ALARMS

Remember alarms?
Remember the coffee routine before the day started?
Remember making school lunch or planning a dinner that was "regular'?

I miss getting the automated call from the High School telling me my kid was a few minutes late.
I miss picking him up at school and talking/not talking in the way you do with a teenage boy.

I miss yelling at him to get up! I miss being bossy in that way that seemed meaningful.
I miss knowing that he wouldn't sleep all weekend because he had basketball.
It stinks that it's my job to create some normal in this abnormal world.

I'm the mean one: I'm the "tardy" call.
I'm his new badass, his new mean teacher, his tough couch.
Now, I am his crappy new routine.

The girls have settled in easier than him: home-college is not so bad.

He? He misses everything so fundamentally and physically, I can feel it in the way he smiles and jumps around and goofs off and then seems so sad.  He is sixteen and stuck inside.

Tonight, he said to his sister, "I think God doesn't want me to be a Varsity athlete."

This was interesting to me because the GFYO wasn't raised with religion.
This was interesting because even for the GFYO the world feels wrong.

Remember alarms?
I think I have to blare some everyday: WAKE UP!
Let's hit the hoop! Let's study music for ten minutes!
Let's make some waffles and talk about history!

Maybe I can remind him that when the alarms go off, the world will be okay or okayish?

PIN BALL WIZARD

Let's be honest up front: I have weaved in and out of looking for a "job" for two legit reasons.

1) After a "career" in the music biz, some publicity self employment, three kids, badass volunteer work, a blog (omg) (is that even a word used anymore?), some minimal success writing for actual money, and a TV Show for kids (back to that volunteer thing).... my resume isn't exactly hopping. And no, like everyone, I can't do Excel.

2) Also, every step out seems like.. well, I'm right back in. "I left my backpack with all my gear -- and I need it for a game" two hours away, or "do I have a social security card and this office is scary and I want to cry" or "is it normal for my finger to swell up after I cut it with a knife?" or "MOOOMMMMMM! Practice is right now and you have to take me!"

So that. All of that.

I guess I can push that worry and self-doubt aside right now, because I doubt the job market is waiting for me. What is waiting for me? Today? Like all the other days, but even more now: food, dinners, laundry. A smiling face. A sense of normal.  I think that might be the reality for many of you, or... sorta, or in some kinda way.

I bat one ball away. Ding!
I bat another. Ding!

One slips through. The lights explode! The game goes nuts!
You got one more ball. Ignore the lights....
Focus. Do better this time...

If I am right, I can make sure all is well -- him, them, her, she, they, everyone.
Pull it back, take a breath and SHOOT...

There is no paddle I can operate fast enough or with wizardly skills to keep these balls at bay!
The game was hard enough to begin with.

Pacman?

B

(You can read back and see what I wrote about Her then...)

She is who I saw back when she was little.
Not a lot has changed: she is vulnerable but also so brave and strong.
She takes too much of me, all of us, on her shoulders.

She is resilient, despite me.

We sat on the bus together traveling through Italy with her soccer team. We saw so many beautiful things and laughed so many times. We also whined, because it was weird and busy and like a race. When we returned, she was cut from the team. She had to pack up and come home. Soccer -- her identity -- done.

She seemed destroyed, and she was: drunken face plant on her day back to school.

Since then, she did what she always does: fixed it, changed it.
No soccer? How about the ski team? Cool. Tour guide, yes!

Also, she's in love.

This kid, my guide, my North Star...

THIS IS HOW IT IS

If you want to read some lame boring quarantine crap with ideas and strategies and Pintersty ideas that mostly make a girl feel like shit, google on. This isn't that.

We are the people who have run out of toilet paper. We are the people who have yelled at each other more often than we have played all those games you might have seen people playing. We are the people who wonder what the limit is for "together time"?

A happy family is such a wonky model. Shake it off!

I admire the stories of couples and families enjoying this self-isolation, but I am slightly suspect.
I doubt any Monopoly session could fix what is essentially the process of becoming an adult.
No amount of board games will fix what these kids are losing.

The GSYO (sixteen now) needs his friends and school to do what we all have done, what we all did: navigate a path to adulthood out there in the world. B and R are similarly stunted.

I don't have the words to make this better and I don't have a plan.
There are not words that I can write to fix it.

When your heart breaks, where do you hold the pieces?

So Anyway 2

How do you say hello again to an old lover?
Do you whisper it, do you slap a noisy kiss on the cheek?
Do you sheepishly wander around the perimeter and hope you are seen?

None of these seems like a good idea. No idea seems good.
So anyway...

The wind is howling outside a new fence, less picket than the old one, but still, here we are. Me and the Kid, and the Three Drunk People, who actually have been drunk (they are 20, 18 and 16 -- don't judge), because yep, that happens. New house, same small town, same Kid, same me. Sort of.

So what's up?
Oh and me? I did some writing work for money. I started a community TV show for kids. I got gray. I tried Botox. I once went to a writing workshop but I still haven't finished that book I meant/mean to write.

Oh, and the Three: they are shockingly well, despite me. Except for the fact that their worlds have exploded in the last month, except for the fact that these three happy kids -- two one foot out -- are now forced to have both feet inside.

So yeah, I mean it's fine.

SO ANYWAY, I'm writing here again because the truth is that the tap tap tap on the key board makes me happy.  And I stopped because I felt I should protect them as they got older...

I have been in more embarrassing snap chat/tik tok/insta stories, that, well....

Maybe it's alright that I start writing again?

Better to Dance

Death should not look like this. It should be solemn and serious. It should be awkwardly hugging and deep and sad: it should not look like the way we made it.

Death, two deaths actually... this family took the word "celebration of lives" to heart. We took that celebration and decided to mean it, to live it, to have it for sure. My brother in law -- his parents died, both of them and just three days apart, and it should have been so gut wrenchingly sad but it wasn't.

It wasn't.

His parents left sisters and a brother behind, and even my parents, who were their friends as teenagers and years after that, which is all the days I remember them best. They left five grandchildren with memories kinder than even those gone days and probably more lasting.

A heart could break, thinking about it. But none did.
None.

Instead, we danced to the music of three generations -- everyone there, all together: the old Yale boys harmonizing with the younger ones until the younger ones turned up the Ipod and showed how they roll. Dancing, guitars in tune, even really bad singers singing and we rocked on. We rocked on. Stories were told, neighbors took photos, love was had all around and I don't think a tear was shed outside the church.

I saw Mr. W, who lived across the street from me as a kid, and who (because the world in waspy Connecticut works this way) was also my brother in law's dad's first boss on Madison Avenue, which means, yeah, I grew up with the real Mad Men. (And yes: my sister married the child of her parents' teenage friends and also happened to live across the street from her future father in law's boss, who would become his lifelong friend as well.) (Writing that down made me tired.)

I was younger than Mr. W's kids and he liked football so he'd invite me to watch the Sunday games with him at his house.

"Can Big D come over?" he would shout across the street.

Mr. W and I had some really happy, lazy times together watching football on their leather couch.
I learned almost everything about that game (number 33, Tony Dorsett!) and truly, really the whole idea of sports from him. I muddled through childhood and tweendom during those days and years on his couch and I swear he helped me be what I wanted to be as much as my own father did.

At the funeral, Mr. W looked exactly the same and I kind of melted into his arms when I saw him.
I missed them most when Mr.W said, "He was my best friend but I don't think I was his. Everyone was his best friend."

In the morning, with a very busted elbow from an amazing dancing injury with a nephew who wore a bow tie and who will never know what crappy, pathetic mourning looks like, I found myself suddenly silent the way one does after a big event and a bigger night. Alone in the bathroom, as if caught in a shell from the ocean, I could hear only laughing, only hearty ridiculous laughing ringing in my head, just rattling there. It was loud and awesome and I have decided that it was like a little jack hammer making space for emotion, like a miner making room and getting gold.

So here I am, slightly damaged, bruised, and what do I know that I didn't before?

I know that if someone mattered, they will always matter. I know that it's a good idea to show up and be kind. I know that being arms open is better than arms closed and I know how hard that can be some times. I know that kindness and kinship and true real love crosses all kinds of distances and boundaries and that if I allow it, I'll be happier and better.

I do know that despite the risks, it's way better to dance wildly than cry.
Yup. It's way better to dance.

So Anyway

How many years ago did I stop speaking here?
And why?

It's been a while and for a lot of solid reasons. Kids getting older, the world of bloggers getting closer (and weirder), and then there was the whole thing of writing for other people. Anyway, anyhow, I missed this. Well, I miss at least the way that this was meant to be: a daily tell, a therapeutic wee story, just that. Nothing more.

I remember when some other writers would tell me that the teenage years would come with a vengeance. I miss those voices now as of course it turns out they were right. I miss the notes from strangers whose lives I followed and cared about. I miss that naked, anonymous camaraderie.

I need it now.

Anyway, putting the pen to paper. Yo.

Grown Up Now

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