Open Letter to Carmela Soprano, My Girl

I’ve saved all your Christmas Cards, Carm -- loved the one you sent of AJ with the goth face and mistletoe (he was such a baby then), and who knew Tony liked a sweater with a reindeer embroidered on, with a bell? (That photo almost made me pee my pants!)

It was always a joy to read your long letters, Carm, the ones stuffed inside the envelope, with all the news of the Family; you have an excellent use of language – and God, you're good with clip-art too. Good luck with your adventures in contracting and house flipping! You go, girl! And if I ever need a lawyer, even though, as you know, I am not Italian, I will be sure to call Meadow. You Soprano women… You kill me.

You must be so proud of what you have accomplished. Troubles aside – oh those long weepy phone calls we shared (God love the Pinot Grig, right?) – I hope you can see, can you see now, how everything worked out?

If you taught me anything, it is that marriage is a long road – what did you say? It's a horse-driven carriage we ride on over bumps howling with joy sometimes but mostly, it’s just shit we smell in passing. You reminded me – especially during those long dreary days you spent with Ton at the hospital – to keep on keeping on. You were – you are! – so brave, Carm, so brave!

I have especially enjoyed how our friendship had little to do with our kids. Mine are still so little (just wait, you always say, just wait) and yours seem all grown up now (oh don’t cry, you lush!). But going through all that stuff with you with the kids? It has given me great fodder for the future. Like with Fin: I loved that kid -- I know, I know, it's the preppy in me -- but I would have just died had that been me (as the Mom) when it didn't work out for Med. God knows we want different things for our kids, but still he was cute! And sensitive! And Med seemed so inspired by him.

I'll never forget what you said when it finally ended: "A mother knows what is best for her daughter." I guess you were right; God, I hope you're right. (I still love Fin though -- hahhahahaha!)

Our friendship was never about our husbands either. Waste management (peeyooooo!) and advertising? Ton and That Man don’t have much in common, and I loved how it never mattered. That being said, they can both shoot off at the mouth like the best of them, right? Ha Ha! (Truth be told, I wonder how mine would be with a little therapy? How’s that going for Tony, by the way?)

Anyhoo, I am not sure where you are going – I get it, I get it, you need some space, especially with that big shake up for Tony at work, and the empty nest thing (kinda – that AJ! I’m praying for him! And by the by, the new car? Oh no you didn’t!). Still, I want you to know, before we lose touch forever, what you have meant to me.

It’s hard to put it into words really Carm, but I feel like I know you better than anyone. You are a real inspiration: mom, career woman, and long-suffering wife to a Powerful Man. It’s been pretty obvious from the beginning of our relationship that your problems have surpassed my own – damn girl, you have more funeral outfits than any one woman should have! (I hope you don’t take that the wrong way....) Besides the age difference of our kids and the hubbies’ jobs, and all the money you have (did I just say that? out loud?), I still felt like we always had so much in common. You felt the same right? I know you did. It kind of goes without saying, right friend? Right?

I am thinking, just a suggestion, and Lord knows you have a lot going on, but maybe you should sign up with the Internet and get one of those Websites and write down all the stuff you’re thinking about and care about and want to gripe about? I would read it; I swear I would, like every day.

It’s just a thought.

Until then, thanks again for the recipes (you are so, so thoughtful) and thanks for just, you know, being there.

It's War

We are about to engage in a tussle, my neighborhood gals and me. We are taking on the big guns in the small town to raise a ruckus for positive change. We are activists all, ready to rally ‘round a good and decent cause, to stand together in protest of a wrong. We have a letter of petition; we have a plan, a committee, and a mission statement.

We want Stop Signs. (Maybe speed bumps, but stop signs --much much better.)

Lest you think I am being slightly, somewhat, perhaps a little ironic or shall I say, cheeky, I am, and also I am not.

Stop signs are good! Slowing the speeding cars on this street that is overflowing with kids (who like to play outside, who’d a thunk) is good! Getting flipped off by those in said speeding cars is bad! Very bad, and we are coming for you.

Give me Stop Signs!

The cheekiness lingers, I know. It comes from the same part of me that smiles when I am carded. It comes from the part that still does not believe I pay a mortgage. Or bills. Or have a Will. (I will die you say? With something to leave behind?) It comes from the part of me that still chuckles a little at titles hurled at me like Mrs., like M’aam, like Mom.

This is not the protest of my youth. That was the early 90s and the first Gulf War and, um, grapes and laborers, but this is now. This is Stop Signs, motherfucker, and I want some.

I do my best to meditate on the Big World problems. I actively engage in all elections, contribute money to Veterans causes, and argue effectively with my NeoCon husband my opinions and beliefs. I hang an American flag (because I still believe in this place) and remind people to oppose the war and not the warrior. I am encouraged and delighted and surprised even that our next president might be a woman, or a black man. I ordered a bumper sticker, and when the time comes, I’ll stand on a street corner with a sign.

But I am not, like many of us, walking on Washington in protest. Truth be told, I am not affected daily by the war (though I bawled my eyes out at the funeral procession for a fallen father and son from our town, to which I hauled my kids, all under five at the time, because it was important) and I doubt you are either. Most of you. The Big World problems exist around my dinner table, but sadly, ashamedly, I have not, as of yet, taken it to the streets.

For now, it’s Stop Signs. On my street. Which will become I hope, a kindler, gentler, safer kind of street.

Think globally, act locally.

They're Wicked Smaht, My Kids

R to B: I watched a movie in art today.
B: What was it about?
R: Um. Art.
B: Oh yeah? Mozart?
R: Yep.
B: I loved that one.

Women In Art

Have yet to see the real genius in YouTube but this comes ridiculously close.

Oprah/Cormac

Cormac McCarthy was on Oprah today. Somewhere my father is testing the temperatures of hell.

After They Come Home

Why does this shock me every time?

Why does it it amaze me in fact that within ten minutes of all three coming home, after seven hours STRAIGHT of all three being gone (the miracle of the post-pre-school playdate), in which I was so wonderfully accomplished, polite and cheerful, crossing off the items on my list with an upward, gleeful brushstroke, folding all their tiny clothes with love and ahhh, smells so sweet -- why does it amaze me that it is not only the silence of my house that evaporates (the kind of silence that I hate to shatter even with the sound of my own stinking voice), but also out the window goes any idea of order, of clean, of me being the woman I just was, NICE and SWEET and KIND and CALM.

But there I am in some kind of slo-mo dizziness each time they re-emerge from their lives without me, there I am in the middle of countless VERY IMPORTANT school papers (ie: recyclables) and gooey tops of fuschia yogurts, water gun damage dripping from the seat I just sat in, shouting the things I wouldn't have dreamed of shouting ten minutes before: "Speak one at time!" "You will know I am ready to talk to you when I look at you and am not shaking my hand in your face!" "No you can not do that -- probably ever," "Does anybody pay attention to anybody else in this house? I said never!" "Put it down; it's a knife!" "FLUSH THE DAMN TOILET!"

There I am, hands on hips, hands on forehead, hands making that shoo-shoo sign which is shorthand for leave me the hell alone for two seconds, in my twilight zone episode of motherhood, experiencing this which I have experienced so many times before as if I were experiencing it all for the first freaking time. Was the house really clean? Quiet? Was I ever nice to anyone ever? Was it all just a... a... dream?

Winning

We won our first game today and I am way too happy about that than I should be.

Even though I cheer for the other team at a good goal or a good save, I still wanted mine to win. But those girls, a hodegpdoge of kids, they listened to me, and when I told each one that they had done something good, they believed me. I believed me: they were awesome. I love soccer. I love how I get to be when I teach it.

Soccer is a complicated game built for a player with skills of all kinds: the physical, but the mental mostly. It is a game of precision and control, but also a game that anyone can play. I was once moved to tears by this description by Sean Wilsey of World Cup soccer, which I paraphrase and edit here (and for which I hope not to be sued):

"Soccer's universality is its simplicity—the fact that the game can be played anywhere with anything. Urban children kick the can on concrete and rural kids kick a rag wrapped around a rag wrapped around a rag, barefoot, on dirt. Soccer is something to believe in now, perhaps empty at its core, but not a stand-in for anything else.

What makes the World Cup most beautiful is the world, all of us together. The joy of being one of the billion or more people watching 32 countries abide by 17 rules fills me with the conviction, perhaps ignorant, but like many ignorant convictions, fiercely held, that soccer can unite us all."

What an amazing thing to believe, in our wartime especially, that a game can be bigger than its players or the rules. When I read this again, in sharing it here, I was newly inspired: for soccer (obviously), for the kids that play it all over the world, and also for my own simple desire for peace.

Kick the ball, spread out into the places no one is, find a player to pass to, help each other, defend and offend in equal parts, no one scores a goal alone.

Politics, schmolitics. This is what it means to be a soccer mom.

Then The Question

My friend Sarah, her husband, and then two girls made a very conscious decision to leave their suburb and opt instead for a life outside the outside. The goal was to live a simpler life, a meaningful life for them. They found a house in a small town in which they knew no one, grew some vegetables, clipped their budget, and in time had a son in that home with a midwife present. (She, a nurse, chose to forgo the conventional birth, the medical birth, and wrote about the experience so beautifully to me that I convinced her to publish it -- and she did!).

Sarah asks a lot of questions of herself, and I wish I could be as thoughtful as her. Her Post Picket Fence -- it's as complicated as mine, not as idyllic as she hoped or wished but maybe nothing ever is really, not even the things one chooses deliberately. But she went there; she goes there every day, totally committed literally and figuratively. I am honored to know her.

For Sarah, a recent question in a writing class was this: What will your life look like in 20 years?

"In 20 years I will be 57. I am so unclear as to what my life will be like then. I’m scared scared scared to think about it. I know and hope that the constant will be my husband. For now, we spend all of our time building our home – our homestead – planting sapling heirloom apple trees and peach trees and blueberries; clearing poison ivy and choosing some significant, meaningful name for our place.

I so fear that all of this will be for naught – that we’re doing it for the wrong reasons – huh? What reasons? Resale value? To impress the neighbors? To give our children a vision of simplicity and a taste of our little vision of utopia? To have a place we’d survive in if we truly needed to be self-sufficient? A place that represents purity and hard work and love and acceptance?

I cry when I think of what the “playroom” might evolve into. What will sit on its shelves? Will we break down and put in a TV to lure the kids back home?

In 20 years I want to be an expert – a gracious one so that I won’t feel nervous and self-critical all the time. I want to be active, interested, in LOVE with my life and my Loves and the World. I want the world to change and meet me halfway so I won’t feel so frustrated and like throwing my hands up in the air and wondering if anything is worth it. I want to be living, eating those apples, watching my children become adults, and holding the hand of my Love, traveling down the path we can hopefully choose together."

Where will I be in 20 years, or you? I'll get back to you about that, but for now, what I do know is that I am the luckiest girl alive to have the friends that I do.