Magic, Not Magic

This is magic:

Pots of tinted goo applied by paintbrush.

Seeing an old and beloved friend in the hair-do chair right there.

Being told to interrupt. "You're gonna have to," she said.

Counting down seconds so fast, you barely notice that you're "on."

Seeing your wrapped up sister and her uber-cool daughter dance through the studio door like Christmas morning.

This is NOT magic:

Do you remember Carolyn Online's Bubba?

Bubba fixed a temporary problem with a permanent one. Bubba is dead.

I read all that Carolyn wrote about him. Her words were funny and sort of snarky for sure, but every little word she wrote was tinged with a bit of curious awe. It was obvious to me, even from the start, from a distance, that there was a part of Carolyn that adored him: his brashness, his willingness to show up with a dead deer at Thanksgiving in Buckhead, his devotion to his passion, his sport, his Bubba-ness, and his love for his son.

He loved his son.

Carolyn always admired him most for that.

The Today Show thing came out of the blue, as did Carolyn's horrible news -- and pretty much at the same time. We have typically been on the same path, but I figured our next "coincidence" would be buying tickets to see "The Help." It did not happen this way this time.

This is the thing about magic: it is tricky and fickle.

It does not cotton nor cooperate. It does as it will -- like luck, like God maybe -- and the best we can do is salute it when it swings by. Magic appears in our unusual days, like the one I had today (stars! makeup! cameras! crazy!), but sometimes it appears when we least expect it, when we're washing the dishes, or folding the laundry, or planning the car pool, or when we see a flash of camouflage say, or read a recipe for venison.

Magic will come to Carolyn and her family: I know it.

If not magic now, some sweet breath of peace until then.

LOVE YOU CAROLYN and scott and tempel and parker and s and J. Punch.

Watch Me!

This first appeared here. And lately it's been over here, thanks to the lovely Heather of the Everyday Ordinary and my girl, Whiskey in her Sippy Cup, and all the other amazing people at Story Bleed Magazine.

Tomorrow, I'll be drinking sitting down with Kathie Lee and Hoda to talk about my silly life with kids and also the book, Torn. Pretty crazy and also cool.

Anyhoo, this post seemed amazingly apropos:

Kids at a pool: it's the epitome of fantastic wretchedness.

They swim and dunk and dive and flop unattended and fully entertained and working up to an excellent exhaustion. The sunscreen melts off the minute it's applied, but their bodies are submerged, so: only shoulders get burnt, maybe noses. They paddle and flop and hunt quarters at depths taller than they are. They coordinate games named "Baby Dolphins." They get drenched and pickled and giddy all at once.

But the goggles are too tight or too loose or worse than her brother's. The towel is too soggy but worthy of a battle, a whippingatyou, smackingatyou battle. The sister's belly flop is half-assed and "mine will be better and hurt more than hers" and WATCH ME WATCH ME WATCH ME will echo across the chlorine, over the deck chairs, past my magazine, and straight into my face. Straight into my face over and over and over: WATCH MEEEEEEE!

I explain that I have but two eyes and even if one goes one way and the other another, I still cannot see Three Short Drunk People do Amazing Short Drunk People Tricks in the pool. So I say -- "you first" and "your turn now" and "hold on! hold up! do it again: I am watching."

Watching what? Nothing really. A kid holding her breath for as long as little lungs can, a wobbly hand-stand where points are counted for pointed toes, a boy and his butt-crack attempting a cannon ball. Watch me! they shout.

What they mean to say is: See me! SEE. ME.

I struggle to get through a page of the New York Post, which is pathetically impossible. I am commanded to WATCH ME every four to seven seconds but I realize something as I do as told, as I bear witness to nothing and everything: little changes with age. That impulse to be seen? It clings to the body like salt water or chemicals. It holds on past childhood.

New jeans, fresh paint, shiny car, a sleek tattoo: we dive in, we jack-knife, we swim the fastest, we make waves, we sink to the bottom, we do a dead mans float, we make up games and break the rules, we hunt for money at some depth deeper than we should, we float and drift to the stairs.

See Me! we say. We say it sometimes without speaking. We say it to people we love and to strangers and to passers-by. We are all sometimes just kids at a pool, fantastically wretched and soaked and half-naked.

Watch me.

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 right about the same time Ayelet Waldman declared herself a "Bad Mother." 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.

PICKET RETURNS

Where should I begin?

The psychoanalysis of kids with their candy?
The book I was just in? And that people pissed on at this place.

(Was here on the radio, PS)

Should I begin with the fact that I have seen unlimited angst in the "world" we made online?

Or that the street of Ms Picket is similarly troubled?
Or that sometimes you need to run away?
Or how pissed I am that the Tooth Fairy does not issue a "code of behavior"?

Santa, too. Mad at them both.

Or should I spend time writing about how I've spent too much time being angry -- about.... you name it.

Whatever.

I started this experiment to write.

I realize that my need to experiment hasn't changed.

Don't tell me where I should begin.

Just tell me I should.

While I Go Gas Up The Truck...

I've written this post about a thousand times. Well, maybe ten.

In my head, this Dear John letter is pure poetry, but every time I try to put it to paper, it never sounds the way I want it to sound. It never says all the things I think it should. Plus, when it comes to quitting: I'm sort of notorious for changing my mind.

(It might be useful to play the video below... Go ahead: press play. I'll wait.)

My mind is made up now...

When this idea started, kicked off by the Kid, turned to reality by me, I never imagined anyone beyond he and maybe two friends would read it. In all honesty, I doubted even he would. Which he didn't, at least regularly: but that's okay.

Turns out, I loved the anonymity of type-type-typing into what I thought was an abyss. Turns out that abyss was ironically crammed with people like me. All of us, alone, waiting for the echo of our words and being surprised by the voices that bounced back -- voices which were not our own, but something different, someone different, someone...

This blog saved me in measurements only a small few will understand.

That small few might be large now, but for me... It meant a small circle of random women and men who collided at one time in one perfect space. Their stories, my stories: they became a mix that made for a perfect concoction in that one long, awesome moment. Their words, these people got me to go deeper inside my head and in equal parts, let me get outside of my head...

I am so grateful!

Me and Carolyn made our book.

In May, I'll be featured in another one, Torn. (I hope you'll read it.)

My kids are becoming old enough to have experiences that aren't mine. I can't write about them in good faith anymore -- it seems uncouth and uncool. That being said, I am grateful for every inappropriate word I wrote here about them, and us, and our lives: I think I might like those words more than any of the pictures I took.

Right now, I want to write fiction and maybe, at last, the book I swore to the Kid and everyone else I would write. This does not mean that I'll stop telling my truth. I just want to start telling it differently.

I hope you keep telling your stories. I hope you keep speaking your truth...

Thank you for hearing mine. Thank you so, so much.

I've loved every bit of this.

Goodbye from PostPicketFence and the Three Short Drunk People and the Kid too....

"Pack the old love letters up...

We will read them when we forgot why we left here."

Bad Cop Confessions

There is no singular story behind feeling badly, because when you become a mother, you sign up (unknowingly) for a lifetime of feeling like shit. Birth a kid or get one another way: your guilt ramps up no matter how you conceive, and also, the minute you do.

Currently, my three Drunk Kids want nothing to do with me.

Sometimes, I even think they hate me.

I am definitely the bad cop.

I have no idea how, or desire, to change that.

The Kid is the good cop.

We can talk circles and squares around it, but the truth is that I'm better at the bad cop. I have more patience to be mean. He's more willing to go Chuck E Cheese: he wants to give them what they want.

I do too -- just not all.the.time.

We weigh our ways and wishes and balance them between our kids. It works.

Mostly.

Sometimes I get tired of my badcop-ness. Sometimes I want to let someone else be the heavy. I want to be the "fun" parent and not the mean one who is around to make homework happen or chores checked off.

On the weekends, for example, I'd like to be the one who monitors bowling or soccer or playground fun. I'd like to come home to a house ready for the week ahead -- laundry done and delivered, dust sent and gone, toilets scrubbed, beds made, dinner on the table.

I'd like to be the good cop.

Freewheelin: Honoring Suze Rotolo

This image pretty much sums up my romantic teenage years. I think I tried to recreate this album cover many times. I should have put myself in Bob's place, but the truth is, I always wanted to be Suze...

Suze Rotolo (the woman on the album cover) died this week. I have no idea what became of her life after her "life" with Dylan. She was always frozen for me there: in love, loved, wanted, happy.

He wrote songs about her and spoke about her influence in those early years: she was his muse for a while: "Don't Think Twice.."and "Boots of Spanish Leather." She introduced him to the politics he would later write but never care much about. She welcomed him into her world, which inspired the beginning of his best work.

They broke up.

She moved on.

She never spoke of him to the press and that made me love her even more.

Suze Rotolo will always be my example of feminine inspiration: she was beautiful and smart and way more than a clinging girl on an album cover. I adored her, but more importantly, without her, there wouldn't be as much amazing music in the world.

Thanks Suze. You mattered.

Here's the song you made happen.

I know somewhere Bob is humming it too.

Sleep tight.

You wasted nothing.

Letter to Carolyn

I am back in the land of an internet connection that does not run on pig grease or whatever shit they use out there where my mom lives. I brought all the Drunkards back with me, though the plan had been to leave two (Ro getting braces tomorrow; SamtheDog going to the Vet) and The Kid would swing out Friday for the weekend and more skiing.

But guess who got paged to the Ski Patrol yesterday afternoon while all three of her kids were in afternoon ski camp?

Imagine me running (running!!) in ski boots with a mushroom shaped blue helmet on her head toward the “ski patrol” which, as luck would have it, looks just like every other run down shed on that mountain, so naturally most of my running was in crazy, wobbly circles. By the time I reached the shack, I was in a full on dripping-sweat and in dire need of oxygen. Bridget on the other hand was splinted and slinged and weepy. Haven’t gotten x-rays yet but I'm thinking it's more likely a sprain. Yay snowboarding!

Also, I had a dream where I had a miniature baby that I carried around in a zip loc bag. You (CarolynOnline) kissed the baby’s teeny head and told me to zip it up in the inside pocket of my bag so we could get into some swinging club where some hot dude (who was maybe on the run -- FROM JAIL) was waiting for us. I think we were on a Nancy Drew-type mission. When we got inside, we had to weave past all these long flowing curtains (I think I saw this on a CSI Miami episode) and when we came out on the other side, it looked like the lobby at Blogher.

I said, Hell no, and you said, follow me.

We pushed our way through people and came out on the other side right in front of this giant, giant purple pool, all lit up, really beautiful and elegant, and with all our clothes on, and with my bag with the mini baby inside, we took a running leap and jumped in. We were laughing our asses off, like pee in the pants kind of laughing. (Somehow I knew that the baby was fine. No worries about the baby.)

Then the hot dude who was from Pennsylvania (I memorized his address) told us we needed to scram because the cops were coming.

I woke up.

This is the first page I googled with the address from my dream.

Turns out? Even the internets love a good story.

PS: Me and the Kid rocked DC, including the Avett Brothers at Constitution Hall. They played this song, which is my favorite.