman because I thought the Man's unemployment was going to run out. And, if you're really really good and buy me another drink, I'll tell you about how I had a mini-mental-break-down and sat down on a curb and bawled my eyes out because Sarah Palin was a VP candidate and I was a door to door salesman with a 93% score on the GRE verbal.

Speaking of test taking, my only skill, other than packing light and being able to sleep anywhere which only lends itself to being homeless, maybe I can convince one of the test prep companies (Kaplan, Princeton Review) to give me a job teaching.