Hearing Voices

Weird thing about me # 5,436,872 (or 73, I lost count): Sometimes I hear voices.  Not very often, so when I do hear them I tend to listen.  There are a few times that stick out in my memory.  The first was when I was nineteen and my dad was dying.  I was along with him at his apartment during a bad spring storm.  There was a lot of lightning, and the electricity went out.  I was terrified he was going to die while I was there alone with him, and my older brother and sisters would kill me for letting it happen.  I sat in his tiny bedroom, listening to the IV machine pump on battery power, thinking "Don't let him die tonight, don't let him die tonight." I heard a voice, and I saw a light in the corner.  The voice said, "He will not die tonight." And he didn't.  He died two days later, and I was not there alone.
The next time I remember most clearly was only a few months later.  I was babysitting my baby and toddler nephews, and they were both taking naps.  Everything was very quiet.  I heard a voice say "Check the baby." So I did.  The baby wasn't breathing.  His face was very pale, with a blue cast to it.  I gave him CPR and called 911 and my sister.  Today the baby is 15 and doing quite well after surgery to fix a problem he had in his breathing passage.
Many years have passed since I heard a voice say anything useful.  Today, as I was unloading my car (it's a secret what I was unloading.  It starts with Ch and ends with ristmaspresents) I was inside the garage, and I heard my mom call my name.  It was a specific kind of call, a certain way she says my name.  It was "MaryKathrine." Like "Pay attention" not like "help me!" I walked out front to see if there were people talking and I just misheard.  But, no, no one was anywhere around. So, as I prepare to leave town with the girls and travel to my mom's to be with her during her surgery for her lung cancer, I carry the sound of her voice saying my name with me.  But I don't know what it means.

Reconstructed Dialogue

A reconstructed dialogue proving what a douche I am:

Me: "My life sucks."

Not Me: "Two months ago you were sending out stories, all excited about your new projects.  What happened?"

Me: "I got a stack of rejections."

Not Me: "Let me guess, 'Dear MaryKatherine, We're not just rejecting this story.  We're rejecting you as a human being.  Love, Please Eat Shit and Die Review"

Me: "Well, that's not verbatim.  Plus I don't know what I'm going to be doing next year."

Not Me: "You're facing the job market with three degrees when 90% of the world can't claim one.  Yeah, I see how it's tough for you to get out of bed come morning."

M: "I'm tired-- I'm working four jobs!"

Not Me: "Four part time jobs."

M: "I work harder than a lot of people who make more money than me!"

NM: "You cannot be serious.  A. How do you know, B. So what?  You know what an addict's worst fear is?"

M: "Are you calling me an addict?"

NM: "If the black ski mask fits.  An addict's worst fear is that all their dreams will come true. You have good jobs that allow you to do most of your work sitting in a tree if you want.  You have a decent house in a decent neighborhood.  No one in your family has ever gone hungry or without..."

M: "But I don't have a dishwasher."

NM: "May I punch you in the face now?"

M: "Yes, I think that would be appropriate."

Spectacle Ethnography and Other Polysyllabic Words

The other night we had a family conversation that occurs about once a year. My older daughter was talking about some "brown" person, and I "corrected" her and said "black" person. This makes no sense to them, of course.  They know I'm white.  They know their dad is black, but it doesn't really make sense to them. My older daughter prefers "brown skinned" if she must talk about race. But honestly, she seems not to need to talk about it. So, they know they're not "black" they know they're not "white." They prefer "tan", but I was explaining that society has certain words they use to describe what they believe to be the "race" of people (I'm going to stop with the quotes now.  You get the idea).

So, I said "you're mixed. Or biracial. You're half white and half black."

"I prefer zebra," my oldest daughter said.

Don't be too shocked-- she's been saying this since she first heard the term years ago. I remind her every time that it's not appropriate, but she doesn't understand why. She would much rather be called a zebra than mixed. And I don't think she's totally wrong there.

My children aren't very interested in their racial characteristics. They know who they are, and that seems to satisfy them. They know who we are as their parents, and they know they have white aunts and black aunts and white grandmas and black grandmas and, well, you get the idea.

Other people, however, seem much more interested in the spectacle of our family. The line I most hear (and that most cracks me up) is, once they meet my partner, "I never would have imagined you with a black guy." Seriously? All I can say is I'm sorry.  I'll try harder to be the kind of woman who would be with a black guy. I'm not sure what that means, but when I find out, I'm going to dedicate my life to being that kinda gal.

When I'm out with my daughters and their dad is not with us I hear "what are they?" Why, they're little girls, of course. "No, I mean, what are they mixed with? That one (pointing at my youngest) looks Indian. That one (older) looks Mexican (or Greek, or Italian...)" This is not a game, people.  There are no prizes for guessing correctly.

More innocuously, I often have people tell me what a nice guy my partner is.  He is a nice guy.  He's way nicer than I am. But sometimes I wonder why people have to tell me all the time. Is it because, with his bald head, tattoos, black skin and bitchin motorcycle they expected something different? Or is it because they thought he would be different? Was he supposed to not be a nice guy?

He is much more forgiving than I am when it comes to people's racism. I can't guess why, but if I was forced to, I'd say he's probably more used to it than I am. He told me a story about his Mee-Maw. She's passed now, but when she was alive she was probably one of the gentlest ladies (and I mean LADY) that you'd ever want to meet.  Tiny, maybe 5 feet tall, thin, beautiful. She went to church every week, taught special education, was loved by many, many people.  I never heard her say an unkind word. I never, ever, EVER heard her curse. Once, when my partner was a youngster (I imagine twelve, though I don't think he ever said), he traveled with his Mee-Maw down south to the Tennessee/North Carolina area, where she was from.  They were at a gas station, filling up, when a truck full of white men blew past and screamed out the window, "Fucking N---s!" Larry's sweet Mee-Maw turned around, held up the special finger and screamed back "Fuck you, you fucking rednecks!"

I'm more comfortable with my family when we're in a group of black people, even if I am the only white person. People notice me, obviously, but it's a kind of, oh, she's white. Moving on. With large groups of white people, more often than not people approach to tell me how beautiful the girls are (which they are, so thank you), but also to touch their hair and exclaim over and over (and over), oh their skin is so BEAUTIFUL! I wish I had that skin, my goodness that SKIN! Sometimes I want to ask, would you like me to lift their lips so you can see their teeth? Go 'way, please.

White people (in general) are extremely uncomfortable talking about racism. They get all stiff and mutter "race card". Black people have no problem with the discussion, when it comes up.

I was talking, before a graduate level class, about the experience of taking my girls to vacuum out the car at a car wash just up the street from our house.  The girls love to work the vacuum. Scratched there, just under the quarter feeder, was the N word. I moved the car so the girls wouldn't see it, but I found myself looking over my shoulder (I know, ridiculous).

One of the men in the class said, "I think racism has gotten a lot better."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"Well, I haven't heard about any lynchings lately."

Well, if that's the standard we're using, then yes, hallelujah, racism has been cured.

Race is not a "major part" of our life in the way some people seem to assume.  We don't talk about it very often ("Black man, if it's not too oppressive, could you do the dishes?" We do have a favorite phrase I heard on a black radio talk show one morning-- "All the doo doo you done done to my people!" but generally I say it to him when he asks me to do something I don't want to do.) And when we do, it's with the girls, in the way all parents at some point have to talk about the craziness of race in American society. We understand discrimination as a family, so we work hard to have a home where discrimination is not tolerated in any of its ugly forms. Are there cultural differences? I guess so, though I think of it more as "how his family does stuff versus how my family does" or "what his mom cooks versus what my mom cooks." Which I think is pretty much how my girls view it, although I suppose I'd have to ask them. We've faced discrimination, and even some meanness ( in some cases from family members, but not close ones).

Spectacle ethnography.  I love that phrase.  I picked it up when I was taking a woman's lit class, and a theorist was writing about white America's response to the influx of Chinese immigrants in the early 20th century (or perhaps before, the details escape me now). I love the term, because it so neatly describes the kind of racism that still openly exists-- the spectacle of difference.

The Spillway

There is a spillway that contains the water between the Coralville Reservoir and the Iowa River below the dam just outside of Iowa City, Iowa.  The Corp of Engineers sits in their tower above the thundering water, maneuvering the levers to change the flow of the water to the farms and towns south. I still go to the Corp of Engineers' website and monitor the water level occasionally.  I compare this year's water level with the record highs and lows.  I check the level against the floods of 1993, when every river flooded and the engineer's released all the water they could, but the water built until it washed over the top of the dam, Iowa City flooded, and my sister's house was swept away.

I can measure the distances of my life by the spillway.  My dad used to take us there when I was little.  We'd stand at the railings, staring down at the water that crashed through the ridiculously small spillway, spraying anyone who stood too close.  He'd tell me about the power of the water-- that anyone who dared to jump in would be swept under and down stream-- dead before they ever came up. He'd tell me lies-- about school buses that went in, whole cars full of people.  I know now-- should have known then-- that a school bus would have to be going pretty far out of its way-- intentionally out of its way-- to get anywhere near the spillway.  And the channel was so narrow that the bus might have a chance of hopping the spillway if they got up enough speed.  I don't think anyone ever died there.  If they did, I never heard about it.

One of the first things I did when I got my driver's license and a car was to load it up and drive out to the cliffs on the res that was cornered and allowed to escape so thinly through the spillway.  We had to park on the side of the road and trek through the woods, dragging blankets, beer, and small grills along.  We'd come out of the woods on a rocky cliff overlooking a turn on the river where it was dammed up into the reservoir.  In low water, the cliff was thirty feet above the water, the shore below gray and sharp.  A jumper had to get a running start to clear those shores below.  I never jumped off the cliffs-- not until the year of the floods, when the water was so high it wasn't a jump so much as a step.  I swim like a fish, and I'd jump off anything into clear water.  But I had a fear of water I couldn't see through.  I'd heard of too many kids who'd took that dive into dark water and cracked their necks on rocks they couldn't see.  And in the dark, after the sun had cleared the trees on the other side, a diver would disappear from the air into the black water, and other than a splash no one would know for many minutes that they were under and not coming back up.

 But that never happened.  We sat on the rocks and watched the divers until there was no one left willing to fall into the icy night water, and we'd pack up and trek back through the woods, a completely foreign land in the dark. We'd come out of the woods hundreds of yards from the car and we'd have to walk down the berm of the highway to get back to where we'd begun.

I traveled with a strange mix of divers: kids from small towns who'd come to Iowa City when their parents booted them out when they were barely teens.  Kids who'd grown up on the res, knew just by looking at the darker gray on the rocks whether the water was too low for diving, whether or not the corp was letting the water out or damming it up higher.  Gang bangers from Chicago who'd come down with their parents, some, but mostly come because Iowa was just next door and an open market for drug dealers who were organized and had unlimited product to sell.  We'd all stumble through the woods together, sit on the hot rocks and watch the pink sky, jump into the water and sit, shivering, drinking Old English beer from thick bottles.
Someone would have brought some weed and know how to roll it and would pass the joint around, many hands held up to keep the wind from knocking the fire off the top of the lighter.

My dad kept a speedboat at the Jolly Roger Marina on the res-- an eighteen foot Crestliner that I learned to drive when I was fourteen. When we came in from speeding up and down the reservoir the man who owned Jolly Roger would pull the boat up the ramp with an old tractor.  The man was young, and his wife had a kind of cancer that caused small cysts to grow over her entire body.  Her hands, her face, her eyes swelled with the gray cysts. The last summer I went to Jolly Roger before my dad died and we took the boat to my sister's barn I saw her again. Her cancer was cured and I was stunned. She was beautiful.

My high school boyfriend took me to the spillway once.  I was fifteen and he had a new car, and he drove me out and we stood with the water spraying against our faces and the sky full of stars. They hung low and were textured in a way they never are in the city.  He took me home after, and soon we broke up.  I was too young and not very interesting, I'm sure. But when our lives converged again he took me back to the res, sat next to me on a bench at the deserted fall beach, asked me to tell him what had happened to me while he had been gone.

My daughters petted their first cat fish there by the spillway when we were in Iowa visiting.  An old black man had been fishing straight into the churning waves, pulling up fish after fish.  He held the cat fish still and told them to watch the whiskers, cause there was poison in there, and he smiled but didn't correct them when they told him how cool it was that he'd caught this ugly pet.

My sister had a house down by the river, miles below where the Corp of Engineers had dammed it off. She lived on a dirt road with no lights, her neighbors on one side a lesbian couple who I loved until I found out they were also cousins, and then I didn't know if I was allowed to love them or not.  Down the other way a house where a woman had been found in winter, naked, dead in the snow.  At the end of the road, deep in the woods, a man with mean dogs that meant you had to carry a stick if you took out walking.  We'd ride in intertubes from semi truck tires we bought at the tire repairman's in the river, then stand up and walk out, dragging our tubes, when it got boring or the bugs came out. But in 93, not so long before I left town for good, the rain up north got too heavy, and the engineers did their best to dam up the water and save the homes and farms below, but the water would not be held, and it foamed up and over the dam, washing everything near the river away.  My sister lost her house, and her cat, though the dogs swam to land.  We took her stuff out on a canoe we borrowed-- as much as we could.  The government took that land back when the floods receded and said no one could build there anymore.

I had spent my childhood swimming at the beach, waiting for the day I had the strength to swim all the way out to the buoys that marked the swimming area, then the next year shocked by how close those buoys actually were.  They weren't far at all. I swam in secret coves off the back of my dad's boat and dug my feet into the three inches of loose mud at the bottom. But when I came back years later with my daughters, excited to take them there and let them swim, I didn't hardly remember the place anymore.  It was small, and hot, and the water smelled like dead fish and scum. I remembered my sister's cat lost in the flood, and the way the water had slapped softly against the brick shower houses and toilets on the grass behind the beach when the roads opened and we could drive out and see what damage had been done by the big flood. I told my daughters they could go in, but not to put their faces in the water, to not swallow even a drop of it. The sand was rocky and the grass was brown and hard on the feet. The spillway looked small and old, and I couldn't imagine what had ever drug me there, had ever made me love the place at all.

All of God's Creatures, Including Slugs, Hamsters and Killer Frogs

My daughters are ten and eight, and an extremely dangerous situation this morning got me thinking about all the pets we've had in the last decade.  More than our fair share, I'd say.

First, this morning.  I found a huge (I mean super sized, probably antibiotic resistant nuclear powered) slug slithering along our outdoor fireplace.  So, like a dumbass, I called the girls down to see it.  They were willing to accommodate me, especially since they were getting ready for school and in various states of undress (re, naked).  Ew! Cool! We moved on with our lives. I was upstairs, brushing my teeth and cleaning the mounds of toothpaste out of the sink when my eight year old hollered up the stairs, "I brushed my teeth already" (yes. I see that you also brushed the bathroom sink.  Thank you.) "Oh, and Mama, I caught the slug. It's on the table."

"Why?" I wailed.  "Why would you do that?" But I got no answer.

In addition to the monster slug (which I now can't find), we also have a frog.  Someone gave my daughter a little aquarium for her eighth birthday (who would do that? Bad people.) So, of course we couldn't just fill it with grass and an imaginary frog-- the best kind of frog to my mind.  We had to have the real fucking deal.  Well, that frog outgrew the little plastic aquarium and had to go into a big glass one.  And with all that room she (Alyssa Faith) seemed kind of lonely.  So we bought her a friend.  Who she promptly ate. Then Alyssa died. Larry found her, post mortem, and called me. "You better replace her now," I said. "We cannot repeat the hamster situation of oh-nine." So he replaced her that day with the same kind of frog, and we told them the other one died. One out of two ain't bad. So we have a new frog, and if I call her Alyssa Fake, the girls don't notice.

Alyssa Faith escaped from the aquarium the first night we put her in it. I was sitting on the couch, and I felt goose bumps begin to rise, and I got that feeling you get when you know something really terrible is about to happen. I looked at the floor, and there she was, halfway to me, a murderous glint in her beady, froggy eyes.  Our damn dog (just one at the time-- more on the dogs later) didn't even notice the killer headed straight for me. Alyssa Fake escaped from the aquarium once.  I have a clearly stated, contract signed, repeated over and over rule that no one is EVER to hold Alyssa Fake unless the door to the room she's in is closed, locked and barricaded.  Someone forgot the rule.  "Mama," my daughter calmly informed me. "We can't find Alyssa Faith."

"Larry! We've got to move right now!" I screamed. Luckily, the frog was later found. By that time I was comfortably living in my new, pet free house. The children aren't allowed to visit. They can stand outside and wave.

The hamsters.  The hamsters were probably one of our greatest pet tragedies.  The girls wanted hamsters for Christmas.  That's all they wanted, swear to God, just hamsters we'lltakecareofthempleasemamaweloveyousantawillsayyesweloveyouweloveyou. We generally go to Iowa for Christmas, and anyone who thinks I was going to drive nine hours with live rodents in the vehicle is out of their g-d mind.  So, the girls got a fancy hamster cage and a letter from Santa stating that it was against the law for Santa to transport live animals across state, let alone country, boundaries, but that this letter would serve as proof of payment for the hamsters they were to pick out from the pet store just as soon as we got back to Ohio and Mama got better anti-anxiety drugs.

So the very night we pulled back into Columbus I was forced at little girl gun point to the pet store. As they picked out their small hairy rats (They both wanted females. The pet store person said it's impossible to tell what sex they are. I told the pet store person just to say that any hamster they picked was a female.  Duh, pet store person). It's also, it turns out, impossible to tell if they are pregnant and in the early stages of labor.  More on that later.

We spent more than a hundred dollars on hamster accoutrement-- more cages, balls, toys, treats.  We took the hamsters home, where they began their little hamster lives in earnest.  Several nights later, we were awoken in the middle of the night by the sound of our dog Ali (we got him at the pound when he was a puppy) whining very excitedly.  One of the hamsters had gotten out.  The chase was on.  We saved the hamster.  Then, the next night we walked in to give them their treats and found some extra, hairless, white little nasty hamsters in the cage. I called the pet store.  Ooops, was basically their response.  And also that we needed to separate the non-mother hamster from the mother hamster and the babies or the non-mother would eat the babies. Yummers. So we snatched out the hamster we believed to be the non-mother, stuck her in a hamster ball, and took her to the store with us (I'm not sure if we thought she/he couldn't even be in the same house?) At the store, my family went to the hamster aisle, while I stood at the counter with the hamster in the ball.

"Can you just check to make sure we got the right one?" I asked the girl. She did.  We didn't.
"Let's go, people!" I yelled through the pet store. "We brought the wrong one. We left the killer with the babies!"

We gathered another seventy-five dollars worth of hamster crap, and took off going sixty miles an hour down a residential street.  We got home and the babies were still there in their white, hairless nastiness. We did the necessary switches.  But the babies died anyway.  And then the mother died.  And then, to try to assuage the other hamster's grief, my daughter gave him/her a sucker.  He/she died, too. No more hamsters.  Ever.

We've lost more than our fair share of fish. At one point our aquarium caught the plague and they all died-- some fish we'd had for years.

We had a bull mastiff for a short time.  A huge, red dog named Brooklyn we'd found in Winton Woods in Cincinnati. We were walking along the creek in the woods, and the dog was under a tree, across the water, watching us.

"Oh, my God, why is she here?" I asked my partner.

"She's been here," he said.  He'd seen her before as he drove through the park on the way to the girls' preschool. I used his cell phone to call the SPCA, and they informed me that they knew she was there, had known she was there, but they didn't have the manpower to come get her.

"We're taking her home," I informed the kids.  They didn't look all that thrilled about this massive dog, bigger than they were by a hundred pounds.

I told my partner to keep the girls on that side of the creek, and I crossed over, talking quietly to the dog.  She watched me, seemingly interested, until I got within a few feet of her.  Then she stood up-- she was huge-- and began to bark at me. Oh, crap. I'd left the only cell phone on the other side of the creek and now I was about to be eaten by a bull mastiff without even the comfort of dialing 911.

"OK, baby," I kept saying, backing away.  I walked to the top of the hill where the woods met the road and watched her.  And she watched me. My family began the trek back to our van, but I couldn't leave that monster dog there. "We're leaving," I told her.  "If you're coming, come on" and I started walking.  Every few steps I'd glance back and there she was, following me at a distance. My partner opened the back doors of the van and she jumped right in when we got there. She was coming.

Brooklyn was an awesome dog.  The girls slept on her, they rode her, we took her everywhere we went.  After a few days, I had no doubt she would never hurt the girls.  However, she would hurt anyone who tried to hurt us.  Or, you know, talk to us. Or approach our house.  As a matter of fact, she'd prefer if you stayed off our block all together, thanks.  Our neighbors were horrified and terrified.  They stopped letting their kids come near our house.  We couldn't have people over-- no one liked our Brookie.

Eventually, we had to give her to some people with a farm in Iowa (this is not a euphemism-- we actually took her to a farm in Iowa).  We had little girls and a little house, and it got to the point where we couldn't move anymore, because Brook took up residence right in the middle of the living room floor. Not to mention we'd become pariahs in our neighborhoods and families.

We hadn't learned our lesson about pets as Christmas presents.  Last year the girls got a brand new puppy. I guess we figured we've had pretty good luck with keeping dogs alive and happy.  Ali is six-- he's happy, healthy. 

Yesterday my eight year old came home with a book from school: How To Care for Your Pet Rabbit.

"No," I said.

"Listen," she said.  And she read to me all about her new pet rabbit.

"No," I said.

"Yes, Mama," she said. "When we move to our new house." And she continued to read.

Duck, Duck, Goose

I have a tendency to approach the world with this attitude: I'm not going to do that.  That's dumb. For instance, "I'm not going to cross the mile high bridge.  If I wanted to be suspended a mile above terra firma, terrified for my life, I'd fly in an airplane like a normal person."..."Wow, that was the most amazing view I've ever seen." "I'm not going to roller skate.  Do I look eight?"..."That was so much fun. Let's do it again!" I tend to build up a resistance before I even try something.  I don't know if this is some kind of ancient survival instinct (if I convince myself everything is horrible, then when it is horrible, I won't care very much).

I've been taking this approach to my newest undertaking.  In my attempts to get my ducks in a row for next year, when I'm going to get shot out of the santa-slide into the real world again, I've sent away to the Ohio Department of Education a request for an alternative licensure for high school teaching. There is a part of me-- the part that taught and lived with high school students during the week long OSU Young Writers Workshop this summer--that thinks this is a fabulous idea.  I love those students.  The experience was one of the best of my life. And, yet.

I have this sense of high school (one not earned, as I mentioned in an earlier blog, I never gave high school much of a fighting chance). But what I have seen: an environment that seems to me most easily described as prison-like. Including the shower behavior. Teachers who are fighting against a pretty much worthless system, or who have been so inundated with teaching to the test mentality they've decided they can no longer fight at all.  Students who aren't being offered much in the way of education as I envision it (kind of like I envision parenthood-- you show them some cool shit to get them started, then let them fly.  Hopefully, if you've shown them cool enough shit, they fly in directions you've never expected, and they use their wings in ways you couldn't have imagined.  Had enough of the bird metaphor? Yah. Weak.)

But this morning I thought: what if I'm wrong? I know-- shocking. What if my beliefs about high school are based on my (pretty much nonexistent) experience and substitute teaching in a pretty bad district? Hmmm.

I also have another fear.  It's a big one.  I'm afraid I'd get fired in the first week.  Maybe two weeks. First, I'm not the most appropriate person ever invented. I swore (snicker) I'd try not to swear during my first class yesterday, and then my phone rang (dammit) and I said "crap" as I turned the ringer off. That was in the first two minutes.  I have a tendency to share things I think are interesting, regardless of age-appropriateness (see this summer's experience, when I might possibly have mentioned that the narrative arc, much loved by western tradition, most closely represents the sexual experience...Also much loved by western tradition.  And the students told on me THAT SAME DAY.  Yes, I believe they did it with good intentions ("hey-- did you know the narrative arc looks like sex? It even has a climax!") but nonetheless.)

I also have extremely limited tolerance for intolerance.  One might even say I'm intolerant of intolerance. I'm not the kind of person who hears something like "I just don't believe in same sex marriages" and says, "Well, I disagree, but you have the right to your opinion." I'm more like, "Get out and die, fucker. That kind of discrimination is equal in evilness to racism. Are you proud of yourself and your religion? Do you like it when you hurt your fellow Americans and make their lives impossible to live? Die! Die! Do it now!" Luckily, I create my college level class plans with the soul purpose of avoiding finding out about their social/political opinions, so I never have to know if they feel this way.  But I wonder if I'd have that kind of freedom in a high school classroom. Again-- I don't know. But that never stopped me before.

If Nothing Else, An MFA in Hand Means Not Selling Penis Pills

I've been thinking (obsessing) this week about jobs.  I'm in my third year of my MFA, which means next year they're going to kick me out (unless I can convince someone to turn this into a five year program?!).  It's not so much that I think the job I get when I leave here is going to be the job I have for the rest of my life, or even that I'm terribly picky about what I do.  I just want to like my job.  That's it.

I love teaching.  I've never loved any other job.  Of course, I've never had any great jobs.  My worst job was selling "all natural male enhancement pills" for Berkley Pharmaceuticals. And the "pharmaceuticals" should not be taken too seriously.  I was in college and I had two kids to support, and they let me set my own hours. It was basically a mail order company that sold "all natural" pills of various kinds.  But the penis pills were the big sellers.  They had these ridiculous commercials (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTa98ixcy9Q), and we knew when the commercials were scheduled to come on, because the phones would start ringing.  Men would call in for the "free" sample.  Free, except you have to pay shipping.  And also, they use the credit card you gave them for the shipping and handling to sign you up for this monthly deal, where if you "donotcancel" you will start getting charged for these penis pills.

The name of them was Enzyte.  All of the "natural" pills had really interesting names.  I discovered soon after I began working there that they came up with the pill names based on the 1-800 number the phone company assigned them.  So, 1-800-Enzyte.  I was on the selling side of the floor.  For some odd reason I was really good at convincing men who had just called in to try this free thing to buy a year's supply for three hundred bucks.  I'm still pretty proud.

I made friends with some of the people who had worked there long enough to get assigned to "customer service" calls.  It turns out many of those calls were angry customers who had not heard or had not been told that they would be signed up for this monthly deal.  Other callers were concerned by side effects such as vomiting, itching, skin discoloration.  Anal bleeding.  I quit before the FBI raided the company for charges of mail fraud.  They were shut down for quite a while.  They're back open now, at least they were the last time I drove past.

I worked at Lowes for a year.  There is no worse place for a woman to work than Lowes.  I met many single, middle aged mothers who were terribly abused by the management.  I went to a meeting once and watched the store manager scream at these women for an hour.  I never really caught what he was screaming about-- it had something to do with someone complaining to corporate.  Lowes (at least the one I was at) is a terrible place to work.

The other, better but still terrible, job I had was substitute teaching middle school and high school.  For those who ask me if they should substitute teach, I say go for it.  But substitute teaching is not teaching.  Subbing is babysitting with horrible handouts.  The teacher would leave a packet on his or her desk of handouts and overhead sheets for the class period.  Students engaged in such serious learning as reading out loud (it turns out not all teenagers can read-- so I had to read to them), and copying answers directly from an overhead to a handout.  The entire time you're trying to break up fights, convince them not to leave, and praying to God that this isn't what they normally do in this class.

From the very first period, the first kids walk in, see you, walk back out in the hallway and scream "Sub! Sub today!" It goes down hill from there.  It's not teaching, it's not fun, but it does pay OK, and you can learn something.  Like how to use your body language to threaten fourteen year old girls into shutting up and using your body itself to break up fights between six foot tall teenage boys.

I have to find a job. But I hold out hope that nothing I can do is worse than things I have done. And, if all else fails, there's PhD programs.  And Post Doc.  I could do this for years.

Compost me. I Want to Be a Tree

I just finished reading Stiff by Mary Roach recently, and it got me all hyped up about having my corpse freeze dried, mashed up and turned into compost so I can grow a tree. I informed my partner about this and his response was, "We'll see." WTF do you mean we'll see? WHEN exactly will we see?

When I was a kid I used to love to wander through cemeteries, mostly with my dad.  We'd go to the famous Black Angel Cemetery in Iowa City and walk through.  He'd point out the unmarked graves over to the side that belonged to the unclaimed bodies, the elaborate white gates that marked the entrance to the baby cemetery on the hill (I can't remember what it was called, but it had it's own name, and I swear to God it was something like "Baby Land." I'm going to find out, cuz I really hope I'm wrong on that one.) When I was seventeen a friend of mine's baby died of SIDS, and she was buried there in that cemetery.  I remember the tiny coffin-- it was like a toy coffin, if such things existed.  She found the baby, just a month old, in the morning.  She had died in the night.

The first funeral I ever attended was for my Great-Uncle Bert.  I was four, and all I remember is getting pinched by my mother when my brother and I wouldn't stop fighting and sliding up and down the pews.

There is a cemetery about a mile down the gravel road from where my sister used to live.  I'd let my little nephews drive (they were probably three and six, and they sat on my lap and steered the car) down there some days.  My little nephew would cross through the wrought iron gate and climb the hill with his hand clutching my pants, confirming what I already knew-- that he could see dead people. "Sanctuary," he called the cemetery. "Sanctuary!" Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame had just come out.

I've never been too much troubled by cemeteries.  One of my high school friends convinced us that there was a haunted cemetery in Cedar Rapids, a good half an hour drive away.  So, we dutifully loaded up my car and drove up there in the dead of winter.  For some reason the cemetery gates were open, despite the fact that it was night time.  I drove my car slipping up and down the little snow covered roads of the cemetery, waiting for the promised nudge of a dead hand against the bumper.  It didn't happen, and I was disgusted that we had wasted perfectly good drinking time.

After my dad died, about a year later, I got a call from the people who owned the Bohemian cemetery where he's buried.  It turns out they put him in the wrong place-- he didn't own the plot where he was laid for his eternal rest.  Either we had to find the person who owned it and get permission for the plot, or my dad would have to be moved.  I made many phone calls to distant cousins (the cemetery is tiny, and almost everyone over on that side is some kind of relation) until we found out that the cousin who owned the plot had died years before and been buried in California. (Here's a bit of corpse law-- if you choose not to use the plot you buy, you lose your rights to it.  Bear that in mind.)  I spent many hours picturing the moving of my dad's steel colored coffin, and imagining what he might look like now, a year after dying (not that they would open the coffin, but still).  It grossed me out.  It still does.  Why would a person want to be stuck in the ground to slowly rot away? Compost me.  I want to be a tree.

Forgetting the Map and Other Tragedies

I'm feeling guilty about a conversation I had with my oldest daughter in the car yesterday.  In the fifth grade, every Thursday they get a map (it might be a map of the oceans, or the continents, or whatever). They take the map home, and they study it for a week, and then they take the test.  This is the third week of school, and for the third week she has forgotten to bring home her map (just to be clear-- it's not that big of a deal-- the maps are easy, she still gets an A every time. 100%. This will matter later.  Maybe only to me).

But I got really upset in the car.  At some point I said something like, you know the difference between people who go to Harvard and people who go to some state college? ("What?") Remembering to bring their maps home.  Yes, I was serious. My stomach started to hurt from the massive amount of agony I was in. I may have cried a little out of fear (not that my kid would end up at state college, I swear.  Fear that I have no idea how to help her, and I never will).

I'm a driven person.  That's what other people tell me, most notably my psychiatrist. Maybe so. But really I'm a loser.  I'm telling you-- you don't have to believe me, but it's true. Sometimes I sit on the couch for up to an hour and watch reality TV. Occasionally I do nothing useful all day except be a mother and clean the house. There's a voice in my brain all the time "Loser, loser, loser", but sometimes it's louder than other times. Yes, I'm driven.  I'm driven to get out of loserville. I could make a list.  OK, I will.

1. I dropped out of high school.  Yes, I have a bachelor's degree and 1.75 master's degrees, but really I have a ninth grade education.  Ninth grade being the last grade I actually showed up (I did 10th grade in an alternative school, but I don't think standing outside smoking pot and attempting to shove the couch out of the lounge window count toward my education).
2. I have a criminal record.  Disorderly conduct. I'll never be president.
3. I'm a terrible mother.  Please see the conversation above.
4. I rarely clean the corners. And then I see how dirty they are, and I buy one of those rotating brushes and clean them, but they get dirty again.
5. I swear. A lot.
6. I have terrible hair.
7. I have big feet.
8. I taught myself to braid hair, but I never do it right.  The braids are too loose.
9. My dogs jump on people.  Nobody likes dogs that jump. Nobody likes my dogs.
10. I bite my nails.

I mean, honestly, the list goes on for days.  My counselor has suggested wearing a piece of jewelry (11. I don't wear jewelry), something that is slightly irritating, to remind me not to be mean to myself. (12. I think that's dumb.) At first, when he brought up this whole "you're in an abusive relationship with yourself" thing, I thought, oh, ok, I'll just try to be nicer to myself. No problem. But the more I pay attention the more I realize that this "driven-ness" I have seeps into everything. It's not just that I want things to be perfect.  I make myself sick, and I waste a lot of time I could otherwise be using to clean corners telling myself how much I've failed.  I'm terrified of failure. Cliche alert.  But I mean terrified.  I mean ulcer attack, can't breath, tight chest, oh, God, I'm going to throw up terror.

Nothing's ever good enough. A clean house is not clean enough, remembering to bring home your math and spelling, but not your map, is failure. A *B* is failure. I don't judge other people so harshly (I try not to), but I wonder if that's because, deep down, I don't care so much if they fail.  Make space for the other losers.  I don't think that's true-- I hope it's not.

So hysterical.  I'm not that bad.  The older I get, the more I'm able to let some things go. I try to keep my mouth shut when it comes to my kids (sometimes I fail. Lahoooser.).  I don't know, since I went to state college, but I'm guessing admission to Harvard has more to do with choosing to be born to rich parents and/or having parents who support and encourage you, even when you forget to bring your map home.

This morning we were in the car (maybe I should just stay out of cars?) discussing a certain incident in which my older daughter failed to stand up for my younger daughter when they were playing with a group of kids.

"Is that what Dr. Martin Luther King would do?" I asked my older daughter.  All I got was silence.  I turned around and looked at her. "Is it?"

She looked completely befuddled.  "I have no idea, Mama.  I really don't know."

Minding my Own Biz

I was talking to one of my sisters yesterday about an inner-familial problem, and she cut me off right at the beginning. "Why are you even in this? How is this your business?"  Whoa.  Slow down there.  Not my business?  But, but, but. OK, it's really not my business.  Damn. At some point in my life I designated myself Captain Save a Ho. If someone has a problem, and I know about it, I consider it my life's goal to fix that problem if I can.  And if I can't fix it, I at least offer my ass kicking services. As I grow older, I've managed to stay out of other people's problems both because of lack of proximity (I'm just not paying as close of attention), and I'm too busy solving the problems of my kids, my partner, myself, my dogs.  A Captain gets busy.

I remember when my ten year old told me about a friend she was having a problem with, and I immediately started my plotting about what we (I) were going to do about this problem.  "Mama," my daughter said, "Can I just solve this one myself? I mean, I'm ten years old. If I can't solve it, then you can step in."  The speech had the smack of being rehearsed-- she'd been working on this one.  It felt like I had just gotten all suited up in my Roman armor, my shield, my sword, my horse, and somebody said, "Hey, you know what, how about we don't conquer that country? What if we just stayed home?" I was all dressed up for a violent overtaking, and the violence got canceled.  I'm still kind of upset.

Luckily, my younger daughter doesn't mind it when I get involved.  "What do you do if a boy hits you?" I ask her. "Call Mama," she responds.  Mama will handle this. Someone once told me that you can't go in front of your children, protecting them from everything. First, it's impossible.  Second, it's not good for them.  I know that's true.  But, but, but. My job is to be there as a sounding board, to offer advice, but to stay off the field.  That's hard, especially when the advice I want to give is "Who needs friends? Screw friends-- you can hang out with me!" I am the mother who shows up at every game.  If my kid gets hurt, I'm there before the coach.  If they hit the winning run, I meet them at the plate.  I once jumped up and down screaming "Safe! She's safe! Ha!" at a five year old catcher when my daughter crossed home plate just seconds before the little girl picked the ball up.  It took me a few seconds to notice everyone staring at me.

So I'm working on minding my own business.  And when I don't have any? I guess I'll have to make some.

Useless Questions

Last week I spent a day in my favorite useless pastime-- wondering if, in fact, I was a writer at all.  I tentatively investigated jobs that had nothing to do with writing or teaching.  I thought about other possibilities.  Nursing? No. I hate sick people. Lawyer? Bah. I hate litigious people. Marketing? OK, bottom line-- I pretty much just don't like people. I like student people, but mostly because I don't see them too much and they seem at least nominally interested in books and rhetoric and writing and the crazy shit people say and do.

Elizabeth McCracken came to give a reading at a university I attended, and she gave a small Q and A afterward for the graduate students.  She said that her biggest regret is that she spent so much time wondering, worrying, if she was a writer.  That once she stopped asking that question she was suddenly producing a lot of writing. Like books of writing.  Since then, I've tried to remind myself that the question, at this point, is moot.  I've been writing since I was four years old (a plagiarised copy of a book about a puppy-- I simply changed the puppy's name and kept all the other words the same. My technique has evolved since then). I remember sitting at a typewriter at the dining room table and pounding out my own version of The Boxcar Children, then later poems and short stories by the dozen. It's not that I chose writing.  I write, as has been famously said by many famous writers, because writing chose me.  I write because I have no other choice.

It's not just that I write stories.  I write my whole life. I write letters because I know in a letter I will get everything I want to say in.  When my partner and I were first together we would argue through email and text-- hashing out those small things you never realize you're going to have to hash out once you settle into the long run.  He indulged in my desire for written communication, though I know it boggled him-- he's not a writer, but, luckily for me, he, like I, doesn't much go for verbal discussions either.  When I'm not writing I'm writing in my head.  Just give me a comfortable seat and a blank wall, and I'll stare at the wall for hours. I have whole books in my head, several to choose from, and I just write them inside my brain. When I get bad news I write the whole story out in my head-- how will this play out? What if I revise? What if I change this or that?

I have another useless question. Am I a bad mother? It's similar to the writer question, because, like, dude, you're in the fire. At this point you fight the fire and don't worry too much about the hard questions. I'm a mother.  I'm a writer. It's a given-- I have to do the best I can do. The questions (and answers) are eerily similar.

People Tell You Who They Are

I was having a conversation this morning with someone about a young person in my life who I wish would stop having a relationship with another young person. It's so clear to me, I kept saying, what Young Person B is. How can Young Person A not see it? But I earned my knowledge.  I know who people are because I spent years completely clueless about seeing people for what they really were.  And I had to make much bigger mistakes than Young Person A has thus far made to get to this point.

Someone told me years ago, "People tell you who they are.  Listen." This became my personal mantra. Maybe too much so.  The other day one of my oldest daughter's friends was behaving in a way I thought was inappropriate.  "Geez, she's rude," I said to my daughter when the other girl was gone.  OK, I may have said it as she was walking away.  Even fifth graders are not wholly protected from my wrath.
"No, she's actually not, Mama," my daughter told me. "She's just tired."

Maybe my daughter's right. Maybe she knows more than I do-- it's happened before. Maybe I've used my mantra for evil instead of good sometimes in my life. I do tend to make snap judgments about people.  Luckily, I'm a solitary soul, and I keep a small circle. This will probably never change, but I do notice myself having to revise my decisions about people after I've made really quick judgments, then took the time to watch them operate.

People tell you who they are.  Listen. I've applied this to myself. I've tried to operate in the world in a way that tells people who I am, good and bad. With mixed results.  People sometimes tell me that they were scared of me before they got to know me.  Actually, one of my students wrote that in an assessment of my teaching and classroom. "At first I thought she was mean..." it gets better after that, I promise. I do have a protective bubble, both in my body language and my actions. "Grrrrr," it says.  "Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr." I try to let it down, but I'm a solitary girl. Growling at people, whether vocally (only one or twice), or physically, helps keep me isolated.  And I like isolation in a lot of ways. I like to be alone.

People can change (ugh-- that phrase).  I know because I've changed. I've seen other people change. But sometimes that change changes more than I intended.  It's like I had to run through a fire to get out of things I should never have been in.  And in order to run through that fire I had to don some protective clothing.  It's heavy, and there's a lot of crap involved--helmets, socks, gloves. And it worked so well to get me through the fire I figured, why take it off at all? Just keep it on in case another fire springs up.

Sometimes I try to make my kids wear the fire clothes.  But they don't see a need, which is a good thing. Sometimes when I'm with them I feel like a body guard-- I'm always watching the people around us, the traffic, the weather, them. It's a relief when they're at school, because my watch is over.  Except it's not, because even when they're at school it's in my head-- my charges are on the loose.  This morning we were talking about school being a safe place on the drive to said school.

"Mama, did you know you can get expended for bringing a toy weapon to school?" my eight year old asked.

"I did know that.  School is a safe place-- no weapons, no hitting, you can't even talk about violence.  Your school is a safe place."

"But it's not," she said. "Because a kid got expended for bringing a toy to school."

"Your school is safe-- that's why they suspended him, because he broke the safe school rules." She seemed satisfied, but I was not.  I pulled into the parking lot thinking about the possibility of doing some sort of search of the classmates-- just a pat down, nothing too scary.

"What do you do if someone hits you, though?" my daughter asked.

I hate this question.  The right answer, of course, is "don't ever hit anybody first, but if they hit you, WHOOP their motherfucking ass. Don't stop until that kid is bleeding.  Then call me, and I'll kick the little fucker." But I'm not allowed to say that. So I say, "You tell a teacher.  We never hit. If you hit someone, you'll be in big trouble. School is a safe place."

And they got out and went into their safe school with the little weapon-carrying violent sociopath kids. And I drove off, resisting the urge to follow them in and glare at any seven year old who looked askance at my daughters. I just can't help myself. People tell you who they are. I'm the kind of person who hits first, at least in my heart, as much as I try to resist it in my person. My dad used to say, "I'm going to kick ass now and take names later" (in reference mostly to punishing all five of us for something maybe one of us did. Seriously. He'd line us all up and we'd all get it with the belt.  I was ten years younger than the oldest kids.  Do you really think it was ME you asshole?). Maybe that's my manta, really. I kick ass now and take names later.

Leaving, But not Before I Sweep

I'm heading back to Columbus today after a week of staying in Cincinnati with my mom during and after her chemotherapy. Yesterday I wrote no less than seven emails to my brother and sisters (who will be coming down for consecutive chemo therapies) listing foods my mom likes, things that seem to help, calls for a different approach after the learning curve of this time. I went to the store five times yesterday. I bought enough protein bars, chicken noodle soup, ginger ale and crackers to feed at least five cancer patients. In a fit of hyper strength I moved a queen sized box spring from my mom's basement to her guest room for future guests.  Then I blew up an air mattress and made it up in the other extra room. Then I added clean pillow cases. I did the dishes.  I vacuumed.

All of this reminds me of when the girls were littler and I would type two and three (single spaced) page letters when they would go to Iowa for a week to visit my family without me. I included their lotions, their medicines, their special blankets and special bears. I reminded my relatives that the girls like chocolate milk in the morning, keep them away from cats, and never, ever, ever spank them.  No matter what.

It's a bunker mentality.  I'm surprised, in hindsight, that I don't actually have a bunker in the backyard. It would fit my personality completely.  In all my years of teaching I've never forgotten a book or a handout.  Not once.  I did once forget the book I needed for a class I was taking, and I was so horrified I began to cry as I searched the building for the professor to tell her ahead of time what I had done. Look at what I have done!

I remember my therapist once asked me what it would feel like if I got a B in a class.  I started to laugh.  Not only can't I imagine such a feeling, I wouldn't even try. I remember talking to a mentor about some of my students who were earning Bs and Cs in my class, and being worried about them. "They're not you," my mentor responded.  Enough said.

I like to believe this level of perfectionism doesn't touch my children.  They are perfect to me-- they don't have to run through the world proving it (as I do). But then I think about two weeks ago when my daughter had a loose sheet of paper in her bag (fifth graders have like seven folders--color coded-- to keep themselves organized.  This brings me so much joy.)
"Uh-oh," I said, pulling out the piece of paper. "We've got a loose one. Remember, the goal is organization! Where does this one go?" Yes. I actually said this. It seems funny now, but I'd do it again. I can't seem to stop myself.

My oldest daughter, perpetrator of the loose sheet, is enough like me that she quickly found the paper's place. My youngest daughter amuses me to no end because she's not a fan of my bullshit, and she'll call me on it. "Uh-oh," I'll say to her. "Your papers are not in your take home folder! Now they're all messy!"

"Yup," she responds, not even bothering to look at me. "But they're in my backpack. You're lucky they got here at all." And I know it's true.  Because she was just as likely to throw them away, leave them in some one else's mailbox, or just turn them into paper airplanes and watch them fly away into the blue future.

I know what all of this is about (I'm the worst kind of crazy-- I know I'm crazy, and I know why I'm crazy). If I miss a piece of paper about field trips or PTA meetings or Curriculum Night I am powerless.  As I've said to my kids before, "I can't do anything if I don't KNOW!" If I slip up and miss a signature somewhere the school will find out, and when they're counting signatures I'll go on the list of bad parents.  Parent of kids that should henceforth be ignored or possibly abused, because their parents don't really care about them at all.

So I buy twenty-five protein bars and stack them neatly by type in a bowl on my mother's counter. I ask her repeatedly if it's OK for me to leave today. I vacuum the floor again. I mop the upstairs once last time. Because all of this will forestall the universe. Oh, there's action in that house. Let's leave that lady alone-- we won't make her sicker or make the chemo not work, because somebody cares enough about her to sweep. All that noise and action scares the bad spirits away. If every thing's clean and tidy and organized nothing bad can happen. All the papers will be in their places.

Caretaking

The chemotherapy treatment my mom is on is kicking in-- at least the side effects are. It's a nice reminder for me that I would never make a good nurse (isn't this all writers' alternative plan? Nursing or teaching high school? Or truck driving, which I would suck at, too).

When my dad was dying of pancreatic cancer I took care of him.  I remember the busy-ness of it.  The changing of the IVs, the emptying of the gastric bag, the changing of the pain patch, then later making sure the morphine drip was working correctly.  But if I really think about it, much of the time I was bored.  I don't remember if I was reading a book (I've already read three since I got to my mom's). I do remember that I couldn't watch TV or talk on the phone.  My dad couldn't stand any noise at all in his apartment.  In fact, he made me unplug the television.

That quiet-- that's the part that gets to me.  My mom would never demand that I turn off the TV or not use the phone.  But her house isn't that big, and the wood floors and wood ceilings cause everything to echo.  So, I read my nook or I sit on the back porch and have short conversations while she sleeps in her chair in the living room.  I try to offer to do things for her, but I don't want to offer to do too much.  It has to be good for her to get up and be autonomous, right? She can't drive, so I do go out and do that work for her, but she's certainly still capable of standing up and pouring herself a glass of ginger ale.  So, I let her.  She's in charge of her own pills (I don't dole out the medicine like I had to for my dad). Because I'm going to have to leave at some point, and she'll need to be able to take her medicine-- as she has been all along before I got here.

I feel real guilt that I have to leave.  I miss my kids.  I miss my bed. I miss my dogs. I miss my life.  I know it's only been a week, geez. I'm worried that when I leave something will happen and it will take me nearly two hours to get back here.  I'm hoping she starts to feel better soon, but what if she doesn't? I'm tired all the time, and I feel sick to my stomach.  I guess I have psychosomatic chemo.

Emma

Dad's girlfriend and Dad dated off and on throughout my childhood after my parents' divorce when I was nine. Rumor has it that he proposed to her during the time of his chemo/radiation at the Mayo Clinic for pancreatic cancer, though they never got married.  They broke up before I got involved in his care, after they did exploratory surgery at Mayo and realized the cancer had spread everywhere and he only had six weeks to live. But Dad’s girlfriend was at his funeral.  I remember she asked our permission to put something in his casket. A picture, I think.  Or maybe a flower.

What I really remember about Dad's girlfriend was that she was the head of the anti-abortion movement in Iowa City, where I grew up.  When I was about ten Dad and Dad’s girlfriend sent me into the parking lot of a gynecologist with a huge stack of anti-abortion fliers to stick underneath the windshield wipers of those who parked there. The reason why they sent me was because it was illegal-- trespassing--and they told me to play dumb if the fuzz came.  The fuzz didn't come. I remember I only stuck a couple of fliers on the cars, then I threw the rest away and walked home.

My dad and I protested at the local women's clinic-- the Emma Goldman clinic.  At that time, Iowa City had established an ordinance stating that protestors couldn't stand together or be within fifty feet of one another while protesting (to try to stem the tide of times the protestors would accost women trying to get inside).  The staff at Emma Goldman took my dad and I's picture when we stood together. “Smile,” my dad whispered, putting his arm around my shoulders.  

The only other thing I remember was a guy walking by and saying, "How would you feel if your daughter got raped?" My dad put his arm around me and said, "This is my daughter." Then the Emma Goldman staff woman took another picture, standing in the doorway, hip holding the door open, ready to escape back into the safety of the inside.

Six years later I went into the Emma Goldman Clinic when I was in need of their services. I was terrified that there would be a poster on the wall with my picture on it: Enemy Against Women's Rights or something, or that the staff would recognize me from that little kid self.  But they didn't.

I had been driven to Emma for a rape kit to be performed. I was seventeen.  I remember feeling sad because the doctor was so nice. She spoke kindly and she offered to testify for me. I laid back and stared at the mobile of butterflies floating above my head and I wanted to tell her what I had done when I was a child. I wanted to confess.  I wanted to apologize.  I watched the butterflies float above my head and thought about how nice that was, that they had remembered that a woman might need something to watch, and that butterflies were nicer than posters of kitties, and that before the butterflies were all the way around their breezy circle this would be over.

Lit-ra-toure

In lieu of talking about boring old me yet again (I actually don't think I'm boring at all, and I've got the psychotherapy bills to prove it. I think I'm a train wreck of fascination) I'm going to talk about books. Because, if there's one thing we can do for the other members of our humanity-race-people-friends, it's share good books (and also talk about reality TV, but one thing at a time). I'm not going to go over my favorite books, because there's only one, and it's Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, and if you haven't read it, then you should, right now.

OK, now that we got rid of those losers. Most of the time, I pick up a new book and read the first few sentences and think, oh, OK.  This might be interesting.  Sometimes I read them and think, oh, no, this is not for me.  But every once in a great while, I read the first sentence and the feeling is of great relief.  Like, oh, it's you! I'm so glad it's you! It's the feeling of sinking into an older, but still stable, couch, a glass of wine in one hand, pretzels on the table, and one or three girlfriends curled up around you. I have no idea what's going to happen, this feeling tells me, but I know it's going to go on for hours, and it's going to be enlightening, and funny, and sad. I'm going to discover things about my friends that I didn't know before, and through this I'm going to realize ME, TOO! And sometimes I'll tell them and sometimes I won't, but the feeling is foggy and warm, but not too warm. And suddenly we're not all disconnected amoebas floating through the fluid of the world-- we're all connected.  We're not alone. When I walk out of this room, I'm going to feel fortified for life again.

I started a new book yesterday, Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship by Gail Caldwell, recommended by my professor and friend Michelle Herman, who has yet to steer me wrong (it's uncanny, really). I offer the first sentence as evidence: "I can still see her standing on the shore, a towel around her neck and a post-workout cigarette in her hand-- half Gidget and half splendid splinter..." (8). Oh, man. Commence sinking. And, as always happens when I find a great book (and by great I mean one that calls to me, I don't mean great in the sense of Moby Dick or Uncle Tom's Cabin), when I take a break from turning page after page, not even noticing that the pages are turning, I glance down and realize, Oh, no, I'm already halfway through! I have to stop! I have to ration the pages, because soon they'll be gone, and then what will I have? Months, maybe years of reading "smart" books, or funny books, or good books, or shitty books, before I find another one like this. But, of course, twenty-four hours later the pages are gone, and I can't get them back, and I don't even want to start another book because what's the point? It's a kind of grief. I'll go bike riding, or start a new cleaning project.  I'll depend on something else for a while, because I can't pick up another book and know immediately that it's not good enough.  Sometimes I try an old favorite I haven't read for a while, and it's great, but you can never get that feeling back.  It's like a muted version of that feeling.  Oh, yes, this book changed my life, at least for a little while.  I remember. Those were good times.

I'm going to be honest, because it's not like a bunch of people are going to discover this-- I usually only love (and I mean this kind of love) books by women.  This is totally inappropriate, and I shouldn't even say it, but it's true.  I love books by men.  I love lots of books by men. But it's a totally different kind of love.  It's a good love-- it's a love that makes a difference in my life.  But usually it's the kind of love I feel for a particularly precocious student.  Man, that kid is smart.  Funny, knows his shit, has some really jaw-dropping stuff to say. I'm delighted.  But it's not the female-friendship love.

It's true (for me) that I have a lot of male friends, but they can't be my female friends. I can't describe why. I've thought about it.  There's always this extra layer.  The closest I can call it is sexual tension, even though that's not right, because these aren't male friends I'd ever sleep with, or even think about sleeping with. But there's something there that's different.  Not bad different-- my best friend is a man-- I have lots of great male friends that I wouldn't exchange for a girl even on my worst hair days. But it's different. And, in my deepest core, there's something about my female friends, and my books by female authors, that sinks deeper into me.  The conversations sink deeper. But don't tell the boys I said so.

Lesson One: Getting Hit Doesn't Hurt As Badly as You'd Expect

I've been working on a blog about liter-a-toure for a while, but it's not coming together, so I decided to write instead about violence.  I actually have a semi-good reason, which is all I ever need to write about something. I've had headaches my entire adult life.  Sometimes they're just headaches, sometimes they go on for days, and sometimes they slip into migraines and I end up in a dark room, shivering.  I'm a big believer in the mind-body connection, and I know the headaches are usually induced by stress, but that's not what I'm thinking about today. 

I had a CAT scan a few years ago when I started getting headaches every time I bent over.  It turned out to be a combination of a small bleed in my brain and allergies, but in the discovery process the doctor asked if I had suffered a lot of head injuries in my life.  I laughed (I always laugh at weird shit), because, yes, I have.  But, for some reason, I started thinking about just how many head injuries I've had in my life and then I started to get freaked out.  I'm like the civilian Ali. So, I decided to list them, from concussions to just run-of-the-mill head-as-club injuries.  Because, first of all, I actually like to create lists.  Secondly, I'm always interested in writing about the things I think I forgot, but it turns out I totally remember.  I have no idea why I keep using italics.  I think it's because I just re-discovered the control-I thing.

So, here goes, in no specific order except a loose time-line, because, well, why the hell not?
1. I was in my walker when I was an infant. The old fashioned kind with wheels that actually went somewhere. Someone left the basement door open. I think we can all see where this is going. My mother found me at the bottom of the stairs, in convulsions, my eyes rolled back in my head.

“Is this your first child?” the doctor asked disdainfully when my mother brought me in to be checked.

“No,” my mother answered. “Fifth.”

“You should know better,” he said. I don’t think people had a lot of respect for concussions in the late 70s.

2. My father shoved me down the stairs when I was three or four. We lived in a split level, and he shoved me from the top, causing me to tumble, tumble, tumble until the front door stopped me.

3. My sister put me on the handlebars of her bike when I was four. No one could have known that the brake line would go out. No one could have known that stopping yourself with the garage door with your baby sister perched on the handlebars was a bad idea.

4. All I’ll say is clean sliding glass doors are really hard to see when you’re running and your expectation is that when you’re running that fast no doors will stop you. Because they will.

5. Body, meet two wheeler bike. Bike, meet gang of evil eleven year old Schwinn biker boys. Face, meet ground. Boys, meet my very angry father. He’s a prescription drug addict with a rage problem. Good luck.

6. I was fifteen and my older brother was out of town. My older brother had gotten a car for his birthday. It was a stick, and I couldn’t drive a stick, but since I had no driver’s license anyway I didn’t think this should stop me. We stole my brother’s car, me, my best friend and two other girls, and we drove to Rock Island. Driving a stick is not so bad. As long as you stay on the highway and avoid even the slightest hill, it’s really quite easy. But Rock Island, an hour away from Iowa City, on the Illinois side of the Mississippi river, is a hilly kind of town.

We stopped at a gas station and a truck full of young men pulled up (literally, a pickup truck full.  There had to be like fifteen of them).  We commenced doing what young people do, but we quickly decided this truck-o-boys was not that great.  So, we took off up the long hill, me carefully attempting to get all the way up to third gear without stalling the car and rolling alllll the way back down.  Suddenly, the truck pulled up and veered in front of us, forcing me to slam on the brakes.  But I forgot to hit the clutch, so the car shuddered to a stop there in the right hand lane.

A few of the young men jumped out of the back of the truck and came to my car window, which was already rolled down.  One of them stood right outside my window.  I remember he had on jeans and a black vest with no shirt.  Which should have put me on my guard, but I was young and not the brightest bulb.

"Are you that desperate, you have to run women down?" I asked him.  I don't know if he smiled or not-- I couldn't really see his face until he took a step back.

He started talking, and I still remember his monologue-- he said, "You all are going to visit Alex? Is that what you're doing?  Well, he's a punk.  And he would never do this--" and he raised his arm, and I saw, as his body twisted, that there was a black gun tucked into the waist of his jeans. He punched me in the side of my face, and I remember falling toward my friend's lap.  I passed out and woke up thirty seconds later, fighting to sit up, not knowing who had their arms over my head. I woke up fast enough to sit up and see the truck pulling off in front of us.

A few days later another friend who had been in the car saw an article in the Quad Cities newspaper-- that same man had gone on to do a drive by shooting that night or the next day.  He missed his target, but he killed a child on the sidewalk and wounded one other.

7. Head, meet crazy boyfriend that will take months to escape. Head, meet steering wheel the first time you try to escape him.  Head, meet steering wheel a few more times.  Drive, dammit.  Just drive.
Escape attempt #2: A while later he held me hostage in my apartment with a bat, occasionally tapping me on the head with it.
#3: run to the bathroom to try to escape.  He is a surprisingly fast crazy man.  Escape fail.

8. I played catcher in softball and had a tendency to flip my helmet off a little too fast.  It's no one's fault that my head met the bat a couple times.  The batter was just trying to get on first.

9. Boyfriend #2.  He didn't seem that crazy.  But I guess I pissed him off. He dragged me down the stairs and ran my head into a wall.  But it was just that one time.

10. Same boyfriend.  Different time. We were at a bar and suddenly a huge fight of the chair throwing, punch wailing type got started.  It continued outside, in a parking lot up from the bar, but it became clear that it was no longer a bar fight and was, instead, a bunch of men beating the crap out of one guy who was on the ground, pressed up against the fence that separated this parking lot from that parking lot. I knew (although I don't remember how I knew) that I knew the body pressed up against that fence.  In fact, that body belonged to crazy boyfriend #1 (from whom I'd long since escaped thanks to a handy warrant he had to serve time on). I ran forward and began grabbing the men's arms who were beating  him up.  I just didn't feel that it was fair, that's all.  To give the men credit, I don't think they realized I was a woman. It was dark, and late, and they were full of fire.  When they did, they totally stopped punching me.

I feel like there's more, but I've run out of steam. I took a couple taps to the head when I kick boxed.  It's important to me to be physically capable of violence, if necessary.  I have not used that skill in many years, and I have no intention of using it (what do you mean you don't like my story? HA! TAKE THAT! AND THAT!) But if I'm ever walking to my car late at night, it won't just be the keys that the criminal gets. I remember a friend saying to me years ago that she'd never been in a fight, that she was terrified that she would ever have to fight.

"The first thing you have to know to be a successful fighter," I told her, "is how to take a hit. The most surprising thing-- the thing that still surprises me, is that getting hit doesn't hurt that bad. Once you know that, it's all gravy. Just let somebody hit you and try not to be afraid."

Pickles

I'm settling into a routine-- get up at six-fifteen, drink as much coffee as humanly possible, wake the girls at seven, fix breakfast, ladidadi, take them to school, then write (ok, fine, revise-- I'm not producing anything new.  It's the story of my life that once I decide to put together a short story collection all I want to do is write nonfiction) until 11:30, then ride my bike to Weilands to buy lunch and anything we need for dinner.

If you're not from Columbus (or maybe even if you are), Weilands Gourmet Market is a really expensive grocery store where you can find lots of random stuff you never knew you needed, plus some amazing stuff that you know for a fact you don't need.  But the other day I discovered their deli kosher pickles, and now that's become my reward for revising for three hours every morning instead of watching reruns of Jersey Shore (Do YOU! No, you do you! No, I'm doing me!)

I have a pickle problem.  No one else in my house likes pickles, but I love them so much.  When I lived in Iowa, my friend and I would go to Stringtown Grocery and pick up bulk goods for my mom, then run over to the Kalona Cheese Factory (right down the street) and buy cheese curds, 7 year aged cheddar cheese, and kosher pickles.  And, ps, we were usually hung over.  So wrong. And then we'd eat all this nastiness on the way back home-- probably 15-20 miles of hilly country roads. So, so wrong.  But so good.

Stringtown Grocery is the official name. Really, it's the Amish store.  It's this tiny bulk foods store with no electricity.  They sell these weird, old beauty products, local baked goods (almost always burnt and dry, and yet I rarely don't buy some), and bulk foods.  I mean like bulk noodles and fruit preserves, not like Sam's bulk foods.  Everything comes in huge, clear plastic bags labeled with the store name.  And it smelles funny in there.  I'm not saying Amish people smell bad.  I'm just saying it smells funny.

The Kalona Cheese Factory is a place where they make cheese the old fashioned way, and they have a store built into this cellar-type room.  You can stand at a foggy, dirty window and watch them make the cheese, and see the cheese curds being run back and forth by these huge hand-like machines. And they have an off-brand soda machine where you can buy orange-orade pop for twenty cents.

The Amish girls are very sweet, and they don't talk much.  They stare, though. And who can blame them? Generally, my friend and I were dressed in tank tops and shorts, our tattoos hanging out (among other things). Or, more likely, we had pajamas on (which I would totally still do if I could pull it off).

So, there's no Amish store in Columbus.  And today's pickles from Wielands weren't as good as expected.  Boo. Boooooo.

Hysterical Chlamydia and Other 18th Century Ailments

While doing research for this blog (research that mostly consisted of talking to my girlfriends on the phone while burning dinner. Burning spaghetti, it turns out, is quite an accomplishment) I realized that hysterical Chlamydia is far more widespread than I originally thought. I believed that it was mostly caught after a night of bad decision making, usually involving a bar you would never otherwise go to and an encounter that can best be described as not quite as satisfying as an evening at home, reading Jane Eyre.
A few days later I received a phone call from a friend with whom I had discussed my thoughts about hysterical Chlamydia.

“I went to the doctor,” she said.

“You did?” I asked.

“Yes. And after I told him that I hadn’t had sex since my relationship split up over two years ago he said ‘probably not Chlamydia.’ But he said it with a straight face, which tells me this disorder is far more widespread than we first believed.”

I suffer from hysterical asthma. Like the hysteria of 18th century literature. Hysteria had more street cred back then. People often hear me, in tense classroom situations or at question and answer sessions that turn snarky, sigh loudly. And they laugh. They think this is who I am—the jerk who will sigh loudly, exasperated, when the world turns off center. I let them believe that. The truth is far sadder. I have hysterical asthma. When people, particularly men, but really just anyone, get too close, I can’t breathe. It’s not a feeling like, oh, I do believe I might be having a little difficulty catching my breath. I cannot breathe. My chest is caving in, my lungs are sinking against themselves, my ribs suck closer, and soon, probably in the next three seconds, I am going to start screaming for help before I can’t scream at all. So, in order to harness my hysteria, I sigh. I sigh when someone says something I am really interested in. I sigh when someone makes a point that strikes too close to home. I sigh when the teacher walks in the room (I can’t help it. No matter how old I get, I’m still a student at heart, and I just want the teacher to like me in an A+ kind of way.) I sigh to prove to myself that, no matter how it feels, I can still breathe.

So, I organize my world so that people don’t get too close. I rarely ride the bus (closeness, generally, is not optional). I carry a big bag, one so large it requires its own seat in auditoriums, you know, the seat between me and you, if that’s ok. I smoked during almost all outside conversations so I had an excuse to back up a few steps, turn to the side. No one, not even fellow smokers, wants second hand smoke blown in their face. When I sit on a couch I sit with my feet up (much like second hand smoke, people have an aversion to feet). And, embarrassingly, when faced with my partner’s family, a massive clan that takes every goodbye as an opportunity to hug it out (to the point where I plan thirty minutes for goodbye saying), I spent many years saying, “I have to pee,” and then, after taking as long as humanly possible in the bathroom without raising awkward questions, waving from a corner, protected on two sides by walls. Do not hug me, thanks. I promise, I’ll be back. Dear God, I will come back if only you don’t touch me.

I’m getting better, I think. I hugged someone (actually, two someones) the other day, and I even initiated it. Sigh.

I Don't Play

When my kids were little(r), one of the biggest struggles I had was when they asked me to play with them.  I had various responses-- you wanted a sister.  Now play with her... I can't right now...or, most often, Let's do crafts! People would say, I can't believe all the creative stuff you come up with for your kids to do! I would nod, but what I really wanted to say was, don't you know that if you don't keep them busy they'll want you to play with them?

My daughters painted, they colored.  In the winter, I'd fill spray bottles with cold water and food coloring, and they'd paint the snow. In the summer I'd buy huge amounts of butcher paper and they would create collages that I'd then tape to the garage door.  On Halloween we'd make all of our own yard decorations. We built race cars out of boxes, masks out of paper plates, Christmas presents out of clay.  All so that they would forget to ask me to play with them.

I played when I was little. We moved nearly every year when I was in elementary school, but the one belonging I had that I made sure I kept with me was my box of Barbies.  It was an old cardboard box, falling to pieces, filled with every Barbie doll I owned. We lived close enough to bike to the house of the Doll House Lady, an old lady who got the dolls that were donated to Goodwill and fixed them up and sold them on her back porch. Every time I had two nickles to rub together, I would ride my bike to the Doll House Lady's house and buy a Barbie. It was the most delicious feeling of my childhood.

I spent hours on the floor of my bedroom, or on the big bed I shared with my sisters, playing with my Barbies.  I had a lot of them, but they were all embroiled in dangerous, highly dramatic lives.  And every time I walked into the room, I could pick them up and know all of their stories.  I knew which story needed to be dealt with first, and I knew who all the players were. The whole story clicked into place in my brain, although I never knew what the ending was-- the story unfolded as I played. And I played alone. Luckily, my sisters were too old, and my brother... well, if you don't have a brother, I will tell you now they are useless when it comes to Barbies. GI Joe, GI Shmoe. I never wanted to play with anyone else.  Other people ruin the story.

I remember being probably twelve (and still playing with my Barbies) and coming to the realization that adults don't play. I remember being overtaken by chills.  This was nearly as bad as when, later that year, I realized that people died.  I remember thinking, that will never happen to me-- I will never stop playing with my Barbies.  Although, of course, I did. But I quit playing with Barbies to, eventually, become a writer, so I'm not so sure I quit playing entirely.

Not too long ago my oldest daughter had the same realization.  Adults don't play. She didn't seem as struck by panic as I was, but she's never been much for playing on her own, anyway. She plays mostly as a way to advance or establish social heirarchy, not as a release for the stories in her brain. As she gets older (10 and a half now, whoa), I see her play switching to the kind of play that will serve her well in a few years when she tells me to go to hell and I suddenly become public enemy number one: she does her hair, she tries on outfits, she breaks into my makeup. She'll still engage in a bout of imaginative play if her little sister comes up with a really great proposal, but long gone are the days when I would hand them a canoe paddle and send them out into the backyard with the instructions to play. I don't mourn the loss of play as much as I mourned the passing of the years of magic (Santa/Tooth Fairy-- those were great years.  I've never had so much fun in my life as when I created a Tooth Fairy template for Tooth Fairy/Tooth Loser correspondence, or watched as my nephews grew up and took the baton and began creating elaborate almost-Santa-sighting on my sister's property in Iowa on Christmas Eve).

Adults don't play, it's true.  At least in my case.  I'm down for wandering bike rides, sloppy hikes through the woods, catastophic messes in the name of crafting.  But I don't play.  I haven't for a very long time. It's my one thing-- the thing I was never willing to share.

I'm Kind of a Big Baby When it Comes to My Mom

My mom came in to town today to go back to school shopping for the girls with me.  It's the first time I've seen her since she called to tell me she has cancer. My mom was clearly in pain, though she denied it when I asked her.  After she left, my oldest daughter followed her outside, as she always does, and stood in the front yard, waving, until my mom was long gone.  My daughter has always done this-- since she was able to wave.  When she was a baby she'd sit at the window of our old house and tell my mom "wave up and down the hill!" I believe this was her first sentence.  And my mom would.  She'd open her car window, no matter how cold, or rainy, or icy it was, and she'd wave until she got all the way up the hill. And my daughter would sit on the back of the couch, behind the curtain, waving, her face pressed against the glass.  "Bye Grandma!" she'd scream. "Bye!"

I was a terrible teenager.  From about twelve on, I was overtaken by the devil of teenage-osity.  I snuck out, I smoked, I drank, I dated all the wrong boys, I tried drugs (I wasn't very good at them, but I tried really hard). I was all the things mothers pray they won't have when they get baby girls in the hospital.  And I despised my mother. I attempted to manipulate her (and succeeded quite a bit). I lied to her, I abused her, I took advantage of her generosity.  If it was wrong, I did it. I had no interest in a relationship with my mom.  I just wanted her to get out of my way.

But then I had a daughter.  And I was a single mother.  Except I wasn't, because my mom showed up.  She rocked the baby, she held that baby, she bought that baby everything she needed, then some.  She took the baby to church with her so I could sleep in.  And my daughter loved my mother.  I wouldn't ask, because I wouldn't like the answer, who my daughter loves more.  It's my mom.  And I'm so glad for both of them.

So, today when my mom left my daughter ran outside to wave up and down the hill.  And I went into the kitchen and cried some.

"She's still out there," my partner said. "You can catch her."

But I didn't. I went into the garage and watched out the window as my daughter stood and waved, then just stood, staring down the street that my mother had long since turned off of. 

Needing is For Suckers

I've been feeling like my whole life is on hold while we wait to find out what my mother's treatment plan will be for her lung cancer.  Will she have surgery, then go to Iowa for chemo? Will she have chemo in Cincinnati, then surgery, then go to Iowa for more chemo? Or is there some other plan I don't even know about, because once a person gets sick, their entire life is handed over to a bunch of overpaid doctors who may or may not give a rat's ass? Thank God I'm not bitter.

I have been known, once or twice in my life, to be a non-compliant patient.  My sister, who has been in health field for years, occasionally likes to call me and scream "Non-compliant! Non-compliant!" then hang up the phone.  It's true.  There's nothing I hate worse than feeling like my life's plan is in some one else's hands.  It's not that I doubt the wisdom of men and women who have studied medicine for many years.  I know they're probably right.  I just think they don't know me.  If they knew me, they'd know I'm not going to wear a cast for five months when six weeks will do, thanks.  I'm not going to take vitamins. I'm not going to "take it easy." Taking it easy is for suckers. Illness is for suckers, which is how I ended up, during my MA program, in the hospital with a leg swollen to three times its size after being forced into it by my office mates, who were so grossed out they kicked me out and I had no place else to go. Swollen legs are for suckers, as is mono, which is what it turned out I had.

I got this attitude, at least in part, from my mother.  One of her classic lines: "I'm sorry.  I just don't like sick people." Who does.  They're all needy, and sicky and coughy and, well, yuck. 

It sucks to be needy.  It sucks to not be able to do for yourself.  After I had a c-section with my daughter, I got in trouble with my doctor because I refused to just lay around in the hospital bed, waiting to heal.  I wheeled her little plastic bed up and down the halls of the maternity ward.

I know there is sanity to healing-- to allowing your body to heal.  I'm just not good at it.  Healing feels bad to me.  It's too needy. I've never been a fan of needing other people.  I don't get warm fuzzy feelings when people do things for me.  I feel indebted.  In debt. I just want to do it for myself.  Yes, I recognize that voice.  It's the voice of a two year old.  I can do it! I can just do it myself!

On being 30...something

I have the benefit of having sisters who are 9.5, 8.5, and 7.5 years older than me.  When I was in my twenties they used to say "just wait until you are in your thirties. When you're in your thirties, everything makes a lot more sense.  You just get a lot smarter in your thirties." I believe this is a lie.  Kind of like when they told me it was safe to ride on handlebars.
 I'm just as confused, if not more so, in my thirties.  Maybe I'm just not thirty enough? Maybe they were referring to the mid to late thirties?

When I was in my twenties, I was raising small children.  There wasn't a lot of time for questions.  I just settled into the endless misery of diaper changing, potty training, pacifier confiscating.  I just lived as best I could, stumbled, and fell more times than I care to count.

But now, in my thirties, I have little girls who aren't so little anymore, stepkids who made it (mostly) through their teenage years. I have time to ask the questions I never had the time to ask in my twenties.  And I'm clueless as to what the answers are.  I remember being a teenager and watching my mom fill out her taxes in the late hours of April 15.  Surrounded by paperwork, smoking cigarettes by the handful as she sat at the dining room table, cursing eloquently (something my whole family really excels at.  It's our legacy.) I remember thinking I will never understand taxes.  I cannot accomplish adulthood, because taxes will always be beyond me. 
Teenage self, I would look back and say, No worries.  You will be a teacher and a writer! You will never make enough money not to get the free turbo tax edition.  PROBLEM SOLVED. Now take off that blue eyeshadow, and, for God's sake, stop perming your hair. And step away from the boys.  They will be around in a few years, and that thing in their pants will not have changed.

A lot of my friends are childless. Some of them have entered into the great debate of the late 20s-early 30s and beyond: Should I have children? To them I say DO IT! Or, you know, don't.  Either way. Same diff. I'm not exactly in the position to offer advice.  Very soon after I became a full adult in American society, able to vote (which I didn't) and buy alcohol (which I did!), I used my great power to A. get drunk and B. get pregnant. I never debated if I should have children.  I guess I must have debated whether to not have children, but not really.  I was pregnant.  Children (or at least child) I would have.

My children made my life (children I would have.  Turns out I didn't learn my lesson the first time, because two years later I had another one.  I have no idea how that happened). But I was the kind of young woman who would not live for myself.  I wouldn't take life by the balls and shake it.  I would not charge into my future.  I kind of just hung out and hoped my future would ask me to dance.  But for my daughters, I would charge.  I made shit happen. Because I needed my little girls to believe in me as the fearless woman warrior (literally.  My oldest daughter's name means "daughter of the warrior" in Gaelic).  So, I became, on the surface, a woman warrior (inside I was still the quivering teenager waiting for life to teach me how to get funky, but that's another story).

My children saved me.  But who knows, had I not had children, if I wouldn't have (eventually) saved myself.  It might have been kind of cool to see who I would have been if I hadn't had children.

OK, if I'm gong to be 100% honest (which I never am, so this is a rare treat), I know I would be a better parent if I had waited til, say, now..no now, wait...NOW to have children.  I don't think I'd sweat the small stuff so much.  I mean, I knew intellectually in my twenties that everybody goes to kindergarten potty trained, but I didn't believe it in my heart.  I knew in my brain that my kids would learn to read, you know, eventually.  But I didn't believe it. I knew that laughter and joy is a much better diet for little kids than anxiety and fear.  But I didn't believe it.  But it's hard to tell if it's age or going through the fire that taught me all this. Or maybe a combination of both.

 I'm in the enviable position of being a step-grandma.  Yeah, thanks for that.  Grandma at thirty. Except, I'm a step-grandma, so it doesn't count, just so we're clear. I'm actually not a grandma at all.  So I won't think it's funny if you call me Grandma. She has a grandma.  It's his ex-wife.  I'm just a nice, pretty, very young lady who loves her a lot and buys her toys and takes her on cool vacations. Are we clear? OK, if we're clear. The point is, I feel no (or next to no) anxiety regarding this little kid.  She's cute.  She's two. She's smart. She likes books.  She's mostly potty-trained, except when she pees on my stairs. Sometimes she throws a little temper tantrum, but it doesn't make my nerve endings hum or make me believe I am the worst step-grandma (again-- not a grandma at all. As a matter of fact, let's not even use the g-word. Let's just call me "lady") in the world. I just think she's tired, she's two, and maybe she's a little pissed off about being two, which, if you really think about it, probably sucks quite a bit. I think she'll turn out great.

I wonder if this perspective comes with age, experience, or just the knowledge that, in the end, it's not really my problem.  I'm just mostly a spectator in this game.  I'm the fan in the fourth row who offers coaching advice and occasionally stands up to do the wave in between beers and hot dogs. It's her parents who have to live with the crushing guilt every time she cries.  Ha ha suckers. I told you to use condoms.