Somebody's Always Hungry

Kids Under Construction

2012-01-24T11:39:00.000-08:00

I was making Nathan's bed and thinking about the time when there won't be all these (semi) little people's messes to clean up after - then I thought, hey wow these people are only staying here for awhile - they only stumbled on my house through my vagina, they stay awhile, eat alot of food, get a car and leave for college.

Luckily I'm somewhere between food and getting a car, there's still a fat chunk of years with them, except years go so fast that Christmasses can touch each other if they stretch their hands out far enough.

In the meantime, I will try not to kill Nathan's teachers for not preparing him for tests, and I'll try to limit Lilly's tv watching while I'm preparing Nathan for his test instead, and Emma, she is swept up in the wasteland between the two. I have to throw her a life preserver, and hope she bobs my way quick enough to know her before she's taller than me. Thank God she knows how to dress well and has a strong sense of herself.

Can't imagine if I was working at another job and they were floating along with LESS of me - it's hard enough with all my time. Okay, gotta go get Dolphin Bessie at preschool. Wearing basically clothes you would paint a house in.

Bess Predicts the Future

2012-01-23T10:55:00.000-08:00

This morning while eating Cream of Wheat, and wearing a dotty dog shirt, Lilly says to me, "Can me and Luke get married when we grow up?" I said, "If you want to." She says, "Cause I really want to be a tattoo artist and I think he wants to be a truck driver."

I believe all my hopes have been met.

But here's how she looks in her rain boots.

Virtual Realilly

2012-01-20T18:33:00.001-08:00

Lilly's sitting at my feet in a dog costume singing.

The Candyman Can

2012-01-13T09:24:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine from school brought me 5 gigantic bags of candy. I'm really bad with guessing numbers, but I'm guessing there are a TRILLION pieces of candy in these bags.

I set them on the washer so I could close the doors and not see the candy and eat it all, and then I turned the washer on to do a load. One of the bags vibrated open, spilling candy in a nice happy design on top of the washer before vibrating OFF the washer and falling down the side of the washing machine, leaving candy TRAPPED and STRANDED in that skinny nowhere between washer and wall.

Of course I panicked. I removed the spilled design candy, the survivors, if you will, from the top of the washer along with the other bags to a safer location.

Then I tried to move the washer even though I didn't try too hard cause I didn't want water pipes to come loose and start spraying everywhere. The washer wouldn't budge. Oh my god, I thought. There's a half a bag of candy TRAPPED down there. I could hear their delicious chocolatey screams.

I reached as far down as I could and pulled the half-dumped out candy bag up as far as I could toward the top of the washer. There was this rack in the way of getting it all the way to the top. I know how the hikers on Everest feel at this point. If I can ONLY GET IT TO THE TOP. I start pulling pieces of candy out, airlifting them to the safety of the washer top. The bag is getting skinnier. Ooh, look, physics - reduce the mass of the bag so all candy can be free. (It's an unknown physics law. The eqaution is something like Fat Girl + Wants More Candy = You're a Disgusting Pig.)

The bag empties enough and I am able to pull the dwindled bag to safety.

But alas, I see the remaining five pieces stranded at the bottom, on the floor in the crack, nestled amongst dryer lint dust. Plaintively. They are looking at me. My heart swells. No candy left behind. I need a broom, I think, panicked. I see a back scratcher on my desk. Perfect arm extension for candy in crack rescue.

It's 9 a.m. on a Friday, I'm huddled by the side of the washer, sticking in my back scratcher and thinking, "I'm doing this for my stepmom." She, yes, she would do this. What candy would you leave behind? These were five good candies. Almond Joy, Tootsie Pop, Snickers, for GOD'S SAKE. Dots. Butterfinger.

I scrape them out one by one. Assisting them out of the rubble of the forgotten crevice. You are all worth it, I dust them off. Even as I return them to Mound of Candy mountain, where they mingle in silent glory with their friends, every candy is worth it.

Dumped at Costco

2012-01-06T19:58:00.000-08:00

So I have this friend, or I HAD this friend, let's just call her Flake. Flake and I used to meet at Costco every Friday to eat pizza and let our kids play. It was so good, I never thought it would end. It's not that we had so much in common - she's young and fresh, I'm old and much better looking.

Sure, she's been having marital problems. But now she has this Other Interest, a person who fixes her family's computers, and now she's all about IT Guy. In fact, she's so all about him that Costco this Friday (that would be today) was a barren wasteland. There was no call about going to Costco. Me and Costco are standing there in the choking desert breeze, our clothes tattered, our hearts beating a dull sound. Like the sound of no one is shopping here anymore.

I'm just letting you know because it can happen to you. Enjoy your pizza and all the soda you can drink while it is still flowing, and the friends are frolicking amongst you. Someday an IT guy will come along and fix a bunch of loose wires on your friend and then you won't have a friend anymore because she's in Camarillo all the time.

I do know that my friend Flake had many years of a crap relationship. She is so happy to have happy I.T. in her life. She's had 11 years of kids that require medications just so they can eat a sandwich like the rest of us. She is letting loose. I did the same thing this year with a big fat horse, well maybe not the SAME thing. But in case she never comes back, since in our deflated tire circle of friends it's the Year of the One Parent Goes Crazy, I want you to know that that soda was really good, man. Those free sample Fridays were worth it.

I will be crouched over my kitchen table in bad lighting working on a poster comparing Ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt while Nathan jiggles his foot and looks out the window, dying to go bike riding. I'll be slumped in the office chair helping Emma write her report on tragic Indians forced to live in Missions for the illustrious California 4th grade history. Yes, those Costco moments, it might not sound like much. I will be running there, in my dreams, in slow motion, as the computer screen gets blurry with my own tears. I will shop alone. Don't worry. I still have my big fat horse, and my treadmill and my pirated copy of "Moneyball." I will paint war paint on my face.

I will go back for more free samples.

Chickens Can't Swim

2011-12-27T10:17:00.000-08:00

One of the little chickens fell into the pool and died on our anniversary yesterday. It's okay, we have too many chickens, but of course this was the cool colored black and white one that looked like an Oreo.

Lilly and Bruce and Emma buried the chicken and then said good wishes for it. Lilly told me she wished it would come back. She also said she wished she was a fairy. I said, that's a nice wish for the chicken. She said, no, that wish was for me.

Ode to Anne

2011-12-19T09:23:00.000-08:00

If you're ever bummed out, you should read "Anne of Green Gables." She's so happy about everything, and funny. Like the good part of your mind that finds everything a carousel ride, even the truly tragic things. The more tragical, the better. It's all a mosaic, if you see it with the right eyes.

It helps if you peel a tiny orange while you're eating so your fingers smell like oranges. It makes it a little like Christmas

Hooray for Hollywood

2011-12-10T08:52:00.000-08:00

A good way to kill people would be to take them to a live taping of "Kippy" for four hours on a Friday near Christmas.

"Kippy" is a Disney show for kids, and we were packed into audience seats with about 200 kids under the age of 11. With a ringleader guy whose job it was to get them to stand up and scream constantly. His job was to actually encourage the kids to FAKE LAUGH at the really bad jokes like they were funny.

I grew up in Hollywood, of course I know that it's all fake, and even the actors are fake and everything they sit on is fake, the elevator's fake, and the cameras are there to record how real it all looks and yet it's all fake.

I must have gotten old because everything just looked bizarre to me. A group of well-paid grown ups were sitting around on the stage, by the monitors actually LAUGHING like the jokes were funny and I thought wait, are they funny? But they're not FUNNY. The kids are just mugging. Well, if I had to pick one, the lead actress was actually physically funny, she looked 40 and she was 18.

I took five kids, two of mine and three extras. None of them had been to a taping before, although my kids have been on soundstages when their dad works, so they are savvy. But they're at this stage like awkward fish - too big to be little, too little to be big. And I had to leave Lilly home with Barry for many hours and I missed putting her to bed (I think only the second time in her life) and my friend (who got us the tickets to the show) kept saying I should get out more and I just stared at her because who the hell would want to be out more, when I have the greatest thing going on at home?

To get the show, I had to take the three girls from Emma's school and rush from there where I'm doing a Santa's Workshop, selling stuff for kids to buy for their families, pick up Nathan and his friend at middle school, feed them all cold pizza in the car because there would be no food until 9 at night, drive to Hollywood. Get ushered into the soundstage. Sit down and realize that I have hay all over my sweater and scarf, and my socks had horse pee on them. Watch actors that are 9 years old who probably drive better cars than I do. Who puts their kids in show business? An adult couldn't handle being primped and fussed over and having to act like a grown up, stay on your mark, don't move, stay focused, look cute - and then go home and take out the trash? Very weird world.

Then I had to refill my water at one point and left the audience section to go to the water cooler and had two security guys almost throw me to the ground until I explained, Boys, I'm only going to refill my water. (I pointed to the cooler) It's right there. They had a discussion, she's only going to fill up her water. They thought about it, then they let me do it.

The kids had painted their own Jessie t-shirts (which was very cool), and screaming guy who gets the audience warmed up made sure they were noticed.

But at least the taping went on past 9 p.m. As I slowly disintegrated into myself, the kids had a blast. Because of my friend on the show, they got to meet all the actors, got to try out all the furniture on the set, got to get their posters signed, got to take pictures with the actors. They got the whole thing. And in the car on the way home, they all read the script out loud and played the parts. That was really sweet, actually.

SO loud, it's true, I don't get out much. The yelling up in the audience, and then the action down on stage - it was an 11 year old's dream. It was the first time I realized thank God I didn't have to sit through Britney Spears concerts.

I got home and got in bed with Lilly in her footie pajamas and got my book out (Anne of Green Gables) but then I couldn't even read, I just felt my brain de-fry, the baby's weight on my chest, and I was cured of Hollywood dreams. So glad I've spent the last 11 years with these kids, making a nice solid nest. Sets are fun, but we're only a soundstage wall away from a cold hard Hollywood street out there. I admire those actors for putting their hearts out there and giving everything for the ten minutes they have of fame. But being home with that baby, I couldn't wait. There is such success, passion in that reality. Making a person. That's weighty.

It's a Holly Jolly Christmas

2011-12-06T08:54:00.000-08:00

Last night we were trimming the Christmas tree and I had to send the kids to their room three times for fighting. The first time there was so much crying I actually yelled "This is a great memory!" Lilly has a cough like a seal played by Demi Moore, and to her horror she could not go to school today. So now I can't do anything either, in those precious few hours I usually get - so Christmas is cancelled.

But she is sitting here eating a popsicle in her cupcake pajamas and we got to read about 40 books together. Because I decided we were too tv reliant. I miss tv now. Then I had to punish the kids yesterday so I told them only an hour of tv or ipod a day and man does that punish ME. But maybe they'll read. I will have to tie Nathan to the book.

We have the Santa's Workshop at the school in two days, am I ever prepared! There's a reason I'm not in command of an army. There's all these parent volunteer slips that have come back to me and I have to try and return all the slips and tell the parents yes, come help out, but instead I'm drowning in the papers and wishing I could eat alot more kettle corn. With chocolate on it. I'll get it done but really all I like to do is sit and collect the money and see the kids happy because they get to buy something for their families. Usually fart jelly. Every mom's dream.

Okay, back to mini-sicky Demi Moore. Yesterday I said "Come on, woman," to Lilly and she said "I'm not a woman!" I said, "What are you?" She said "I'm Lilly, the kid." I love that nickname. She's a little outlaw, you can see it in her eyes.

By the way, our tree came out beautifully. After I fixed the lights because I told Nathan to put on the Christmas lights and I came back in and he had literally wrapped the tree like we were celebrating an all-bondage Christmas. We could have mailed the tree in a flat package. So I gently told him that maybe he wants to do things a little more carefully and take his time - just like in school, I want him to learn to do things WELL, not just DONE - and he was of course listening with a bright glow in his face at my wisdom, he was not putting on his 3-D glasses and hanging ornaments off of them. While Emma sang rap songs where one of the lyrics is "I got passion in my pants and I'm not afraid to show it."

When she's 20 she's going to say "OHMYGOD, Mom, I did NOT know what that meant, what a terrible mother you were." But maybe she'll buy me ice cream. I have a feeling I'm going to be ice cream deficient, it's just a prediction.

Lilly's done with her popsicle and just said "Mom, can I be a tattoo artist when I grow up?"

I better go turn on the tv.

Pipe Down, Crazy Voice

2011-11-30T19:41:00.000-08:00

I was dreading going to meet with Nathan's teachers today - for some reason I always think something bad is going to happen. Even though I asked for the conference, to see how I can help him do better in school. It might have just been that it was during my 2 hours off - I don't like to give up that time.

I got to the school and because some idiot part of me refuses to carry a bag, my hands are clutching my phone, keys, wallet and this fat envelope of money because I don't want to leave it in the car. It's $400 in cash from the elementary school, to buy stuff for our Santa's Workshop. As I'm going in, I'm thinking, what am I nervous about? I have a BAG of money. I just casually leave the bills sticking out the side on their desks, and suggest that this money looks like A material. Oh my God, he's only in 6th grade. I shouldn't be buying grades until at least 10th.

I met with the teachers, one who looked just fat enough to be uncomfortable yet still attractive, and the other one looked like a TJ Maxx version of Mary Louise Parker. (I love Mary Louise Parker.) Anyway, the meeting went well except for my frazzled brain which kept yelling things like Does my hair look okay? Are you looking at my hair? Cause I'm looking at your hair. Yours looks great. And I kept wanting to rip the grade book from her hand that she casually leafed through, so I could say how's he doing really, where does he fall in the class, is this the stupid class? I know he's a daydreamer, does he have problems? They seemed so relaxed about everything. Maybe because they weren't at Costco with him last night while he was throwing pizza cheese onto Emma's upper arms. I should return him, shouldn't I, before I ruin him?

I guess middle school is such a huge jump, and there's all these bad influences, kids lying, kids stealing other kids' lunches, and Nathan is so prone to influence, I worry that he'll take a turn and end up living at my dead grandmother's house drinking and playing video games. I just want things to go UP for him. Even if he wants to be a truck driver. I want him to be smart, strong, sweet, loving.

I came home with a new resolve to stop telling Nathan all the things he's doing wrong, and start supporting him. I see him come in from the bus, and he's long and big and the wind is blowing his hair around and I tell him his teachers love him, that he's doing great and they're glad to have him in class. Which is true. I tell him I'm proud of him. I leave out all my mom worries. I just let him hear what he needs to build a strong next level Nathan. I hear that the voice in your head is the one you heard growing up - what people told you about yourself. You might as well have love.

And pipe down, crazy voice. When I sit still in a chair in a quiet room and have to talk to grown ups that hold grade books, I'm served with a nice fat anxiety attack, and crazy voice kicks in. I start shrinking into myself, sinking like Jack did after the Titanic sunk - and crazy voice is throwing all these word ropes up to try and save us, except they're stupid, fear-ridden things like these teachers think Nathan is stupid, I have no idea what I'm doing, how can you look so relaxed with the planet spinning so fast, I'm getting older way too fast, can you see my face? life has me by the balls, how can you be so comfortable, give me that grade book.

Pipe down. Crazy voice should be recognized as crazy and celebrated as my inner humor coming out as raging anxiety. I am so grateful that the voice stays INSIDE my chest and has not yet passed the crazy barrier and begun spurting out of my mouth.

Except for here.

Nathan is fine. He's 11. He's totally simple. He ate a ton of Kentucky Fried Chicken. It's my goal to never cook again. There's a girl who's "like a boy" he says, in his class. She plays rough with all the boys, and they like her because she's like a boy. Yep. Ellen. Rosie.

I could learn alot from Nathan. Hey I think Pipe Down Crazy Voice will be my Indian name.

Yupdate

2011-11-28T23:38:00.000-08:00

I've just spent the last two hours scouring ebay for Anne of Green Gables paraphenalia. Is that spelled right? Emma is a devoted Anne reader, she even made barettes with "Anne" on them. So now when she's riding the bus people will call her Anne. Except she never rides the bus.

Barry's been working nonstop on a video (audition, if you will) for me for Nickelodeon - they're making a new show about funny mom bloggers. So it'd be the Me show. He's titling the video "Julie's Big Break." No pressure. We'll submit it, they'll love me, there will be magnets with my face at Rite Aid. Or, we'll submit it, there will be the sound of crickets and I'll become a lactation consultant and squeeze women's breasts the rest of my life. Both of these outcomes sound pretty good.

Lilly's new thing is to cry. She's having trouble with transitions. She cries when we leave school. She cries when we leave McDonald's. (I cry too.) She cries when she has to end something. She can't see anything past what she's doing exactly at this moment. The rest is just bad.

And Nathan, I don't know what he's doing lately. He's the simple, strong, silent type. He's so bored of all the girls in his house, I think. I did run across the living room today and jump on him where he was laying, with my knees in his chest. He loved that. I had to do it like 20 more times. He just likes to be squashed.

So it's a million o'clock. Lilly is waiting to put her feet in my face all night as I sleep.

All Together Now

2011-11-20T21:59:00.000-08:00

I put my mom on a plane after 9 years of living with us. She got a free ticket and she had to leave in a day and a half, so that last day I didn't really see her, she was mostly in the garage freaking okay, not really, just gathering her stuff. Mostly I was gathering while she was pointing out what she needed.

We had just moved her into the house, into Emma's room, because in the midst of cleaning out the garage, we had decided to expand Moose's room so Poppa could move in, since Moose had said she was out of money and had to move out. She said that like 2 years ago but it came to reality this month. Only she didn't move anything. She didn't move a single thing, it came down to the last day we could possibly move and I had to move everything while she stood there. It was like she was on a deserted island and the tide was coming in and everything of hers was getting wiped out by ocean and she didn't understand, she kept backing up into the middle as the island got smaller.

Then she was in the house, and in the middle of us, and it was awful for her. Her neat little oasis of clean, her spic and span room, gated off to keep the dog off her bed, and it just was too hard, with kids running in and out and dirt and tumult everywhere, and she slept different hours, and she was always walking around with a dust pan, and I knew it was too much for her. But mostly it was the sadness and anxiety she carried with her, everything was unhappy, there was no pleasing her, she kept looking for the things that were missing, if you didn't say goodbye at the door or if you didn't answer a comment she made, it was too much, I officially couldn't keep up trying to make her happy. I was just getting mad.

So when the ticket came she was standing in the living room with music on and cleaning some pile of dust and she was sad because she didn't really want to go and I was relieved because she was hard to please and I saw relief coming my way. But then I spent a day and half getting her ready to go and then in the car ride to the airport I was trying to memorize her voice and actually look at her without being mad or irritated because you never know when you're going to see your mom again, and I was feeling guilty for all the nights after I put the kids to bed, instead of talking to her I'd sit at the computer and look at horses or waste time and she'd sometimes come scratch my back, and I wanted her to love me but not need anything, so I had to tune her out because having a mother is complex.

And even though she's noisy and talkative and picky, she's also been in and out of our daily life for 9 years, I can't even remember being a regular person without my mom there in the next room. I figure it's going to take time.

When I dropped her at the airport and walked her in and helped her get through the line and the security line and the dog dropped off into baggage, and we didn't know if she'd get on the plane so I had to wait 20 minutes after leaving her, and she's not an easy person to leave, she could get lost on the way to the bathroom - so I left the airport crying but then I was on the bridge over the traffic, to get to the parking lot, and I just stopped there because I had 20 minutes and I just lost it. I started crying because that's what you do when you're in limbo, on the bridge between there and here,when you're losing something that you thought you would pay anyone to lose, but then in reality, I didn't want her to leave, I just wanted her to be less. Bigger, but less. So I cried and she got on the plane and I cried and she flew away and I cried because it's a long way across the country and I wouldn't be going there, rarely if ever, with three kids. And I don't want to travel like that, to be stranded across the country like in my childhood, split down the middle, not knowing where I belonged, east or west. Airplanes are not a good thing, except for romantic travel, where the whole trip is a dream, a vacation.

I want people to be there, now. I want to see people's faces that I love, and hear them and be part of their living world. I don't want tattered. I'm better at solid. Boring. Steady. Meaty. Real.

So now I can be on the computer and there is no one in the kitchen trying to be quiet. I miss her noises. But then I talked to her on the phone the first time the other day and she sounds happy. She sounds like maybe she was dwindling into hell at our house, she was having no life. She had us, but we weren't doing it for her. She was missing herself. That cheered me. Maybe life is leading us all the right directions. It just feels bad to tear away a parent. Even a quirky one. I've spent so much time caring for her, and worrying. And then poof, bye. But maybe she's building herself there. I hope so.

I guess I just wish all my people were in one place, and that it was a little more beautiful where we all were, a little more open land. I wish I could see my niece Ruby do her ice skating and go out for pizza, because we live nearby. I wish I could walk over to Lukey's house and play Scrabble. I wish I could track mud into my mom's clean rug and string popcorn for her Christmas tree. I wish Chris would braid my hair while we watched Jane Austen movies.

Just feels like life dashes by, and I know it does because Nathan is almost as tall as Barry. Even though that's not saying much. I know we all need each other, because in the end the people we love define us. All that matters is standing in the misty rain, like we did today at the farmer's market, after eating too many bagels, and watching my dad dance with my two little girls to Dixieland, in his blue jacket that matches his sparkly blue eyes. Lilly's hat kept falling over her eyes, and Emma's only 9. And we're all together.

Lumps Under a Shirt

2011-11-15T21:56:00.000-08:00

Lilly stopped nursing recently, even though we'd been slowing down to practically nothing for the last year. It was really hard to stop nursing, just the routine of snuggling in bed, even when the boobs weren't really doing anything. It was just a connection that is sad to shut down, even though she's old. I waited as long as I could. Now we just go to sleep like I do with the other kids, we talk and read and sing and then just snuggle.

But it's sad when a part of your life is over, when your boobs that worked so hard and gave life to little creatures for seven years total, are just returned to what they were before - lumps under a shirt. I think as a mom, that nursing was one of the most important parts of motherhood. I always felt prepared, I had guns ready for crying children. I supplied actual food out of my actual body. I was a buffet table, and provided comfort in a very organized, efficient and warmest of all ways.

My boobs are definitely a little let down to have resigned their posts. They're, in fact, wondering why they got fired. Standing by the water cooler with the rest of the staff and no one's talking to them because it's awkward that they don't realize they're off the team. Except they're still on me. Constant reminders of what is already finished.

Ah well. I did talk to my gyno about becoming a lactation consultant (to put a positive spin on it), and he gave me a number of a lady he works with. Maybe my life will become about other people's boobs. It would be nice to get people psyched for using their bodies to nourish their babies, and growing other people's connections to their kids. It's just such an amazing thing, what your body can do, and how much you can give to your baby, turn yourself inside out. It grows your heart so big. Can't explain it. All I know is giving up nursing is one of the most tragical things that can happen to a person. The only worse tragical thing would be never having nursed at all. I guess you know things matter when they come to an end, you're bittersweet about the whole experience. That's when you know, wow, my life has been good. I am moved, here. I felt something, I blossomed.

Anyway, I stood in the kitchen in the middle of my life tonight watching my kids draw cards for their gramma who is flying away on a plane tomorrow morning to a far off place called Merryland. She has lived with us for the last 9 (?) years. I have wanted to kill her and wrap her in plastic. I have also felt her pain, and watched her survive a few pretty bad illnesses. It has been an honor to be the daughter I have been and to care for my mom. As much as I cuss and complain about her annoyingness (and I spend a great deal of time doing this, I could have a whole other blog), the truth is, for all her wild inconsistencies and her weak areas, she's a beautiful, warped, rainbow human being that loved me in her own way. So I don't know what the future holds for her, or for us. If she'll even get on the plane. If she'll be gone forever. If she'll come back too soon. All I know is, like nursing, you give everything and hope desperately that things will be okay later on. But you still give everything because that feels so good. Even if my boobs are now just lumps under a shirt, I knew them in their glory. I'm still in there, believing in everything, no matter what shape my shirt takes.

Like the end of that movie Joe vs the Volcano, Joe and Meg Ryan are standing on the edge of a burning volcano and are being forced to jump in by angry natives. There is no way out. They stare at each other, sensing their doom. Then he takes her hand and shrugs and says, "We'll just jump and we'll see."

Every day, right?

I Need My Fairy Wings On

2011-11-10T10:12:00.000-08:00

Lilly has been getting up too early these days, like 7. I'm still in the middle of getting Nathan and Emma breakfast and ready for school, it throws a whole extra person in the stew. She peeked around the kitchen corner this morning in the fairy costume that she slept in and I saw her and said "Ahhk, Lilly, you're up too early." and she held up her wings and said "I wanted to put on my wings." (She couldn't sleep in her wings, we had to take them off for bedtime.)

So I reattached her wings. I do understand the need to be a full fairy as early as possible in the morning.

Then she was zooming around pressing the shiny medallion on her costume because it gives her superpowers to kill people she says.

Then she and Emma were playing in the war zone room that is Moose's old room, through the hole in the wall (it is actually a doorway, but looks like a square bomb made it). They were playing Scrabble. Emma said "She's winning!" It's bad when you're playing Scrabble with someone who can't read, and they're winning. I told Emma you can't HELP her. So basically Emma was playing herself and then losing to herself, but Lilly was putting the tiles on.

Alot goes on here before 8 a.m. In fact, the day is pretty much over by 9. It's all a slow slide into tired, hell and feeding people. Unless we go to McDonald's and I can knit or read while the kids play. Yesterday I took lunch to the park so Lilly could play with her tiny friends after school and I talked to the moms - asian mom, fat mom, teacher mom and me, slacker mom. I said to them all, I don't know how everyone looks so put together and organized. I feel like I'm crawling through every day just barely hanging on. Then they all said they were crawling through each day too. But why does no one say that? And why does everyone have time for nice outfits, crafts and patient voices?

That reminds me, I want to go to Michael's and get more stuff we can glue.

When I left Lilly at preschool in her fairy costume this morning, and led her over to the play kitchen where Hannah was dressed in her Sleeping Beauty costume. There was also Maya, the asian kid, whom Lilly likes, but Maya does not like princesses, and she does NOT need help putting her fairy wings on. I wanted to kick Maya in the face. Lilly started to explain what the medallion does on her fairy costume and I jumped in and gently encouraged Lilly that maybe when you press the medallion, pixie dust sprays out and everyone can fly. They all seemed to like that. Thank God, otherwise Lilly would be racking up a dead body count at preschool.

Chasing Sun Today

2011-11-03T16:25:00.001-07:00

I was walking Lilly into her preschool yesterday, carrying her actually, and she said, "Mommy, you never say 'I love you, Lilly.'"

Oh my GAW. Of course I spanked her. No, but I told her of course I love her. And I'll say it more. She seems to like it because everytime I say it now, she likes to say "I love you too." I think she likes to answer back.

We played on the floor today in Moose's old house, which is the only part of the house that has a carpet. Lilly and Emma climbed on my feet and back and wrestled and Lilly stuck her feet in my face and said "SMELL MY FEET!! SMELL MY FEET!!" for about an hour or until she decided to sit on my head for awhile. Once I laid on the carpet I couldn't get up, because I canNOT lay down during the day or I will just lay there until like Christmas I'm so tired and happy to lie still. Emma did her homework there on the floor and we were pretending it was our bedroom, this side of the house that is now opened up temporarily with the wall knocked out.

Earlier it had been so cold (70 degrees) that we kept going outside to warm up and chasing the sun across the deck. Lilly and I sat in the sun and played Candyland and kept having to move the game so we stayed in the sun (this was the beginning of me laying down). It takes so much time up to feel guilty during the day when I'm not playing with the kids, it's so much easier just to sit and play a game with them. It was actually fun and relaxing not to be doing, just to be setting with them, her. As Southerners would say.

I just like days where nothing is going on, and the biggest activity is to stay a little ahead of the creeping shade, keep your feet in the sun, just for one more minute.

Go with the Flow

2011-10-28T08:29:00.000-07:00

(Pix of Lilly's Life Point of View - when she has the camera)

I wrote about the moving of my mother as pushing an avalanche of snow back UP the mountain as it's crashing down on you... That's what Katie and I did, like drones, we just kept moving all the junk amidst the resistance...Boxes up in the garage rafters, organizing the closet for Moose out there neatly, making it tidy for her. Breaking our backs.

Now this morning, only one day later, my mother wakes up in Emma's lovely room and Lilly climbs in bed to snuggle with her and they're watching cartoons and it's completely opposite. My mom isn't lonely anymore.

I think you live alone so long you think "I have to be alone. I have to have things MY way, I can't change, resist, resist" even if you're supremely unhappy.

Then things change around you, despite you, in fact you stand there, in her case, and watch it all happening in total distress, and then you get a nice morning with your granddaughter in the middle of a warm and mostly happy house. Love for breakfast.

I hope I remember this later for when I'm old and crotchety and living at Nathan or Emma or Lilly's house (or with Chris in Newfoundland).

I hope I will erase the resistance. That was the hardest part.

Anyway, it's only been one day but already things are flowing better. And we're making room for Poppa!! Barry and I have acheived the commune. We already got through a terrible part, I hope it's easier now, whatever happens.

Someday You Might Miss the Shoes

2011-10-26T21:20:00.001-07:00

Spent the whole day (with the help of Katie) moving all my mom's stuff out of her house and into the garage. Apparently she's out of money, so we're moving her into the house (Emma's room), Katie's in the den and if we move all the kids into our room, technically we'd have another room open. So if anyone needs a place.

I just feel grateful that 1) today is over, and b) that I never have to do that again. Except when I have to go to Maryland to pack up my mother's house there. I was also laying in bed just now with the blessing of Lilly's tonnage of sleeping body asleep on my chest thinking how lucky that we have this house that can hold all these people, it's kept us safe and we're all still here. Crowded, driving each other nuts, but here. It won't be forever that the kids are hanging off the furniture and their clothes are on the floor. Like that guy told me one time, he said he used to cuss everytime he came home from work and tripped over his kids' shoes in the doorway. Until someone told him "someday you might miss the shoes."

So crowded but grateful.

ps. highlights from today would be me yelling: You're f@#$$#ing insane!! (when my mom kept bringing stuff BACK IN that I was moving out) Lilly getting in bed tonight in only a hat (because tomorrow is share day and it has to begin with the letter "H". So she had her hat). Eating at the Panda Place with the whole fam (I didn't cook hooray). Barry doing all the carpool so I could finish outside. Emma and I getting her ready for picture day tomorrow. Nathan in the hot tub telling us about meeting his twin at school. Accidentally washing the kids' camera after taking before and after pictures. Seems like I can break my balls for 8 hours working but I will always lose money - wash the camera, there's your little jab from the universe. Life speeds by, not enough time for bad tv. I hope to get back to that.

The Audience of Bacon

2011-10-20T15:09:00.000-07:00

The other morning I woke up at 5 a.m. with this dream about my mom. You know, in that twilight of sleep/wake, where you think you have it all figured out, hooray, it was all going to be allright, or not, and there was no going back to sleep. So I watched the room get lighter and the fog outside on the treetop, and then I went to make lunches and breakfast and when I get up my body hurts because I run around so much during the day and sleep just shows me how tired I am, instead of erasing that tired.

I was sad about my mom because no one wants their mom to get old, but then I felt peace because life is a joke, you can't hang onto it, except when you're hanging upside down on a roller coaster, and they give you an actual BAR to hang on TO, and that's only for split seconds.

So in the dark I put the turkey bacon on to fry, and when you first put bacon on to grill, it sounds like applause. So then I automatically gave my Oscar speech in my head, and thought about all my parents, and my kids, and my husband, and the things worth applauding for in my actual real life.

There are moments of beauty and peace that are tumbling at me these days - Africa, the bacon, the bagels we eat on Sundays when we have nothing to do but wander, the horse outside who has only one speed: slow. I have gratitude, I cultivate it with a hoe and a spade, because it is fertile, man. Sprouts all this happiness.

Everyone Has a Dream

2011-10-18T12:49:00.000-07:00

Nathan found a trash can that rolls, that was out abandoned on Peoria street near our house. Not the city trash can, but just a regular old black trash can.

He said, blissfully, "This is my dream come true."

Homework Hell

2011-10-14T08:38:00.000-07:00

You know I didn't like middle school when I had to do it, like 40 years ago. And now here I am again in the middle of Ancient Greece and the ruins haven't changed that much. Just a different obnoxious teacher asking kids to do the same obnoxious homework.

Can't tell Nathan any of that because I'm teaching him to be responsible, neat, optimistic and driven. He's really trying, the poor guy. Last night was a drag, though, we were swamped with mounds of English homework, where they have to COPY the question out of the book and then answer the question. It's all busy work. Although at least his answers were well thought out and interesting. Usually it's just what do I have to write that gets me out on my bike?

I did teach him how to make a story dynamic instead of just functional. I hope he sees that writing can be made loopy and exciting, even writing that's required writing. And I hope he'll see that reading is a way to travel when you can't get off the ground yourself. So these are my goals.

Both the kids are hard workers and good thinkers. Nathan's more a dreamer, Emma's more a wade into the middle of it and shout until all the waves smooth out around her. Then do a dance. While Nathan rides around her towing Lilly behind his bike on the wagon. At this point, I have a truck driver, a dancer (pretty sure Vegas Showgirl type, ahhhk), and Lilly who will probably invent a time machine. She spends alot of time waiting for me to be done with the other two, and so she has a vast imagination.

Last night after school she said "there's a kid at my school named Bodie. I think the mother said I like boats. Boatie." (She thinks his name's Boatie.) Now when I see that kid I see sails flying.

She also said there's a kid named Landon. "Is he nice?" I say. "I smiled at him, and he smiled back," she says. "Oh, good," I say. Then she says: "But he gets in time out. Cause he throws things at other kids." I love preschool.

Der Wienerschnitzel Isn't for Pussies

2011-10-06T14:42:00.000-07:00

Here's what you eat when you're a 95 year old man: 2 all beef chili dogs. Side of cheese fries.

That's what I have to bring to Poppa, the kids' grandpa, on Saturday. I couldn't eat that on a regular day. Or more importantly, I'm glad we'll be gone by the time that goes through the 95 year old man.

Magical Fairyland Garage

2011-10-01T23:07:00.000-07:00

I just spent the last week oppressed by my garage. We had barfed out the entire garage into the driveway and for a week we dug through junk like homeless people at a hobo free-for-all. Then it was supposed to "rain" (14 drops, a deluge) so I forced myself to finish the stupid garage. People who were enthusiastic helpers 5 days ago were dropping like flies. One got a ripped arm tendon, she's out. Another has an impossible bone disorder, dismissed to a hot tub! There's just me standing in the middle of disaster, body sore, but do I stop? I chugged through it. And this morning the kids got up and the garage fairies had made them an awesome playroom where normally there was a hoarder's paradise.

Spacious, desks for painting, room to ride a bike through the expanse, toys and games. And now I'll have to do the treadmill again because even though you rip all your muscles packing and trashing boxes, if you don't exercise you still get fat.

Huge pile of trash that a dumpster has been ordered for, where we will apply the trash and it will disappear.

Some stuff for a yard sale. And still furniture and lawn mower and stuff that has to go back into my magical fairyland garage but I'm still leaving it out in the driveway because the garage is too fun to have boring gassy smelling equipment in it when it'd be so much more fun to spill a bunch of water, freeze it and have an ice rink instead.

Going Through My Boxes

2011-09-25T22:48:00.000-07:00

Up to my balls in papers, toys and baby clothes in the garage.

We barfed out the entire garage into the driveway, and it looked like an episode of "Hoarders." Except I have an education and I don't have a bad dye job.

I keep thinking of my big brother, "going through his boxes," but because we have Katie here, and she isn't afraid to buy things in bulk, she actually managed to bring 24 clear plastic containers (I would have passed out in Target spending $100 dollars on clear plastic containers, couldn't we just make them ourselves out of mud?) - anyway, I owe her about $100 but we need about 24 more to make the garage a place people could take other people on dates. It is looking amazing and it's nice to have someone else organizing things and have me wander in after feeding children to sit down and sort through stuff already pre-arranged for me with all the stress taken out. Threw out SO many papers and old clothes from my fatty self (been all sizes after having kids), and broken toys and one shoes. Also got to read old love letters and see pictures of when the kids were small and find a new skirt for Lilly.

Bad part is the kids are wandering around without a leader, Lilly is waifishly alone too much, but I figure this week I have to push through, get things neat, get my mom moved over to our house, feel the relief next week and Lilly won't suffer long. It is good to lean on people and have them help. It's impossible to do some stuff alone.

Lilly told me last night that she's never going in there (the garage) again. "Because there's pincher bugs and a splinter." She got one on her foot.

We went to Back to School Night with Nathan the other night and we told him "hey we get to follow your schedule and go to all your classes and see what you do each day," and he looked panicked and said "ALL my classes? That's gonna take like six hours!"

Life is pretty big and scary right now, with my mom being my mom, and me having to understand (or never understand) how to be patient with that relationship. And Barry going to Ghana with a guy who isn't exactly the nurturing type, and parts of our house about to turn into a battlefield with walls torn out and room being made for old Poppa who can't hear a thing.

I thought today in the middle of the boxes that maybe boxes are silly, who is ever going to care and read these things, or look at these pictures or care if I still have my grandmother's old shoes. But life is messy that way - some of it is voices talking to you, people you love and know, some of it is their handwriting, some of it is a tall black dog, some of it is artwork made by kindergartners. Knee deep and wading around in the past in the garage, to try and make sensible room for the future which is hurtling at us. Nathan's already grown two inches from getting braces. He might as well apply for college, our lanky boy. Emma's as tall as a 14 year old.

Sprints by, folks.

All's Fair in Love and War

2011-09-22T00:14:00.000-07:00

We went to the fair today and I had soda at a McDonald's at 8 o'clock tonight which is why I'm still up writing on this blog. Happily. Well not happily writing but I'll be happy when it's over.

There's just something wonderful about taking your three beautiful blondes to a place where farm animals live. We got to see a Wild West show where a guy shot balloons while speeding past on horseback with a real revolver like in old Westerns. There was a stagecoach zooming by pulled by six very amped up horses and I looked at the guy with six reins in each hand and thought wow I'm glad I'm not that guy. And it looked like how did anyone survive stagecoach travel? The kids made their own lasso and I lassoed Lilly and reeled her in. We ate fresh ice cream, we picked fake corn from velcro trees (very cool), we touched a giant pig, we went into many many funhouses built by alcoholic carnival workers.

I got to watch 11 year old and 9 year old beauties ride fast rides like the grown up kids they are becoming. I got to watch 4 year old Lilly throw a ping pong ball into a floating dish and win the biggest pillow pet animal there was. (A penguin.) Poor Nathan had to swallow chunks of soft taco whole while on the ferris wheel, because he can't chew with his new braces. His teeth are pretty much just no good. I'll have to be feeding him with a tube for the next few days.

We sweated, we bought souvenirs, we rode the tram in a long, tired circle on the way out. Even though we parked close and didn't need the tram, we rode the tram because it's fun to ride in a circle, get out where you started and then walk to the car. Because the fair looks pretty from the tram, in the night breeze, when your feet hurt and you have the happiness of knowing you're going home.

We do the fair every year because it is a day we don't have to be anywhere else, we eat what we want and I get moments where I am exactly standing in the middle of my life. These kids are so good, they are so funny, and I am really lucky.

Life with Lilly

2011-09-17T00:04:00.000-07:00

Why are PTA ladies always fat with glasses?

But I don't want to talk about boring PTA ladies. I want to talk about how Katie organized our candy-tea-ice cream cone cabinet so that when you open the door, stuff doesn't fall out of it. SO NICE.

Lilly cried today because she couldn't go to school. She didn't understand why someone wouldn't want to be in school on a Friday. Then it got worse when she realized there was no school on Saturdays or Sundays. Poor dear. She was always with me every minute we volunteered up at Nathan and Emma's schools, from the time she was BORN, so she thinks school is like, uh, well home, I guess. Maybe she'll get like 15 Masters degrees, and dump boyfriend after boyfriend when they don't have her academic determination. I can see her, brilliant, at 25, small but wily, intensely telling me how it sucks that no one is as smart as she is. She says this as she's defiantly tucking her blonde curly hair into her astronaut helmet. Not live, in person, but on Skype, from Mars.

And I'll be standing there with a half-eaten pan of brownies in my hand, because I'll be raising her children. Hooray for me.

The Quilt

2011-09-11T13:24:00.000-07:00

I only made one pie this summer. It's like summer got on it's running shoes and dashed off leaving me with an empty plate and and apron on, yelling "hey where ya going?"

Nathan is 11 and off in the masses of kids at the Big School. In three days he's turned grumpy, insolent, dark, in fact he may be a vampire. And he hasn't seen any of those movies. Except when his friends are around, he's back to his light and airy self. When the friends go, apparently they take the Good Times, and we are left with the gravelly, angry parts. The bedtimes, the homework, the rules. I'm going to bargain with him to try and get back perhaps HALF of the Good Times, I may even takes the Friends to court to try and get custody rights. I'd take visitation.

Nathan is best in motion. On his bike, on his feet, moving or building something, he's his best self. He prefers to be engaged. Then he's talkative, happy. Perhaps we will start our own cooking show. Then we can eat afterwards, and we'll be busy together. I guess puberty is on its way, and growing hair on your body takes alot of the fun out of life. It's apparently exhausting. So I'm trying to be understanding, and supply alot of grilled cheese sandwiches and not yell so much.

Lilly got new grandparent pink shoes and she's hurtling toward preschool. Running so fast, it's good she got shoes with traction.

It was her first day this morning and she was so happy she could barely talk. We run up to school on the bike and I can barely make it I am not used to the bike ride - and then the school doors open and she is the first one in. Miss CeCe, the 12 year old teacher who taught Emma and Nathan says, "Come on in, Lilly!"

She got to make a cupcake (what a great first day, sugar by 9 a.m.), and then went to play in the pretend kitchen with a fat kid named Junebug (is the fat kid going to be our friend?) All the moms are fresh faced and 22 years old, except for one older mom who is so loud I'm doubting we'll be close. But still hoping. Maybe she's just nervous.

So then it comes time for me to leave, all the parents are leaving or have left. And there's this big empty space, where I am leaving and she is not. She's staying. Of course I start to secretly cry, because all of parenting is pain and saying goodbye, and making it okay for them to say goodbye, so they'll be strong and groovy grownups. But dammit, she's 4 and she's really really cute.

I go out to the waifish, stranded bike, my metal friend. We go home together, and riding a bike home from preschool is the best thing because you can cry and nobody cares and I pass Emma's school where she is inside and I think oh my god, all my kids are in institutions, but then I slowly stop crying because there are birds chirping, one really loud one, and the wind is blowing in my face, and I am a part of the world. And the world is lovely.

So I understand for a second my mom having trouble kicking out her alcoholic son. I understand that mothering is tough and terrible job, and if you're doing it right, you're crying alot of the time. Yesterday I was so happy thinking I'd be getting three hours to myself, to do all the things I want to do while Lilly is in school and then here it is and I don't want to do anything! I want to be frustrated and irritated, wrestling kids into carts at Costco and breaking up fights and yearning for Diet Coke. I'm really GOOD at that.

I guess it's all rolled into one, the riding the bike home from preschool, the wind, the wrestling, the crying, it's all fabric, and this is one gratifying and beautiful quilt we're making. This family.

Every Party Should Have a Rebecca

2011-09-05T21:31:00.000-07:00

We went to a party today where I didn't know anyone. It was a work party for Barry, and there were kids there, so we all went.

There were only four other families there. Everyone seemed to be very Hollywood. Lots of big floppy black hats. I thought one woman had actually come in twice because she had the same hat and blond hair as the woman who came in before her. It was all very Angelina Jolie. And the kids had so much un-rubbed in sunblock on their faces it looked like clown school.

But you know when you're sitting with people and trying to get to know them and it's like an awkward first date and there's no chemistry really, we're all just waiting to get the food and get out of there, or maybe that's just me, with everything in life, but I think I keep looking for the big, maternal loving creature, who exudes "relaxed", whose lap I can I crawl into, if only figuratively, and sigh. There are only a few people like that - my friend Rebecca. I think I'm always looking for her at parties. Hoping for a Rebecca. She's funny, has a calm edge, a nurturing spirit. She doesn't try to have these things, she just IS these things, and they fit her so well. So when you meet her, it's like eating a Rolaids, you just kick back and say ohthankgod. You're here.

So this party really needed a Rebecca. Rebeccas are a quiet people, you would never notice your party didn't have one until you've had one at a party and then you have to go to a party Rebeccaless. Then alas you feel the hole.

So we made conversation, we waited for food (what is it with people who don't serve food immediately?? Don't they know how HUNGRY I am??) (Why am I HUNGRY??) And then the food they offered, for children under 11 - tomatoes with cheese on them (yes, all children love tomatoes), brussel sprouts (I'm not kidding), and spinach salad. So my kids stared up at me like God hated them. They waited for hamburgers. Lilly ate literally nothing. Came home and had to make her egg on toast pronto. I don't like coming home from a party to cook. (Um, I don't like to cook at all.) But especially not after a party - when you go to a party, you endure making smalltalk because someone else is going to feed you, so you don't have to do it later. So this sort of blew my whole someone-else-is-doing-all-the-work vibe I had planned out.

Kids are beautiful though. Playing duck duck goose in the setting sun on a hillside with other kids, in their tan bodies and bathing suits by the pool, one of the last days of summer... I just miss them, and I'm here, with them.

Put Lilly to bed and she asked why Santa gives stuff to kids. "Does he have a lot of junk and he wants to give it out to kids?" I said he likes to give presents out to boys and girls if they try to be good all year. She says "Does Luke know to be good??" She was protecting Luke - she wanted him to get his presents.

Then when she's sleeping I look at her little face and her head and think about how tiny she was, and how I rush around all the time and never have the long stretches of time I had when Nathan was a baby. I think about how we get such a short time on Earth and it isn't fair because I love all the babies, and I want to see Lilly's babies, and even that's not going to be enough because once you've opened your heart to babies, just ain't nothing that fills you up, you just get bigger and wantier. Because it feels so good. And they're so so deep and weighty in you, like wading through stars all the time. My own starfield.

So I only complain about the tomatoes and the big floppy hats and the Hollywood people because I don't understand them, I know they're doing their best. I just don't shop at the mall, I hang out with a big fat horse and chickens to de-stress. Because at that party not any of those people seemed to fall over faint with love for their babies - they were organic, high-end, clean people, and all I wanted was a big lovey Rebecca, stumbling through life with a laugh, where our kids are fireworks at the end of the day, because THAT I understand.

Look Ma, No Skill!

2011-09-02T00:51:00.000-07:00

Nathan and Katie and I finished the bunny cage today. We added a door, it really needed a little door in the front. We are definitely not builders, we were trying to shave down the door with the side of a saw, so it would fit. But we are determined. You can do a lot with determination and little skill. And cute bunnies, and chickens ambling around checking your pockets for food.

Nathan is so amazing with his drill, he just gets in there and gets it done. There's something for creating a person who grows up and is able to fix stuff with tools. It's very satisfying. Much better than the other side of him that makes faces at Emma when she's crying or telling her that all the shows she likes are retarded. That is less satsifying, and yet - the same person.

So now we have a cute little chicken area and bunny area and the big fat horse. That I'm scared to put the kids or myself on. But we're getting there.

The horse has been here 18 days and today she gave a soft whinny when she saw me. Aww. I know she wanted food, but still, hey, she's talking to me after all this silence. Silence is bigger when it's furry and weighs 1400 pounds. I think she likes us.

Determination and little skill, I'm happy with that. The blind leading the big fat horse.

Cage Free

2011-08-30T23:34:00.000-07:00

There's guys whacking concrete to bits with huge metal posts in our yard the last few days. For some reason, this is the Loud time at our house, Loud and Destructive. We're making way for new spaces, we're making room for our huge tree, we're making room for Barry's dad maybe, to come live here.

There were all these remnants of the cage that was around the back of Moose's house, and I hated to see all that wire thrown out. So Nathan and Katie and I made a new bunny cage with some of the pieces. We were sawing and cussing and poking ourselves with sticks and Nathan was using his drill. But then it got really really fun, cause at sunset we had finished this wonderful cage!! Out back, hidden in the chicken area, an oasis of joy for bunnies, under the trees. We stuck them in and they seemed happy - flopped immediated in their hay-filled litter box to relax.

So tomorrow we can destroy the old eyesore of a cage in our driveway. It was heaps of sand and spiders. Should be fun to take apart.

Of course I didn't play with Lilly all day because we were doing the cage - this was after Nathan's orthodontist appt where the doctor said oh your kids are so well behaved and then ten minutes later in the car I'm telling them they're assholes for fighting the instant we get in the car. Course I said "jerk" because we're PG rated.

Anyway, it was nice to finish something useful. Tomorrow I'll try to relax. We do have to put a door on the new cage - but I'm sure Nathan can help us figure it out.

Two Hours Takes Forever on Ice

2011-08-29T22:09:00.000-07:00

Hey, I hate ice skating. Took five kids ice skating today. Looks so pretty, the white ice in this heatwave, those twirly girls that you know spend every day on the ice since they were four and loved spangly outfits.

But then I have to skate sort of bent over while Lilly is hanging on me with both hands. Last time we went skating was her first time, and by the end she was skating on her own, on her impossibly tiny doll skates. So I kept trying to shake her off, encourage her to skate on her own, look at Emma and Audrey skating, look at Nathan and Henry. But today she had to hang on me and then once she realized I had a bag of snack food all she wanted was to get back off the ice and eat chips and rice krispy treats. Dammit.

Two hours takes forever on ice. I started promising myself we'd stop at Costco and I'd feed us all pizza and there would be my soda, all the free soda and ice I could drink. It was the only thing getting me around the long icy loop of the rink, the no cooking and soda ahead. Then as it got later I could see that there was not going to be any soda and things got darker and darker.

We got off the ice and suddenly I was just a chauffer, getting the kids home, having to make hamburgers which smelled bad and I ended up giving to the dogs. Then the sun was going down and there was no movie night or anything fun, and then poor Lilly is so tired and she gets in bed and peace is coming because quiet is coming.

I found myself sitting out with the chickens today on a chair like an 80 year old woman whose house has exploded. I don't know what I'm doing these days, this motherhood gig has taken a turn for the busy. There's all these friends over, which is good, but I keep wondering what happened to the simple life, where we all liked each other. School is hurtling at us and I know life will not be the same, we only watched Price is Right ONE TIME this summer. And now Nathan will be at middle school and Emma will be in 4th grade and Lilly starting preschool and no wonder I got this horse. Hey wait, maybe Barry and I can go to the movies at 10 am three days a week. Or once a month.

Anyway, it moves too fast. Even the bad stuff, nothing lingers long enough for me. If you're in my life, linger. Would ya?

It's Rooster Time

2011-08-24T10:30:00.000-07:00

We had a party here over the weekend. Kids dripping off the furniture kind of party. Hanging off the bunkbed. Building a treehouse. Swimming, eating bagels. 11 is a good number, nice and even with those parallel sticks of number.

The day before, our neighbors had handed us a rooster over the fence. To try him out. He was beautiful, and immediately put the moves on Chris the chicken, who looked a little surprised, and then a little pissed. Then she puffed up her whole body, straightened her feathers and decided he was okay.

But at 4 in the morning the next morning, it was like a car alarm was going off. The cock a goodle goo (as Lilly calls it) would not stop going off. For like 40 minutes. The bad kind of car alarm, the nature kind, where the only way to turn it off is to strangle it. A little talk with the rooster was not going to work. He was always going to go off, when it's still dark, because it's his way.

So Barry walked in at 8 when we were all awake (had all been awake for 4 hours) and said "Uh, can the rooster go back?" I said uh, like right away.

So the night of the party I climbed the back wall and met Bill our neighbor in the dark and handed over loudy the rooster. I hope he doesn't shriek his way into a stew.

Moral is: lots of boys at birthday parties are great, and if you have roosters, have alot of land so they can crow not directly into your bedroom window.

Good Old Reliable Nathan

2011-08-18T21:30:00.000-07:00

11 years ago today I was laying with a nice fat stomach in a balmy bedroom on a lake in central Florida (Oklawaha, to be exact). Barry was working on a horror movie, and not even my husband, just the Guy. I woke up at 4 in the morning feeling a little crampy. So I ate a popsicle. Wandered around our little rented lake house.

I think I'm in labor, I thought. But never having been in labor, I waited to tell Barry.

A few hours later, I was definitely in labor. We drove the AD's borrowed truck (of course it would be Nathan being born, his last ride to the hospital in a truck) and got to go to the Munroe Regional Medical Center where we had toured and seen all the newborn red wrinkly babies through the nursery window. I didn't want any of those babies. I just wanted the one I was currently growing.

Couldn't wait to see that baby.

Of course everyone's read the book and knows the story of Nathan's birth - I highly recommend having a baby while on vacation in Florida. I'd only been there a few weeks, spent alot of time watching "Unsolved Mysteries" reruns on Lifetime (I love Bob Stack) and hanging out in the alligator lake in the humidity with dogs Jed and Maise. Bruce was 16. I was a youngster, too.

Anyway, so there we were, Nathan slithered out to hang with us in that life changing hospital room where I stopped sleeping and started caring for my little baby boy. He started out much smaller and gentler than you'd think if you saw the current massive Nathan. He fit in the crook of my arm.

I told the kids in the car tonight on the way home from Poppa's, that having kids is the greatest thing that can ever happen to you. Even with all the yelling. They're amazing because there is nothing like them in the world, you can't make another, they are walking and talking and laughing and feeling creations from nowhere, from clouds and atoms and spirit. No technology made Nathan. He's just love, walking around in my shoes. (That he fits now.)

ps. Nathan 11 yrs ago: liked milk, watching people and sleeping
Nathan now: likes hot Cheetos, riding bikes, watching people build stuff

The Lone Modifier

2011-08-17T22:05:00.000-07:00

A friend I didn't even know was a friend came and is staying in Emma's room. She hardly takes up any space and is one of those kind of people that could be comfortable at a subway derailing.

She came and the first night she was here I found them all on the floor of Emma's room where she had barfed out a huge load of jewelry she had made. She had an entire (small) suitcase filled with jewelry that exploded all over the floor, and the kids were no kidding, knee deep in necklaces. Lilly had bracelets all the way up one arm.

We took away bags of the stuff. She wanted us to take everything. She was sick of her jewelry. Had gone to one craft show and hated it. So even though she had obviously spent years tediously bent over tiny beads and ruining her eyes, suddenly we had a ton of it displayed all over the children.

We would have liked her without the jewelry.

She does loan modifications for a living (wait, stop yawning) and is just moving out here. My dad said that sounded like a really boring kind of cowboy - The Lone Modifier. She is a smart, fast-thinker and an activist for people who are losing their homes. She's one of those people who reads fine print, and tells banks to go blow themselves. She knows the rules better than the rule-makers, and she saves people's homes, because the banks don't seem to know their own rules. Or the temps at the banks, that the banks hire so they can fire them at 6 months without having to pay benefits.

She's the kind of person who stands on top of the wall during the French Revolution and waves the flag until she's stabbed with a bayonet. And then goes down in glory.

The Lone Modifier, to the rescue.

She also loves bunnies, dogs, and horses. She keeps bringing different sweets to the horse in our yard but so far the horse rejects them all. Jellybeans. Donuts. Carrots dipped in molasses.

And today she sat in the kitchen and cut up about 40 pounds of fruit and then came out with that and a professional looking chicken salad display on amazing bread just in time to feed a load of swimming family and friends. No fanfare. She just set it out and then sat around. I'm not kidding, it's like having a staff. But tomorrow she starts her job so that's a real bummer cause she's entertaining and I liked the food.

Luckily, she's staying awhile cause she has to find a house to rent for her family. So we have a boarder, who cooks and cares about people. But is self-sufficient. She'll talk all in a burst about what she does and how she saves families from losing their homes and then she'll sit cross-legged and shrug. Go feed jellybeans to the horse, for fun. Those firey Irish.

Lilly in the Car

2011-08-12T22:09:00.000-07:00

Lilly says "You had a baby. I was a baby. You had me, and you had Emma." me:"That's right." L:"But Daddy had Nathan." me:"Oh, because Daddy's a boy?" L:"Yeah. ...Buuuut, wait, I think you had Nathan."

Then later in bed, "I wish I was big. Nathan and Emma are big. How come Nathan and Emma are big?" me:"They started before you."

A Thursday in August

2011-08-11T13:19:00.000-07:00

The kids have friends over so there's peace in the house as toys get played with that are usually ignored. And there's friendly chatter instead of baiting and arguing, our usual background noise.

I was folding laundry and realizing that my life is slipping away. But then I realized that most of life is folding laundry, and that made the folding easier. I felt happy to be doing it.

Break On Through to the Other Side

2011-08-09T22:00:00.000-07:00

Today two big guys came to our house and bashed a hole in our wall. Well, they measured it, then they sweated, went under the house, did some stuff to the water pipes (or so they said), took out a saw that I'm pretty sure they used to amputate legs in Civil War days and then there was suddenly a hole in the wall.

Your bedroom looks really weird with a hole in it, it looks dwarfed, like it's going to spill out into the yard. (Can I even say dwarfed anymore? Do I have to say Little Peopled?) The room, I KNOW, did not change shape or dimension in any real way, but it DID change, in every way, as the hours passed. At first it looked like a big mistake, like we were going to be living real up close and personal with nature, and as a natural girl, I like nature but I don't like to sleep in it. The room looked shrunken to Chicklit size, a raft of a room beside the pool. The pool, in fact, introduced itself in a way it never had before and wanted to come inside and meet the bathtub.

Then the guys covered the room with plastic in an ET- medical experiment way and continued cutting and making general banging noises behind the white opaque shield. The room started to look longer, I can't explain it.

Then at the late hour of 7 pm, the door is in. The French doors, and we all sighed and sat on the floor of our bedroom in front of the beautiful doors, that look out on green bushes I just trimmed, and blue pool cover and red barn and yellow dog laying in the grass glad we're all staring at him. The air blew in and we had made a new space and I see why astronauts like space travel. Its refreshing to see new angles on old things.

One of the workers, Tim, could only smile with half his face, like he was saving the other half for something REALLY funny, he was from Alabama, an actual white guy, and I told him I loved the South, I miss humidity. He actually turned to look at me on that one. I do love the feeling of walking out your door at 11 at night in August in the South and being completely and disgustingly sweaty. He lives at the beach in Ventura now. Like moving from a sauna into a rainstorm.

The other worker, the leader, had arms like hippopotomus legs, bulby in a good way. In an I Could Lift Your Piano Off You In A Fire, way. We loved both our guys.

Nathan sat there from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m., just sat there. Took pictures. He loves busy-ness. Wreckage. Concise work. Tools. He loves to observe. Then he did mow the lawn and I made him an apple pie. Well, everyone.

But sitting in front of those open doors, with our beautiful wood floor leading out into nowhere, out into the wilderness of our backyard, the kids laying on me, eating smoothies we made, Moose sitting on the bed, Barry and Nathan stepping in and out of the threshold - it was like a picture coming to life. A moment we could feel of summer, of this life.

(See the title, get it? The Doors?)

Turn On Your Hearthlight

2011-08-02T23:47:00.000-07:00

(Isn't that a bad Neil Diamond song?) The kids played so hard at this indoor play place that they were sweating. My friend and I sat on hard chairs and talked for 4 hours while they kept coming back and eating food and drinking water. Then we came home and swam in the heat of evening when the ground was still sweating from the day.

In the kitchen I had three people I like most, my tall friend with the wicked sense of humor and bendable heart, my gentle younger friend with the buttery tan and my mom, always dressed well and giving out advice no one will take. The kids were gathered outside in the porch tent, their own ante-room eating noodles, and one husband and kid were in the living room discussing (of course) poop and barf. I wandered back into the steamy kitchen and it only had 3 women in it, but it felt full. I was putting stuff away, barely looked at anyone but I felt buoyed by the sound and feel of these people in my kitchen – they float my world. It’s hard to look directly at people when their presence is what holds you up.

Putting the kids to bed I realized I felt that feeling, the house full long after they were gone, they filled a crack in my life, the crack of summer, it can’t already be August. Nine o’clock on an August night after a full day and people in the kitchen also avoiding bedtime, and everyone is so joyful and good looking. The people matter – no house, no stuff, any kitchen anywhere – it’s the people that bring your life heartiness. These families fill my hearth.

Missing the Target

2011-07-31T21:18:00.001-07:00

Oh my God, I don't know if you've been to the Burbank Target lately but when the kids and I went in the other day dying for an Icee (okay, Lilly was dying for an Icee) and we had our cups from the last Icee so we didn't have to actually pay for an Icee anyway, we went inside and there IS NO food court anymore. No food court!! Not that we ever held court with our food, they should really just call it the Bad Food Area.

Our used cups will no longer be any good at our favorite Target because not ONLY are they taking out the Beloved Pretzel and Icee area, they are putting in a STARBUCKS. This sucks!! No free soda! No pretzels! Four dollar muffins and none of us drink coffee or have laptops.

So the vibe of Target is forever altered. We can't wander while I refill my soda a hundred times and then stay up all night from too much caffeine writing blogs like this. This will affect you, kind reader.

Alas.

There's No Place Like Home

2011-07-28T00:07:00.000-07:00

In case anyone wanted a chicken update, I'm not sure the mites are gone. I hover on that strand of hope each time I go out to see what the chickens are up to. It looks good, but I'm no chicken/mite expert. I hesitate to declare triumph. They are Mitey.

I do know that the chickens are desperate to go home to their chicken house. Every night at around dusk, they crowd around the path to the chicken house door, like groupies with no tickets, desperate to get into that rock concert. They look despondent. Tonight in the dark, I had to move the three baby chickens who were huddled against their old door in a desperate mini-chicken stack. It's heartbreaking, really, their loyalty to tradition. They laid against the door, deriving comfort from just the nearness of their old place. I put them in the new area with the other chickens, a gentle nudge toward togetherness, team, family. Find comfort with the Group, when really they just want to go Home.

Also I hear them irately calling to me (or anyone) during the day when they want to lay their egg in the chicken house and the door is shut. They walk around anxiously, freaked that their regular place is closed, what will they DO?? They don't LIKE the nests out here, they like them where they USED to be. Because they used to be there. That's where we GO, in THERE. They shriek. So they are laying SOMEPLACE, I know they're laying but they are HIDING that location from me, in protest. I'm expecting a typed letter soon, from their attorney, a Rooster. They'll be firing me, and hiring Emma, who will open their door for them. And they can file inside in an orderly fashion, and assume their old roosts, right at dusk, prompt for bedtime, because as all chickens know, dozing on that wooden beam in the chicken house is the greatest time of day. Who cares about the mites.

Diet Coke and Murder

2011-07-27T23:50:00.000-07:00

By nighttime I just want to shoot myself. Because the day is ending, and then somebody usually calls and wants us to meet at the beach tomorrow and when the sun is going down all I can think about is please, somebody, will somebody put me to bed? I couldn't POSSIBLY do ONE MORE THING, let alone a WHOLE other thing, a tomorrow thing, involving driving and talking and packing and cooking and entertaining and then more driving.

And then the end of THAT day will be the same rush - that still has me putting people to bed too late, and that same feeling of why is everything so mad dashy, are we running a sprint every DAY? And then yes, I am trying to keep up with people who have shorter faster legs, and open minds and bright visions, everyday is a birthday party because it is summer, and I am just so GLAD there are these kids and there is Diet Coke. Because we are going to get married. Every day at 4 o'clock, Diet Coke and I remember our refreshing love. It's not that it tastes all that good. It's the same with the chickens, the bunnies, the dogs at our house. It's not that they are the greatest animals ever. It's just that they are simple, they don't beg for ipods, they don't say no. They're just sitting there, furry and cute, ice cold and all mine.

The simple things are my work bonuses. My happy way to say fuck off everyone. My nurturing bone is shattery. I need the perks. They ward off murder.

Mitey Big Problem

2011-07-26T22:48:00.000-07:00

So last night on the internet I was looking up "Chicken Mites". Like I'm sure you all were.

Emma and I kept noticing that when we went in to feed the chickens or gather eggs, we'd come out feeling a little itchy. NOT THE LICE THING AGAIN. The little bugs were like tinier than poppyseeds. I looked it up on my favorite porn site, Backyard Chicken. And yes, look, everyone has chicken mites. On that site. They don't spread to anything but chickens. But they do feel nice and itchy as they run up your arms looking for the chicken in you.

So the site recommended doing all this stuff to get rid of mites. Like, you know, moving everything out of your chicken house, scouring it, spraying it with poultry dust, bathing your chickens in dish soap, covering them in DE (which I just happen to have to clean our pool).

You've never felt sadness until you've had a handful of wet chicken. Today I found the difference between ducks and chickens. A duck becomes powerful in water. A chicken, it just loses the will to live.

I bathed nine chickens in a row in the already filled up baby pool that had been sitting outside for a few days. Holding the chickens' wings turned out to be a crucial step, because at one point one of the chickens started flapping and then dish soap really bubbles up, it's like a plane was taking off in suds. One by one, the chickens went from being fluffy, jolly cluckers to being despondent water balloons of glum. The wet chicken is what the word "sorry" was invented for. I guess they don't like the weight of the water. You wash a chicken and then you set it on the grass and it just stands there like it's been stranded at a Greyhound bus station.

I shut up their chicken house (closed for renovations til the Mites decide to move out) and sent everybody over to the barn area where I'm sure tonight they'll be eaten by racoons but at least they'll have been washed up for the occasion. I dusted them all with DE, the white powder that is used in the pool filter, the feed store was out of poultry dust, which I Nathan I went on a run for and I guess I still need.

Did I mention I'm kind of over chickens? They're a sorry excuse for a horse. I like the 6 eggs I get a day, but the mites, the predators, you can't ride them, all of it - eh, I don't know. Then Barry was leaving and he was in a bad mood cause his boss is mean so he told me maybe there are too many animals around here. So I said (muttering) maybe there are too many husbands.

Then later he called to apologize and I thought he is alot easier to have around than the chickens. I barely have to feed him and I've never had to hold his wings down when washing him in the baby pool.It's just the animals keep me from focusing on how I can't get anything done or stop the kids from growing. They don't talk, and they give me surprise eggs. I like the surprise. Minus the mites.

Blobs of Happy Familiar

2011-07-15T00:16:00.001-07:00

I was putting them to bed tonight, all 3, since Barry wasn't home. So that means big Nathan on the left, smaller yet competitively biggish Emma on the right and Lilly the runty one directly on my stomach. We can't figure out how to put them to bed at the same time in different rooms, so almost 11 years in and we're still piling them all in one convenient location and then inviting sleep to come at a group rate.

Putting them to bed is the one time of day I'm just focused on one thing. I can actually think at bedtime, and I can look at them and actually see them. Touch their hair, or snuggle. The daytime is like a relay race that we're always, always losing, or a breath away from losing. I want to do everything - I want to look at Harry Potter shirts with Emma on Ebay, I want to rebuild the rabbit cage with Nathan, I want to sit at Lilly's pretend barbecue table and eat plastic food. But I can never keep up. Today I did the rabbit cage, and Nathan rewarded me for my time spent with him by stepping on a rusty nail. So now I'm hoping that booster he had at 4 years old is still hanging on, otherwise we're in for a long and boring day of getting shots at a horrible little clinic in Glendale.

We did go on a bike ride up to Hansen (Handsome) Dam which Emma enjoyed enough to get a sore back and aching feet. We tossed rocks into the dam. Which was very big for having really just a toilet's flush of water in it. Then we went to wander at Target where summer is apparently over because we got lots of beach toys at half off. We just started summer like 2 weeks ago. Did they cancel summer? No one told us.

Anyway, all along the dam I kept thinking about Poppa, Barry's dad, who had fallen earlier in the week and just hasn't come all the way back from it. It was like he was himself, always, every day, no wavering, the 95 year old patriarch who loves Oreos and ordering his sons around, and then he slipped on a bathroom rug and now everything's different. I just kept thinking about him and why do things have to change like that?

Putting the kids to bed, there was a black blanket bunched up at the bottom of the bed and I kept thinking it was the dog, Owen. Because of the shape of it. Then Owen wandered into the room and I realized he wasn't there at all, it was a blanket. I thought about our old dog Maisie, we just put her to sleep a few weeks ago, and we still sort of expect to see her or hear her, we were used to her. She was a shape bumping around here that we cared about.

I don't see the details of everything because my life is innundated with details. I deal in generalities - big slabs of food delivered to small mouths, every few hours. Bathing of people, clothing of people, entertaining of people. I see blobs of things, basic shapes. I meet the most pressing needs and the rest is just blobs of happy/familiar that I warm my hands with. Those shapes keep me grounded, I recognize my life by those shapes, the shapes aren't always focused on, but they're everything. I didn't know it.

The kids fell off to sleep, one by one. From our kamikaze day. I am nestled in this baby bird nest.

I'm missing the shape of Poppa.

This Little Flag

2011-07-04T23:54:00.000-07:00

One of my moms told me to fly last night. She didn’t even care where I was going. She just said to go ahead and fly. Don’t think about anything else. Where I was going. Who needed what. Don’t feel guilty about anything. Just go fly.

They got me a bike. Shiny new and clear blue like Hawaiian water. I dove into my bike and rode with Hank the big fat dog late tonight. We flew out past the 4th of Julyers, teenagers out walking from parties. Ducks asleep at the duck house. Nobody else on the road, just black deep pavement and sleeping houses.

In my mind I replayed the parties we went to today. I could actually feel the parties, sometimes I’m on the outside of them but today I was at Poppa’s 4th party, with red white and blue decorated children and the tattoos we spilled water on and ruined in the car on the way over – melted ice cream and cotton candy and I ate an entire hamburger. Emma won the hula hoop contest like usual and Nathan fumbled the rely race like usual – Nathan has exuberance and clumsy going all at once, tied together in joy. Lilly ran the relay too, capturing a tiny American flag and running back with it held high – she didn’t know the point of the race is to run as fast as you can, forget the flag you’re holding. She thought she won the flag, so happy to have run and won the flag.

Then we swam at Michael Shapiro’s with the family that we love, two hunks of love parents and two blonde spritely boys. The kids buried themselves in pillows, Emma jumped into the hot tub and smashed her lip, I ate half a hamburger, we ate whipped cream and ice cream and brownies. And all the variety of kids sat in a row on a high bench, on pillows and watched the fireworks and me and Barry sat behind and there was our life laid out there on the porch, the fireworks over the mountain, the kids lined up in their pajamas, I like this 4th because it is one time that I can sit down and catch my breath and see that my life is a holy place.

We get home driving the freeway with fireworks bursting around us like it’s celebrating us driving home, and at home Lilly is asleep in moments, laying on my chest, and her weight is like a treasure chest, pirate gold. I think, I love being smothered, I love being needed, I love mattering to people. There is warmth spreading out from Lilly’s little heart, down my limbs, into my fingertips and toetips. The whole day brings me this.

So I snuck out on my bike to fly for real because Hank and I needed more room, the whole outdoors to hold in the love because I didn’t know it but everyday, all these days, look somehow I am soaring. I’m not winning any relay race at all, who needs the race, I don’t even know the rules, cause I already won this little flag. It was meant for me.

Walkin After Midnight (okay, ten)

2011-06-27T22:40:00.000-07:00

Took the dogs on a walk after dark today. Weird to go out at night, after 10, what if there's a psychokiller, don't they all roam the neighborhood at night? Braved it anyway, and you know what, it's beautiful out at night. There's no one out there. All the buildings are out there, but even they are sleeping, the world looks very wide without any people in it.

The dogs and I jogged up to school on the path I've taken every morning for six years with the kids. I know every inch of it, a geologist couldn't know more. I walked to and from my own elementary school in Santa Monica and knew every crack, but I have not known and loved the walk to school like I love this one. Because this one I am aware of the passing of time, I can see the world twice - my own elementary walk and now these little people's walk. And I can feel everything, because I have grown to love feeling everything, even the bad things.

I get to school and it's a summer wasteland, summer's only been here one day and it already looks flat with relief from no kids pounding its pavement. Three days ago we watched Nathan graduate from 5th grade in the auditorium, and I didn't cry, except when I was trying to tie his tie and I thought oh my god, someday I'm going to be tying his tie at his wedding and then I had to back off because whoa man, I can't start crying now.

I am havng a love affair with the whole boxy school. The big fat auditorium building, the hamster cage fencing, the open playground, the green poles. I have loved being a part of this school. The dogs and I pass the playground and I see the basketball court and think of how I stopped to play basketball with Nathan during recess on the last week of school. I was trying to leave, running to do one thing or another, and then Lilly was playing with Emma's class on the jungle gym, so I joined Nathan playing his friends at basketball. As we played more kids wanted to join in and it was a cutthroat 10 minutes, Nathan had learned to fake where he was going to throw it and that was new to me - how did he learn that?

Passing the empty schoolyard made me wish there were more moments like that, more time on the playground at this simple school, where will we be without him? What will next year be like?

And then the dogs and I get to the park and there is his preschool, the stone building and it's lit up but silent and the park just yawns out in front of us - look at the dark sky, look at the no people, look I can breathe and stretch and be nobody, be empty, long and free. The dogs and I think nothing as we walk through the grass. We just look and listen and feel Earth.

It's good to go out at night. It's good to sit in a tent with your kids and ignore them when they say they want to go to the beach or go ice skating. There's time for that. It's good to feel your mind relax. Graduation isn't anything. Playing basketball at recess, walking the kids to school. Those twenty minutes. That's everything.

Full Speed Ahead

2011-06-22T21:54:00.000-07:00

I remember in Florida having Nathan in that brand new stroller out on the porch of that lakehouse. Gorgeous new stroller with no miles on it, still crackly from the box, not sun dried or bleached, and three day old Nathan, the new baby, my first baby, taking up the space of a kitten stretched out in there. That humidity, my mom was washing the porch off of the dog off with water, and that big lake was behind us, with alligators even though I never saw any, and I had Nathan there, fresh from the gods.

Now the stroller is missing a seat, it's 11 years old, it's in the trunk of the white van Blizzard, it seats Lilly's bottom now at the zoo and schleps stuff to and from school. We live at school, Lilly's life is just with me at school, visitng the older kids.

Today was one of Nathan's last days in elementary school. Our wonderful little school with the cast of teachers we have known for 6 years now - at noon I stood in the auditorium where the 5th graders were having their luncheon, catered by Panda Express. They were getting teachers' autographs, friends' autographs, you could feel summer outside the doors, the 90 degree weather belting through the door cracks.

All these kids swirling around me but that Nathan is still the same - he's gigantic -he's relaxed, despite my anxiety all the time. He's sure of himself, he's a thinker, he's wiggly, he's strong, he cares. He's not shy, except he is shy a little bit. I was looking at the 5th grade Nathan, and at the little sign we painted hanging from the stage curtains behind him, "Class of 2011." The sign was an accident, we painted it in Emma's class yesterday. They were painting Van Gogh's Starry Night and Nathan came to "help" and then we painted a graduation sign for his classroom. Tiny little sign, just for fun and now it hangs on the main sign to celebrate the kids, our nothing little sign is THE sign, a shot of fireworks swallowed against the hugeness of the stage. It fits. It's understated. But somehow it's there, directly in the center. Just like Nathan.

Florida baby is growing up. Despite everything I try, all the ways I'm sure I ruin him, all the bad moods, everything I've done wrong, there is this tall blonde weed just growing happily. They know how to play, these kids. They know how to love. Barry has been our buoy, I cast off the streamers, and the kids sail us.

It has been the most remarkable 11 years of my life. Each day is, we're all ingrown and sprouting. And then there's this suddenly growing up boy. And every moment is like this gradutioun. Seeing him born. Putting on his tiny sandals. Driving to Target. Watching him, this interesting, funny person.

It's not sacrifice, being a mother. It's opening the door and being swallowed under a snowdrift. But you don't have to breathe because everyone you care about is right under there with you.

Nathan, you came along just in the nick of time. I raise my flag up to you as you stand up with all those big kids.

I stand strong, saluting in tattered shorts on the rickety Opper raft made of logs tied together with dental floss. I have no idea what I'm doing. But you are nimble on your bare feet, the river is wide, summer is ahead, and you and your sisters and brother are all I ever wanted.

The Week of Goo

2011-06-19T11:11:00.000-07:00

Last week of school for my 5th grader, our old dog Maisie died, my mom went certifiable, our friend's marriage is a mess, Barry's working so much it's like a he's a railroad man and just stops through town to salute us, parents are in Nova Scotia retracing the steps of Anne of Green Gables, alcoholic brother in MD basically gave me the finger when asked for help with certifiable mother, but you know what bugs me the most?

That my toothpaste tube has holes in it and every time I try to squirt toothpaste out, it comes out like in a wave in four places. And I don't want to throw it out cause I really like this toothpaste, and I get it at Trader Joe's and it's not a store on my beaten path. So I use it until my hands are like covered in goo and every night I feel like hey, why did you have to get holes in you, gentle toothpaste tube?? I loved you and still you goo me. I threw it away last night. And hey, Crest tastes good too.

Just trying to hang on. Picturing the green grasses and rocky waters of Nova Scotia. And my new favorite type of dog, Newfoundlands. (they're from there. Or rather, from Newfoundland. Which is somewhere over there.)

The Mom's the Thing

2011-05-21T22:02:00.000-07:00

Nathan and I drove a giant, Volkswagon-sized horse at a Chinese wedding in Pasadena today.

Nathan was dressed like a young Amish boy, or shrunken undertaker, in his black baggy suit and hat.

I don't know when I got old, but it looks like it happened in the last two years - the time elaspsed since I drove the wedding carriage last. I am scared of everything. Scared of the new horse I had to drive (might have helped if I test-drove him before potentially wrecking someone's wedding). Didn't help that I had a ripping headache and anxiety fest as Asians frolicked around the carriage and I knew I was responsible for every fleshy body that came near gigantic horse with telephone pole size legs. I had to keep sending little 10 year old Nathan down to hold the horse by the bridle since the horse kept startling at things like coughing, sneezing and clapping. I did not enjoy sending my 10 year old down next to Godzilla horse. Nathan is big, but as soon as he stepped off the carriage and down next to the horse, all I could see was horse trampling Nathan. But I had to choose - ruin the wedding day, or possibly kill my Amish boy son.

The worst part was when young samarai Sam, the wedding guy, showed me the path I had to take with the carriage, and I noticed that the path seemed to be a bike path, perhaps a path you might traipse on in ballet shoes, and here I was supposed to drive my carriage the size of a tractor trailer through here. We had to take the bride on the path around the grassy garden and then stop at the end of a flower-strewn aisle for her to get out and go meet her new husband to be. I must learn the art of saying No.

We load up the bride, and Nathan and I hear the wedding music and we head down the path. I am not used to this horse, and he is already pulling off in one direction and I am MANHANDLING him, and still he is strong. The carriage wheels keep going off the path and I try to avoid breaking sprinkler heads and then finally we just sort of aim sideways and the horse gets stuck in the turn by the bushes, carriage stops, music is still playing. Everyone still watching. I am yanking horse to get him back on the path and he is having none of it. In fact, he's jackknifed himself and his huge lumpy butt is not moving. Will this be the wedding I break the carriage? The bride is still back there waiting to get married. Her name, by the way, was Jing Aling. No kidding, jingaling. Like, hello. I'm ringing.

Nathan looks at me and says "this is bad," and I don't know how I do it but I rip this horse so hard that he finally rights himself and heads the right way. I get off that path as soon as I can and blaze a trail on the grass. Forget the wedding planner dude, I am not getting stuck again. I deliver bride, Nathan jumps out and holds the horse's head (head alone is the size of my 60 pound Labrador). I am riddled with fear because this horse is not relaxed - he's 2200 pounds of not relaxed. And my kid is down there, and I'm holding the reins too and this is not my favorite time. Hurry up and get married already Chinese dudes.

Luckily it's the quickest wedding on earth, half an hour, Nathan and I are melting in our black suits, they take a zillion pictures so Nathan has to stay down there since every time someone claps, the horse things it means GO and he lurches forward. I just want to get out of there. Then they're done and Nathan climbs up and the dude hands up Chinese envelopes with "tips" in them. Nathan wants to open it right away, I tell him wait, it looks bad. (Admire him, though, why do adults have to wait all the time?)

We drive out of there and Nathan wants to get his itchy pants off first, then he comes running up and says hey we got two bucks! Each! Now this is funny, because the carriage rents for like 800 dollars. Usually the tip is 50 bucks, 100 bucks or more. So when he says 2 bucks I just start laughing. Then I realize he thinks 2 bucks is great. And wait a minute, he's right. 2 bucks is great. I tell him to keep the money.

We get the horse unharnessed and put away and I just miss Clyde, our old carriage horse. He would take a nap during the ceremony. He wasn't in a hurry to get somewhere else. I could relax. Maybe I can't relax anymore, and that's the part that freaked me out. As a mom, with the kids, I'm always Watching for Death. Staving off Death. It just raised the stakes a little bit but putting Kid down on ground with Gorilla Monster horse. It's like swimming, dolphin dolphin, high tide, SHARK.

Anyway, I'm out of practice. And worst part, I had two cameras and was unable to take my hands off the reins for one minute to photograph that sweet little boy in the baggy pants and black hat, peering up at me from 2 ton horse's head. He is such a beautiful thing, that little Florida baby, almost 11 years old. I just don't want to be doing any of these extra jobs, these things that aren't baby related. It dulls my capacity, and adds all the bonus anxiety. And in reality, these jobs, they're all weak and pale in comparison to this Mom job - this Mom job is like seeing Ray Charles in concert. Your heart just explodes.

I have never gotten over the immenseness of it.

ps. Nathan's favorite part of the wedding - as soon as the bride was walking up the aisle, the horse takes a gigantic pee. Lasts like a MONTH, the entire wedding march will be drowned out by sound of horse releasing Mississippi flood of pee.

My favorite part - seeing it all through Nathan's eyes. The first job we worked together, and he's so innocent - ("We have to wait through the whole WEDDING?") - wearing my black hat, he's young, faithful and strong - he's still wide open to everything.

The Right Car Ride

2011-04-27T19:06:00.000-07:00

Taught a piano lesson and then the kids and I decided to drive a new, backroad windy street to get home. We passed a sign on a mailbox that said "free fluffy kittens." Of course we turned around. As we walked up to the door, my 4 o'clock tired blondes, barefoot on gravel drive, I started thinking if you were a psychokiller, how would you get young families to come to your door off the street? Put out a sign that says free fluffy kittens.

Luckily no one answered. The kids were shy anyway, hanging back. They like the sign, they like the adventure, but when it comes to ringing the doorbell, all of us have our hearts in our throat. The Shy Family. Luckily we leave with our hearts in our bodies, no psychokiller and no sneezy kitties.

Nathan the 10 year old and Lilly the 3 year old decide that going home is just too sad a thing to do on a Wednesday that's warm, when the world beckons and there's no dinner already made - so we drop sleepy 9 year old Emma home and head back out to Costco where we can eat pizza and meet friends and buy bagels. Somedays you just don't want to go home early.

In the car, Nathan is playing a song by some band called Fray, and the voice on the song has the scratchy, growly sound of summer, or maybe it's just that there's sun and wind and hope in the car. Suddenly I can see a little of an old screenplay I was working on - it's resurrecting itself, starting a slow dance. Hey, I can feel writing happening again. If I can just hear that song, over and over, maybe the whole story will right itself and I can finally find the missing pieces. Fit them together. I abandoned writing really, with Nathan, raising Nathan to this tall, meaty 10 year height, his gorgeous self. All these actual people in my life, so many I need a minivan. I am lucky.

Anyway, writing comes back. Or at least the hopefulness of it. If you're peaceful enough. That stuff you pack away, give up on, decide is too hard, it's still in there, you just have to have the right music, the right dj, the right car ride.

The Monsoon of Blue

2011-04-11T21:42:00.000-07:00

Lilly and I saw a peacock on our little secret path to school this afternoon.

We were in a hurry, zooming up to get the kids and work at the book fair, snacks piled high in the ripped Ralph's grocery bag, ducking in and out of flowering plants and looming vines and then this thing popped out from under a bush, loped across the grassy path in front of us.

Our stroller was going so haphazardly, and it's a ripped apart thing, ten years old, 3 kids later, like me, almost unstitched yet still working miraculously, so it took us awhile over the heaving to figure out what the loping thing was and then suddenly we both saw it, this huge, long, blue and green bird. Yes, it was a bird, but it was long as a giraffe, and the neck was so brilliantly blue, like a color you just can't make, it has to grow that way, the way iridescent would grow. And then it had these feathers, each one had a million feathery tendrils and a dot all to itself, blue to match the bird's neck. A forest of eyes all folded up and following the bird dutifully.

Lilly and I were both scared, still getting over the shock of something jumping out in our path, and then we both exclaimed, because who would have thought something jumping out would be so beautiful. Nothing has ever jumped out at us, on this path, every day twice a day for six years so far. There are peacocks in the neighborhood, we've seen a ton of peacocks, at a distance, behind a fence maybe. But one right under your feet, a surprise, gentle, and painted like that... I wanted to put it in my pocket. Strap it to the stroller. Maybe I could take it and keep it forever.

We just gazed. The monsoon of blue. Then continued on our rocket ride up the dirt path. We had somewhere to go. And talked about the shock, the surprise, and the color.

Gonna Need More Yarn

2011-04-06T08:54:00.000-07:00

Seems to be alot of changes happening all at once. Taught playwriting in Nathan and Emma's class, sweated the first day, did okay the rest. Teaching piano lessons, sweated the first day, then realized 2 months later now as the kid is sitting upside down on the bench talking about her day that maybe I'm not that good a teacher. But at least I'm not sweating. (She's actually doing great. Just did her first performance. Disney Concert Hall. Or her living room at a birthday party. For those of you with no imagination.)

Losing our boarder girl who keeps her animals at our house. I think I caused it. Got tired of having to unchain everything to get through the barn. Hard, though, because I get attached to people. I like to feed people. I like to nurture. I also like to cut people loose with no mercy.

3 guys dug a 4000 dollar hole in our front yard so we could flush our toilets again. The trench and the pile of dirt kept the kids entertained for two days. Everyone should have a trench.

Went to the snow so we could have pictures of the kids in snow. I am terrible at leaving the house, anxiety driving someplace far (almost 2 hours!!) to sleep someplace weird. How will I ever manage it??? Then we get there and wait it's beautiful here. Look at the blue sky. There's a blue bird. Every drink we have has snow in it. The mountain is a natural crushed ice machine. I can live anywhere. I am free.

Lilly built her first snowman and did not want it to have dirt hair even though dirt hair looks AWESOME. Nathan and Emma sledded and played with their best buddies (whose cabin it was) and we made food and knitted and watched movies. Nathan is getting so big that when he walks down the hall I sometimes think he's Barry. Hulking, bulky, 10 year old. There are going to be people taller than me in the house.

Life jet-rockets by. My boarder taught me how to knit and now I'm trying to knit a sling to stop time. Gonna need more yarn.

Vegas, Baby

2011-03-07T09:58:00.000-08:00

Tumbled into Vegas after hours in the car with the kids, and it's like going from one loud, chaotic environment into a louder, chaotic environment - even the rugs are loud in Las Vegas - bright orange, red and yellow and swirled like dead Walt Disney swallowed a bunch of quaaludes and then threw up.

My little mass of tiny people swarmed into this did I say Loud envirnoment - we blew in, fresh air into stale, fragmented, smoke-filled Golden Nugget air, loud bad music there is no place without the music, even the pool has music, the sound of people losing money everywhere disguised by happy dinging bells, everyone's faces look tight from money loss or is it no moisturizer lizard desert skin, not sure... We fight our way upstream to our room and suddenly I am enjoying a large headache and everyone is carrying giant boxes of beer on their tattooed shoulders. The kids LOVE this place, the one place louder than they are, they feel they are finally matched, Vegas is their womb.

All the mothers I spoke to before leaving gave me a list of things I HAD to do in Vegas and I take this seriously so I take the kids out to see the Strip, and every hotel is like ACRES from the other hotels, how did these people park, wade in through parking lots and casinos, cross across 70's rugs, to get to the Rain Forest Cafe? To see the lions being fed at the MGM? That was all we managed. Then the kids decided they hated walking, they love fighting, this age 9 and 10, they need to make loud noises and be sarcastic, whiney and mean, they just wanted to be back at the hotel pool, sliding down the slide through the shark tank. I found myself saying "Well what are we here for??" Then realized we weren't here to see Vegas at all. We were just here to see Poppa.

So I abandoned going out again. Well, I did manage to drag them to Circus Circus to go on the roller coasters for $26 dollars each. But each time I left our hotel there was grumbling and complaining. Finally gave up. We ate at Del Taco for $3 dollars and got a loaf of french bread and never left the Golden Nugget again. Except to cross Fremont Street and see the light show. Vegas is this horrible eye-irritant place served up to families on a tobacco cracker. I did not gamble one penny. I couldn't even sit down with the kids anywhere near a gambling facility, we just waded in and out. So no wonder I stole 3 pool towels, that was to pay back the giant black guard at the pool house door who told me I couldn't come in with my pizza after I had walked 30 blocks to find affordable lunch with the kids in tow, helfting Lilly with no stroller. That was when I first felt like crying. Always a good trip determiner. I should mention that Barry was staying with his dad the whole time, in a whole other hotel tower, we visited him, scheduled moments, like visiting the queen, but he had his own megaresponsiblity - his dad caretaker and party organizer. So I got to experience single mom-hood in Vegas, the kids and I on our own in our own room, and I would have been a terrible single mom. Let's just leave it at that. I'm way better in a team.

But Nathan and Emma got to see their cousins, and we got used to eating bread and carrots in our hotel room to save money and we got to see Poppa turn 95 years old, and we got to sit in the hot tub with 80 year old triplets (they were large) and we got to see fresh new Opper babies, and see my dad all dressed up and have one or two healthy meals and I knitted a scarf and we saw desert and we went to bed at night feeling warm because we had this big family, and Barry knows how to pull a family together and make you feel that you are part of something bigger, that you matter, in a web of things, to a handful of people that are your kin.

And we had Bruce and Nandy visit our room, Brandon and Ziani tailing along behind us to the pool, and we had Aunt Denise and Uncle Donny who stopped to eat ice cream and look at aliens with us on the deserty ride up and back, we had people who love the kids and Nathan in the car who just wanted to go back, but "only when the family is there." And Lilly who said she wanted to go home "because my tummy tells me it's time to go home." And she missed her drawers, where her clothes are, she said. Emma and Ziani wore flowers in their hair and made up a birthday dance for Poppa, and swam and swam and I got to sit next to Emma on the double upside down roller coaster. As we were going up, strapped in, no escape, we both chanted, "I changed my mind, I changed my mind, I changed my mind."

So of course back at home last night, in a quiet room, on a quiet street, with kids asleep, Vegas is throbbing in my head, but all the noise has cleared away and what's left is all solace - the pool, the familiar faces, and the shark tooth Nathan got from the shark tank divers, driving through the quiet desert with all my kids safe in the car, and there is no pile of money or giant golden nugget strapped to the top of the van, but there were all those people and Nathan reminding us, saying over and over again, like he can't help it, how much he loves knowing his family.

Crazy Hair Day

2011-02-05T21:58:00.000-08:00

Chicken Ramp

2011-01-26T22:58:00.000-08:00

Emma's birthday is coming up. Nine years since she was the tiny baby in the bed at the hospital. You can grow alot in nine years. You lose alot of teeth. Lather with lots of crying. Rinse by going to Disneyland. (Just went. 5 times on It's a Small World.)

Things happen so fast around here, I'm always looking for something I put down ten seconds ago and has now been sucked into the vortex of Time Gone By, veritably whisked away and I can't find it. No wonder I want to spend more time with the chickens. They don't ask me questions, and they have no arms. As the math gets more complicated that Nathan brings home, I keep wanting to build a ramp for the chickens to get into the little house I'm making for them. In fact, let me cook up some more turkey bacon and we can talk about how my brain is just frying. This kid-raising thing, it's like riding a cork shooting off of a New Years Eve champagne bottle, directly into Times Square. The cork lands in the middle of immigrants who took the subway to smash together and be on TV on New Years Rockin Eve. I will surely be squashed. My point is - there is no mercy. There is in fact, MORE TO DO. I'll have a heaping plate of more, please.

More not in the good way, though, like more wiping the dirty kitchen floor with a rag so that it's not so disgusting, and if I wipe the floor and clean the kitchen, then I have to avert my eyes as I go past the laundry that needs to be taken out, or put away, the baby that needs to be pajamaed and put to bed, the Emma that is reading Harry Potter in bed with Daddy, and another day of Oops, did I spend any time with her, looking into her eyes? And wait, Daddy? Wasn't he an important figure at one point, over there in the corner? I remember him from Critters. Nathan is okay though, because we did actually play basketball tonight. So one good, the rest, a crippling distant loss.

I officially can't keep up, I whispered, surprised, to the kitchen floor tonight, and yet I rage on, I will NOT give up. So what if everything is clean in shifts. So what if it's midnight and I'm writing, or packing snacks for lunch the next day, or looking at the baby chicks sacked out under the lamp in their cage. My life is this series of meticulous events, with nothing getting done in the leisurely Tahitian way that is my birthright.

I started teaching piano to one of Emma's friends. She has a name that rhymes with - well, I always call her Trinitron (to myself). I did her second lesson today. The first lesson all I did was overprepare and then sweat because I'm not a piano teacher. And yet - I am now. When the mom asked me to do it, I said "Um, well, okay." Then I told her I'm not a teacher. She said how much would I charge? I said, Uh, I don't know, $20 bucks. She said, "how bout 30." I said, doubtfully to Trinitron, "Well, you can fire me whenever you want." But the mom said, "No, come to our house, the other kids can play with our other kids while you have your lesson." It was kind of so perfect. And the second lesson, I went back today, and the kid had actually practiced and learned. So I did some more with her (and brought a watch this time, cause time is money), and I think she's doing really well. Plus kids tell you hilarious stories that waste a lot of time. I kept having to say okay, that's interesting, but THE PIANO. Plus she looks alot like my nephew and I kept looking at her and thinking god my brother's a loser.

Anyway. Earlier Lilly and I went to my horse job and I let her ride one of the tiny poines there. Ponies scare me. They are really cute and tubby and this makes you think they're safe, like they could put on an apron and make you some comforting brownies or something, but you know in their mind all they want is to buck of your baby and kick you in the face. They're just biding their time. So I had some mild anxiety putting her on the horse, and luckily she wanted to get off before any injury occured. Then we went and got chicks at the feed store on the way home. Because they're 2 dollars. And we love egg on toast. In June, when they start laying.

When Lilly wouldn't take a nap and I was lying there pretending to sleep while she did pushups on my stomach and sang "It's a Small World" directly into my eye, I did have a sense of humor. It's all a joke, this order and sense. There is just the commitment to life, that's all - the daily leap we all make to conquer the day - not necessarily the mish mash mess that the day makes out of us - but that the day turns into a sort of beautiful, misshapen life... In my case today: piano teacher, writer, mother...all coming from the same messy place - the part that doggedly believes it's all possible.

That's why that chicken ramp is so important. Making a simple little house for simple creatures, out of our old shed. It's like my version of a Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney movie. Simple works for me. After these busy days, I can do simple. The simple heals up the mess.

Mostly Bob Lays An Egg

2011-01-18T20:49:00.000-08:00

Hey our chicken Mostly Bob did the deed. A small, tannish egg, and he's (uh she's) only 4 months old. He joins the ranks of other notable chicken prodigies - Henny Penny (The Sky Is Falling), Chicken Licken (have no idea what he did), Foghorn Leghorn (I just like to write that), along with the countless nameless chickens who have sacrificed themselves to Colonel Sanders (KFC).

I was so excited (and jealous, because Mostly Bob mostly belongs to our friend Tina, and she wanted the egg) so I had to go out and buy two new little chicks (promptly named Sea Bass and Scoop by the kids, though I suggested Martin Luther King). I told you my chickens weren't laying enough. I guess Mostly Bob was mostly listening. At least I'll have lots of eggs in June. If these little guys survive the night. They're the size of thumbtacks.

I Have A Dream

2011-01-17T21:34:00.000-08:00

That everything will be as good as it is today. Or was, as the kids and I drove home in the dark from Costco, everyone happy, everyone together, just happy for no reason. Contented.

We spent yesterday walking to the park, seeing kid friends, and with no toys or playground in sight, the kids actually played on the grass, lined up their bodies and made a tunnel that Lilly crawled under. Emma making her list of people she wants to invite to her birthday party, and putting "the Lakers Team" under "maybe." Came home to Barry making the street smell like garlic with his garlic bread, all the kids eating spaghetti the windows foggy with steam, then later we still have food so we invite the girl with the horse in our yard to eat. She works at a prop house and she has to write J Edgar Hoover's diary as a prop for a movie they're making. She didn't know Hoover liked to dress in women's clothing. In those days, she said, I guess if you were gay it didn't matter, you just got married and had children anyway. I said, well, that's what I did.

Today the kids kept begging to see their friends but then friends were busy seeing other friends so I said, we're going to do something even better. All three sets of eyes looked at me with hope. We're gonna make an obstacle course, I said without believing I could do it, but hoping they couldn't see through my weak rah rah enthusiasm. They'd been having a revival of rollerblades for the past two days, and it was like 80 degrees in January, so we were outside, so I set up a little obstacle course with a watering hole, some hula hoops, a soccer goal, and about seven other "stations" they had to rush around to. Lilly just played in the water, and Nathan and Emma loved running to and from everything long enough for me to decide to go get the video camera. By the time I got back and turned it on, they were sick of the obstacle course. Then they left and I went to clean it all up. Which I complained about as we ate in the living room and tried to play a game of Parcheesi which got interuppted by Lilly screaming, I thought, from Nathan running over her toe with his roller blades, but really she had sprayed Binaca into her eye. Ten minutes of washing the eye out as she howled and I laid there with her on the bed wondering if we were heading to the Emergency Room and she won't open her eye and Nathan saying She looks like Helen Keller and Emma saying that's rude and then miracle she's fine again. And her eye is minty fresh.

The game is still out on the table, and I believe Emma is still winning, although Hank may have moved a few pieces in his attempt to find any food left over out there.

Nathan and I sat on the front porch and I shaved his hair shorter so he looks less like himself and more like a Marine, but with his short blonde hair, and furry back from the hair falling down, he looked like my little brother for a second and I felt happy, having this boy who is growing up and remembering that other boy who used to be in my life, a big part of my life. Felt like he was here, and it felt happy.

We bounced on the trampoline and I looked for eggs but nobody laid out there so I had a firm talk with the chickens, who I don't think were listening, even though I mentioned pot, stew, and You Taste Good Too, you know.

Then we headed to Costco with a stop in the dark at Penske, the closest parking lot to our house that is empty and hilly so the kids could roll on their rollerblades, while Lilly and I ran around them. Then Lilly and I looked through the mail we had picked up on the way out in the car and there was the package of Tall Pants that I got to order from my parents for Christmas, and look, pants that go all the way down my legs without stopping, what an amazing trick that is. Actual girl pants that fit me. Parents are awfully helpful, also an amazing trick.

Then the shopping and the home in the car ride, that I mentioned, dark, kids, a Barbie movie on Lilly's lap singing music, it doesn't matter where we're going, I feel buoyed by these babies and this life, usually so busy I forget to see I am doing something, by being important to three people. They're good company. So I have hope for tomorrow.

Home at 8, way late, Nathan tell us oh he needs a book for his biography tomorrow. At 8 at night, on MLK day. We'll have to go to the library tomorrow. It's all going to be okay, I tell him. Like MLK (his day today), I have a dream.

Jane and the Hot Tub

2011-01-06T22:09:00.000-08:00

Drove up the coast and back with kids climbing all over the car, reading Sense and Sensibility. Not much has changed since 1795.

Had a nice visit today with a lady and her two sons. They played out back and we sat by the fire, just talking. See, it is 1795.

I am still learning about character, merit, values, connection, honesty and humor. Even now at this late date, in 2011.

When the kids are happily playing, and there's a fire or an ocean, or something calm to offset the lively, you can really feel your life taking place again. I could slowly piece together pieces of who I am, still in there, and most of it is funny.

I've just been so busy tending to people, I always forget to look or listen.

On our trip we saw snow, mountains, cows, rolling green fields, lakes, ocean, surfers and possibly the most beautiful Taco Bell on Earth. Right on the ocean, like some kind of sick, fast food heaven. Heaven's rest stop. On the beach in front of it, Lilly made a huge sand house, sitting in wet sand for an hour, silently molding it with a plastic spoon, a delibate and studied artist. Nathan and Emma made mud balls and tossed them at each other. It's freezing up there by the way. We met Bruce's girlfriend, a girl from so far up in Russia it's near Siberia. Where people don't even go to work in January because it's 30 below. With some people I just sit there blinking, not able to comprehend. (We were sitting in a hot tub as she told the story, and she tried not to rest her giant boobs on the water's surface.) She has brothers and sisters still there, Alexei, Katya, and several others. People actually living there, speaking that squiggly language, wrapped up in fat animal skins. And she wants to be an accountant. Or stock trader. Again, I sat there blinking.

So Miss Jane Austen warmed me back up to myself, writing from her little desk in Chawton Cottage, witty in those high waisted dresses, never having seen the Pacific or a Taco Bell, or a Siberian in a hot tub.

I'm seeing it all for you, Jane.

Mouserhood

2010-12-16T19:23:00.000-08:00

I just spent the last 4 days crammed in a library with hundreds of screaming kids swarming me to buy presents for their families for Christmas. (I ran a holiday boutique at the kids' school.) It's alot of noise. I have trouble hearing myself over the noise. My normal setting is mouse hiding inside tree. With hot chocolate and a fire.

But we made a bunch of money for the school. And kids love Flarp. My biggest seller. Give a kid a can of goo that makes a farting noise, and they're happy. I loved that.

Lilly spent some time at my feet in the library, sitting inside a box with a pile of books. While kids flung cash in my face and bought farting machines over her head.

The bad part about doing any job as a mom is that there's always this nagging feeling that time is slipping away and you're missing just sitting and staring at the babies as they grow up. Like I should have pulled up a box and sat in it with Lilly. Believe me, it is a wonderful place to be.

So I'm off to Christmas vacation. Gonna just play and be a mouse. It's good to know who you are.

Random Notes

2010-12-08T13:38:00.000-08:00

Spent the morning helping Emma's teacher by videotaping her lesson, so she can submit it for a class she's taking.

It's weird to be silently holding the camera and watching someone else work, witnessing them being them, doing what they do, all purposeful and intent, while I can barely stand up, still basically wearing my pajamas and never having the kind of career path that kept me in one place for longer than a year. It's like wildlife photography for me, seeing someone else's life, curious, fun and strange.

But then these kids - I guess this is my career. I've been Momish for 10 years. I have been silently (and yellishly) shaping the kids, in one place, for 10 whole years. No wonder I'm shocked when, after all this time, they argue so much. This is a GREAT PLACE, I feel like telling them. Being 10 and 8, being home with your mom and dad, this is wide open space. Sure, it's annoying when someone shrieks in your ear or sits in your spot where you like to eat breakfast, or shoves to the front seat or slaps you because slapping makes a great noise.

I don't know what my point is. There's an awful lot of yelling at this stage. Used to be just me yelling, now I have a yelling chorus. So it's hard to hear over the din and the psychological drama.

I'm gonna keep hanging on and watching, and guiding. Just cause, you know, maybe it's a great thing.

ps. I did get a glue gun the other day. If you have $3 bucks, it's an awesome thing to buy. Stayed up way too late gluing flowers onto barettes. I'm gonna be that guy at the park that whittles things. The glue gun is my New Love.

Politics

2010-12-05T22:03:00.001-08:00

Both kids are running for student "office" at school. Emma is going for historian and Nathan's going for secretary. We spent the morning coloring posters (uh, I colored) and making up their speeches (they actually did those). Then I was on the phone and overheard this hilarious conversation between Nathan and Emma as they cut out little campaign "vote for me" cards at the table next to me.

E: I'm going to vote for you, Nathan.

N: Okay.

E: Are you going to vote for me?

N: (shrugs) I guess. Tell all your friends to vote for me.

E: Okay. Will you tell all your friends to vote for me?

N: (shrugs) Maybe.

E controls her anger, crosses her legs casually, then starts to talk like a Mafia boss. Leaning down towards him menacingly.

E: If you don't tell your friends to vote for me, then I won't tell my friends to vote for you. And you don't want me to do that, (narrows her eyes, whispers fiercely) because TRUST me, I have a LOT of friends.

This is when I started cracking up and said, "Wait a minute, are you blackmailing him??"

They both looked at me smiling and Emma said "What's blackmailing?"

Hole in One Every Time

2010-12-01T21:59:00.000-08:00

Went up to the freezing Mountasia which sounds asian but is really just a Farrell's ice cream parlor and a go-cart track up in all-white Santa Clarita. Brother Bruce was home from college and Nathan just slid along on his rainbow shadow, the Brother is the ultimate gift from the North, San Francisco.

Anyway, Lilly is too short to ride on the go-carts so she and I played mini-golf in the bitter cold while waiting for the kids to be done. Lilly's version of golf is way better than the real version. She doesn't set the ball down at the end of the green strip and then try and bat it to the far end. In fact, she thought I was an imbecile trying to tell her to set the ball down THAT FAR AWAY. She considered that, and then picked the ball up and ran all the way to the hole, then set the ball down a hands-width away from the hole (to make it challenging)and then plopped it right in with her club. Hole in one EVERY TIME. 18 holes of it.

For a girl who still refuses to poop on the potty, and can't drive, she's a skilled problem-solver.

At first I tried to show her how to hold the club, tried to steer her toward playing the "right" way, and then I just gave up. Because frankly, her way was so much better. Watching her run from hole to hole with her old spinny dress on and diaper and bare legs in the freezing cold, I kept thinking this is the greatest day of my life. The kids are so happy to be together, there was tons of leftover Thanksgiving food at home in the fridge, we were bundled up and frozen and we just had to play games for a few hours before we got to go home. Watching her play, I kept thinking, at the end of the night, I would get to crawl into bed and have Lilly fall asleep on me, with the black dog at the foot of the bed dreaming, all those blankets, and her warm sleeping body half on my stomach, a movie flickers on tv, a regular night at my house, this is the magic of a three year old.

Our Rooster Was a Racist

2010-11-20T21:37:00.000-08:00

Had to get rid of a rooster today. Our neighbor gave him to us, because he was beating up her black and white hens. She thought he was territorial or something. Maybe he'd do better at our house. We really like her. She's like 60, she scaled the back wall of her yard and dumped her rooster and his wife into our yard. Gently.

The rooster did okay for a week. Then yesterday I noticed he started pecking our chicken Chris for NO REASON. You know why? Because she was eating at the No Black and White Chicken feeding area. Apparently. The dude is a total racist. Does not mind any hen that is brown or white. But those stripey ones - watch out. Maybe they make him dizzy, like watching fuzzy television. And that apparently makes him mad, and he must peck.

Hey Gregory Peck. Great name for a chicken.

Anyway, the rooster has a new home. The girl promised not to eat him. She has a whole bunch of hens that she wants to make chicks with, and use an incubator. So he he has a flock all his own.

Nathan was against giving the rooster up. He says it's a bad idea. That the wife chicken will be depressed. I think she might secretly be relieved. Now she can hang with the black and whites and not feel uhh henpecked.

Let's Take a Tour of My Pants

2010-11-19T18:46:00.001-08:00

So today I made pumpkin pie for Nathan's class. Here's what I learned: use the stove at school.

I had made chocolate chip cookies in the oven earlier in the day (at school) for Emma's class. But as the day was drawing to a close, I saw that I'd never have enough time to make pumpkin pie in Nathan's class if I didn't preheat the oven at home first. So I rushed to Nathan's class with all the ingredients, got together with Nathan's class, dumped a bunch of ingredients together (and suddenly everyone wants to help you - open cans, stir, sift, things the kids would never want to do at home)and we made our very watery pumpkin pie.

Then I had to carry it to the car, sloshing all around. Then I had to drive home holding a pie, with one pie at my feet. Of course I turned left and half the pie slimes over the side by my brake pedal. Dammit! Cursing the pie. Running a stopsign so I wouldn't have to slime the other side of my car. Then I tip the pie I'm holding and spill all down my shirt and sleeve.

I get home, I put one pie in the oven, go back to the car and get the other pie. Put it in. Go back to the car (all abandoned with doors open) and scrape the pie goo on my car floor out onto the driveway where it looks like pie vomit. But hey the car smells like Christmas.

Then I make the monumental decision not to change my pants and shirt. You know, it's like 2 pm. My day is pretty much over. It's not going to get CLEANER. You know? The pie goo starts turning into pie hard, (isn't that a Bruce Willis movie?) and then the pies are coming out of the oven and rushing back to school with tiny cups of pie for all the kids and everyone eats and no one cares about my pants.

By the end of the day, after dinner, sitting by the fire with toys strewn around, kids strewn around, rice and broccoli, I'm looking at the map of my pants and feeling fulfilled. I wore something well, this day was worn well. I can see it all over me.

Mostly Bob

2010-11-17T14:43:00.000-08:00

Nathan's friend Jonathan doesn't have any chickens. He lives in a condo. We decided he should get some baby chicks from the feed store and keep them at our house. He could visit them whenever he wanted.

So we went to the feed store to get two chicks (you have to get two, to keep each other company) and we ended up getting three because otherwise we were leaving one last chick in the cage and the feed store people said that was just mean, they were attached to each other. (They were only 3 bucks.) So we brought home three white chicks, which the kids named Bob, Brad (these are girls, by the way) and Floppy.

The next day was sunny, so I put the chicks in the sun, under a metal cage covering so they could dig in the dirt and still be safe, and relax. I went inside. An hour later I went out and there were only two chicks left. Ahhk! One lone feather from the missing chick. A cat must've squeezed a paw underneath, grabbed it and eaten it.

I tell the kids and Nathan immediately says "It's Brad that got eaten. Not Bob." His chick is Bob. I try to teach him grace and dignity. I tell him that poor Jonathan has no chickens. Let him have the chick. Even if it WAS his chick that was eaten, let him think that this is still his chick.

Nathan thought about it as he pet the remaining chick. "Well, okay. He can say it's Brad. But really, it's mostly Bob."

So now we have eight chickens: Kitty Bigfoot, Gigi, Chris, Big Red Chicken, Penny, Peet, Floppy and Mostly Bob.

A Walk on the Mild Side

2010-11-15T21:09:00.001-08:00

Dropped B and the kids at sports in the park and ran with Lilly to do late night (7pm) shopping, not my best time but an hour I can do it - still wearing dirty clothes from the entire day when I thought I better change out of this and then the day ran together like a Japanese water color painting in a rainstorm and nothing got done except kids, kids everywhere and a pretty teacher was sitting in my yard and there was a rooster her mom gave me and chocolate chip cookies we made last night and kids jumping on the trampoline and wait, life is flowing around me like rain --

but back to the shopping, Lilly in the cart who hasn't taken a poop in 4 days and she's eating a lik a stick candy (she calls Butterfingers Fingerchocolate) and there's this large woman talking to me, she knows me she says, I have all the blonde children and suddenly she's talking to me about middle schools, where are we going to send Nathan and I'm thinking do I know you and then yes, she's the one with the adopted Russian kid and yes as she talks about the research she's done on the schools, Yes I remember you're NUTS. Nice enough. But if I had your brain I would have been nervously scratching paint off the walls with pennies -she just vibrates at a different speed, a not good speed. And I realize that you know what, my kid is going to be fine. He's going to go to whatever school is good enough, he's going to stay smart and happy and tall and blonde and we're going to enjoy Christmas and it doesn't matter this whole education thing. Community matters.

But the lady is moving on with her cart and she tells me I used to see you walking to school with your kids all around you, you look so relaxed (she missed the yelling section, apparently, of every morning) she said "I would slow down and just cry because I couldn't have children, and I would think 'that lady has it going on...'" Weird to think there are people looking at your life thinking you have everything, thinking you're doing it right. How reassuring in this haphazard world that somewhere, to someone I present this loving and nurturing scene to the world - that someone can be affected by just a walk to school. The everyday. The little things do matter.

$25 Dollars From Jesus

2010-11-02T21:42:00.000-07:00

Tonight a guy named Jesus came and took one of the last two kittens to her new home. It's nice to get $25 bucks from Jesus. And he took away a kittie, so less poop tomorrow.

Speaking of poop, Lilly spent alot of the time on the floor of the tire store today trying to stop her poop from coming out. Did I mention how boring tire stores are? They actually make you TIRED.

But when we came home, I talked to Lilly about her poop. That it wouldn't hurt if she just let it come out. This has been the conversation for a month now. (One bad poop and you hold those suckers in, man.) It was a big deal when she finally came over and yes, let it all go while I rubbed her tummy.

So tonight we celebrate. We made it through Halloween, the holiday where you've got to keep the costumes from ripping or getting too dirty before the end of the night, and where there were too many Tootsie Rolls and not enough Milk Duds. For finally going poop, Lilly got a huge cupcake (chocolate) that pretty much looked like what ended up in her diaper.

And Jesus took a tiny grey kitten home to his girlfriend. Somewhere out there, in the big world.

Happy is So Quiet

2010-10-24T23:05:00.000-07:00

Took Nathan to the emergency room today. He was fine, he was just company. I had stepped on a board in the barn yesterday and brought my foot back up with a nail and board attached to my heel. I pulled it off ouch and look at that nice rusty nail that came out of my foot. Damn these goats for trying to eat pieces of the barn and leaving naily boards strewn around for me to step on barefoot. Goats are really annoying. They're like bad waiters. They wander around looking for things to get into, anything but bringing you an extra water or a menu.

Anyway, emergency room, Nathan, 10 yrs old, and me, a fat orderly guy washing my foot (very dirty foot, oh my god, how is my foot that dirty at 44?) a hospital bed, faintly striped curtains curtaining off us from Road Rash guy next door and 4 Days With Fever Girl to the right. Life seems weird when everything slams to a stop and the room is white and you're sitting on a hospital bed on a Sunday afternoon with your giant son. He had two holes in his Cash Cab t-shirt. We talked about rashes. He wanted to know what a Road Rash was. The guy next to us had run a marathon, and I guess fallen and scraped himself during it.

When the doctor was in there with him, behind the thin curtain between us, she was asking Road Rash "Can you bend your neck to your shoulder?" Both Nathan and I bent our necks to our shoulder. "Can you raise your arm?" We did. "Can you make a fist?" We both made fists. "Can you squeeze my fingers?" We squeezed each other's fingers.

Nathan doesn't like to sit for very long. He realizes how tired he is. He stood up to look at the guy across the room getting his cast sawed off. I said "Let's start a rumor. Oh my god they're AMPUTATING his HEAD??"

I never have time alone with Nathan. It's like I forfeited that time when I had Emma, and then Lilly sealed the deal. So Nathan and I haven't grown together in about 8 years. We have some catching up to do.

I asked him about school, because I'm worried since they switched the classes around, that he's not being educated, like, at all. "Do you think the teachers are too easy?" Yes, he says. Hmm. "Do you think you'll try really hard?" Hmm. He shrugs. No. I said "What's your favorite thing to do of all time?" Ride in a golf cart, he says.

Nathan's 10 yr old way of communicating is more short bursts of squeals, banging into me with his body, or asking me to do something physical, like jump on the trampoline, after about 3 hours of playing baseball. He's a fireball of energy, while looking like a very relaxed and mellow guy. I just look at him with energy draining, my feet hurting, and feel like god how will I survive you? You deserve someone, I don't know, running marathons. Someone less curl up in bed with an old movie. I do try to sit on him and punch him as much as I can. It's feeble, he deserves so much more wallop. I'll wallop more tomorrow. I'll screech and tackle him and talk about I don't know, how do you talk? When he's more of a feeler. Wait, I'm a great feeler. Shut off Mom brain, and just feel.

He's still here. He's still sleeping in the other room. He's still 10. My wonder boy.

They gave me the Tetanus shot. It didn't hurt. It's good for 10 yrs. I said, next time I have a tetanus shot, you'll be 20 yrs old. You'll be 54, he told me. I said, You'll be in college. He moaned. School is boring. I said, school IS boring. But college is great. You can eat pizza on your way to class and jam into elevators with about 200 people, and take classes you actually like. He looked dubious.

Let's get out of here, I said. We half ran out of there, me hobbling, Nathan, my baby 10 years ago, and now we wear the same sized shoes.

I think we're happy, and lucky. Happy is so quiet.

Only 3 Pies Left on the Tree

2010-09-27T23:02:00.001-07:00

I was lying on the floor with the old dog Maisie tonight. It was because when I went by her, she laid down funny, like she couldn’t get up. You never know when the last night is going to be, and it’s been 113 degrees, so hot we literally cooked a live chicken in the backyard yesterday. One of the chickens just didn’t look right and then this morning, there she is, fallen over by the water cooler. The pretty white and black chicken. She wasn’t all that intelligent. She looked pretty, but wasn’t ever good at figuring out how to get back through the fence once she got out, even if it was open pretty wide. So because she was pretty but not smart, we called her Barbie chicken. She probably died of thirst, right next to the waterer, but had forgotten how to drink.

But Maise, she’s been with me 16 years. An old yellow lab mix, we picked her out at the pound when she was 6 months old. Leaning against the chain link fence in Annapolis, Will and I took her out to test her out in the outdoor pen and all she did was run around madly. We took her home. She was best friends for years to big black Jed. Then Jed died. Then Will died, then Maisie came to live with me in California.

Then we had millions of kids, and Maisie patiently took up as little space as possible. Then we got crazy black dog Owen, and huge dog Hank. Maisie was the girl scout leader.

Then we moved to the house with the pool and every summer, Maisie swam until her skin stunk from chlorine and drove Barry up the wall, ‘cause she always wanted to lay her stinky self right by him, at the computer.

But this year she hasn’t been swimming. Hard to get out of the pool when your fur is weighted down with water. She barely knows where she is anymore. Wanders around. She still will go out and roll in the grass and sneeze happily.

Today was 113 so I lifted her carefully into the pool to swim with me. The kids would rather watch tv than swim, and the Maise used to love to swim. And the chicken had died. And it was the end of summer, almost all the apples off the big tree by the pool. A few weeks ago, I had said to my friend Nigel as we swam blissfully still weeks away from school, still believing summer would last forever – I said, “how many pies do you think are left on the tree?”

We’d been making pies all summer with the apples that are pretty bitter to eat plain, but really great once you dump a bunch of sugar on them and bake it all into syrupy crusty goodness. Nigel looked at the tree with me as we swam. We thought maybe six more pies.

Is it beautiful that things die, or only tragic?

Petting Maisie’s bony back with her strong ribcage, the cage of Maise that has held her up all those years… I told her about all the parts of my life that she keeps with her. Threaded through dog. I told her Will is up there waiting for her. With Jed. They’ll go on plenty of walks. Will’s got the sky covered for me. He’s holding the leash.

I did get Maisie up and outside to where it was cooler. She sleeps outside these days. Went back in my room and there was only a space where she was.

It’s been so hot, the apples are sort of just cooked on the tree. I’m not even sure there’s one good pie left up there. But the summer, swimming laps, kids screaming, friends over, dogs laying around, watching that tree and hoping for more pies…I guess that’s the thing.

All Washed Up

2010-09-18T21:27:00.000-07:00

Just had a holy terror of a day. Two insane boys descended on our house and really USED the place. Running wild, then our kids were running wild, then every toy was used, bikes pulled out, kids looking strung out on heroin, wild with wildness, or was it just me and it was just really hot? Or was the mom that came with them just not helping? What happened?

All I know is, I'm good with my own kids. I can manage a day of not being frazzled by the end, not totally frazzled. But by the end of about two hours with these other kids, I was like hmm, I'm feeling a little stressed. An hour later, hmm, I'm feeling really exhausted. Then by the time they left, it was like, well, being in a cornfield and being picked apart by crows. I am an empty corncob of a human being. Picked clean of myself.

I've had rowdy kids over. I guess I'm used to rowdy. But something was not right - it was me. I can't do five, for nine hours. I can cook, I can clean, I can manage, I can keep kids from falling in the pool, I can be friendly, I can love, but I can get wiped out. So today wiped me out.

I realize that the key to kids and successful playdates is the parents work their asses off. It was only my ass, and my ass is tired. But it was an old friend, and I wanted to see her. So if I wanted to see her, I had to be multi-mom, robot mom, mom ALL. I'm more laid back mom. But this little kid, he was bashing everything and running everywhere and there could be head injuries. I had to be vigilant mom.

Okay, so I'm coming back down from Planet Stress. I will recover. My kids had a great time. At one point two babies were sitting on the ping pong table while we played ping pong OVER them. This, the laughter in this, was gratifying.

Joy to the World

2010-09-14T23:03:00.001-07:00

Weird adjustment to the kids not being home. Summer abruptly over just when you thought you were going to strangle yourself. Then two days later, I miss all the arguing all day. Even though the morning stretches out wide like a snowy Mississippi River.

Morning time I can get everything done because it's just Lilly. After two o'clock it becomes like a horror movie - I can't get anything done because my feet seem to be clogged with molassas, there's noise and I can't cook because I hate it. But I cook anyway.

Tonight we went on a walk last thing and the kids climbed up a huge pile of sand up on the mountain. Covered in dust, rolling down the sand mountain on their stomachs. Dogs running up the hill like the finish line was right at the top. Sun setting.

It's a beautiful thing, this world where everything changes no matter what door you slam to try and stop it. On Monday, school started, and the cat had 6 kittens at the same exact time. Of course.

In a few months it will be Thanksgiving, the cat will get fixed, and summer will be this weird past thing we barely remember.

I'll try to hang on to Lilly swinging on the swing in the front yard tonight, in her 3 year old joy to the world, hanging her head back and saying "I'm catching the wind with my mouth."

Enjoy the Money Tea

2010-09-06T23:07:00.000-07:00

Because Nathan had a fever we stayed in. It was a little like Christmas, all of us wandering around, nobody getting anything done.

We played Spoons (the card game) in the backyard while Lilly sat on the rocking swing having a tea party with the bunnies. Then we went over and sat with her, and she filled our tea cups with loose change. My first ever money tea. And she kept refilling. I'm rich, and my stomach is full of pennies.

Kids have the weirdest games. You set them up thinking it'll be nice and traditional, and then there's money tea. Just proves no one knows what the hell they're doing, and it's pointless anyway. Better just enjoy the money tea. Imagination tastes great.

Save the Toothless

2010-08-31T21:57:00.000-07:00

I want to raise money to get my brother a new tooth.

Birthday Boy

2010-08-18T22:56:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow it's ten years since I had Nathan. In the pool today I was floating around with him, and wrapping my arms around his giant midsection, swimming with soft, watery skinned Nathan whale. Baby beluga. The guy has the greatest skin.

I know I'm always yelling at him because he's got like super strength and uses it to try and pop Emma's head by squeezing every day, but aside from the massive body and little self control or ability to manage such a big body (immature midget loose in a giant's body) - he's still that amazing little creature that used to fit on my lap in Florida where he was born. We were there, like, a sneeze ago. Minutes, only.

Today floating in the pool he talks about how he wants a camera, and megapixels, and can we go to Target, and earlier he had made lunch for his friends, he actually grilled hamburgers and brought them out on a tray, directly into the tent where they've been playing by the pool, and even if he did nothing but float, he's this wonder, live, living blonde tall wonder baby, mine, ours.

This remarkable Nathan, he's just sleeping down the hall, on top of the covers, with Emma, both wearing boxers. I told him in the pool today, "10 whole years, Nathan. They've been pretty good. Should we go for 10 more?"

Down Mexico Way

2010-08-12T11:23:00.000-07:00

Bruce is home from Mexico where he surfed and lived in a cabana (nice word for shack) on the beach of someone named Kiwi Dave. A New Zealander who lives in Mexico with a kid he calls "Poles." A nickname for Rolondo, Roly Poly, now Poles. Everyone calls him Poles. There were also two other Australians there named Wombat and Skeeter. Apparently everyone had teeth.

Bruce said in Mexico there are giant water tanks over everyone's houses, and the gravity forces the water down into the pipes. At Kiwi Dave's, one of the giant logs holding the water tank over the shower had been eaten away by termites. When Bruce went to take a shower, Kiwi Dave was on the roof, showing Bruce how the log just flakes away if you touch it. Thanks to Poles, who noticed the log atrophying, the log was getting replaced, saving the 5000 gallon water tank from crashing directly down into the shower. Where Bruce (or another surfer Bruce) would have been inside, rub a dub dead.

Although from the smell of Bruce, there was little danger of him being actually IN the shower in Mehico. If you surf all day, salt water must make you feel clean. When in actuality, you reek like a freaking rotten mango.

What I like is that there is a whole legion of people (mostly guys) traveling the coastal regions of Earth during winter and summer, following the best surf. That storms are important. Storms mean waves. And that it's apparently rude to call someone by their real name when their nickname DEFINES them.

Time to find a great nickname. Spew, already spoken for. Also the grandparents, Dandy, Damma, and Moose, pretty good. My brother Debah. Lilly Vanilli. Nandy. Navery. We should have a contest. And if you don't like yourself, time to rename.

We're heading to Oregon for a family reunion. Diving right into that storm. Wait, storms are important, right? They mean waves. Who wants flat, when you can ride a wave? If you pack a surfboard, I guess you can be right in it, and balance on top, exhilerated, at the same time. (Note: Must build inner surfboard. And then remember to pack it.)

Thanks, Bruce. Unknowingly passes on genius, from the unshaven, stinky poet that is our surfer son.

Camptown Races

2010-07-30T14:05:00.000-07:00

When my husband is busy doing his commercial, it's like I lose all sense and make plans I would never make. Going camping at 9 at night, for example.
Bad planning at its best. Then add a baby and a dog, the dark and a steep and trecherous hill littered with glass to walk down in flip flops while carrying a stroller. These are the highlights.

I took the kids camping in Azusa (still have no idea where it is, I think it's in the Congo). Half tank of gas, driving up into the mountains, it's only 8 at night, the sun is going down, the dog is drooling on Nathan's leg, we never have taken the dog anywhere, is this a bad idea?

We have to meet the cousins, they're only in town a few more weeks, and we must do everything they want to do because these are called MEMORIES. I can't miss any of them. So we go camping with the cousins' dad, who is Camper Man, while we are camper weaklings. They don't meet us up there until after 8 - 8 is a time with a baby when you are looking for the bed, happy for The Bed, looking forward to the oceans of time between 8 and 9 before you fall asleep, when everything seems again free and possible.

I have given up that time, I see, alas, as Camper Dad points out the sheer cliff we must scale down to camp by the river. I see now that unloading car, going down hill, putting up tent, easily an hour. Baby is already starting to deconstruct. I too, feel my life shredding, as we are linked, and I am bigger and must carry her.

The dog runs ahead, barking at Latin Americans or anyone he can tag in his racist manner, while I apologize, although I'm more worried that the sun is going down and I am hefting, like I said, a baby and a flimsy stroller down a luge tunnel lit by one tiny penlight flashlight held erratically by an 8 year old. After this we cross a quarry of giant chunks of rock and find the other camper ladies huddled around piles of tents that are not being put together by indian guides. In fact, it appears I am the indian guide.

Camper Dad Girlfriend gamely sees with some brief maternal compassion the baby situation and starts setting up the tent. I set the baby down on an already dirty rolled sleeping bag while the kids entertain her by shining the flashlight on various bits of broken beer bottles and throwing rocks.

The river rushes by next to us, no help because it has no arms. Beautiful, and loud as an industrial air conditioner. But tent. Poles, holes, stringing through, tent pops up. Some other guys stagger down, already laughing and drinking. This is not the child matinee crowd, for sure. There's a reason I'm a control freak. As the tent goes up and I put the sleeping bag in, I can tell the fire will be built at 11, marshmallows at 1 and sleep around 3, followed by a nice restful wake time at 5 when the sun comes back up.

I start crying as the kids swarm me with their bags and I spray bug spray on them like I'm prepping them for the oven. "It'll be okay tomorrow," Nathan says, feeling bad that I'm feeling bad, and I'm feeling bad that I'm feeling bad. "Camping is just hard with a baby," I manage to say, and choke in the rest of my tiredness. I'm old, dude.

When the baby is asleep, and the dog is found (he had gone running back to the car, the only sensible one, hoping to get the hell out of here), I do see the humor of the situation. There was never going to be any sleep. And it is beautiful, that's an actual star up there. Almost a handful of them. There's a little 9 yr old friend of the cousins who I swear is a man. She laughs loudly and gravelly, like Brenda Vacarro. She is a loud flower.

The kids drop off to sleep hours later, and the adults drop off to sleep, the drunken one lays directly on the rocks and sleeps like an angel. Hank the dog and I are awake. As always on any camping trip, I hear everyone sleeping. I hear every cricket. I know I'm supposed to relax, to love the outdoors. I'm supposed to feel nature. I try to feel nature, but I don't like loud nature. I don't like sleeping with my face directly on gravel.
I take a vicodin left over from my hand surgery. Now I am a drug addict, AND a bad camper. But this does not make me sleep. Finally I let Hank in the tent and at around 4, I think I fall asleep. The kids wake up an hour later. Yay.
The only good thing: smores over a campfire at 6 am. Swimming in the freezing river with the dog, at 8 a.m. Thinking, if I only slept outside more, I'd be used to it. The best moment ever - watching Lilly's shoe float downstream. Bye bye. The kids see-sawing on a giant floating log. Walking to the car, the glorious car, hours later, knowing that now we get to leave.

When we get home, we get a tent at KMart and put in the yard. We play in it, but we don't sleep in it. Are you kidding? The best time ever, is crawling in bed at night, all those covers, our wonderful house, the reason houses were built, for bedtime.
Maybe camping will be easier when the baby is bigger. But then, who's gonna want to go camping?

Sparkle, Shirley

2010-07-19T22:13:00.000-07:00

At the commercial I started networking with this Indian family (real Indian, like curry)about Earth Mother. It's cause I promised in the Pool of Dreams on the 4th of July that I'd do something with Earth Mother, and once you mention something in the Pool of Dreams (which is just actually a regular pool at a friend's house...or is it?) it kind of sticks in your head to follow through.

And there was this lovely Indian family in the whole Indian outfit and the mom had soft features and looked like her path to god was sort of more worked out than mine, and I kind of liked that. Her son had this long hair, I mean down to his calves. It made me feel like, man, I put the kids in soccer, but look, this kid had COMMITMENT. She showed us how she rolled it up into basically a sock ball at the back of his head. Still Nathan thought he was a girl all day and couldn't figure out why he had a motocross shirt on and was hanging with the boys. And maybe Earth Mother is a potentially snoringly boring show idea, but I like moms, I like all kinds of moms, and I am dying a slow choking death of no culture. So suddenly there was my Indian friend. By golly. That Pool of Dreams. Hoping for financing from Bollywood.

And speaking of all kinds of moms, I saw all kinds of moms in the holding room at this commercial. The kids were "acting" (jumping up and down and saying "Whoa - awesome") in this commercial Barry's doing - standing under hot lights for 8 hours. Lilly and I were hanging out both on the set and in this netherworld stage mother waiting room. Why do fat women wear tight pants? I stared in wonder at most of these mothers, just especially wondering how they could sit down, I mean, don't those things chafe? Their pants' legs were so tight they looked shiny, like porpoise bodies. Topped with a giant cinnamon roll. And I'm sure all the moms were younger than me, but it was like a hag fest. You couldn't drink enough beer to make these women attractive. Then they started talking.

You ever feel like you're drowning? When you're trapped in a room and the talking volume is so high, and all the people talking around you are talking about the auditions their kids go on, and voice lessons, and tai kwon do, and conjugating their verbs wrong, and then I realized this is what they DO, they sit in rooms while other people work with their kids. I started feeling like a slacker for not having the babies and instantly sending them out on auditions, like I'd wasted all these years they could've been working. All this time doing schmucky things like baking, taking them ice skating, going to museums, on hikes, putting them to bed, spending time with them doing nothing. Nothing...always felt like enough for me. Like bliss.

Instead I was wiping yogurt out of a wardrobe shirt, and Lilly was learning how to whisper on set and play amongst cables and apple boxes, and I was telling the kids, my wonderful kids, that even though they were tired, they had to act excited so - so - they wouldn't get fired - Sparkle Shirley! Sparkle! As Shirley Temple's mom used to say.

Ick. Yeek.

It was awesome. It's also over. Nathan, 9 years old, torn apart when things come to an end, like me. In the pool he has to talk about every crew member, and remember them. A brotherhood dissolving before his eyes. A two day marriage. Emma took it more like a man. Loved the work. Check, please. Also loves just being Emma.

I guess total commercial immersion was just one more cultural step for Opperkind. Lilly was the most fun. Aside from playing in a bank of lockers with dangling keys for hours, we did get to play out front on the lawn briefly, where we had a massive sword battle with sticks. Her in her red elastic ponytails, saying "I'll cut you to ribbons, you blaggard," at three.

She's art in motion.

Ice at the Museum

2010-07-08T21:42:00.000-07:00

We go to the Museum of Natural History today. Because it is summer and we can do this. Lilly is wearing underpants, the thick cozy cotton kind, which really just means I spend alot of time taking her in the bathroom. She does not like to get on the potty. She will pee though, if I do the pee pee dance. I set her on the potty and then she tells me to dance, so I dance around and look at her under my legs and she'll pee. I am a trained monkey, and I miss diapers. Diapers means she's little. I'm going to buy diapers tomorrow.

The museum looks just like museums look. Like time has stopped since Eisenhower was in office.

I learned that T-Rex has narrow hips and therefore lays a narrow egg, and that Triceratops has wide hips and lays a nice round egg. T-Rex has teeth the size of bananas.

I learned that I don't like to leave downtown LA without all the children in the car - they stayed with the friends we met there for an extra hour. It took Lilly about 20 minutes driving down the freeway before she figured out we weren't driving around to pick the kids up, but actually driving home. She howled. She wanted them with us. Then I started thinking, does she know something? What if something happens? Perhaps they'll be mugged by a dinosaur gang. Museum guards will lure them into dissecting rooms. And the usual child snatching. I managed to eat pizza at home, obviously not that stressed, and they made it home. Went to pick them up at their friends' house. Ended up staying 2 hours while they played Clue. One of their friends was determined to win. Nathan was interested in the game for about 40 minutes (a miracle for him) and then spent the rest of the game drawing on his face with a pen. Emma was so hungry she forgot how hungry she was. Lilly peed in her pants.

I also learned that the day after you go ice skating with a 3 year old (that was yesterday), your shoulders really kill. Bent over like the witch from Hansel and Gretel, helping someone tiny who is trying to balance on tiny metal strips on ice. Good times. Or maybe I'm sore because I forgot the stroller and had to heft Lilly around the entire museum.

She only held my hand when she was a little scared, which for her usually means live grenades exploding. She never wants to hold hands right now, so when she snuck her hand up to mine as we approached the huge elephant exhibit, it made me feel like yes, I can do something here. She still needs a little protection. She didn't understand why the elephants didn't make the elephant noise. I'm surprised she didn't notice that the elephants didn't move, like, AT ALL.

The kids probably had the best time sliding down the bannisters and throwing ice from a pile of cast off McDonald's ice at lunch. Outside the museum, in front of the rose garden, as we ate our highly nutritious lunch, the kids got cups and cups of ice and threw the pieces in high arcs into a trash can. It's the best part of summer, not necessarily the learning, but the friendship, the time stopping for a bit to shove an icy hand down someone's shirt.

Being out in Downtown LA with three blondies, being responsible for - I figured out - 30, 65, 100, almost 200 pounds of human aside from my own flesh... it's a big job, this mothering. The best part is, I weighed myself on the "How Much Do Your Bones Weigh" scale, and 32 pounds of me is bones. Which you really can't count. So I am technically at my ideal weight. Which is a nice feeling.

In the car, I was daydreaming about getting back to my piano, the new love in my life. And the garden, where the squash plant is growing up and wrapping it's tiny veins around the metal trellis I stuck around it. You set it out there, and it looks up for your support. Nature answers you. I guess these are the little moments of peace, the knowing that no matter where you are, there is a stretch up ahead, of peace, waiting for you. In fact, it's all around you.

Putting Emma to bed, I was feeling her heavy 8 year old head. And ice skating with Nathan, he let me hold his meaty 9 year old hand. He's going to knock me over someday, with his hugeness. He's still that tiny baby in Florida, he's just, well, smarter.

I talked to Robert, my friend, about how summer is busier than school, in a way. It's hard to find moments of peace in all the commotion and all the meeting of needs and household work. On the ice yesterday, feet throbbing, Lilly in tiny bird skates, she looked up at me and said "I wanna see the kitty movie." She was done skating. She just wanted to be home in bed. Watching "The Aristocats."

My little pieces of peace. We're coating ourselves with summer.

The Littlest Firecracker

2010-07-05T14:03:00.000-07:00

4th of July. Lilly learned to jump off the diving board at Michael's house. First she ran to the end like her brother and sister but was not going to go in. Then the third time, with me floating under there, not thinking she'd do it, she just ran and leaped. Right in. Her little purple polka dot thrift store bathing suit skirt parachuting up and then submerged. She came up, surprised that she did it herself. "Wanna do it again," she said.

The five year old at the party who swam with a floating airbag around him watched from the "bathtub" (hot tub) as this little wisp of a Lilly, at 3 is swimming like a drowning sailor, and leaping off the ship into trechearous waters. This is an amazing girl. She has already accomplished more in her 3 years than I have in many years. It's a honor to watch her life, and be cast as this massive role as Mom.

After she jumped off the diving board a million times, she started just running to the end, and then giving a double thumbs up, with her thumbs kind of flat on her hand. It was like a retarted person's thumbs up. Why she was even gving us the thumbs up, we're not sure, but it was funny.

Then we watched fireworks, the first year she really can figure out what's going on. The first three she just sat there, staring at them. That's what's great about kids. When something miraculous or just plain interesting happens, they don't overreact like kids do on tv. Real kids just sit there, in studious wonder. After the third firework, she remembered her voice and was able to say "WHOA!!"

In the car on the way home, she said "Goin to the next party?" "Wanna do it again." And when she didn't see anymore fireworks out the window, she said "Where is them?"

She's sleeping now. The littlest firecracker.

Life's a Beach

2010-06-24T21:48:00.000-07:00

Went to the beach today. Windy, cloudy, freezing, hot wind, kids running around, kids actually in arctic cold water. Like, with their heads under. Bruce in the car, to and fro from the beach, talking about metaphysics, religion, surfing and punching Nathan everytime we pass a VW.

The punching and laughing reminds me of my brothers. I have a lack of brothers in my life, and this Bruce is one killer brother. My brothers were/are both comedian types. Bruce is funny, but Bruce has this (ocean waterlogged) curiousity - a humble, giving guy. It's kind of nice to see a guy in his 20's who actually cares about kids, the earth, his place in the world, what he can do, how he can make things better. We talked about how maybe what you actually have, is enough. How being honest, when it's not popular, is brave. Maybe cause the kids are getting older, I can see our whole family - the kids all fit together, Bruce is important. With three littler siblings, it's kind of important that he has something wise to say - I'm glad he isn't just a comedian. At least he's teaching the kids humanitarian issues. He's alot like his dad. Good job, Dad. Good job with all of them. See, you are teaching them some things. Depth. I make cookies. You make thought. We all win.

But back to the beach. I was telling Bruce how all Will would play on his guitar was "Are You Strong Enough to Be My Man," and after laughing he started playing it. Emma and Lilly were tackling each other on the sand, Nathan and the other boys were swimming, a baby was running around with no pants, the wind was whipping us all and the grey ocean just kept going, wave after wave. I started thinking about Will because that music, man, it was like he was there, old Wooley, that fricking song he played, and I thought God, I'm sorry, Wool. You're missing this huge life. It's all there, crashing down around us. This huge life here, this complex chaotic busy life, and the beach is so cushy I wish I could just lay here and remember, every second, how lucky - Will, and all my people - the world is so noisy and rushing past, but I have these people, I love my people. I might be impossible to live with, and yellish, but I have loved all my people.

Even the people that came to pick a kitten out in our barn last night, it was dark, they were a family of three, we were gathered in the barn and they kept trading kittens, and talking about their pets, and telling stories, and they were doing this familiar dance of family and it was a privilege to be so close to Bob and his family, it was like a warm campout fire.

But today. It is a beautiful place, this beach. Even the car ride, and Carl's Jr afterward, and all the sandy feet and tired skin. We're here, I can see you, and I feel it all.

Let your Filth Shine Through

2010-06-19T14:02:00.000-07:00

I have a really nice blister on my thumb from raking leaves off the roof. I think I'll post a picture of it for you. In a second. Or never. My advice - never work hard enough to get a blister.

ps I'm so boring, I organized a lunchEON (that word is stupid for boring people) for teachers at school. I should have worn sensible pumps and had my hair in a chignon. (Love that word). I could go swish swish when I walked and have a friendly smile for everyone. While inside I'm just twisting alleyways of filth with tall teetering buildings and the occasional gondola and singing italian. Who's broke, but still singing.

Sunshiney 50's mom on the outside, dirty and scampering film crew member on the inside. A layer filth cake. Better that way, not so chalky and dry. You never know who's thumb you might bite into.

Love Letter to Stonehurst

2010-06-12T14:34:00.001-07:00

We wanted Elementary school to be what we had. A simple walk to school.

Elementary school for me is a time when everything still rolls along unconsciously. You’re learning how to sit in a row. How to hang your jacket in the closet. What meeting new people feels like, how to recognize true leaders, the difference a wonderful, loving, giving funny teacher can make. All these people behind you, helping to roll your small ball down the hill – an army of people, all there silently cheerfully, behind you, believing in you because you are a kid and worth the time.

I’m deep into motherhood. So deep that I can barely see out. In fact, I don’t want to look out because I’m fairly sure that’s another pile of laundry out there. I’ve been resisting seeing my life as divine. When I feel like life is overwhelming it’s usually because I’m trying too hard to make something happen, trying to force something my way. Maybe because there is enough in making a nice sandwich for the kids. Or pouring cereal, brushing hair, getting dressed, walking to school. Being there for seconds at a time. All these chores of taking care of, they’re the same as repetitions of prayers, as divine as mowing the overgrown lawn, smoothing everything down as best we can and then sometimes (rarely but sometimes) stopping to play in the midst of the garden of kids you’ve created.

The school even manages to do this, our tiny school. We have rules, and discipline, but we have art made out of tin foil, and flowers the kids have planted and shows where they sing. The teachers all show up, and despite the coffee spilling in their car or the bills looming or the country falling apart, they walk into the courtyard and show up and it all looks like dancing. They’re not trying to make it look like that, better than it is. It just looks like that. Or maybe I’m in love with them.

I’m in love with you all. This may be the first time I’ve written a group love letter (but hopefully not the last – this is California).

I love you, Stonehurst and all your talented, busy kid-builders.

I don’t care if Stonehurst is the perfect school. It’s the perfect school for me. It has me in it. It has the whole me in it. A whole person is a pretty valuable thing, when they’re aiming their hearts, determined to do good. What’s more valuable?

I happened to be in the library as all the teachers were coming in for their Tuesday meeting and it was like being backstage at the Oscars. Every face I knew, some better than others, but here they were, all in a room, these famous people. Acting like themselves. All these people that work hard to keep our little ball rolling. This IS the Oscars. It’s not Leo DiCaprio. Mr. Bohland is Leo DiCaprio. (As Lilly says, “Who’s Caprio?”) Exactly.

There’s no difference between school and space travel and being the Pope or being an ant Lilly and I look at on the path to and from school. This world is an unbelievably good place.

Thanks for tending to my little round sponges, for not giving up, for believing in your gift of every day, even for seconds a day. You guys build a nice bubble.

I read this at piano lessons the other day: “A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song.” We can hear your music, all you teachers. You make a difference with our family. If people flock to leave, we flock to stay.

Tuna Guys

2010-05-23T14:15:00.001-07:00

I'm working on my Earth Mother project. Videotaping my thoughts to use on the demo reel, and then having to look at myself on videotape. Wow, I look like a man. I may be doing the wrong show.

Nathan was eating a pre-made tuna-on-the-go, it's tuna that comes in this can. As he's eating he says, "I wonder what they eat at this place for lunch?" Meaning the tuna canning people.

I said "I bet they're sick of tuna."

Loved his question. Could be a short play. Tuna Guys in the lunchroom eating pb and j. Not knowing much, but knowing for sure, that they hate tuna.

Oh Yeah, That's What I've Been Doing

2010-05-17T15:11:00.000-07:00

So I was thinking, GS, since you're my main reader, about Neil Simon.

I read this article about him in the New Yorker. He's the writer I always wanted to be. Funny, simple, great one-liners. He wrote movies that I loved as a kid in the 70's. They always had these messed up families or people who were tragically stuck in some life they hated, but it wasn't really a bad life, it was just LIFE. And it was funny. And melancholy.

I had this melancholy heart, always hoping for the best, but expecting tragic results. Like, funny, but with a pang of sadness. Sadness isn't bad, I don't think. I think it's the syrup of life.

Anyway, I was reading all about Neil Simon and all he had written, and then I thought about my life and why hadn't I gone farther, produced more, published more, written more - and then I remembered the book of pictures I had given to the grammas for mother's day. A zillion pictures of the three kids I'm raising. Gorgeous, generally nice, innocent, sweet, loving, smart, nutritionally balanced, exercised and nurtured kids. I've been pouring my guts out into these guys. I saw the pictures, the only time of year I sit down to print out pictures, and I suddenly see what I've been every day, for the last year. Why I'm exhausted, and lucky. Oh yeah, look at these guys. That's what I've been doing.

It's nice to be Neil Simon. But it's easy to be a man. You never have to stop your life and completely refocus on the tiny people you bring into the world. You can focus on career - in fact, you better, if you want to be Neil Simon.

But these kids, man. They're better than anything I've ever written. They're complete. They give us gravity. Words are paltry. Everyone has access to words. But these three, they're the only ones I'm gonna get. I bathe in them. I'd be stupid not to. They're gold-paving my heart.

Someday I'll get back to the words. Or you know what, who cares about the words. I wish there were more kids.

PTA Cop

2010-05-14T13:01:00.001-07:00

I spent the morning with a PTA dude who had actually shot somebody. Not at a meeting or anything, not while battling over Book Fair money, but actually while he was on duty as a cop.

He can't do anything anymore, he said. His body barely works since he was in a coma. These are the kind of people that are good to have around, so you realize YOUR use of the words "coma" and "my body hurts" mean actually nothing.

The guy was a highway patrolman. He was by the side of the road, by his cop car, and a drunk driver came barrelling at him. They guy wasn't stopping. I saw his face, he said. He was coming for me, wanted to annihilate the cop. He pulled his gun. The guy rammed into his squad car. He pulled the trigger. The car rammed into PTA cop, and he flew up into a pine tree, breaking both legs, an arm, and he hung suspended by his gun belt from a limb. He woke up 3 months later in a hospital room. The drunk driver, killed.

This is the kind of coffee and donut PTA talk I like to hear at 8 am while we draw signs for the carnival, most of which he misspells and I correct. This is so much better than frilly aprons and starchy hair spray and curled, disapproving eyebrows. This guy can give me the inside scoop to what it's like at the brink of death.

Of course, the first thing I ask is, "If I'm going 80 in a 70 mph zone, will you pull me over, or overlook me?" It's been burning in me.

Turns out he's seen plenty of death and mayhem. In fact, death and mayhem are like his idiot cousins, trailing him around. We haven't actually talked about it yet, because I think he'd probably explain everything very honestly, which is life, and highway driving, are a messy business. Even without firearms.

The closest I've been to death up close was the tedium of my daughter's play last week. My version of excrutiating - bad theater. This guy has seen real death, the kind where no one comes back, and there aren't snacks served at intermission. Which is more dangerous, though? At least with real death, it's over fairly abruptly, versus the living death that is bad theater. Where you walk away and it reeks in you for weeks.

I think PTA Cop needs his own movie. It's like a "Rockford Files" - cop has to remember not to pull gun to shoot balloons at the school carnival. Has to remember to keep his two jobs separate in his mind. Which, he says, is getting harder and harder as he gets older.

Gonna be a helluva carnival, kids.

Lice to Know You

2010-05-11T14:04:00.001-07:00

I had these really good friends until we all got lice. I guess you never really know who your friends are until your heads are all crawling with bugs.

Our kids first got lice over Christmas vacation. We treated it, and then when they went back to school in January, they got it a second time. We treated it, retreated it, retreated it, the lice retreated and then we were lice-free. All our friends had gotten lice. Apparently there was a school-wide lice epidemic.

Some friends told us when their kids had gotten lice. Some friends said nothing. There are apparently many varieties of lice disclosure, and one of our friends had a complete yelling fit at me about her lice dilemma, which I alarmingly realized, she was aiming all at me. I had given her lice. She said. Basically.

I was so shocked at being yelled at by another mom, a friend, I stammered. The lice we had had was so mild. Because I didn't know how volatile she was, I even told her "Oh, we had lice again too," meaning a few scattered lice eggs, after millions of treatments, after scouring the heads daily, hourly, meticulously.

Apparently this other mom's battle with lice had been difficult, and she was impossible to help. Offers of help went in her ears and came out as yelling obscenities at me. This became not a person I wanted to know. Shocking, really. Her need to blame and find a culprit ("Who gave you lice in your class?" was one of the yelled questions to me, to which I actually found myself wracking my brain, thinking of each kid in my daughter's class until I realized wait a minute, who the hell KNOWS who is the lice giver??? There were no name tags. But dammit, she wanted a nametag.) I will accept the nametag, if I am the culprit. We did have it. Yes, I guess I should have told her.

I guess because our battle had been so tame compared to hers, I had not reached freak out stage about lice. I hate lice, I hate the treatment of lice, but it is fixable. I had given a birthday party after our last retreatment of lice, when we were lice-free. I gave the party knowing we would not be infecting anyone with lice.

Yet this parent would not hear me. That's what it comes down to. We were friends. She'd have to trust me. Am I the kind of person who would give a birthday party when my kid's head is crawling with lice? What do you think?

So these little bugs maybe saved my life. These little bugs gave me the chance to experience this person's ravaging warfare on our friendship. Maybe if there'd been some humanity in her handling of the situation, some sunlight could have broken through, some way to salvage the stomping she was doing on a tenuous, cultivated (what I thought was) friendship.

She claims disclosure is the problem. That everyone should yell it from the rooftops when they have lice, to everyone. I realize now I should have told her. Why don't I talk to anyone?

In my heart, I know I acted responsibly. I love all our kids and their friends at school. I didn't endanger anybody.

The first few weeks after the lice explosion of my friend, in the street in front of the school, I tried to make it better with her. Then a second explosion of her anger in front of the school, and I walked away. I missed her for a few weeks, since we had hung out together quite a bit. I re-examined our friendship. I remember that she had done this in the past, erupted at me about some (what she perceived) injustice to herself. I went to my core and there was still the same seeds of me inside. I am still someone I trust with kids. And their hair. Her yelling scared me, I froze, I stammered, but later I realized being attacked makes me freak out. Later, I realized, wait, my actions were fair and true. I am still me. She made me doubt that I am a fair and true person. Wow.

So, lice to know you. I love her, love her kids, love her family. I have to be careful, that's all. With some people, their fingers hover shakily over the trigger. And it might be aimed at you.

My Pact with Bob Barker

2010-04-30T10:43:00.000-07:00

The cat had seven kittens.

I reached animal capacity as the first kitten was born. I, who love all animals, began to feel suffocated. Barry reached this level by having one dog. Me, it takes awhile. But glad to know I have limits.

I was totally irresponsible by allowing the cat to get pregnant - broke my consistent inner pact to myself, the planet and Bob Barker - but I wanted the kids to see something born. I've always gotten my dogs and animals from the pound, always had them fixed, I do my share for not coating the planet with fresh animal babies. But I decided with the cat I could let the kids see some mother nature at work.

We watched all the kittens slip out like wet baby seals. The kids got to see what a placenta is, and how good it tastes to a cat. The kids are caring for the mom cat and finding future homes for her babies with the families at school. Maybe we'll perform our own home spaying to further finish the science lesson. I'm sure I've written the Ehow article on it.

Growing up, my mom raised German Shorthair Pointers, so we saw lots of puppies being born, raised and sold. It was a great memory, seeing how the body works, seeing something from the beginning and watching it grow. We played with tons and tons of puppies, and learned how to care for dependent beings. (And clean up poop.) Which has turned out, for me -- to be the stuff of moms. I'm ten years in, caring, cleaning, feeding. And loving it.

It could just be that I don't really like cats that much, so that lack of devotion coupled with rampant cat reproduction kind of haunts me on a personal and global level. I can see how some of these people who watch "Price is Right" may need to be reminded every day to spay and neuter their pets, like it wouldn't occur to them. Adding more possibly homeless cats to the world freaks me out, cause they aren't as great as dogs. What if no one wanted them? But was it better for my mom to have bred dogs and sold them, when there were already unpedigreed dogs rescueable in the pound?

I'm not all that interested in the battle of right vs wrong. I just know when I cross my own personal lines of right, and float into uncharted territory. I'm seven cats in. But I will honor my commitment to them, and will not make them into a rug. 1already has a home, 6 more to go.

Organizing and Managing Your Family

2010-04-14T14:39:00.000-07:00

Ten Tips

#1: Give up. There will never be organization. Recognize defeat, shake hands with it, bake some cookies together and kick back. Then you'll have strength, security and the inner sense that you know, in reality, that the world moves in chaos.

#2: Night Mom is Your Savior. Day Mom gets everything done in the moment. Night Mom prepares you for the next day. Do at least one Night Mom thing that will help Day Mom when she wakes up in the morning. Pack as much of the lunches and snacks as possible. Set out the breakfast dishes.

#3: Do a load of laundry as soon as the dirty clothes pile reaches load-size.

#4: Delegate chores to willing (and unwilling) small helpers. Yard work, kitchen work, babysitting, housecleaning. Reward with ice cream and time together.

#5: Try doing one thing at a time. Do it well.

#6: Cook/prepare for the whole day of meals at the beginning of the day. Then when mealtimes come around, you have everything ready and there's less stress.

#7: Separate children with empty seats between them to reduce fights.

#8: Start bedtime routine at least 15 minutes before you're ready to start. Then maybe you'll get to bed on time.

#9: Get up 10 minutes before you're ready to get up, and you'll have time to walk to school with the kids instead of run.

#10: To de-stress at the end of the day, replay the great moments, and be grateful for the love, joy and chaos of your kids.

Disclosure
This post is part of a blogging contest from the TwitterMoms community. There is a chance this post could be randomly selected to win a $50 Target GiftCard, so wish me luck! For more details, you can view the contest page here (http://icomp.ly/IconApps).

This Place is Just Amazing

2010-03-08T13:58:00.001-08:00

I watched Sandra Bullock's Oscar acceptance speech on YouTube while I put handcuffs on the baby. (Her choice of toy.) I thought, wait a minute, Sandra Bullock is having my life. Winning an Oscar, making an acceptance speech, skinny, hilarious, with a good solid core.

So I go shopping with the baby and even though I only have to pay 1.50 for a basket of blueberries at our wonderful Sunland produce, I am irritated that I am not a movie star. Not even the star part, movie star writer would be perfect.

I unload the groceries into the car and there's an old guy loading an even older lady into his car next to me. We are surrounded by abundant and affordable fresh fruit, in an ashpalt parking lot on a cloudy day on the outskirts of Los Angeles. He says to me, just standing there in his Henry Fonda fishing hat, a total stranger, and he grins, "Isn't this place just amazing?"

And I have to say, it is amazing. So I do.

Then the baby and I go to the library where I pick out movies and books and music, and she makes me sit on the floor in the empty and colorful kids area and sit on giant stuffed dogs. "Hold them here," she instructs, and I grab my dog by the ears. "Now go like this," she says, and tips over backwards, pulling her dog over with her. So I do. Then we read Curious George, on the yellow carpet, with the alphabet all over it. Resting on our dogs. She's in her footie pajamas with no diaper.

By the time I get home, she's eating noodles and I'm stuffing everything in the fridge from the produce store. My husband calls, whom I haven't seen in months even though we live together. His voice is actually present, and he seems to have found humor out there in the real world. "Everyone's crazy," he tells me.

I tell him about feeling bad I'm not a movie star, and there was a life I saw that I wished I was having. She was making movies, and I was making lunch. Then he became Barry, the man who says exactly what you need in times of crisis. He said "What you're doing is important." He told me that the job I'm doing is impossible, the everydayness, the stability, the loving, the being there - it's so important. It's everything. I said, "It seems so much better to be doing something where you get to stand in front of a stadium full of people clapping for you."

He said, "I'm clapping for you."

(I'm accepting my Oscar. His name is Barry.)

Yes, this place IS amazing.

Is Everything Rented?

2010-02-25T11:44:00.001-08:00

The kids were in a commercial. Well, Emma was in the commercial, Nathan mostly just ate a bunch of snacks. And Lilly spent all the time closing herself into all the empty closets in the bathrooms. I watched, no lie, 8 straight hours of Nickelodeon. Sponge Bob to ICarly. I also ate a bunch of snacks. It was like being on an airplane. Strapped to a seat, forced to sit in a small room with people you don't know and food brought on trays every hour or so. I would've gotten out on the set more, but I had to watch the baby. When I took her out to the set she kept climbing ladders or going behind the soundproof walls, or god forbid, talking in a normal voice. Fear and I were hand in hand. Diligence and watchfulness, never my strong suits, were my companions. Exhausting.

The baby, though, can explore everything with gusto. She's thrilled just to find a surprise pocket on your shirt. The girl loves EVERYTHING.

Emma and Nathan both enjoyed the large make up lady who fussed with their hair and faces. They liked the free clothes, the toys, the black guy who ushered them to and from set, the comraderie of new friends. The cables snaking all over the ground, the 22 year old grips and electricians, the director, the rich investor, his 12 year old girlfriend.

I would be doing alot better if people brought snacks around on trays every hour, and someone else made lunch. I could play. The baby and I could hide in closets for hours. The kids could become workaholics. Homework would be for idiots.

At the end of the commercial, Nathan was crying because it was over, and he couldn't believe he had to go back to real life and real school. At night, he kept naming all the people, and asking "Can we go back? Is everything rented?" I had to tell him that the stage was empty now, that all the equipment went back, on rented trucks. Everything was rented. "Even the people are rented?" Yep. I tried to tell him that that's the problem with movie sets, everything looks real, everyone works together and it becomes like a little tribe, and then when it's over, everything is all cleaned up and it's like it never existed. Except that it did. And it was REALLY fun. He couldn't believe that he couldn't just go back. Or that there'd be nothing there when he did. But it's so exciting.

"I want to do another commercial," they both said.

Three days later, they're back in school and the commercial is fading a little bit. It's hard when the funnest thing to do only lasts a short, intense time and is also the hardest gig to get. I've tried to tell them to enjoy the roller scoaster (as Lilly calls it) - life is actually good exactly where you are.

The Ogre in the Elevator

2010-01-25T14:12:00.000-08:00

I'm writing songs for the kids' band, "The Hole in the Screen." Here's "The Ogre in the Elevator"
(or Uncle Donny from Lilly’s point of view)

I lay on the floor
Between 7 and 8
My Uncle turns into an ogre

He turns to me, bent
His eyes are all wonky
He oozes and limps and is cracked

I cram in the corner
Watch the numbers go up
Please please can’t we get to the top

I’m only two
He’s at least 30
There’s no cure for ogre
I’ve seen stories
Sometimes he’s kidding
But is he?

The bell dings
The door slides
An old lady with a walker
My uncle is normal, and smiles

Come on, he says, straight teeth
Offers his hand, we’ll be late to see grampa

I look at the lady, the scary old lady
With the wheeled basket aiming toward me and
Thick tennis shoes
She wheezes and drools and has yellow eyes
And a hump on the side of her neck

The doors start to close
I jump up on my toes and grab
Onto the clean hand of my ogre

The door shuts the old lady in
I’m safe, and I’m safe?
I walk down the hall
Hand in his
Can’t look up can’t see if
He’s ogre or uncle

Don't Poke the One-Eyed Pony

2009-11-29T10:33:00.000-08:00

My search for the perfect pony has come to an end. An end that required emergency hand surgery.

yes, I found the perfect pony. A 23 year old therapy pony that is so safe retarded kids can ride it. Kids without any legs can ride this pony. Me? No.

I bring the pony down from Northern Calif because it's cheaper to do this than buy a crappy local pony. (all the ones we had seen looked like they had had a box of fireworks exploded in their faces and were permanently psychologically deranged.) Hey pardon my typing errors, but it's one-handed.

So the pony gets here and I hand over a week of grocery money to the hauler guy. Retarded kid pony is here. She only has one eye. Lost the other one in a shipboard pirate battle where it was gouged out by arch nemisis pony and plopped overboard. Or she ran into a stick.

So I know the kids will want to take her out when they get home so after I get the baby to bed, I sneak out to take her on a short bareback trail test ride. She's nice and comfy, a thick dorm couch. I'm cautious, as with any new horse, but she seems fine. Bored, even. That's it, I decide, only these kind of ponies forever for me and the kids.

I head back home and when we're almost there, I decide, well, I'll try to canter her and see how she does. They did it on the video I saw of her, I'm sure she'll be fine. Uhh. $5000 mistake. ch ching.

I kick and the horse trots but nothing else. I reach back and poke her on the right side of her butt, to hurry her up. The blind side.

I don't know what's happening. The world has gone into slow motion, everything around me turning liquidy and surreal like David Lynch movies. I'm on a carnival ride, but not the fun kind. This is what loss of control feels like. The horse is bucking, violently. There is no way I'm going to be able to hold on. I fly over her head and land flat on my back.

I hear wheezing. That's me, I think. I can't breathe. Oh my God. My brain is scurrying ahead, it's okay, you lost your breath, you're not dying, just breathe, it'll come back. Wait. Wait. I sit up on my side. The ground is HARD, man, not bouncy like in the movies.

My breath comes back slowly, and I have to move. The pony is heading back to the house riderless. I see her ambling along. I stagger up. I'm done with ponies, I say.

As I walk, I look down at my left hand. My middle 2 fingers seem to be stuck together. Hmm. That looks like it's gonna hurt later.

I get the pony in, and put away. I walk into the house dejected that I've brought yet another terrible animal into the fold. I pass right by Barry in the office because I'm so disappointed, shaken and upset, I don't want him to get upset and be mad. He thinks I'm nuts anyway.

I lay down with the napping baby. If I had just stayed here... why am I trying to be somewhere else? I was trying to add an element of fun and relaxation into the house and here's what I've done.

My hand is definitely not right. Hurting and swelling. I have to go tell Barry. I have to face my huge error.

We try to go get it fixed at the free clinic, but the line is out the building and around the block. Looks like the DMV or the airport.

We end up in some tall black doctor hand surgeon's office where I see my xrayed broken bone sticking off and he says the words "pins" and "surgery" and suddenly I'm crying. I'm also fairly sure I've seen him on "ER."

I sit in the hallway crying while Barry goes to empty our bank account to pay for this surgery.

Then it's Friday night and I'm in what I'm sure is the abortion clinic, right off a busy street in Glendale, where people whiz by in cars going to the mall and having arguments about dinner, and they're wheeling me into a white room with people I don't know, who have knives. To use on me.

I wake up with a big cast. The guy next to me, named Sunday, cut off the top of his finger on a toilet lid. He didn't get his finger back. I look at my three whole kids who crowd me and my giant hard arm, and that husband who is always there for me. Even when I am lost. I remember what I felt when I lay here for hours before they took me into surgery.

I'm lucky. I'm here.

Rawhide

2009-11-09T22:33:00.000-08:00

So I thought I'd get a pony for the kids. My neighbor had one we could try out. Seemed like the perfect pony. Stocky, pocket sized, but big enough that I could get on and ride. Eats barely anything. Free to keep in the yard.

We brought him home. He was perfect in the yard. The kids got on, we walked him around. Then they wanted to go out "into the world," as Nathan said. "Wait, let's get to know him." For like, 5 years, I'm thinking. But kids like to do everything, all at once, right now.

The next day we did venture out. I did everything the owner said to do. Lunge him first to get any excess energy out. Use a stud chain across his nose to control him in case he got out of hand.

Nathan and I took a walk with the pony and we did great. Very mellow, no problems. Came back to get Emma. The whole family goes out for a walk on the street, the big wide empty street near our house. If we were in England, we'd be on the nice soft moors. I stress the word SOFT. But we're in LA, man. We're cement here.

So we get down to the Penske truck rental place with no problem. I'm pulling the baby in the wagon. Nathan's riding his bike. I'm holding the pony by the lead rope as Emma rides. We start ambling back home.

Then something happens. Either the pony hears something, or decides it's SHOWTIME, I don't know. Suddenly, the pony is RUNNING. He is STRONG. He has become an ELEPHANT. Everything is happening in slow motion. My kid is on a pony and the pony is now huge and mean. And trying to leave with my baby, and my arm. I can't hold him. Emma holds on as I run alongside, trying to pull him back. Then he bucks, and it's all over. Emma goes flying, I let go of the pony and try to catch the flying 7 year old. The cement catches us both in a heap. Pony goes running down the street. Baby is back a few feet in the abandoned wagon, watching us. Nathan is flipping out, goes running after the pony.

Emma is okay, we stand up, she did so well, but she's operating on adrenoline. When I hug her she starts crying. She got a scrape on her hip, her helmet smacked the ground but her head is okay. It's terrible, this realization that I can't control everything, and that I put my baby in danger. Ponies are fun but only safe ponies. Mom Pony Lesson learned.

I stand there for awhile holding Emma until she calms down, and telling her how great a job she did holding on. I tell her she has to get back on, but not til we get home. Lilly is crying now because Emma is crying.

Emma gets in the wagon and we walk home. Emma says why are your pants wet - hmm, thanks 3 pregnancies, I guess I can't hold my bladder in rescue attempts anymore. I also look down and see my pants are ripped at the knee and I have a nice bloody sore. Rawhide.

ps. pony is gone back to pony lady. Emma did ride the pony again and was fine. We search now for very very safe pony.

Boarder Patrol

2009-10-26T23:40:00.000-07:00

We have this boarder at our house, she's keeping her goats and sheep in the barn. She's also my mom's new best friend. She's the daughter who talks to her and spends time with her. My mom can suddenly switch allegiance to a virtual stranger in seconds. It's alarming, and charming, if you're the stranger. Not the daughter, who's standing there, feeling awkward.

Anyway, I got this horse. I thought I was getting this horse for the family. But I learned something, when shopping for a horse, make sure and actually shop OFF OF THE COMPUTER. I have the baby, so I didn't want to drive for 2 hours to look at the horse. Why drive when they can just bring the horse to you? Here's why - because the horse is NOT THE RIGHT HORSE. He's huge. He's off the track, an ex-racehorse. SO what if he was free. This is not the horse to put your 2 year old on.

He is, however, the horse your boarder would like to have. So just like that, I handed over the reins (literally) to my boarder.

So now I have a horse that I take care of and stare at everyday, who isn't mine. Who I can't really use for anything, but who takes up space in the yard so I can't actually ever have a horse of my own. Unless it was tiny. A pony. Hey wait, ponies. Kids. Hmm.

The bigger question is, why I am not spending time with the kids? What am I doing??
Enjoying a soul crushing midlife crisis. He's out in the barn munching hay. Luckily it's hay I'm not paying for now that the boarder has taken him on.

Yes, this life I'm leading. Rather embarrassing. When you feel things, and you see time rushing by and you're trying to grab onto these relationships - it's full of all this emotion. A huge horse isn't going to fill in the gap.

I've decided to spend time with the kids. Stop trying to do everything. Try to do one thing. Make the one thing great. Enjoy the time. Relish the time. Ketchup the time. Enjoy free things. Stop trying to own everything so it can't grow up and leave me.

This mom gig. It's brutal.

GiGi All Gone

2009-10-14T22:54:00.000-07:00

The kids love the chickens. Especially our super freak looking chicken, Gigi that Nathan named GI Joe but since she's a girl he calls her GiGi.

Well, called her GiGi. As Lilly says, when we couldn't find GiGi this morning, "GiGi all gone."

Yep. The summer of Gigi, we only had her a summer. I am a terrible chicken owner. They come and go from our lives faster than Elizabeth Taylor's husbands. Unfortunately, Gigi disappeared into the claws of a hawk, or opossum, or raccoon. Hopefully not coyote, since I don't like to think coyotes can get in our yard.

But this is not easy, this losing of pets. We get attached. I flail, when Nathan says, "We shouldn't have pets because they die." I feel my heart squeeze. He's right. I feel the same way. We love them and they make us laugh, and they keep us entertained and then they're gone. Maybe we should've fenced the roof of their area. Maybe we should have kept them all locked up. The four remaining chickens are locked up tonight, from fear.

But what kind of life is that? The kind where chickens get to resume living each day, you say?

It is a terrible feeling. I'm the one who spent all the time with the chickens. Gigi layed us an egg reliably every day except Sunday. When she went to church. The chicken had her priorities right. She was in charge of the food. She had crazy feathers that stuck out all over, she looked like a biker chicken. She was tough. Why she had to go and not our other, less interesting chickens... She probably threw herself in their path. She sacrificed for the family. The sacrificial chicken.

There is this black feeling, where the chicken used to be. It is a depressing thing, feeling this hole an animal leaves when they leave your life. We try to give our chickens a perfect life, and she had the most perfect life, not a cage in sight. But obviously there was death in sight. We let her down. She deserved more. I didn't protect her, and last night, in that rain storm, without noise or feathers left behind, that was it. She vanished. We need night time protection, suddenly.

I told the kids we had to have a ritual to memorialize Gigi so she won't be forgotten. She was our greatest chicken. All the others had stopped laying for winter, but not Gigi. She was just sitting on the nest happily yesterday. Making her green egg for us. I didn't know it was our last.

Our other chicken Cake is gone too. Very tame, very social. It's killing me.

I guess tomorrow I have to look into some chicken wire. I plan to wire the sky, and keep everything out. But as I told Nathan, it's still right to love things, even if they go away, even when it feels like the most wrong, most dangerous thing to do because there is surely hurt at the end. Hurt is just the body's way of saying hey, Gigi, you mattered to me.

Party On Dude

2009-09-26T21:55:00.000-07:00

Went to the birthday party today for a 7 year old. A school friend, Sony Trinitron as I want to call her. I did not feel like spending three hours out of my life to hang out in a million degrees heat with people I didn't know well. But I am The Mom. So. Off I go.

Mistake number 1 - woke the baby up to go to the party. Mistake #2 - did not wear bathing suit to party with water slide. Mistake #3 - trying to make conversation with ebuillent young black chick in roomy shirt. I had overheard someone say "are you ready for the big day?" And she said "Yes! I just can't wait for it to be here already." Assumed she was pregnant. Said to her later, "So are you having a baby? I heard about the Big Day." She didn't look so happy. I know now she was feeling fat. Because of me. "No, my daughter's getting married," she said. I had succeeded in making no inroads to black and white relations, AND I had said "nice pregnancy" to someone who hadn't been pregnant in 22 years.

I'm not the best conversationalist in general anyway. So I got my phone to call Chris and talk about the 2 year old at the party who had a man's face, and was scaring me like I was on acid. She seriously had a block head with some nice black curls in the back, the only saving grace. But the face was like a permanent scowl, and she looked like a mini man. I couldn't stop staring at her. So I called Chris and I forgot that I dropped my phone on the street at gymnastics and now no one can hear me on the phone. So even if she had answered (which she hadn't), she couldn't have heard me anyway. I tried to leave a message and the voicemail couldn't hear my tragic voice talking about the scary man baby. Plus I was sitting in wet clothes because the baby had decided the slide was too "Cary" and needed me to climb inside the water tomb, up the flat inflated ladder and down through the rain forest with her on my lap. I spent the rest of the party leaving water stains on every piece of furniture in the house.

I checked out all the other moms that walked in. Nice tight polyesther dresses (ick, but they were trying, man). Hair and make up accomplished. I looked in the mirror in the bathroom. Crappy old pink t-shirt, circa 1996, shorts, hard chlorine summer hair hadn't been washed in many days. That 40+ haggard appeal. Nice tan, I thought.

Followed Lilly around like her dog to make sure she didn't fall into anything or slip through a heating grate or something, she's pretty small. She's hardy. But small. My pants stayed soggy and I managed to rub some nice chafing marks onto my thighs from sitting and walking in wet pants for three hours.

There was actually a kid there named Magnus.

Since my phone wouldn't work, and I was trapped on someone's bed while Lilly played on the bunkbed next to me, I asked some 6 year olds for paper. I thought I'd write down some thngs to tell Chris, or maybe write an actual LETTER. But kids can't find anything. You ask them to look, they say "Oh yeah!" brightly, they take like three shuffling steps, and then they forget and start to play with the toy they find under the bed. So that went well.

There was a door that said "Beware - kittens. Do not open." I'm sorry, but some rules just have to be broken. Very very purry and cute, by the way.

No amount of pizza could fill up the gaping hole I was feeling, but I tried pretty hard anyway, 3 pieces and several crusts. Then I promised I wouldn't eat cake and it was cupcakes and they were kind of hard. Looked better in the brochure.

I don't know, man. I know I'm a conscious outsider. Everyone looked they were just trying to get through so they could get to another party they could just get through. Or maybe it was me. Two men sat sucked into a low couch watching a big screen television and ignoring the entire party. I admired their passion.

Presents opening, my ticket to freedom. Time to go!! The kids and I trailed to the car. Hot asphalt, Lilly in only a diaper, she HAD to stop and step off the road to smell a red rose just about to bloom. It took her five minutes to manuever herself through the gravel and vines to get her nose to that rose. I loved that. There was no place else she needed to be. She had all the time in the world, and that was a rose right there, smiling at her.

I guess I'm so in the midst of this ambling, dream-like life with the kids, I forget that everything is not a fable. Sometimes it all looks fake - taking me to a party can be taxing.

The best part - the kids had a great time.

Blocked and Flying

2009-09-25T00:20:00.000-07:00

Emma did a round-off backhandspring by herself in gymnastics today. This is a big deal. The girl can flip herself on her strong little arms all the way across the room. By herself. She's only 7. In the back part of the gym, Lilly was standing at fake tool table and going poo poo in her diaper. This is also a big deal. We've been feeding her prunes and lentils, the poor thing, to try and help out her blocked feeling.

Blocked and flying through the air. Both my daughters represent my daily mothering mind and job. It's hilarious to try and pretend I am in control in any way. I am just hanging on, my friend.

Need Waitress

2009-09-22T23:49:00.000-07:00

Here's the problem. The kids are getting bigger. I'm screwed. Lilly is the most horrifying little reminder, with all the talking at 2 years old - who taught her how to talk? She's really funny - she's just in on every conversation, like she's manning the meeting we're all having and if only she knew more words, she'd have us all fired.

But it's not fair. I wasn't done free floating with all my babies, and now I have to think about life after babyhood? Taking a desk job at some point? It's like trying to eat a box of Good N Plenties after you're used to heroin. The Good n Plenty's are good (and they're plenty) but dude, I'm used to being swallowed up. Whole. No wonder I've been trolling the internet looking for a horse in desperation. Maybe stuffing an 1100 pound animal in the hole will help me feel heavier and worthy again.

It's the need factor. I've been filling needs for 9 years now - happily, quickly a virtual Need Waitress. My tips have been crap too because kids are notoriously broke. This has been a good gig. My longest ever where my attention and creativity haven't waned. I have in fact become more of myself.

I guess I have to run alongside Lilly instead of after her, trying her yank her legs out from under her to stifle her with my own tremendous needs. It's just that I'm all oiled up, the engine runs great and my job is running away from me. It runs away from me BECAUSE I've done it happily, and well. So is that it? The mom just standing in the street, watching the kids growing up, up and away. Clutching the shards of her apron. Hoping for the disastrous Thanksgivings and Christmasses where the kids come home tattooed, pierced, dyed, with prison boyfriends? Or wait, is there a happier ending, where Nathan owns his own towing company, Emma is a rock star and Lilly is a radical politician? Wait, is that the happy ending? Why is there an ending? I don't like any ending where there's an ending involved.

They are only 9, 7 and 2. I haven't even taken them to Europe yet. There is still time ahead. They still love motels. They still call me Mommy. I've just been hiding from them lately when they come home from school because I like them so much. I don't want to care more. If I care more I am surely doomed. My heart is a tender, swooning maiden. A delicate pie crust. I am alive, and I feel it all. It's scary to love people so much.

I spend most of my time trying to tone it all down, not feel everything, so as not to disintegrate on the spot just from the hugeness of spirit in my house, in those faces, connected to me. If only I did half so well with people my own size. My own husband.

If I like you, I guess I can't show it because man, it is so beautiful.

Horses understand this. They just stand and look at you with those big, soulful eyes. They have no words, no arms to fling around to distract anyone. When I run away from my life 2 days a week to my simpler horse job where I ride for people, I stand alone with the big horse Deco in the dirt arena and stare at him and he just stands there, content just to stand there. Extra happy if I have a carrot.

My brain is big and unused, and my life before kids was alot more organized. Here I am now, trying not to feel it all and feeling bits of it anyway. We are a mess. I've spent the last few days heaving stuff out of the cluttered garage. I'll get rid of it all, in 100 degree heat. Get rid of everything, nothing matters. Old clothes, old toys, why am I hanging on to stuff? It's all going away. Even in the midst of kids crawling around, voices in the garage, discovering old toys, I'm still covered in all of them.

I just have this desire to stop everything from happening. Why is it going? What's the rush??

Living truly, this is a passionate way to live. Guess I better get used to the big love, big heartache. Like every great love story.

A Revolution Against Underwear

2009-09-18T00:27:00.000-07:00

Lilly wore underpants today for the first time. She kept them dry. She rushed to the potty when she had to go pee pee, and even paused to shut the screen door behind her on her way in the house.

What's the deal, now EVERYONE in the house will be potty trained? She's only two. What's the rush? I was enjoying her being the baby, needy, messy, babyish. Now she just wants to chew gum and sit on the potty. I hope it will pass. I don't want to be done buying diapers.

We're having a yard sale, so there's a pile of junk by the front door that I will hopefully be adding to. Why not get rid of everything all at once. Let the baby start using the toilet, speaking in complete sentences, joining chat groups online. Get rid of every stray piece of stuff we don't need and will never use. But who wants to be tidy like that? I like that we have unnecessary things, that we're behind, that we aren't finished. I like that life is messy, kids are stretching in their elastic bodies, life keeps on going. Despite me running alongside it, out of breath, and trying to wave it in the other direction with shiny fabric flags.

Lilly Bess, the smallest wonder of the world in our house. Immensely proud of her new underwear.

My Good Friend Melancholy

2009-09-11T23:56:00.000-07:00

Lilly is two and she swims underwater. There's something about a baby floating in the big lagoon of the pool, weightless, goggles on, looking at me underwater. We swim twice a day together.

She just walks off the step, slips underwater and then moves in slow motion, the water like a big liquid oil painting around her. Then this little body, the littlest one in our family, and she can do things, complex things like remembering not to breathe, finding my arm when she needs to lift up and get air. She loves the floating and touching the bottom of the pool. I like the silence, and the joy, and the watching her. She only weighs 24 pounds. She looks pretend in that quiet, otherwordly suspension that water brings to the body. She's my watery, living art project.

This week school started again. Nathan managed to slip and sprain his ankle. The scream still echoes off the wall of the burrito place. But he got to drive an electric cart at the grocery store. This is almost worth the ankle pain.

The rush of school, the sudden being someplace after months of being no place, it kind of sprang up on us. It feels like we were never free, we were always slaves to the clock, even though I know that's not true.

Sitting and watching Emma in her new class as I taped up words on the word wall and Lilly hid in the closet with the backpacks - I wish that melancholy and I weren't such good friends. I'm enjoying her life, but damn, her life is just running at a sprint. I was never a good runner.

So I go home and float with Lilly in the pool. We don't think about anything, we just float.

Pre-Birthday, Checking in with the Kids

2009-08-18T23:33:00.001-07:00

Lilly would not take a nap today. "Nursy?" she says, plaintively, after she's already nursed to death and then wanted to "lay next mommy" meaning lay next to me and play with the curtains and not go to sleep. She cries bitterly when she doesn't get her way. It's sad, and when I finally gave up she had the puffy eyes of someone who'd been up all night on a bender. She's obsessed with gum and everytime we get in the car she says "piece dum mommy?" then cries when I say no. We try to limit her to one tiny piece a day, and she chews it forever. She's forgetting how to eat, though. She thought it was very funny today when Karina had on Emma's bathing suit. She laughed and said "Pia wear Emma bay suit," grinning, like that was the craziest thing.

It's Nathan's last night of being 8 years old. The little meatloaf baby is now at least sixteen meatloaves long. He spent his last day of being 8 playing in the pool at my horse job while I worked, and playing with Karina his friend who is 11 and has braces, and playing in the tree with Emma, and eating pancakes and carrot cake cupcakes. He also got to wear purple and play a basketball game with his and Emma's team at night. His favorite meal is salad with grilled fish and broccoli. He does not enjoy chocolate cake or milk. He loves dog movies. The current favorite movie in the house is called Slappy and the Stinkers and involves some little rascal type kids and a seal. They've rented it from the library like a zillion times. Plus it's the only movie they could watch since the DVD side of our VCR is broken, and it's a tape.

Emma has lost most of her teeth and doesn't look like anyone we know anymore. She looks like the butterfly half out of the cocoon, and like she had to pay her way out with some of her teeth. She's tall and a tumbler. She'd like to watch tv all day and eat pistachios. She has about forty bathing suits, and enjoys favoring one for a week at a time. She just got a new one at a yard sale down the street this weekend for one dollar. I probably should be scared that she cares so much about matching her clothes, except that she also like gathering the chickens' eggs, climbing trees, dancing and swimming. She's a good mix of lazy and impetuous. Her wish when she throws a penny in a fountain is to be a mermaid with magical powers.

Tonight, going to bed, Nathan told Emma she learns things faster than he does. It was a shocking moment of honesty and love. We told Nathan that he learns things differently, like he's curious about things and will study them until he knows everything. If he wished on a fountain, he'd wish for an 84 Nissan pick up truck with camper shell. Just like his brother's.

If Lilly could wish on a fountain, she'd wish for gum.

Train Train Train

2009-08-12T23:52:00.000-07:00

We went to the fair today. We took the train, which of course became the best part of going to the fair. I don't know what I was thinking, I got up at the ungodly late it-must-be-summer hour of 8:45 and had only made it inches out of bed before the kids were pounding me with canwego canwego canwego - I gave the baby some cereal and thought wow, canwego? The train leaves in 45 minutes, and we have to get to the train station.

The kids fed the chickens, fed the bunnies, I fed the dogs, got the baby a new diaper, oh yeah and I should put some clothes on (always the last thing), picked a flowery 70's number that I could nurse the baby in and not feel too fat, packed some leftover food from the beach the other day, no time for sandwich making (I will be sorry later), we rush out and oh shit it's 9:17. Train leaves at 9:30. Barry looks at me like he wants to kill me. We'll make it, I say. I hope. We tear over there, train hasn't gotten there somehow, we unload stroller, kids, bags, race up the platform. Kids are jumping up and down, I yell down to Barry You're my hero.

The train is beautiful, perfect, quiet. Everyone looks like professional train people, the ticket guys have hole punchers, books of tickets, little hats. The kids are different now - they're older, and Nathan is frankly mature. He helps me with the stroller because he decides he needs to. Without me asking. They walk the length of the cars. They agonize over what treat to buy in the overpriced cafe. Lilly puts the pillow protector sheet on her head and says Yook. Paypa towel. Hat.

We get out in Ventura and it's freezing. Nathan has forgotten his sweatshirt. I was going to pack one for him and he said, wait, I'll get my favorite one, and then he didn't get it. When I say "you forgot your sweatshirt!" exasperated, he doesn't cry. He actually doesn't get upset at all. Mature. I instantly miss his babyness.

The million fair goers and we go into the crowded fair gates. In five minutes we've eaten over-priced popcorn and a caramel apple. I could own a grove of caramel apples for what I pay. We see cows, horses, pigs, sheep. The family we meet there follows us, and the kid veers between angry to sullen. I think it is his version of joy. My kids are innocent, and hungry.

We only stay three hours. I manage to spend 7 thousand dollars, mostly on one burrito. An Asian family shares their table with us, and I decide I like Asian people.

We dash back to the train. We're right at the beach and we chose to be inland, on a parking lot, with loud music and people with tattoos. We decide next time we're going to the beach. Even though we were just there Monday.

On Monday we were out by the waves, and we could see the ferris wheel in the distance. Even then, I knew the waves, the sound of the ocean, the sand-covered kids, the sweet, frolicking baby, the free beach were so much better than the ferris wheel in the distance.

In a blink the train ride again - going South. My kids seemed older than me, except they have the jagged teeth of youth. They're so good, they don't give me anything to do but appreciate them.

Our train ride is smooth, foreign, fun because we never ride trains. Everything looks new when you're not in charge of it, when you're just the passenger. Look how life speeds by, and here are these beautiful faces, all three, just sitting with me. I made three people.

We get off the train and Barry again piles us in the car. We are a full family, we are packing in our summer, we won't give up our summer until we suck out the last drop. I am already feeling I've lost Nathan, he's almost nine, he's so tall and what if he turns sullen and angry? What if another day goes by that I don't grab him close, tickle him, love him, find my way back to him? All these babies have gotten in the way, and maybe he's forgotten me.

Then in bed, I put his eardrops in, and he lets me. I scratch his back, and tell them how proud I am of them. I am just the mom, I see. I am not growing parallel to this mom life, I am intertwined, the stalk moves through me.

Moving through life, on and off trains, lugging, fetching, feeding. I am here, Nathan. I care. I wish I could keep you at every age, right here. Loving you and your sisters, and your brother - I am so lucky.

So the fair was kind of loud. We had that silence of the train, with the fish we won in little plastic tanks on the table, Lilly with no nap, and the blueberry muffin from the cafe. Emma resting on my lap. Nathan seeing the curving front of the train out the window. All these signs of messy, outward, jumbled life, and then there's the thing that keeps me going that you can't see at all. The joy that's all around these three sprites. A place for me to belong. Solidly, meaningfully, happily.