A Short Poem About Old Love (plus the Pixies)

A long road begets bumps.

So we bump and chuckle. We shoot and miss

each other and we drive

our love away.

Many moons rise and fall and slide

into our home still

I feel your hand in mine and you

you

you as always:

you're the right road.

Note: After many months with the Kid all up in my bizness, he's been gone for a week. And -- duh -- I miss him.

An Embarrassment of Bitches

Joyce Maynard wrote an article for the New York Times "Modern Love" column (which is one of my favorites) a long while back (2009!) in which she talked in detail about her grown daughter. Her daughter responded in turn and the whole thing is played out here.

Didn't click that? Let me share the highlights -- from the comment section:

Dear Oversharing Blogging Parents:
You may want to pay close attention. This is your future.

And

Does it seem to any one else that most memoir writer types are raging narcissists as a rule? And golly don't those types just make the BEST parents...(snort).

I'm betting that pissed you off if you write (or read) a blog that might include your short drunk people from time to time or if you write a blog about your life and all the non-kid people in it because um, scandal someone else wrote about her kid and her life and oh shit? Lots of people don't like that.

At all.

Oh, PUHLeeze.

This cheerful discourse happened before the Tiger Mom got her teeth pulled and before Ayelet Waldman declared herself a "Bad Mother" because, among other things, she loved her husband more than her kids. And it happened before Lisa Belkin's Motherlode Book Club unleashed the beasts with Torn:

All of this happened a long time AFTER (my personal hero) Anna Quindlen was publishing her "Public and Private" column in the New York Times, which was one of the best written collections about the experience of being a modern woman, mother, worker, and wife. Erma Bombeck probably got there first, and I am sure I am missing others.

The fact is: women write ugly dirty nasty stuff because women feel ugly dirty nasty stuff -- about kids, relationships, work, parents, life, friends, politics, people, dishwashers. Women also write with the wing of an angel for a quill about all these same things... I've witnessed it.

I can tell you from experience, the devil and the goddess swaps her presence in me basically from hour to hour. What I will write, how I am thinking -- it often depends on the moment or the day, or the minute of the day for me. And after some forty years on the planet, I can honestly tell you this is exactly why I love being a woman and gratefully, why I love being a woman who loves to write.

What I don't love? The chronic bitch-slapping that makes so many of us go red in the face simply because we are doing or (snort!) writing ideas and thoughts and experiences that happened in that minute or day or fucking month. What went down at Belkin's Motherlode over the book Torn? It's not the symptom of our disease: it's the virus.

We have the choices we do because a bunch of women put aside their silly parenting differences, or sexuality differences, or any of the differences they might have had, and made a pact and plan to move the ENTIRE group forward.

They did this with what? Some leaky ink? A pony delivering letters? A train that took weeks?

Surely, we can and are obliged to do better. The frickin' interwebs weren't made for us to split into pieces with our anonymous throw-downs. What a goddamn shame if we can't use our culture's finest communication tool as a source of cooperative discourse and ultimately, progressive change for ALL women?

I write about my Small Town bullshit, my friends, sometimes my marriage, and wait?? What the? Oh yeah. I have kids who are funny and sad and I write about my kids too. You know why I do this? Because I can. Because I am moved to. Because for twenty sometimes sixty narcissistic minutes in my day, I tap tap tap on the keyboard what happened or didn't happen in my life and hit "publish."

Those commenters (years ago) on Jezebel are wrong: there is good in this (measured) telling. I am a stay at home mom and I am never sure if I am doing anything right for them -- or for me. As my children grow, there are things I will keep aside, but I can assure you that there are photo-filled baby books that can't touch what I have already written about my kids...

And there are lessons I have taught myself just by telling.

So, I tap tap tap because I believe that someday, this writing here? It will help us.

All of us.

ALL of us.

And who knows? That might mean you.

Beginning Our Tour of World Media Domination

After giving a toast at the wedding of my cousin this weekend, a toast that I cannot repeat because I had one of those out of body moments that public-speaking inspires and so I can not remember anything I said (except for forgiving my cousin for being born) (I know? What?), my trusty little phone beeped a message at me. I was sure it was from someone in the wedding party wanting to offer me a nationwide motivational speaking tour, but it wasn't. It was from this nice lady Susan at 5 Minutes for Mom who shared this with me:



There's me and Carolyn, acting typically um typical. And this? This was the fifth attempt because the cameraman who I affectionately kept referring to as Jacques (not sure why) was having battery issues. And maybe there were swear words. Maybe.

Anyhoo, it was fun to see because, like the super awesome wedding toast, the whole thing was a blur of us laughing and asking Jacques (over and over) if he was using the fuzzy Barbara Walters lens. Which apparently he wasn't but all is forgiven.

Too bad the camera wasn't working at the wedding because I'm pretty sure I concluded my toast by donning a pair of those Groucho Marx glasses. Between that and the wikkid cool rock hands I flash at odd moments, it's very obvious that I was born to be a classy self-image-maker. Or a cast member of Dancing with the Stars. Because I rocked it on the dance floor. Didn't fall down once!

And I can tell you from personal knowledge that Carolyn is the master of the jazz hands.

But don't let any of this stop you from enjoying the epic tome that is TO, now new and improved with a fancy hawt cover.

Older Like You Do

The thing about old friends is that they get older just like you do.

You see two at the table at a birthday dinner:

Her face lined but more perfect than it was back then, different in a better way, better than our yearbook pictures, different in the way she looked after college, after Him. So much more different is her face: it shows, looser now. Better.

She pours my drink. She looks me in the eye. I am grateful.

And also:

She sits beside me. Her face, her body so much smaller that it was back then, but her voice? It's always truth when she speaks and I find comfort in her all the time. I hold her son's hand and I get zen: this is her son. Hers! I feel lucky and luckier still.

She knows this much.

There is some meaning here bigger than feeling yummy good with old friends, and I hope you find it and whoa! maybe write it yourself.

For now, I just wanna write this down: just wanna say it out loud.

Just want to be grateful for this happiness I feel.

Twitch

My right eyelid's been doing this effed up twitching thing for what? five days now. I don't dare google it. I remember when my mom ventured onto the 'net (for the first time) to find a cure for my cousin's infant's problems: "swallowing and sucking" she typed in. Even now, I can still feel the burnt-red on my mother's cheeks.

So my right eyelid twitches and I forget about it until it does. Kind of the way I forget about the GFYO's learning issues until I look at his school papers. Kind of the way my daughter's intense moods seem meaningless until they strike. Just like my other daughter, confident yet mostly friendless, which I realize when I realize that she rarely goes anywhere but here.

My eye twitches. A little spark, a shot to the gut from the brain for a second: you okay? are you okay?

Who the fuck knows? Not me.

My eyelid twitches and I feel it, that weird uncontrollable movement no one sees but me. My eyelid twitches, even now, while writing this, while my children dream deep in sleep. My freaky heart and brain, EVEN NOW, makes my eyelid all shaky, all weird, all randomly electrified.

A Sweet Vacation From Reality

While mopping and swiping and cleaning windows, while hauling four loads of laundry, while hand-washing sweaters, and debating Halloween costumes with Short Drunks (I insist on home-made; they want otherwise), and while defrosting a pork roast that I will not want to eat, ever ever ever: I imagined the death of a girl.

It's easier to pretend when you can.

While mopping and sucking up the dust, a girl like me gets thinky. As in: Polite Fictions thinky, and she remembers what is limitless and blameless, and..

writing some truth? Here? Like we do? That's hard. That's work.

Take a sweet vacation from reality here.

*****

PS: This awesome VodkaMom teacher? She's got it going on. And shoot: click that link and you might win...

Pushing Buttons, A Short but Not Nice Poem

Is it really so hard

to push the button on the car door

the door your grubby hands

have smeared

and made sticky

Is it so hard

to push the button and --

hey look at that!?

make the window

seal out the rain?

If you pushed the button

to make the window go down

and I have yet to understand

why you would do that

as it fifty degrees and um? raining

but if you could push the button

to open the window

could you not

also

push the button to close it?

See, the rain gets in and

makes the seats and the carpet on the floor

and the sweatshirts and

the backpacks and

the marker-colored papers you left behind

it makes them all very very wet

like smelly wet because

wet shit smells.

Let that be

lesson number one.

Lesson number two: push the stupid buttons

next time and I mean this

like when I say "wipe!"

and "furniture!" and

"don't for the love of God lick that!"

And I mean it when I say

I have but a few buttons, Short Drunk People:

do

not

push me.

Wrapped Up

My current obsession: scarves. Not the silky kind, not the wooly kind, but the kind that's mildly bohemian. With the cool colors and the danglies and stuff. Not sure why I am so obsessed but I think it makes me feel um "dressed"when I sling one around my neck, maybe more grown up and dare I say, looking like I might give a shit?

The Kid is working now, nothing permanent, but great nonetheless. I haven't quite finished up my resume and I know I should. There's so much attached to it: fear and change and rejection and having to face the future for reals. (You mean I can't just write on this blog and call it work? I can't just write agendas and plan meetings? Sweep the floor? Drive to soccer and offer occasional psych counsel and tutoring to my three kids?)

So I swathe these cloths around my neck -- which takes way more time than it should, and then there's the issue with the hair: up or down? down? no. up? christ -- and I avoid my resume and the future all together and head out to where? school or the grocery store or the book shop. Doesn't matter.

I am wrapped up. I am giving a shit.

See?

For Kevin's Girls

Kevin of Always Home and Uncool has asked me to post this as part of his effort to raise awareness in the blogosphere of juvenile myositis, a rare autoimmune disease his daughter was diagnosed with on this day seven years ago. The day also happens to be his wife's birthday, and so...

*********

Our pediatrician admitted it early on.

The rash on our 2-year-old daughter's cheeks, joints and legs was something he'd never seen before.

The next doctor wouldn't admit to not knowing.

He rattled off the names of several skins conditions -- none of them seemingly worth his time or bedside manner -- then quickly prescribed antibiotics and showed us the door.

The third doctor admitted she didn't know much.

The biopsy of the chunk of skin she had removed from our daughter's knee showed signs of an "allergic reaction" even though we had ruled out every allergy source -- obvious and otherwise -- that we could.

The fourth doctor had barely closed the door behind her when, looking at the limp blonde cherub in my lap, she admitted she had seen this before. At least one too many times before.

She brought in a gaggle of med students. She pointed out each of the physical symptoms in our daughter:

The rash across her face and temples resembling the silhouette of a butterfly.

The purple-brown spots and smears, called heliotrope, on her eyelids.

The reddish alligator-like skin, known as Gottron papules, covering the knuckles of her hands.

The onset of crippling muscle weakness in her legs and upper body.

She then had an assistant bring in a handful of pages photocopied from an old medical textbook. She handed them to my wife, whose birthday it happened to be that day.

This was her gift -- a diagnosis for her little girl.

That was seven years ago -- Oct. 2, 2002 -- the day our daughter was found to have juvenile dermatomyositis, one of a family of rare autoimmune diseases that can have debilitating and even fatal consequences when not treated quickly and effectively.

Our daughter's first year with the disease consisted of surgical procedures, intravenous infusions, staph infections, pulmonary treatments and worry. Her muscles were too weak for her to walk or swallow solid food for several months. When not in the hospital, she sat on our living room couch, propped up by pillows so she wouldn't tip over, as medicine or nourishment dripped from a bag into her body.

Our daughter, Thing 1, Megan, now age 9, remembers little of that today when she dances or sings or plays soccer. All that remain with her are scars, six to be exact, and the array of pills she takes twice a day to help keep the disease at bay.

What would have happened if it took us more than two months and four doctors before we lucked into someone who could piece all the symptoms together? I don't know.

I do know that the fourth doctor, the one who brought in others to see our daughter's condition so they could easily recognize it if they ever had the misfortune to be presented with it again, was a step toward making sure other parents also never have to find out.

That, too, is my purpose today.

It is also my birthday gift to my wife, My Love, Rhonda, for all you have done these past seven years to make others aware of juvenile myositis diseases and help find a cure for them once and for all.

To read more about children and families affected by juvenile myositis diseases, visit Cure JM Foundation at www.curejm.org.

To make a tax-deductible donation toward JM research, go to www.firstgiving.com/rhondaandkevinmckeever or www.curejm.com/team/donations.htm.

Things You Can Count On: One Weak Week

Things You Can Count On, Vehicles:

1) If the battery in your husband's car has died once, it will again.

2) It will die when you are driving it for the day.

3) It will die in the WalMart parking lot. With three hungry kids in the backseat.

4) Hungry kids who need to pee.

5) There are kind and helpful people everywhere. Clean bathrooms are less plentiful.

6) Do not bother contemplating why your husband has not replaced the battery sooner.

7) Just don't go there.

TYCCO, Chasing Ambulances:

1) Where there is thick, black, acrid smoke, there is fire.

2) You will feel your long-gone-ambulance-chasing grandmother act through you, literally take the wheel with her ghostly hands and gun the pedal toward the action.

3) Unlike your grandmother, who never once did, you will find a fire. A big one.

4) Firetrucks are big and streets in the Small Town are small. Your driving skills will be tested. Thankfully, the car's got a new battery, so that's a plus.

5) You will feel adrenaline and guilt and compassion and fear all at once and it will take you way too long to get past hoses and other gawkers and past smoke to finally get home.

6) You will vow to never, ever run after a siren again.

7) You will point to the heavens and say, "that one was for you, Ruthie."

TYCCO, School Comes With Many Things:

1) You think the worst they can bring home from school is math homework.

2) You'll be wrong.

3) It has legs and lives in scalps and rhymes with vice, as in: YOU NEED YOURS. Now.

TYCCO, Redemption Has Its Limits

1) Your fingers will peel from all the laundry and the washing and you will, at times, act like a pouty bitch.

2) Your children will be brave and patient.

3) Which will make you feel like ass, so you will bring home chocolate chip cookies in a tub and pizza dough.

4) You will allow everyone to pitch in and you will feel redeemed at their flour-y, happy faces and wrastle their bug-free hair.

7) You will forget to place their creation on the pizza stone first. Um. Uh.

8) You will scoop up raw dough and cheese with two spatulas and a dream.

TYCCO, Is This Week Done Yet?

1) You will burn the pizza and say -- it's a little black in parts but no worries!

3) Except for the raw middle.

4) The GFYO asks if we can save it as an "experiment."

5) You say yes and contemplate waffles for dinner.

6) You will contemplate next Monday. You will keep hope alive.