Girls Weekend

The GFYO and the Kid are 8 hours and two states away. They are getting all manly on an island near the Canadian border, with a bunch of other 5 year olds and their dads. I can picture it: fleece and rubber boots, fishing poles, cold beer and juice boxes, men (and boys) and nature and heaven! No chicks in sight. 

It's quieter here without them. The girls walked to soccer practice together and I stayed home cleaning playing video games on my phone. We ate spinach noodles with butter and salt and watched the Spelling Bee I'd taped. We decided we are not excellent spellers and that we prefer American Idol. I danced in the kitchen to a retro Pepsi commercial and they rolled their eyes but secretly loved it. When 9pm rolled in, I sent them to bed, to my bed, with a hug and a kiss and they went. Just went. No tucking in, no stories or monster checks. They kissed me and went to bed.

It's weird without the Kid and the GFYO here. We three fit on the couch better for one. We can get very quiet and into our popcorn and Spelling Bees and not here the sounds of make believe guns and the click clack of a lap top. We let the sink fill up and avoid our chores. We are three chicks with no dudes in sight.

Tomorrow, after their games are over, we might rent a movie and turn the lights down and eat pizza and sit in silent rapture in front of the screen. Or we might buy tickets and watch one in a theater and eat at the mall restaurant we love, put cloth napkins on our laps and do away with the crayons and the kid menus. We won't hold hands in the parking lot; we will be three girls out on the town.

Later, we will hope for good cell phone reception and the sound of their voices. We will clean up the kitchen and put away cleats and turn the lights on in the bedrooms.  We will realize how much we miss our Boys.

A Rite Of Embarrassing Passage

Bridget, who is nine and a feather weight even when holding 15 lb dumb bells and who also converted her tiny closet into an American Girl Doll condominium, had The Movie at school today.

Based on her descriptions of the clothes the girls wore, I am convinced this is the same "hygiene" Movie I saw in the late 70s. I don't remember, though, the theme song she sang for me --which was something like, 

"it's right around the corner/ 

right around the corner!/ 

oh lucky me!/ puuuuubbbbeertyyyy!"

There was some clapping thing involved too, which sounds menstrually cultish, kinda like a Mini Red Tent for 4th graders, but anyway, I don't remember there being a song to accompany the embarrassment and the horror of The Movie when I was a girl grade schooler. 

I do however remember my teacher telling me that if I inserted a tampon incorrectly (um, where? what? insert?), as had once happened to my teacher, I might spontaneously orgasm. That's right: spon.tain.ee.us.lee.oar.gaz.um. 

I had no idea what that loon was talking about, but it scared me. Honestly, it was a good ten years while later before I realized that what she was talking about wasn't actually a dangerous thing like suddenly catching fire or getting a tapeworm. And then? In 8th grade, when we had the Actual Sex Talk, our (male) teacher showed us a Real Live Diaphragm and I laughed out loud with such force I think my gum is still lodged in the wall of that science room at that school. I am kind of a prude about this stuff.

When Bridget came home with a sample pack of "sanitary napkins" (hrrumph) and a mini sized deodorant, I took a deep breath and tried to shake off my historical puritanism. I said oh-cool-nice-cute (the mini deodorant, as it turns out, is quite adorable) and I tried to act all laid back, tried to channel my inner cool mom. I kicked my feet up on the coffee table -- look! I'm non-chalant! -- while flipping through her paperwork and said, you know most of this stuff, right (because after all, we had already gone there, in the car once, on the way home from soccer, like Oprah advised), but did you learn anything? 

Before I could finish, she said YESSSS! YESSSS I did, and I thought: crap, here it comes. 

Mom, she said, sweat glands look like giant pink tongues and it's deeesgusting and that deodorant smells like Tums!

And she, my brilliant girl, was right yet again: that adorable deodorant did kind of smell like Tums.

She stashed her semi-grown up goody bag in her drawer upstairs, safe for years there until she needs it, and I waited downstairs, aging a little bit more than I do on typical days, waiting for her to come back to me.

Soft Ball

There is a soft ball between me and the Kid.

I don't ask outright what's going on with him. I don't even sling low rising pitches his way to see if he'll strike.

He is an athlete: he loves nets and goals. He likes scoreboards and winning and pats on the back and trophies and I do too. 

But lately, I just serve up puff balls.

(I am a supportive wife after all.)

Trouble is, he knows my pitches and that I generally strike every time. 

Sometimes -- gasp -- I throw the game.

I Don't Do Baby Talk

I babysat for the neighbor baby. He is 18 months old and luscious. He is blue eyed and Kewpie doll and he can be delivered to my house without fear. He knows me because I spoke to him before he was born and because well, we are neighbors.

That sweet little blue eyed baby that helps me to get over having any more of my own: he was totally spazzy last night. I gave him some baby tid bit food and he started waving his hands at me like a crazy 18 month old baby.

In an orderly way, he waved and shook his hands. I was pretty sure he wasn't having a seizure but I had no idea why he was all up in my face with his tiny fingers. He stomped his feet. Something was wrong. 

I gave him my Iphone because he loves it and he took it but still, he was still making the freaky hand gestures. 

Is this kid throwing gang signs at me, I thought. His parents seem very nice so that would be a surprise. Then again: babies are impressionable and who knows what happens behind closed doors.

Rory came home from soccer. She ran to him the way she always does to the GFYO and this little baby (she will make a great mom someday) and she turned to me, so disappointed in me, as that baby she loves did that thing with his hands, and she translated,

"Mommy, he wants more! He's telling you with his hands: he wants more!"

Oh. Ooops.

He kissed me when his parents came to get him. I speak that language at least.

Psycho or Boy?

I am starting to worry about the GFYO. 

Right now he is on the trampoline, and he is jumping on it -- well, at least it looks that way. Wanna know what he's really doing? He's really engaged in his own brand of mortal combat, an epic battle he's been battling for what? three months. Maybe more. 

He hurls himself to the trampoline, his face twisted in pain and the agony of his own defeat: he's been felled again by the invisible (to me at least) hand of some invisible (to me at least) foe. He tries to haul himself up, to make one more heroic rally, but the fates will not have it. He's done for. 

Sometimes he is down long enough for me to think he might in fact, actually, be dead. I count it out to be sure: one one thousand two two thousand and usually by the time I get to five or maybe seven one thousand, he does a slow and creaky yet oddly graceful rise to life. Sometimes he's revived almost instantly (a secret salve perhaps?) (a magic potion?) (a change of plans?), but nearly every time, though weak at first and hand clutching his heart, he starts his Frankensteinish walk back into battle and then POW KAPOW JISH THWOP YEOOOWWW and game on, muthas. Game on.

He does this on the trampoline, on the couch, throughout the kitchen, in the bath, on the potty, in the car, while getting ready for bed, while getting ready to eat, while he's supposed to be cleaning up his toys, when he thinks no one's looking and when he forgets any one's around. He fights these invisible (at least to me) bad guys or whatever they might be...ALL THE TIME.  If the soundtrack to my life is whatever good song I last heard, his is his own voice making animated effects to the battles he imagines.

I grew up in a house of girls. I don't think I said the word penis until I was 28. The GFYO says mama i lovvvveeee you and mama sweet sweet mama and then he kicks the knees out of some villain I can't see.  Normal? 

To Leave Here

It keeps dawning on me lately that I have lived in this house longer than any house I have ever lived in before. When the GFYO turned five, I realized that my Youngest was now older than my Oldest was when he was born. This relentless house realization feels the same: transformative. As if it makes me something different literally.

A decade plus inside these old and crooked walls, on this hilly and busy street, in this cranky, swanky village built on rocky ledge, that must do something to a person, shouldn't it? To a person who also, by the way, no longer has any toddlers in her dwelling place? That makes her something kind of newish, no?

Maybe. Maybe it just makes me older, with plenty of old paint cans and useless pieces of furniture in the basement which is now empty of strollers and exersaucers and giant plastic reminders of how things "used to be." Maybe the facts and figures of a life can change, but the person living the life? Maybe that's static. Maybe I am still the brave and ambitious risk-taker I was before I became this settled-down, post picket fence me. 

I'm kind of banking on that actually, because the reality that me and The Kid and the Little Pickets might unsettle from this spot is a real one. He needs a job, a career-making one really, and the world is wide (and the Boston market is bad) and hey, let's go. I'm game! I'm a risk-taker (remember?) and as long as we have wifi, let's get in the proverbial van, dude! With the kids. 

Oh, who need to go to school. And be fed and housed and play soccer and maybe hockey and make friends and wait, wait one minute...

So I squeeze out all the information from the cable hooked to my computer so I can research every public school system pretty much every place he mentions as a possibility. I look at frames and frames of houses I will never see in real life and maps and stats of towns and cities I have never been before. I have moved us into a house on an island off of Washington, into a gated development in Austin, into a tree-less mcmansion in the South, in row houses without yards but Oprah nearby, into the tiniest sweet thing we could afford in the suburbs of New York and San Francisco. 

In my mind, or online, I am relentlessly brave and on the road. In reality, I drive down twisted streets at 7pm, on the way to the final PTO meeting of the year, and the sun is like Hollywood lighting: highlighting the peeks of gabled homes and making them glisten and golden. The ocean is calm and greenishly gray and filling with boats and I know if not the names, the faces of every one I see. And I think for a minute, like a flash it just comes, what will it be like to leave here? 

A Pathetic Yet Sweet Story About Mothers

On Saturday night, we hauled ass to NH for a best friend's 40th. She is the most divine of women and not just because she had both of her babies on the same day, which this year happened to be Mother's Day, but because she is just simply divine. 

Me and the Kid had been outside all day -- me digging in the dirt and weeding with my Mom, who was visiting, and me and The Kid coaching in between (his team is 3-0 and no shots on goal) (my team is... not), and also, there was the dreaded Carnival in town. It's a beach-side carnival but still a toothless drainage of money and self-respect. (The last time I went,  I ended up digging out change from my car seats so I could play another round of that shoot the frog on the lilly pad game. Note to self: NEVER go to Vegas.)

So anyway, the party was like all 40th birthday parties: orderly, mature, a sophisticated event in which all of the participants decide to drink too much, fall backward over coolers, and generally act like they are NOT 40. You want pictures? Go see Carolyn. We weren't at the same party, duh, but we could have been. Minus the wigs and the fake smokes: it's the same party.

We spent the night in NH with my divine 40 year old friend (because remember? mom visiting...) (and also, um, duh: beers) so we hustled home at 10:30 the next day early to honor thy mother and also, to get coffee and more coffee and egg McMuffins. We came home to an empty house: they were at the beach the note said and so I figured they were at the Carnival (again). I felt bad for my mom, but I had time to wash the mascara and eyeliner off my cheeks. 

My kids came home with rocks. And my girls took those rocks they got from the beach and dish towels they found under the sink and they stuck them in the nuker to heat. They dragged out rusty beach chairs for me and my mom. They made a spa for me -- and for my mom too.

When we were not being scalded by dirty beach stones and nasty extremely hot dish towels, we were slathered in cream on our hands and feet on over-grown grass in my backyard: a spa day.

In the early sun of spring, when my little kids pamper me and my mom, there is no such thing as a hangover or regret.  On the thick grass, with my feet in a pasta pot filled with luke-warm water and god knows what, I get to sit on a beach chair next to my mother, her own feet soaking in a concoction made from her daughter's daughter and I think: 

I'm pretty sure I can't do better for her. I am pretty sure this is the tops for us both.

Blog and Me Fight The Good Fight

Blog stares at me in really judgmental ways. 

Blog whispers to its friends and it sounds something like this: she says she's a teller and a writer but look at her! She types emails and what else? Nothing! That's what. NOTHING!

I stare at Blog with an equally disrespectful glare. I snarl my pissiness when I think Blog isn't looking and I say something like this: The fuck? Such a bitch, so needy...

Blog hears me and so, we wrestle. 

Not like really wrestle, since Blog has very very short arms (almost none really). So we go at it the way most people do, over a six pack and some smokes. Blog sputters and chokes on a drag and I call Blog a loser and Blog stubs the butt out and says something about the pot and the kettle and though I want to kick Blog's teeth in: I don't. Though I wish to drown Blog in the toilet, what with the no arms (and actually no legs either): I don't. 

We are at an impasse and I think I have fallen out of love with Blog.

Blog shakes its head, a woeful, sad kind of shake. Blog spits a peanut shell on the ground and says what do you want from me? and I say, ohmygod, wait, what? 

Crap. Blog has feelings. Blog feels bad. Blog says these really kinda nice things about being here JUST FOR ME and -- well? well, I feel all kinds of guilty and all kinds of bitchy right then and Blog takes my hands, grips them each, looks me straight in my eyeballs, and lays the final blow.

Blog says: I am nothing without you.

I take a swig. I kick the peanut shell with my foot. I kick it again, because that seems easier than looking at Blog, poor sad Blog, and I contemplate just climbing out the window in the bathroom and disappearing into the foggy, humid sorta spring night. 

I am fight or flight all the time. When it went from 9 to 10cms with each kid, I was looking at exits, scoping a way out.  I honestly thought I could ram through the fire door and run through the parking lot in my hospital mumu and book down the blocks and run and run and run and leave all the pain behind. 

I kick the peanut shell one last time. I kick the shit out of the shell and send it flying through the space. 

There are some things you can't ever run away from: the baby being born, the baby growing up, you growing up, and whatever else in life you are meant to do.  Sometimes it's easy and if you're lucky, everything (literally) slides into place. Sometimes the things you cannot run away from nag like a fly at your ear, a buzzing you can't drown out and which distracts you. It's annoying and you can hate it, but the buzz is the hint to your very own secret path to happiness. 

Blog, I say, and I look straight at Blog, right at it, and I say, Blog, we can do this.