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?