Home on the Fringe

Garage Sale

2009-10-24T20:54:00.003-05:00

At 6:30 a.m. Friday, someone was already waiting for us to expose our wares, ready or not. "How much for this top and skirt set, honey?" she asked me fairly patiently as I click-clacked around the garage in a hurry, sliding boxes and topping pricing markers with importance; I had to get to work; I had to feed the kids breakfast; I had to make their lunches; I had to .. to.. . DO... LOTS. OF. important... THINGS. I was busy. "Three dollars. ?" I blurted as if under undue pressure, and then left the rest to John, who was relaxed, detached, and as a result actually accomplishing tasks while I was filling the garage with unproductive, invaluable tension. By 7:00 a.m., the kids' lunch was half-made, their breakfast half-eaten, my earrings half-on, and my shoes still click-clacking with false, forced authority all over the wood floors, the tile floors, the beautiful expensive flooring in the house we're indebted to for generations, the house 50 successful garage sales still couldn't afford, the house we love, but probably shouldn't have bought, the house we will stay in until we've resolved all the other poor choices, and learned all the other late "life lessons".

John braved the constant traffic and occasional haggling with "customers" on Friday, with virtually no comments, other than how much we made by selling junk to others. Saturday morning it was my turn, and I had to get over myself and my irrational fear of the unknown, and the fact that it's also irrational that the "unknown" includes allowing unfamiliar people onto my driveway (how horrifyingly anti-social for someone who considers herself "open" and "liberal"), let alone INTO MY GARAGE, only *feet* from a portal into my home, the home with the mess and dysfunction and reality I have yet to "manage" in any acceptable way, despite my criticisms and my know-it-all, have-a-response attitude about everything until I screw up and see how hard it all is, and how we're all just a bunch of snot-nosed kids when it really comes down to it. But having that realization around my mounds of dirty clothes and pet hair isn't necessary, is it? Even though a lot of the dirty clothes were carried downstairs by my kids at my request with pretty decent attitudes, and the pet hair comes from two of the most peaceful, family-oriented creatures on earth? Yeah, still. Not necessary. Because the peace is always the after-math realization I have. I look BACK and go, wow, the kids are really basically sweet. I shouldn't yell so much. SIGH. Wow, the animals are so amazing and low maintenance. I should appreciate their part in the family more. SIGH.

But I digress. By Saturday morning, it was my turn. After shoving down any remaining human emotion I might have about allowing others near my territory or whatever nonsense instinctively rules my brain, I parked myself in the garage and forced friendly "HI"s to come out of my mouth. I answered people's questions. I negotiated prices. I even had conversations that I was disappointed, YES, DISAPPOINTED to end. People were full of information for me: they'd had a garage sale last week and now here they were buying more stuff, ha, hahaha, ha, ha; they were stopping by on behalf of their aging parents who loved garage sales, did that TV work?, no they didn't want me to plug it in, nevermind; why are you selling the Wii Fit?, did you not like it, oh, you didn't use it to get in shape like you thought you would, yep, they understood that, ha, hahaha, ha, ha; would I take fifty cents for these two toys marked fifty cents each?; how about a dollar for the already priced to sell three-dollar DVDs? When the customer who asked the last question literally STUFFED HER WALLET -- WITH PANACHE -- INTO HER BRA EIGHT INCHES FROM MY FACE AFTER HANDING ME A DOLLAR AND WAITING FOR TWO QUARTERS BACK, I wished I'd studied Zen Buddhism. Or been blind. Or non-judgmental. Or somehow oblivious. But no; I am none of these.

I'm a broke, educated, white mother of two white males in the smack-dab-middle of the United States of America. I have a high paying job and lots of nice things, and I pay for my kids to go to a school that will teach them about a world that exists beyond their skewed, screwed-up house with two-car garage. I have no more hope of perspective or depth beyond what I can claim to pay for. Somehow the white trash bra-wallet lady seems to have something figured out here that I don't, much to my instinctual, consistent dismay.

Mr. In Control vs. Mr. Entertainment

2009-07-05T21:42:00.003-05:00

The kids are smitten with the nine-year-old daughter of my mom's next door neighbor, which has introduced us to the phenomenon of what life will be like when they're in high school. Her back yard is not fenced, and neither is my mom's, so the first time they met, and after the obligatory shyness wore off and their natural competition rose to the surface, the flirtation of choice was racing across the length of Her back yard. Quinn always loses when it's a race based only on speed, which means two things: Quinn gets frustrated and moves on to something else, and Bryce demands a race every. single. time. he sees Her.

Last night all the families were out before fireworks started, and Bryce used his trusty "let's race" line to get Her attention. Cue the same rules, the kids in the same line-up, and the same four seconds of all-out sprinting followed by Quinn's desperate attempts to win for once by heading for the finish line before reaching the agreed upon mid-point of the far fence, and Bryce's (legitimate but screechy) accusations of cheating (even though Quinn still never wins). Party music was playing on the back porch when all the kids came up for a drink, though, and She started to dance, which led to Quinn joining Her with his signature hilarious lip-syncing, finger-pointing, disco party moves in perfect rhythm to whatever was playing. Bryce got his drink and said to Her, "let's go race again," but as he ran off, She hesitated and said, "I want to dance, I don't want to race." Bryce didn't even know what to make of this. He had no desire to dance, and no intention of dancing. (I can totally relate; in fact, this is probably a medical condition he inherited from me, much like his desire for control, frustratingly photographic memory, and obsessive-compulsive tendencies.) He tried to wait patiently while She and Quinn jammed through all the classics streaming from the digital cable party channel. The entire bottom half of Quinn's head was soaked with sweat and he was probably delirious with fatigue and dehydration, but nothing was going to take this victory away from him. I tried to encourage Bryce to join them, but he just ignored me. He tried a different tact, walked up to Her mid-shuffle and said, "let's play climb the mountain on the rocks over there!" to no avail. She told him to dance too, but he shook his head and I could see his mind racing for something to offer Her that would be more compelling than dancing, and dancing with Quinn of all people! Quinn was lapping it up, performing for the neighbor family across Her back yard, lip syncing to songs he didn't know and pointing frantically, occasionally changing up his points for some air guitar when the songs allowed for such genius.

Finally, She was ready to take a break from dancing and agreed to humor Bryce's constant requests to play a game, any game, any activity involving role playing that might somehow resemble video game life where he could feel in control, directing the activities of all the players and declare the winner according to his pre-determined set of logical rules. Bryce seemed to relax again under these circumstances, although still perplexed by the whole thing: the dancing, ... who can tolerate all that out-of-control, purposeless movement with no defined end in mind? Watching the three of them play and the boys compete for Her attention and approval in whatever way they could, I said, "the teenage years are going to be tough with those two." "Yeah," said my stepdad, " 'Hey Quinn, find out if she likes me.' '...Well, Bryce, I've been out with her four times now, but I just can't tell.' "

And just think: before this set of exchanges, all I was worried about for the evening was firework safety.

If that's not a postmodern expression of injustice, I don't know what is.

2009-07-03T17:19:00.004-05:00

The other night in the game room, in lieu of playing another smashing round of "Hangman" on the kids' chalkboard, we played "guess the picture" which is exactly what it sounds like - no more, no less. In the spirit of Calvinball, none of us defined any rules or guidelines, but a pattern of each person drawing two mystery pictures at a time emerged organically. After one round of this pattern, Bryce wanted to play again. I was out of ideas after my masterpieces of "castle" and "crown", so I gave my second turn to John, who drew his final pictures just before we both announced it was time for teeth-brushing and face-washing before bed. Bryce objected, saying it wasn't fair, John had had three turns, so he needed three turns. John opted for a sly approach and threw in a previously unspoken "guess the picture" rule, saying he and Quinn had taken four turns total, and mom and dad had taken four turns total, so the "teams" were even. Bryce continued to wail and we continued to herd Quinn into the bathroom for bedtime rituals. Bryce's rage had to be expressed, so he growled and ran back to the chalkboard and angrily scrawled this in his choppy second-grade cursive (parenthetical, correct spelling, and all):

dad had three turns
mom, 1 bryce, 2
quinn, 2
(no teams)
unbalanced

I read his message and gave him a high five. That kid's going places, I tell you.

Reparations, 2009

2009-06-08T21:43:00.006-05:00

In January I made an actual New Year's Resolution. Well, okay; it wasn't exactly "specific" or "measurable," the way real, adult, professional goals are supposed to be. It was more of a theme, but not one that could be adequately described with words. My new year's resolution was more like the artist formerly known as prince's symbol - elusive, non-descript, cartoonish, even. My life by mid-year was going to epitomize peacefulness, genuineness, gratefulness, graciousness, any -ness I could think of that was consistent with my ever-forming "values." At the time this seemed perfectly reasonable and realistic. By not placing specifics around the resolution formerly known as Fix My Life, it seemed somehow doable, maybe probable, and even enticing. I would simply know when a choice presented itself to me to prove my commitment to The Resolution. You see, the past few years have taken quite a toll, and not necessarily in the way you might assume -- not in all bad ways. Good news in the way of a beautiful home, healthy kids, career recognition, and little joys like the barn kitten we brought home from a Thanksgiving visit to my dad's charmed Kentucky life have been probably appropriately (or at least not surprisingly) balanced by bad news in the form of health scares, horrific family strife, near-fatal accidents, and the stress that accompanied the "career recognition" I just mentioned. The Resolution was going to be my awakening from the comatose survival mode of simply reacting to the chaos around me. I was going to consciously choose everything from my tone of voice when I'm saying, "we use napkins in this house" and "stop licking the seatbelt" to my breathing patterns during mind-numbing, politically charged meetings at work.

Yeah, well, that didn't work for long. The tangible results I was looking for would have shown up first in the mirror, when I would glance there without cringing at the reflection of the dozens of extra pounds that the chaos and resulting coping mechanisms of these past years have cruelly deposited. They would have certainly shown up in my closet, where I would have been able to wear 90% of what hangs there limply instead of the mere 10% that is faded and worn and soon to be stretched to oblivion. While I haven't forgone the possibility of achieving the resolution formerly known as Fix My Life, I have woken up to the reality that the vague, artistic symbol communicating The Resolution needs to be shaped more like a treadmill than a cup of frozen custard and Oreos, or a margarita, or a couch. I know losing weight won't achieve all the "-ness"es I strive for, but I'm awake enough to recognize that I have to start somewhere, and the ability to recognize my own face in the mirror and fit into my own clothes would be a refreshing start.

So, at 5:00 a.m. on June 15th, picture me cursing January and my stupid, stupid, undying theme of a 2009 resolution to Fix My Life. I will be heaving and frowning in an attempt to exercise after only sitting and coping for two years, and wishing I'd picked a "SMART" goal per Corporate America's instructions, one that by now I could have failed to achieve and simply look back and sigh over, like, "oh well, that didn't work out - it was just too darned specific!"

For The Birds

2009-06-07T22:53:00.003-05:00

Leaving the movie theatre Friday night after seeing "Up," Bryce's voice caught my attention as he called to us: "What is this I'm looking at? Guys!! What is this?" Normally I would have let my impatience to hurry up and live this pesky life override any temptation to exacerbate Bryce's already overblown sense of curiosity, but the tone and message of Pixar's latest masterpiece was still fresh, so in one fatal moment, I turned around and said, "what?" Bryce's usual, seemingly impossible stationary bounce was magnified and exemplified by his wide eyes and pointing finger, and I followed his gaze into the freshly mulched movie theatre garden of prickly bushes and saw two pink, writhing, see-through lumps of flesh topped by dry, open, barely chirping, tiny bird mouths. John tried to keep walking, but now Quinn was involved too, and soon all three of us were guilting him into helping the pitiful creatures. It wouldn't be that hard, I said. My own brother found three nestlings as a kid, I said. My dad raised them on whatever gruel we could find in the house and they lived and flew away weeks later, I said.

Once in the car holding the makeshift nest, a sense of panic and doom came over me. "Uh, this doesn't look good," I said, noticing how truly transparent their less-than-paper-thin bird skin really was. "I don't know if they're going to make it." John nodded his "yeah, I know, that's why tried to keep walking" nod. Pet stores were closed, so we rushed to the nearest open grocery store and quickly settled on baby formula as the method of Bird Life Saving we would try on, like a cheap new pair of shoes or something else equally necessary but unfamiliar when the technical requirements really become important to know. There was brief panic when the grocery store's pharmacy was closed: "WHAT? WHERE WILL WE FIND AN EYE DROPPER?" We searched frantically until we came across a basic syringe, then breathed deeply and tried to keep from exploding when the cashier needed an old-school price check on it: "Can we show the guy where it is on the shelf? Don't you know we have dying baby birds in the car, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, PEOPLE?!"

The box from Bryce's serendipitously recently purchased tennis shoes was still sitting out waiting to receive its new occupants, who miraculously lived through the night despite my pathetic attempts to feed them human baby formula with a syringe, despite my almost choking and drowning them in human baby formula, despite my not keeping them warm enough in that huge shoe box on a marble counter top in an an air-conditioned house built for humans a thousand times their size. The little one died a few hours into Saturday morning, simply but tragically still when I came to feed them both mid-morning after being shocked that the night hadn't taken them. Who knew Death liked to hang around 'til mid-morning? And for a harmless baby bird, at that. I spent a few hours looking for a wildlife rehabilitation center, but couldn't get anyone on the phone, and realized that when I decided to "try to save the birds," it was really my decision and not one I could somehow pawn off on the local authorities like I think I'd assumed in the back of my mind outside that theatre. I took the kids to find real bird food and an eye dropper after John suggested the human baby formula might have been too rich and the syringe too aggressive for these tiny, tiny creatures. The real bird food was thicker, and after a few feedings left a paste on the outside of the remaining baby's beak. But, again, despite my horrifying performance as a baby bird rehabilitator, he lived through another night.

He didn't make it past dinner time, and this time Death decided to play it up for us, make the whole thing more traumatic and memorable. When Bryce and I went in for a feeding, the still-naked bird felt cold and looked paler than before. I offered the eye dropper of freshly prepared, bonafide baby bird food, and he opened his mouth, but when I gingerly squeezed a drop in, he sputtered and gagged, and he seized and drew his wings and tiny pink feet as close as possible, until...nothing. Bryce said, "what's he doing? Why is he doing that?" and since he'd been anticipating the second bird's death for the past 24 hours, said, "Is he dead?" "Well....he's dying," I said. The bird's beak opened a few more times, but his breathing had stopped after the first (last) drop of food. Bryce asked, "Should I carry the box in to the kitchen and let everyone know?" When he walked up to John and shared the news, John said, "Well, we did everything we could." I gave him the evil eye, thinking his response was cold and brief and non-responsive, but it was actually what Bryce needed to hear. "Wasn't it lucky that I spotted those birds? They were SO lucky that we found them and tried to help them live longer."

We all participated in the back yard burial and memorial service, which consisted of the kids and I in our pajamas and John in shorts and flip flops with a shovel, the two bird siblings wrapped ceremoniously in official deceased baby bird paper towels, and our dog Pax in the background, perplexed and softly mouthing his chew toy, which all of us thought was a symbolically significant and sudden chirping of neighborhood birds. When John noticed it was only the dog's toy squeaking, we all laughed, patted the ground, and sat on our back porch before having ice cream.

A Taste

2009-04-11T20:33:00.003-05:00

A Conversation Wherein I Try to Discern Complex Details from a Six-Year-Old Obsessed With Possibly Misplaced Priorities (AKA "the bubbles vs. the answers")

Me: Quinn, tell me about the tests you took in school today.

Quinn: Oh yeah - Dr. H read to us from a book.

Me: Oh! So, did you have to answer questions about what she read to you?

Quinn: Well, we had to fill in the bubbles and stay in the lines.

Me: Yeah, I know that - you have to color in the bubble next to the right answer. But what kinds of questions were they, Quinn?

Quinn: There weren't any QUESTIONS. She turned the pages and we had to stay in the lines when we filled in the bubbles!

Me (perplexed): O....kay. Well, how did you know which bubbles to fill in?

Quinn (irritated because his mother is a moron): SIGH! You had to stay in the lines when you filled them in! I've told you this already!

Me: Let's start over. Dr. H read from a book, right?

Quinn: Right.

Me: And then she asked you a question, and you had to fill in the bubble next to the right answer -- were the answers pictures, or numbers, or words?

Quinn: She didn't ask any questions! She was just reading! All we had to do was listen and then fill in the right bubble and stay in the lines. I'm tired of telling you this!!!

Me (not willing to let it go): Okay, well let me ask you this: were you filling in bubbles next to pictures?

Quinn (annoyed, losing focus): Yes, there were pictures.

Me (drunk on falsely perceived success): Hmm! Now we're getting somewhere. Were they shapes, or animals, or something else?

Quinn (now looking out the window): ...I can't remember.

Me (face planted in remaining dinner on plate): Oh.

****************************************************
Car Rides: Still Torture After All These Years

I was reading through some of my posts from early 2006, a whole three years ago now, and I was surprised to read a description of driving with the kids that sounded like something I could write today. Something about one hand on the wheel, one hand flailing in the back seat to keep the two toddlers effectively separated from one another. On the one hand, I've been thinking we've come so far in our parenting trek and that some of the infant and toddler hardships are definitely behind us. But on the other hand, I think maybe this is just one of the stories I tell myself to keep my few remaining shreds of sanity intact. Because honestly, just this morning on the way to the kids' soccer game I was one vein-bulging moment away from my head exploding and causing John to, in shock and disgust, careen off the road, all while Bryce and Quinn undoubtedly continue "humming" one single insanity-inducing note at exponentially increasing decibel levels. The blood and guts and crashing metal wouldn't stop them. Believe me. Nothing. Stops. Them. On the bright side, they have great tone recognition. If this apparent talent turns them into a successful two-man band, I think some potential band names could be Incessant, Madness, or Incessant Madness.

Slash

2009-03-27T20:43:00.009-05:00

Here's the thing: When I was three, my parents decided to put me in ballet lessons. I was a quiet, compliant, blonde, easy child. It seemed like the obvious thing for any well-intentioned parent to do. I went to the lessons, learned my moves, practiced as diligently as a three-year-old can be expected to, and primped and preened for the big day of the recital, where there were undoubtedly hordes of (16?) anxious fans (parents and grandparents) waiting to judge the performance. In my black leotard, face painted whiskers, fuzzy-ear-headband, and stapled kitty tail, I joined my ballet class on stage and proceeded to fixate on the audience while I robotically stepped through the moves I'd faithfully practiced and learned. The girl next to me clearly didn't bother to practice (stupid three-year-old), missed a few steps, and ran into me, which threw off my entire already endangered performance. For the rest of the humiliating time, I stood on stage and looked at the overwhelming number of strange faces in the crowd. I'm pretty sure I remember the bright, hot lights and the feeling of embarrassment and the flushed, red cheeks in which that dreaded combination culminated. As legend has it in my family, I came home after that hideous recital and exclaimed that I would not dance again "until I was a teenager."

Of course, if you've read anything written here by me (I'm shocked if you're still here), you'll know that I basically never danced again AT ALL. Not at my wedding, not when drunk, not at gun point, not ever. I've associated dancing with being watched and humiliated. Really, it's a self-centered fear: who cares what my dancing looks like? Who even knows what my dancing looks like, actually? But it's not the point. I've carried the memory and the stories associated with this feeling with me for three decades. It's why for so long I was characterized as "shy" when in reality, I am anything but shy. What I am, is private. What I am, like Bryce, is demanding of control. The combination results in a personality that resists any exposure to vulnerability that may devolve into what I perceive as embarrassment or humiliation. This same characteristic has so many extremes: it's All or Nothing. Usually, it's All. All of everything, to the point of exhaustion or self criticism / deprecation / loathing / continuous slashes until I get the perfect word. Occasionally the slashes cut me to the bone, and I have to go to the other extreme of Nothing. Of course in our culture, this Nothing doesn't look like "nothing" - it looks like fulfilling responsibilities and paying a ridiculous amount of bills and taking deep breaths when I'm angry and kicking back on the couch to relax with a glass (or however many) of wine before starting over the next day. But for me, and anyone who knows me, it's the survival trek of Nothingness. Nothing to speak for other than getting through one single day / week / month / year / ordeal. My survival trek of Nothingness these past two years has certainly yielded more than nothing: for one thing, here I am; for another, my kids are still amazingly, against all odds, the happiest psychos on earth; for yet another, this family has stepped through piles of life's manure and stands at the edge of the pasture smelling like an exhausted little rose. But as for the little intense ballerina who's faithfully practiced her moves and looks with ire and distrust at her fellow dancers, the survival trek of Nothingness has resulted in only frustration and greater stage fright. Her memories of the moves is rusty, her distrust of the audience is greater, and she's thinking that teenager comment was all too liberal.

There are so many things I've let pass by, and have failed to capture. My All or Nothing approach prevails here as well. Where there is Nothing, there is All, and this includes the expectations and consequences I place on myself. The expectations are All, and the sub-par results are classified as Nothing: I berate myself regularly for so many (all?) aspects of life: I can't keep up with the chaotic demands of monthly financial obligations, not because of a day-to-day lack of money (yet), but because of the sheer madness of it all - who can keep track?; I can't maintain a healthy weight; I can't meet goals of time spent with the kids; I can't learn the intricacies of the politics of my new job; I can't find the supposed "work-life balance" I keep hearing about; I can't not sweat the small stuff; I can't meet a goal to write down what happens in my life, to write down what happens to anything, to write at all. This last bit is evidenced here, and when I sit down to try, or even think about briefly considering trying, this fact beats down on me like those cheap stage lamp bulbs that felt so overwhelmingly bright to the ballerina with the fuzzy tail three decades ago. She looks back at me in the mirror with an unsure glance, wondering when she's going to be a teenager, when she'll have the bravery to risk humiliation again. I'd like to reach over to wipe the black whiskers off her face, but I can't do that either.

So, I'll start here:

Me: I'm tired / overweight / overworked / overstressed. I never have time to write. This is not good.

John: His mangled head has, believe it or not, healed. The cement truck's insurance has agreed to pay off the bills and settle for damages. This is good / great / needed / a relief.

Bryce: One day soon, he will wake up and run downstairs screaming that a hand-held video game has permanently melded to his palms. This is inevitable / consistent / bringing him one step closer to being the creator of our future robot overlords.

Quinn: He is, inexplicably, the most awesome six-year-old I've ever known, and at once, somehow, the combined epitome of Will Farrell and Dr. Dootlittle. I can't wait to say more about him. Maybe in two more days / months / years, huh?

waterfall kiss

2008-12-16T08:26:00.002-06:00

spin

2008-12-12T12:36:00.001-06:00

saddle pillow

2008-12-11T16:25:00.002-06:00

Bike and Basket

2008-12-10T09:45:00.000-06:00

mannequin with hard hat II

2008-12-09T06:50:00.003-06:00

mannequin with hard hat

2008-12-08T09:11:00.001-06:00

While on a walk

2008-12-07T21:35:00.002-06:00

I just want things to work: The Cement Truck Episode

2008-10-04T21:18:00.005-05:00

This week I found myself in the most unpopulated region of New Mexico that I believe to exist. I was only there for work, as entertaining as it all was. The universe likes to throw these little bonuses my way, you know. Some people travel for work and they go to places like London, Prague, or Sydney (you know who you are), but when I travel for work, I end up in some kind of movie scene - a depressing one, with no sound track and lots of grainy subculture. Thanks, universe! This time John suggested I bring the Garmin along, having heard several times how many ridiculous miles I end up traveling by car, inevitably getting lost and hearing banjo music, wondering if this ill-fated business trip will be my last, and finally heaving a sigh of relief upon pulling up to whatever the highest priced hotel is in the region - a Holiday Inn Express, or a Hampton Inn, if I'm lucky. The team I was traveling with this week couldn't stop endorsing the Garmin, and wanted to know all the details: price, reliability, setup information. "I don't know," I said, eyes darting back and forth between the desert shrubs out the window and the lone pink line on the Garmin screen that stretched for miles, confirming that what my eyes saw was accurate (e.g., there is nothing around here so you better hope nothing bad happens to this rental car), "John takes care of that. I just want the thing to work. I don't want to have to 'download' anything or 'set up' anything or 'read' any 'manuals'. It just needs to do what I need it to do."

People who know me well are all too familiar with this personality trait. It spills over into every aspect of my life, explaining quirks like my near refusal to take medication of any kind. It's like it's just too much trouble for me. Who wants to go to the cabinet, open a child-proof container (after checking the expiration date of course, which takes at least another 30 seconds), walk all the way to the kitchen, get a glass of water, swallow disgusting pills, and then, THEN, after all that, wait and see if relief comes? Nah. I'll just suffer while my body self-regulates. The same applies to buying any new technology. It never works properly the first time, and I don't have the patience to work through it, read and re-read manuals, call help desks, re-boot seven times. I'd rather keep using my typewriter, thanks anyway.

You know what has the potential to change OR confirm your perspective on lots of things? A phone call like this, from your non-chalant spouse:

You: This is Kristen.
Him: Hey, it's me. I was just in a pretty bad wreck. This ASSHOLE cut me off, and then a cement truck rear-ended me on the highway? And, anyway, I'm not sure how bad it is, but I think my head is cut because I know blood is gushing everywhere. And the paramedics just walked up, so I better go. I'll call you when I find out which hospital they're taking me to. *click*
You, at work with no working car, because your new economical vehicle was recently recalled for a fuel pump issue, and although it's been "fixed" would not actually start this morning, leading to an hour of frustrated sighing and stomping while you griped at your husband for convincing you to buy two identical vehicles and griped at your kids for not hurrying up because you had lots of meetings set up all day long at work, COME ON!: .... ..... ..... OHMYGOD! A cement truck?! I don't have a way to get to a hospital! Hello? Hello??

After getting another call from the paramedics telling me where they were taking John, and subsequently borrowing a friend's car and making my way to the ER, I watched as the system broke down before my eyes. "This is really bad," a doctor said, after looking at John's head, or the bloody mass that was his head at the time, having soaked through mounds of gauze and other cotton items, like sheets and his shirt and even his jeans, and had made its way to the floor of the ER and was eliciting lots of shocked comments from the ER staff despite their assumed experience with this type of thing, "he'll need a CAT scan." And then I waited, with John's nervous mother hovering over us and summoning her priest and nun friends to come pray with us, which only made the whole thing more nerve-wracking and surreal, since I wasn't thinking I should actually be in a near death situation right about then. John was conscious and looking around the whole time, and when the sheriff came in to discuss the wreck, re-told it with all the detail anyone without a scalped and spurting head would be able to do, including street names, the color of the truck, the color and actions of the SUV that caused the entire thing.

The ER botched the whole thing. I had to ask multiple times what they were going to do about his pain, when they were going to attempt putting his scalp back together, what in god's name was going on. When they finally started, they didn't communicate anything to me, and ended up stapling the top of his head back together with 30 frankenstein-like staples. When they were finished, even though I was muddling through the fog of shock and emotional fatigue, I was cognizant enough to know he looked horrible, and I asked the ER doctor about scarring, what needs to be done about this? He looked at me, looked at John's grotesque, pathetically-patched wound still literally actively dripping between the staples only moments before applied by an intern who had never done stapling before and was coached by a Physician's Assistant who appeared to be 25 years old and said, "we'll just have to watch it." They sent him out of the ER on foot, with no bandage over his massive head wound, with blood and tissue still clinging to his hair from the original 60-mph impact of the cement truck on his tiny, supposedly safe vehicle that thankfully did not contain our five- and seven-year-olds only because they'd been dropped off at school moments before.

The next day we drove to the wrecking yard where the car was towed, and although the paramedics, fire fighters, and police had been unable to determine what caused John's head to be so horribly cut, I saw immediately that his driver's seat was broken, and had sent him flying back to hit the headrest over the back seat - where Quinn would have been crushed from two directions had he been in the car. The lawyer tells us fighting something like this is a costly exercise in futility, that car companies hedge their bets on exactly this situation -- the driver didn't die, no passengers were in the vehicle, the cement truck company's insurance will be liable for damages, and the car company responsible for a defective driver's seat (and no deployment of ANY of the multiple air bags in the car, a minor detail I haven't yet mentioned) will continue manufacturing this car in exactly the same fashion, assuming that any "fix" to these defects will cost them more than defending the occasional cases like John's, or even the even less occasional cases involving death or persistent vegetative states brought on by similar accidents. We are okay - we now have a bigger, safer car that the kids will be in anytime we're taking them anywhere. John, by some miracle, walked away from the accident with "only" a terrible V-shaped scar and associated lumps traversing the top of his head - but he did walk away. The kids thankfully weren't in the (what I now consider to be) death trap of the car we bought on the pretense of economy, safety, and reliability. And we will have the expenses of this ordeal covered in one way or another by the cement truck company ultimately responsible for the damages. Of course, the unsolved problem for us now is that we still have another identical car in this household, that neither of us trusts. Note to self: don't buy two identical cars EVER. AGAIN.

I went on my work trip this week only after making sure John's energy levels were back to normal and his pain was minimal. During one of the trips with the rest of the team banished to the middle of nowhere, the Garmin got confused. "Recalculating," she said, in her consistently patient and calm voice (and therefore a voice not approaching human to my ears) . My team laughed, entertained by the limitations of the technology. I snatched it from the dashboard and pulled the power source out of the car's cigarette lighter. "This is the part I don't like about the Garmin," I said, voice tight. "It doesn't always work the way it's supposed to." Nothing ever does.

MRI'm not looking forward to it.

2008-09-08T21:00:00.004-05:00

In the past several months, there have been numerous occasions where Quinn has been walking along and has literally run smack into something -- a wall, a door, once a parked car. Almost always this happens on the right side of his body, the same side that has been quirky since birth. All of his birth marks are on the right side of his body; when he was a few months old, I specifically asked the pediatrician about the shape of his head because it was almost as if his skull were slightly askew inside his skin - favoring the right side. None of these quirks has ever turned out to be anything of import, even though the birth marks, a large reddish-purple one on the bottom of his right foot and a larger and lighter tan one directly above his right knee, never faded as the doctors predicted. They are examined at every appointment and shrugged off with no concerns. My early worries about his skull were explained away years ago, and now I see a perfectly symmetrical skull when I look at Quinn's head, so apparently the mild asymmetry did work itself out as I was told it would.

Since Quinn has always had more falls than Bryce due to his less cautious nature, it took John and me a while to realize how often he was running into things. We were concerned, but he never hurt himself beyond a bruise or a scrape, and we went on with our lives as normal. A few months ago, though, the word "headache" strangely entered his vocabulary. We aren't headache people, so he wasn't picking it up from us, and we started noticing separately that he brought it up at unpredictable times with no common denominator -- bright lights, loud noises, not wanting to do homework, etc. Finally we compared notes and determined that we'd both heard these mysterious headache complaints enough times that between that and the clumsiness, we should at least take a trip to the doctor and talk about how to start ruling out the scary options, like latent tumors that provide only mild symptoms but abruptly and life-threateningly rupture before anyone realizes something is wrong.

We went to the pediatrician over a week ago, and I assumed we'd be laughed out of the office and told to find something better to do with our time than make up illnesses in a perfectly healthy and happy kid. That's not what happened, which means our doctor takes us seriously and also wants to rule out anything horrible. But, she didn't have an easy answer for us, either, which is disconcerting while we wait to have the various procedures and tests scheduled to rule out those unlikely but horrible items.

He had his eyes checked first, with all of us, including the eye doctor, assuming his eyes would be the culprit. But, no. They did every possible test they could do with a five-year-old's eyes. Depth perception? Perfect. Vision? Perfect. Peripheral vision? Perfect. Eye structure? Perfect. The worst part of the eye appointment had nothing to do with the results of any of the tests; it was Quinn's repeated and impassioned sob-screaming of "I HATE THIS PLACE!!" after the funny nurse and doctor he trusted held him down and put stinging dilating drops in his eyes. The staff was pretty unsympathetic, too, and in fact seemed to think that Quinn's hatred of the dilating process was strange and annoying -- something I found strange and annoying considering we were at a pediatric opthamologist's office, a place where I would assume screaming children would not be a novelty.

The next appointment is for an MRI, something both the pediatrician and the eye doctor (while ignoring Quinn's crying) thought would be a good idea, even though neither of them think we'll find anything horrible or even mildly scary. Even the very small chance anything is there is apparently enough reason to rule it out, though. So, the radiology department called me a few days ago to tell me how to prepare for the experience: "We usually have to sedate young kids because they have to stay still for 40 minutes and he'll have to have an IV for the contrast. So, is he a mature 5?" I stopped my hysterical laughter for long enough to tell her no, only to realize the eye appointment was a cake walk compared to even five minutes of what we're going to go through at the MRI. "He can't eat for four hours leading up to the MRI. When he gets there, first we'll numb the spot in his arm where the IV will go, then we'll put the IV in and wait for him to fall asleep. Sometimes they're really cranky for 30 minutes before they fall asleep." Ohdeargodinheaven. Sometimes other kids are cranky. Other kids who like candy and can learn patience and have fear of authority figures and can go five minutes without a snack and not spontaneously combust. She told me it was my choice whether or not I wanted to be in the MRI room with him, and that she is required to be there to monitor him the whole time. I don't think she realizes who she's dealing with. It's not a padded cell he'll be in while he goes through the "cranky stage," after not eating since dinner the night before, right? Okay, then I think you'll want me in the room with you to help sift through the carnage that was once your MRI waiting room.

Eating it too.

2008-08-27T20:22:00.005-05:00

I'm thankful for my job and everything; really, I am. I lived through a layoff at age 25 during a pregnancy with a one-year-old on my hip and two dysfunctional teenagers under my roof and a spouse with a fledgling business. I've worked for some terrible companies that sucked the life out of everyone who made the mistake of walking through the doors day after day, and for some whose culture I could only sum up by combining the worst parts of junior high with the best parts of a Russian gulag. What I have now is heaven on earth in every way imaginable when it comes to jobs and careers in this part of the country. I know this, and even after almost three fairly stable years -- a lifetime given my work history -- I remember it consciously every day.

And that's all fine and good, it's GREAT, actually, if I'm only talking about my career, my job, "success" as defined and recognized by the broader culture. But if my self has to come into the equation, whoever I am without broader culture's expectations and confinements, all I know is that I feel torn, and maybe a little trapped. I hate the phrase, "I want my cake and eat it too" because I've always cringed in disgust at its grammatical structure, but it's actually how I feel about mostly everything these days. I want to conquer every metaphorical hill I approach at work, but still have time to rest under the metaphorical stars and sip metaphorical wine and listen to my kids metaphorically play peacefully (since they would only ever play peacefully in metaphor). I've made certain choices that can only be sustained by my continuing to work. In an ironic and vicious cycle, there is a way in which I actually DO "have my cake and eat it too." My kids attend the school they do only because my job affords us the ability to pay for it; we live in a large, comfortable house with nice amenities and we live (to say the least) a life of luxury when compared to most of the world's population exactly because of this job, the thing that I say makes me feel torn and trapped.

None of us are sick or hurt or in trouble; there are no chronic diseases or unmanageable behavioral crises or stalkers or bullies or fatal allergies to deal with. Things are taken care of - big and small, important and unimportant, all of the official, bona fide priorities end up addressed and checked off the list. Bills are paid, deadlines are met by the skin of their teeth, gifts are bought for birthdays, social functions are attended, teaching moments are seized, life lessons are taught, tantrums are endured, relatives are called, paychecks are earned. But there is a sense of it all being mildly frustrating, even the best times, the times when everyone is fed and clothed and cooperative and at least feigning contentment. I'm not only talking about frustration stemming from the adults: Bryce and Quinn feel it too. Quinn's premature teenage eye-rolling and Bryce's passive-aggressive maneuvers of resistance to school and homework and Tae Kwon Do breathe a whole new life into the finger-tapping and sighing and clock watching and complaining that formerly characterized the malaise around here, mild though it may be. Sure, nobody's walking around with suicide notes taped to their foreheads, but we aren't playing ring around the rosy, either. The insanity has died down from a few years ago; there are no longer one or two uncontrollable 25-pound toddler-sized demons shrieking at us because we dared to put the wrong style of noodle on the dinner plate. We have more peace now, which is what I wanted. We have the money we needed to have both kids at the school I feel is right for them, also what I wanted. We have a dog who is obedient and calm; again, what I wanted. There is simply a blanket of rushed and irritated blah over all of us. Quinn verbalizes this perfectly on a fairly regular basis these days, most recently when a relative brought birthday gifts over for Bryce and we were all going through the social motions of pre-meal and pre-presents conversation. Quinn stood up and with a bored expression, announced, "I think it's time for Bryce to open his presents, blah blah blah." I totally got that.

Maybe what makes all of this a little tragic, if tragic weren't too strong a word for the more mild irritation and fatigue I truly have about it all, is the fact that I know if I didn't have the demands of my job, and had the ability to be at home always, to have "free choice" like Quinn's kindergarten morning time offers him, if I could "have my cake and eat it too" in what I guess is the traditional sense, I know enough about myself that I can honestly say I'd be complaining about all this cake, there's too much cake, who said I wanted so much CAKE, anyway?! Get the cake out of my face! So here I am, back at the beginning - or is it the middle? - of my vicious cycle. Ho hum, I have to go to work tomorrow. What they say about all work and no play really is true, blah blah blah.

Yin / Yang

2008-08-17T21:24:00.001-05:00

Yin

Over a recent weekend, my mom and I loaded the kids up and drove five hours to see my brother one last time while he still resides in a nearby region. The kids are much easier to travel with now than they were a few years ago, but that is still a significantly relative statement. I went from cursing myself for allowing the kids to drown out reality with movie after movie to cursing the kids for not having the mature, appreciative perspective that kids never have when their days still stretch before them with so much ease that they actually have the edifying option of simply looking out the car window, or taking a nap. Once at our destination, there were relatives to visit and minor family crises to discuss and a goodbye party to administer for my brother, which made the kids' completely normal, age-appropriate bickering and mischief slightly more annoying than usual.

During one of the several intra-city car trips to accomplish one thing or another while taking the occasional deep breath after telling the kids dozens of times to quiet down and not cause a heart attack or fatal car accident, we were waiting at red light in a busy intersection where a downtrodden, frail old man leaned against the concrete bridge railing holding a cardboard sign scratched with fading black marker, HUNGRY NEED WORK. For the first time in that 20-minute ride, both kids were actually quiet, but I thought it was just a coincidence until, right as the light turned green and my mom drove through, Bryce's intense but (for once) quiet voice came from the back seat, "are we gonna pay that guy?" The guilty silence choked us while we drove through the now green light, I think both of us hoping we wouldn't have to answer his legitimate question. He asked again, this time more intensely: "Hey. Are we gonna PAY that guy?" I spoke up finally, "Well, Bryce...we probably should have. I wish I would have thought of it before we went through the light." I hoped that would be the end of it so I could go back to thinking about whatever superficial things were on my mind. Now he became adamant, and a little confused as to why this was even up for discussion: "He doesn't have a job! He can't even buy FOOD. We need to go BACK and PAY HIM SOME MONEY!"

Ummm, yeah. Option 1: Tell the ethically observant six-year-old that we'd rather hurry up and order our pasta at the restaurant we were approaching and hope he wouldn't lose that apparently natural sense of human obligation and responsibility. Option 2: Turn the car around and pay that guy some money. We chose option 2 after flogging ourselves for debating over it, which meant we had to turn around and get back on the highway, then turn around again. When we approached him and handed him the money, my mom told him the six-year-old had insisted we come back to him. "God bless you," he said as he gathered the few belongings he had with him. He crossed the street in front of us and waved to the back seat where Bryce was watching intently. Then he looked down at the $20 bill, the first time he'd checked the amount since receiving it, and his expression of disbelief and gratitude was obvious from a block away as he mouthed "wow" on his way across the street. He turned back and waved a second time to the kids. Bryce was quiet the rest of the way to our dinner, and when we saw my brother that night and told him the story, he told Bryce it was good karma, that one day it would come back to him when he needed help or money or food. We got in the car a few hours later to head home and Bryce asked, "Mom, are you happy that we helped that guy?" I told him yes, and that I appreciated him reminding us to pay more attention to what is around us, that sometimes adults forget these things. "Yeah, and you're one of 'em," he laughed.

Yang

We've spent countless hours this summer pulling our hair out over Bryce and his antics. Right now he is in a phase I could only label as "bullying" when confronted with anything not meeting his exact preferences. Quinn, of course, receives the brunt of this problem, but he's also not as innocent as he appears in these cases, so if we're not gritting our teeth over Bryce's bossy, impatient, aggressive stances, we're wailing over Quinn's latest manipulative regression attempt to get his way or draw Bryce into a fight. Bryce's birthday is this week, and despite all the warning signs flashing in our faces, we attempted to have a "fun" and "family oriented" weekend complete with Friday night at the movies and Saturday last minute birthday party errands (Who wouldn't want to pick out one's own party balloons and snacks? Bryce, that's who.). Within five minutes of every attempt, one of us was rolling their eyes, sighing, or saying aloud, "I AM SO SICK OF THIS. JUST STOP IT!"

At Bryce's birthday party today, one of our neighbors' kids let out a wail about something and I caught his mother's eye and said, "so it's not just us." She let it fly after that: "What is it? Summer? What is the problem? They're constantly fighting and yelling and hitting." We were talking in unison by now, "And the CAR, that is THE ABSOLUTE WORST! It's like they know they can get away with something back there!"

They start school tomorrow and frankly we're just hoping the teachers are more disciplined than we are. Our disciplinary tactics (questionable already) have fallen by the wayside over the past several weeks. Even our normally poor attempt at a regular routine has completely failed, resulting in kids who fall to the floor and writhe anytime they're required to get dressed and walk out the door and away from a blaring television. As John suggested tonight, "we either need to go back to an agrarian society where the kids actually have to work the fields all summer, or we need to go to year-round school."

Economies of Scale

2008-07-29T21:06:00.005-05:00

I'm told that more is better, that repetition brings familiarity and comfort. At work, this philosophy dictates behavior that used to puzzle, then annoyed, and now appalls and traps me in others' passive aggressive control cycles. Okay, we understand, you only want to travel minimally since you have young children and are covering the majority of the requirements around here. Um, how about a week-long trip every three weeks for five months when others are staying home all summer? That sounds minimal, right? And it'll be more *efficient* that way, what with the way we depend solely on 10% of our department to do 90% of the work. Well, that's work; I should be used to it already. Hypocrisy, exploitation, capitalism, rah rah.*

But it's not just work: in other aspects of life, "doubling up" doesn't seem to work well for me either. In some crazy scheme we dreamed up within hours of reading up on Consumer Reports' latest opinions, we ended up buying TWO brand new cars yesterday with the justification of --wait for it -- SAVING money. Oh, it made perfect sense, and I can still show on paper how it all works out beautifully. Simply trade in an SUV with poor gas mileage for two cheap, compact, high gas mileage vehicles. Plan to sell additional 10-year-old Honda with 150,000 miles for an extra boost on already legitimately small car loans and be proud to pay off said loan or loans early between old car cash and new-found monthly cash resulting from extra miles per gallon on now doubled up efficient cars; save environment, save money, be happy. But the phone call to the insurance company revealed the nasty truths about all these lovely efficiencies: 1.) brand new cars, no matter how inexpensive and unexciting, are damned expensive to insure, 2.) any attempt at fiscal responsibility involving debt movement from high interest credit cards to no or low interest cards results in doubled car insurance rates within a year (consider yourself warned), 3.) door ding claims, initiated by self-centered leaches or not, are just as bad as running a light and slamming into someone else's car, and said door ding claim will be paid for 20 times over, by YOU, while you wail and gnash your teeth over the fact that you didn't screech away from the leaches with your offending door-slinging four-year-old in tow one fateful day last October.

And let's talk about the philosophy of more kids in a room entertaining each other and thus taking pressure and demands off of whatever responsible adult happens to be in charge. There are no efficiencies here, either -- at least not in this barely functional house. John took Bryce's cue today and invited the neighbor kids over to watch Star Wars and spread tiny Legos through the carpet upstairs while he worked to keep his head from exploding while spending untold hours on the phone with various Specialists, Agents, and Representatives discussing the number of different ways we were being royally screwed by no matter which insurance company we may end up begrudgingly choosing (I'm talking to YOU, Geico, O Creator of Nonexistent At Fault Claims and Yet The Cheapest (Relative to Ripoffs) Option). He e-mailed me (since he couldn't call me, as I was in my boss' office being told about the additional responsibilities that had been chosen for me this year, including an extra week-long trip to yet another middle-of-nowhere, vegetarians-not-welcome town) and said the kids all seemed to be getting along until he heard squealing and, while on the phone with one of the Agents or Specialists, walked to the stairs and saw Quinn naked, and the neighbor kid halfway there. Quinn, of course, was sent to his room, and the neighbors went home. I brought it up a few times tonight (after I arrived home two hours late thanks to my own attempt --stupidly begun in my office as opposed to on my cell phone in my car -- to get a straight answer from an insurance company, any insurance company for the LOVE OF GOD), and Quinn wouldn't address it. At bedtime, when no one else was around, I mentioned informatively to Quinn (since I was just positive he only needed a reminder about this very simple thing) that we need to keep our clothes on in public or when friends are over, and he said, "well, they weren't playing with me. They were only playing with Bryce. I was trying to make them laugh." I told him Bryce said they all played together, and he broke into genuine, awful, real tears of remorse and embarrassment and pain, and covered his face with his recently named blanket, Nixie: "They're [sob] LYING. They didn't [sob] play with me. They chased me. And not for [sob] fun. They were TRICKING me. That's why I don't want to be their friends!!!" I barely made it out of his room before I broke down. I don't know what to do for this kid, this hilarious, sensitive, crazy kid with obviously low self esteem at age five. I can't type any more about this. It's too much to think about, too much to handle, with too many implications for me to address without my innards pushing violently outside my skin.

Economies of scale, not so much. Economies of hell, more like.

*Credit to John: Statement made during our conjecture about how the car dealership would screw us (prior to our anticipation of how the insurance companies would screw us).

High Note

2008-07-21T21:25:00.002-05:00

"I was focused today," Quinn proudly told me as he walked out of the Tae Kwon Do studio. I was late, as I usually am on the days I attempt to make it to his classes. Bryce's hour-long class was to follow, and so I scooped Quinn's hand into mine and ushered him to the car so we could have some one-on-one time. On the way home he volunteered information about his experience at his school's summer day camp today: "At first I was pouting in a corner when dad dropped me off, saying, 'I don't want to be here' but then I started doing stuff, and then did more stuff, and BAM! it was over, and I was glad I went!"

"Wow, that's the best possible way the day could have gone!" I said, enthusiastically enough to be genuine, but not so enthusiastic that he would react with the embarrassed, self-conscious, teenager-like pouting he wields like a weapon. "I know," he said cheerily, looking out the window from his booster seat, the milestone seat that the kids begged me for while I waited for their small frames to hit 40 pounds for so much longer than they felt was reasonable. I non-chalantly broached the subject of his classmates; the week before, in fact what became the very reason for his pouting in the corner this morning, some of his classmates engaged in playground pettiness and I wanted to address it without upsetting him. "Mason was there, and Olivia was there, and Olivia found an egg with a chick inside, and I painted a shark, and I told Mrs. S that I didn't want to do the math because it would pass all my time, and she said, 'that's for tomorrow' which was really funny!" He didn't mention the playground girls that had knocked over his sand castle the week before, so I could only assume they're not in his class this week.

When we got home I suggested we walk the dog until John got home, and Quinn wanted to ride his bike, the activity that can practically guarantee red-faced grunting and frustration within a maximum of four minutes. I didn't let on that I thought it would be a problem, and he maneuvered it outside and managed to ride several wobbly feet, several wobbly times. It was hot, and we were tired, so we ended on a high note and came inside, where he promptly told Truman to sit, and Truman did. "WOW, Quinn," I said, "you really ARE having a good day!" He was beaming, and therefore happily took a bath and picked out stories, which he read to me, pronouncing Hound "Holgund" and Something "Smurgen" only repeating patiently when when I offered the correct pronunciations, and at the end, saying triumphantly, "Wow, I'm really good at this!" From a kid who has recently told us we don't like him, we like Bryce better, and he's not good at anything, this was a huge relief to hear. I came home intending to spend time with him and carve out a conversation about his recent negative self-sabotaging statements because it's become enough of a concern that I didn't want to ignore it any longer. But look at that, he found his groove, at least for today.

During our walk / attempt at a bike ride, I did actually touch on the subject I'd been thining about, and I told him I loved him because of who HE was, and nobody else was like him. I brought it back up before his bath while he sat next to me as I ate a quick dinner, and he finished my thought for me, saying, "and you also love Bryce for who HE is, and I love YOU for anybody else!" which was his Quinnglish version of "I love you for who YOU are because you're not like anybody else," his mistaken vocabulary summing up one of the very things I do love about that kid -- the way he sees and says the world. He gets it. He's getting it. He's getting math, and reading, and art, and friendship, and life, despite my neverending concerns. In fact, his statements, incorrectly worded or not, so often contain profound layers. I mean, is this not what I'll be saying when I'm 80? "At first I stood in a corner and said, 'I don't want to be here' and then I started doing stuff and BAM! it was over, and I was glad I went."

Look. Someone invented him.

2008-07-18T20:03:00.009-05:00

Quinn's feisty nature brings him to the brink of trouble more often than I'd like to think about, and he's only five. I realize this spells disaster for me and my preference for not hyperventilating and having nervous breakdowns on a daily basis as he ages. He is such a joker that most times, people think his shenanigans are riotously funny, and I'm left looking like the grouchy, over-tired suburban parent who can't see past her own manicured nails or tomorrow's lunch appointment and will look up in 15 years and realize she missed all sorts of laughs at her brilliant, hilarious son who no longer cares anything for making her laugh. But I do think the kid is funny, and most of the time I'm only NOT laughing because as a parent I know that laughing at certain behaviors is not going to turn out well for either of us. Example: Last week at my mom's, he was snacking on chips and queso and decided, in his spontaneous and unpredictable way, that he needed to eat them outside on the patio between the 30-second water gun fights he and Bryce were having (30 seconds because they went outside, stood directly facing one another and squirted all the contents of their 3-ounce-capacity miniature plastic water pistols onto each other's shirts, then immediately slammed through the door yelling "I NEED A REEEE-FILL!"). I absent-mindedly helped him carry the bowl of chips because I was also carrying on at least two other conversations with the adults present at the time, and I wrongly assumed my duties were fulfilled and came back inside to sit down. A few minutes later, Quinn swung open the back door and, wide-stanced and furious, yelled confidently, "WHAT is the meaning of NO QUESO out here?!" See? Hilarious, and yet not sanctioned by the Parental Laughter Association.

Tae Kwon Do has been a different experience for Quinn. While most of his borderline inappropriate behavior has resulted in laughter (even if hidden, like it is from me) from whatever audience he has -- grocery store shoppers, movie watchers, innocent bystanders -- the Tae Kwon Do instructors are not fond of Quinn's loud jokes during demonstrations, and his cub-like wrestling with his brother when he is supposed to be listening and showing respect. Because of his age, they are patient in their repeated explanations of the rules, but Quinn has no fear. When he is occupied with a task or learning something he is capable of doing, he is the model student. But when left to his own devices while waiting his turn to spar or practice with the instructor, he reverts to his comfort zone, which is a zone filled with floor writhing and unpredictable, loudly stated phrases about bodily functions. After tonight's class, John was ready to Stop The Madness Already and pull him out of the classes while Bryce continues to work towards his next belt. There is some part of me that wants to give in to what feels like peer pressure from the other parents and go along with with this, but a much bigger part of me completely disagrees and thinks we'd be sending the wrong message to him, that he doesn't fit in, is too challenging to teach, that we'll give up on him just when he's ready to be reached, and a whole host of other long-term self-destructive beliefs.

At dinner tonight after the lecture about his unacceptable behavior in class (during which time he tried to justify his behavior by telling me matter-of-factly, "Look. Someone invented me. God. And that's why God controls me!"), I asked him if he wanted his black belt. He said yes, and I asked him why. To be like the instructor, he said, to be able to do the things he does. We talked about what it takes to accomplish that, and then he said, "you KNOW I'm not good at Tae Kwon Do!" This is Quinn's latest attention tactic: self-criticism or victimization. When he's angry, he tells us that nobody in this family likes him. When he's told to take his toys upstairs or get the dirty clothes off of his floor, he says, "I'm just your SLAVE! You're always telling me what to do!" I try to ignore and deflect these comments most of the time, but tonight I said, "you're so great at Tae Kwon Do that you passed onto the next class, and now you have to pay attention when you're in there or else the instructor won't be allowed to give you your next belt." I braced myself for more self pity from him, but he just said, "okay." Later when he was telling John that he wanted to get his black belt, I said, "but what are you going to do so that you get it?" and he said, "focus." "Do you know what focus means?" asked John. "Yes," Quinn said impatiently, "it means to FO-cus on what the instructor does [pronounced 'dues'], that's what!" and he rolled his eyes and turned away, disgusted. It's a good thing he did, because we were silently laughing.

Inevitable: Back to the Pack (of weirdos)

2008-07-15T21:30:00.008-05:00

Two years ago, Chaos reigned supreme at our house. Today it's more like mild irritation and a feeling of succumbing to the Inevitable - whether that's the kids' addiction to inappropriate Cartoon Network programming, the personification of their love-hate relationship in the form of what I would call bi-polar play ("now you pretend to hit me" "okay" "OW! WHY did you do that?! MOM!! He hit me for NO reason!"), the feeling that we're always running late, or the fact that everything we own will at some point or another be damaged or broken by our kids. So, not so much chaos as simple and utter surrender to the forces at work. Oh, we tried to fight it off for a long time. Tried so hard, in fact, that we eliminated as many sources of the chaos as we legally could.

As it turns out, surrendering to it has enabled us to let one of those suspected sources right back into the fold: Truman. My mom fostered him for two years and was at her wits' end for the 47th time when I realized that 1.) the kids are two years older, 2.) Chaos no longer rules our house since we've given in to the Inevitable, and 3.) we're fat and need exercise as much as the high maintenance, formerly assumed to be epileptic, and possibly still schizophrenic dog does. Since his return, John and I have walked Truman daily and have slept with Cesar Millan's book on the bedside table, letting its calm, assertive, magical powers seep into the house and form peaceful dream bubbles over Truman's head while he lies perfectly still on the floor until the morning alarm goes off. We can hardly believe that each interaction with him is so quiet and brief: a look or a stance achieves what yelling never did, once his ridiculous energy level has been at least partially drained on a (very) brisk walk through the neighborhood.

The issue at hand now is the kids' desire to have a "normal" dog. Although we've accomplished what we suspected we could with the exercise and focus on calm discipline, Truman doesn't seem to know how to play. Bryce especially has been asking for a dog for over a year, and has been waiting for the chance to take his dog in the back yard and throw a frisbee or ball only to have the dog return it on Bryce's command. Now that I think about it, this is actually the type of interaction Bryce would KILL to have with any living creature. Obey my commands, minions. But despite the cooperation and peace Truman has shown, he apparently isn't the fetch "type," and only watches Bryce with curiosity as he repeats Truman's name, throws various brightly colored and insanely expensive rubber toys frantically about the yard with the most sincerely excited face and voice Truman could ever hope for, if dogs hoped for facial expressions or sincerity.

Tonight during my complaints about the pet toy industry's squeeze on America (why the high prices on doggie toys? WHY?) and Truman's obsession ONLY with rawhide bones, which will lead inevitably to his aggressive protection of said rawhide bones and also possibly digestive problems -- which I can do without from an 80-pound animal that is unable to defecate into a toilet -- John had the ingenious notion to put a rawhide nub left over from Truman's lively chew session last night inside one of the expensive rubber toys. We threw it across the yard and Truman bounded after it, but despite the fact that we know Truman is familiar with the phrase "bring it to me," he stood over it and pawed at it, sniffed at it, rolled it around with a mix of curiosity and frustration, but never picked it up in an effort to officially retrieve it. John and I thought we'd be really smart and "show" him how to fetch, because apparently we think the dog is a moron, but this only resulted in Truman following John back and forth between me and the spot in the yard where the trapped rawhide kept landing. Bryce, who was supposed to be in bed, peeked out the back door and asked what we were doing. "Teaching Truman how to get the ball," we said, like idiots. "Oh," said Bryce, in the overly mixed innocent/confident tone of voice he uses when he thinks we don't realize anything is odd about him being outside his bed, outside the house, an hour after his bedtime: "Can I help?" He joined us, in his underwear (now the pajamas of choice), jumping excitedly and saying, "get it Truman, get it!" while he twirled Noir's tattered, two-and-a-half-foot long tail through the air during the five remaining minutes it took for John and I to realize that if we were having to give the dog treats to chase after the bone he wanted, we were actually to the point where we were looking for Chaos.

We put an end to that RIGHT THEN, people. We are just fine with the Inevitable over here on the Fringe. Apparently the Inevitable now also includes quirky, peacefully stubborn dogs and mildly disappointed underwear-clad kids holding expensively obsolete rubber squeak toys.

Fewer Volcanoes

2008-07-10T21:11:00.004-05:00

I've been feeling like I need to explain or summarize everything that has happened over the past year or so. Like most perceived pressure and sense of obligation in my life, this is purely self-inflicted, and it has resulted in a longer absence than I probably intended. After the move to our new house last year, as life and routines changed and unexpected surgeries loomed and unknown levels of strife surfaced, I found myself unable to write. At first this happened consciously, but it gradually became buried under layers of ash and hardened lava from the numerous volcanoes erupting around me until at one point it had been buried so thoroughly that I stared into space and numbly assumed my chance to write and my ability to write had passed me by. I told myself in my coping attempt that I was experiencing everything rather than recording it, that I'd have to be thankful enough for the experience to make up for the desire to re-live it at a later date. Then I'd blink, turn my head, see another volcano blast, and run for cover. I didn't have time or the emotional wherewithal to focus on writing or not writing, and now the months and milestones have passed unrecorded, and that in and of itself will ultimately serve as a kind of anti-record, non-reminder, shadow.

I've accepted this, or I thought I had. But in re-reading posts from the time I was writing and recording these experiences regularly, I've realized that my return to attempting to write hasn't felt smooth or natural. I know part of it is lack of habit and routine, part of it is recovery from a year of physical and emotional exhaustion, and part of it is that -- and this is the most profound realization I've had, as obvious as it should have been -- our life has really, substantially changed since we had experiences like the ones I wrote about two years ago. I look back on some of the posts about the kids and it all comes rushing back to me: the shrieking, the chaos, the high, high blood pressure, the never-ending guilt and frustration. Wow! Either all of it ultimately pushed me over the edge, or it was merely boot camp preparing me for surviving the challenges that were to come. Either way, our days don't much resemble the seventh circle of hell anymore, and I say that with complete love for my children at all ages they've seen, but also with complete seriousness. We were in hell! Don't get me wrong. Bryce is as intense and quirky as ever, and Quinn has continued to learn from the master. Things certainly aren't what I would call "quiet" or "dignified" around here. Although we have finally entered the stage where they are on the same eating and sleeping schedule, can communicate effectively with one another by using the English language, and enjoy each other's company, this also means that they are like a traveling circus, cracking each other up and performing loud, obnoxious tricks everywhere they go. But this is so much better than the torture they were putting us through a few years ago. And I missed writing about that transition! It's happened, it's done, and here we are. Now I've got to move on to discussing Kid Issues exclusively; Toddler Fiasco Stage is over. I have never written exclusively about Kid Issues, and because some Kid Issues bleed strangely into Family Issues and Adult Issues without necessarily clean and stable lines between each, I'm still feeling my way through it.

I've been at the computer for a little over an hour, and in that time Bryce has come into my office to admit that he didn't brush his teeth ("do you think I should?" "I would if I were you," I said, like a true pick-your-battles parent), and to tell me softly for the third time about his cobra/vampire nightmare from two nights ago. Two years ago the interactions would have been entirely different, and would have ended with me writing something about my ongoing parental failures and the inevitable emotional scars I would ultimately leave on my intense kids as a result, which would be completely unfair to them since their intensity had been derived directly from me and my intense genes. Tonight, the interaction is only noteworthy against the backdrop of the distant past, and the absence of record of the more recent past. What is noteworthy today is a completely different set of experiences, and I am working up to recording those.

I'm remarkably -- as hard to believe as this is -- at peace with the missing puzzle pieces of this record. It took the absence of material for me to realize how profoundly things have changed. It turns out my coping mechanism was actually working; I did experience rather than record for a while, and although there are experiences I'll never be able to read about, I live with their outcomes every day while this new existence unfolds and I find that the ashes and black rocks are being layered over too, but this time, for now, not with more lava.

Monday Night Summary

2008-07-07T21:14:00.003-05:00

Back to it.
After my week of pretending I live in a house with some other people that look like my family, I made the death march to my car this morning as John waved goodbye and tried to cheer me up with jokes. It didn't work. Despite the ridiculous amount of e-mail in my work inbox and the "there's one in every office" co-worker who never fails to accost me before I've even finished booting up, the nine-hour day felt more like 90 years. I thrived on diet coke and contests with myself over how many e-mails I could respond to before the next one came through. I'm pretty good at that game. Nobody manages an inbox the way I do. Man, now I'm even more depressed.

Something fishy this way comes.
Remember the scary time that Quinn almost drowned during a swimming lesson? That was fun, huh? I haven't enrolled the kids in swimming lessons ever since, which has only served to make me that much more paranoid about them being around water. I know; it's the stupidest vicious cycle ever. The only way I agreed to let them swim in the gorgeous new pool in our neighborhood this summer was for John to get them actual life vests, which he did technically do, even though they're both about two sizes too small, because John still thinks our kids are three (understandable though that may be, given the whining and tantrums that are still heard daily in these parts). Between the too-small vests and the huge, ill-fitting goggles that Bryce insists on wearing to keep water from going up his nose, I know this is hard to believe, but trust me: we're the freaks at the pool. Bryce, the cautious one, decided to shed the inappropriately named life vest, since it was choking the life out of him and all, and since the pool in our neighborhood has a pretty huge shallow end, he has gradually taught himself to swim. It's a thrashy, explosive swim, which is exactly how you could describe everything Bryce does, so really not surprising, and he's quite proud of his accomplishment. I blew it off the first few times I saw it, because I noticed he would take two choppy strokes and then stand up on the pool bottom and breathlessly say, "did you see me swim?!" just when I was getting excited that he might actually be swimming, and I'd sort of nod and smile and clap, all while thinking, "GAH! Keep going, don't stop!" But tonight he was forced to swim a little further to reach the steps he was going for, and I realized the reason he's been stopping to stand up is because he hasn't figured out how to just lift his head to take a breath. He actually makes himself more tired by taking a few good strokes and then standing upright, breathing several times, then starting over. This swimming and breathing method could sum up Bryce's ENTIRE LIFE. I can't actually even believe it.

Goodbye my love.
Quinn has opted to keep the life vest because floating is easier, smoother, and more entertaining than all that difficult kicking and deep breathing. But, the twisted little kid likes to "play lifeguard" with Bryce, which entails a dramatic sputtering, some "help, I'm drowning"s, and a dose of eye rolling that is only morbidly entertaining because he's bobbing around in a life vest. The kid's a psycho. When it was time for us to leave the pool tonight, he floated to the middle and refused to come out while John and I stood there debating how much we really wanted to 1.) leave, 2.) humiliate ourselves by continuing to negotiate with the little terrorist, 3.) drink. "I live in this pool!" he proclaimed giddily. "I'm never coming out!" Float, blob, splurb, smile. We said, "if you can't cooperate when it's time to go, then we won't be able to come back in the evenings." He paused with only slight concern: "Ever?" I jumped on the chance: "That's right, we'll never come back. Now get out." (We thrive on empty threats over here. Don't judge me.) He meandered over and I wrapped him a towel and gave him a nudge towards the gate. "Goodbye my love, pool!" he squealed with delight. I think I'm onto something here with this "water behavior as a metaphor for the kids' lives" thing.

So much for that bright idea.

2008-07-05T20:49:00.000-05:00

My new office is furnished and just needs a few remaining touches. I've inhabited its space every day on my pseudo vacation, getting used to its new feel and looking forward to the next time I can be there. Am I there right now? No. No I'm not. The office, as much as I love it and am proud of what I was able to put together on a very small budget and a precious allotment of time, is up a flight of stairs and down a long hallway. Under normal conditions, I would actually prefer this seclusion. But right now, no. No I don't.

One of the developments of the past six months has been our enrolling the kids in Tae Kwon Do classes. Before we moved to the new house just over a year ago, we were members at one of those high tech expensive gyms, and we were all getting regular exercise, a couple of us with psychotic but effective personal trainers. Last year's move, surgeries, work travel, family stress, and financial demands put an end to that, and we canceled our membership and told ourselves we'd use our treadmill, or jog through our neighborhood in the mornings, or stop eating Ben & Jerry's. Ah, sweet fantasies. The kids' Tae Kwon Do studio offers kickboxing classes, and a few months ago I thought it would be a perfectly good way to start a new exercise routine after a year of not doing so much as even thinking about exerting myself beyond raising a glass of wine to my lips, walking to and from my parking lot at work, or having daily nervous breakdowns (those don't burn as many calories as you might expect).

The kickboxing classes were some of the best and most challenging workouts I'd ever had, but they were done barefoot, and there was lots of hopping, and kicking, and kneeling, and then more frenetic hopping. Occasionally during one of the one-foot hopping sessions I would have searing pain in one or both of my feet, and I assumed I landed wrong or I blamed the extra 15 pounds that refuses to disappear because I refuse to do a whole lot about it. Then I took two more work trips, carrying who knows how many pounds of paper and laptop over my shoulder. One day a few weeks ago, walking to my car in a recently purchased suit (in a bigger size than I'd prefer, which is actually why it was recently purchased, if we're being honest here), with my anvil, I mean laptop, hung habitually over my shoulder, the heel of my shoe landed in a hole in the sidewalk and I crashed to a pretty pathetic heap after my shoe flew off in one direction, my laptop in another, and the left knee of my new suit pants ripped. The scabs on my knees have healed, but the top of my left foot has never felt back to normal, and I think between the kickboxing, sporadic workouts, already bad bones, and the crash landing in my suit, I've got some kind of stress fracture.

So now, I'm on the couch in the living room to avoid all the painful walking upstairs to the comfortable, private office I finally have. This seems pretty typical, and yet a little more cruel and taunting than usual, even for life on the Fringe. It's okay, though -- if it wasn't this that banned me from my own space, it was going to be the "165 bad guys" carefully and strategically placed on every flat surface by Bryce and Quinn during the hour they were supposed to be resting the other day. I limped upstairs still in denial about my worsening foot pain, heard peaceful playing and assumed the kids were in one of their rooms next door to my office. In actuality, they had christened my room as their own, which means whether I'm on the couch with my foot up or in my personalized, cozy, upstairs office, I'll be surrounded by plastic toys and the sound of kid mouth explosions.

The wrong cave, indeed.

2008-07-03T21:21:00.014-05:00

In the fashion typical of our trip planning capabilities over the past year, we decided at the last minute to spend at least one day during my week off doing something that would allow us to take pictures and have evidence that we didn't stick our kids in front of the TV for 9 days straight while we did laundry and shopped for storage ottomans to fill the space where the desk used to be in the master bedroom. Knowing we would only have time for a day trip, we scoured the state travel magazines until we found a destination that appeared to be the perfect blend of proximity to our city, opportunity for "enrichment," potential for tiring out the tasmanian devil children we'd be bringing along, and low cost. We prepped the kids for at least a good seven minutes before we got on the road: "No getting upset today! No yelling! No whining! No fighting!" Between Bryce's mean streak of late and Quinn's ever-ready arsenal of toddler-like screaming (and by the way, he's FIVE), within 10 minutes of our 2 1/2 hour drive, these ingenious parenting methods once again shockingly proved ineffective, and we pulled the car over on the side of the road and falsely threatened to turn around and go home. Basically it was all downhill from there.

First of all, let me say what a good job our state has done with marketing its state parks. I'm not saying the state parks aren't beautiful, and I'm not saying the state park marketing materials are actually publishing falsehoods, per se, but I AM saying that "family fun adventure" must mean something different to me than it does to whoever is approving said state park marketing materials. We chose a park with a supposed 19th century hideout cave as its main attraction, but as we discovered when we got there, no documentation of any outlaws using said cave actually exists. Huh, no problem - we don't have to mention that to the kids, it's still an amazing rock formation. Since it was a blazing hot July day and we were going to be walking to this cave with two small kids, we chose the "easy" path, supposedly marked with pleasing yellow tree dots. The "hard" trail was red. Let's stay away from red. Red bad. We no like red. John took the lead, and the kids with their boundless damned energy darted around the trail in front of me while I fought off images of their tiny heads bashed on the sharp boulders we all kept tripping over. I only frustrated them and their attempt at glee with my constant reminders to be careful and not die. Bryce, while tripping: "YOU KNOW I'M A GOOD CLIMBER, MOM!" Quinn, red-faced and picking himself up after a fall: "I'M FINE! STOP SAYING ARE YOU OKAY!"

She can't bother both of us at the same time. Let's split up.

Pretty soon in my out of shape flab-covered, osteo-arthritic left knee cracking misery, I started to wonder why this "easy" path was so flipping difficult. At one point we found ourselves up high enough that the kids were walking along edges. Are these god-forsaken cliffs? Where's the damned cave, anyway? Bryce was constantly asking, "Dad, are you sure we're going the right way?" until finally John started saying, "No." because this was his way of verbally admitting we were no longer on the yellow path, or maybe any path at all. I wanted to sink into pits of despair and start screaming for help, but something startled me out of my frustration: a 50-pound black vulture flying from under whatever John was standing on to a tree branch right in front of us. A VULTURE. Um, hi. We're just a couple of fat white people with some tender veal here, and in just a few more minutes on this baking shelf of a cliff, you can help yourself. Can you tell us where the hell the yellow path is, though? Red bad. Vultures bad.

Creepy flying vulture picture taken during the heart attacks of a couple of unnamed adults.

After another 45 minutes, and with several more heart-exploding experiences watching the kids' lives flash before my eyes while they defiantly jumped from one boulder or cliff to the next, we came around a bend in the "path" to catch a glimpse of the entrance, which means we had circled the entire area and never. Found. The cave.

We brought flashlights to use in the cave, but apparently we won't need them for that; what else are they good for? Periscope? No. Microphone? Maybe.

We spent some time letting the kids explore back at the entrance, which was where the majority of the biggest rock formations were, and I would have been satisfied to leave this state park telling myself THAT was the famous cave, and we had simply, STUPIDLY walked all around it for no reason.

See how much fun they're having exploring? We don't need no stinkin' outlaw cave.

But no. John had to go and re-read the state park literature posted next to the parking lot and confirm that we had not only walked all around part of the formation, but ALSO had not found the "famous" (and yet not) outlaw cave. We can't come all this way and not see the cave. But we did see the cave! We apparently stood on TOP of the cave and I was fine with that because we lived through it and didn't get eaten by huge vultures! No, we have to go back. Let's get some water and go back. On our second attempt at the "yellow" path, we ran into some kind of crazy rock climbing enthusiasts who cheerfully greeted us, and when we told them we were looking for the cave entrance, they pointed up the sharpest, steepest incline marked with red everywhere. Red bad. No red. Bad, bad red. We tried to go around and stick to the yellow, the elusive yellow, the cruel joke of a path the yellow dots turned out to be. Soon we were climbing, or should I say, BRYCE was climbing sharp rocks and ignoring our cries to wait for us and let us go ahead of him so as to make sure he would live to see the next second. My head practically exploded a few times and I saw red dots everywhere, now unsure if the dots were truly painted on the trees or just some horrible premonition of doom only I was seeing.

Note red dot. Bad.

Finally admitting we were officially on the red path, John, Bryce, and Quinn scaled - stumbled - spelunked their way up, and then down to the famous cave entrance while I half crawled, half scraped my way behind them. Victory was ours! Despite the poorly marked trails and the vultures and the near death of my small children, here we were at our final destination. Ah, what a lesson for the kids: we had a goal and we met it, we didn't give up, and we conquered the most difficult path of all!

As soon as Quinn had a clear view of it, he screamed, "THIS IS NOT THE RIGHT CAVE!" We tried to convince him, to point out the clever, clever identifying sign painted in yellow of all cursed colors at the top of the entrance, but he was adamant. "THERE WAS NO SIGN IN THE PICTURE! THIS IS NOT THE RIGHT CAVE." I know what he means. In fact, this is basically how I wanted to respond to the entire experience. THIS IS THE WRONG STATE PARK. THERE WERE NO VULTURES OR RED DOTS IN THE PICTURES.

Reclamation

2008-07-01T17:50:00.000-05:00

She married into his family assuming all families were like hers, and would welcome any partner their loved one chose for the simple and profound reason that their loved one had chosen anyone at all. She let this assumption take her down paths of greater discomfort and disappointment than she could have imagined possible as she laid down bricks and mortar to mask and protect her real self, the one that was being assimilated into his family's Borg-like reality rather than accepted and welcomed for its own unique other-ness. After the initial discomfort subsided, she began to think she could accept life as an assimilated one, and despite occasional reminder pangs of who she thought she was, who she'd once been, or who she'd assumed she would be, she enjoyed her position of perceived acceptance in his family and ignored the fact that it was conditional, and fatally so to her identity.

She assumed she'd always be willing to go on this way until the birth of her children, when she realized the bricks and mortar masking and protecting her real self would have to be piled around them as well, but how could she mask what even she did not yet know, and why would she want to? The assimilation of these two, the concealment of their unique and profoundly beautiful selves would be more crushing than hers, and in her refusal to seal them into a reality not their own, she knocked a few bricks loose from her own protective guise. His family went about the same calm assimilation process they had faithfully relied on for years, but she wouldn't budge, and she succeeded in protecting the two she refused to brick over.

The family turned their attention to her, not yet frenzied but no longer as calm in their work, still utilizing the same techniques that had brought them this far. But what they found wreaked havoc on their trusty system: the harder they worked, the more bricks she knocked down. With hardened resolve in the knowledge of every implication of what she was doing, she removed the concrete walls and fortress structures around and on top of the self she'd damaged in the process of concealment and attempted protection. Underneath the rubble she found vines and seeds that hadn't been destroyed, and she let those see the light of day even if she couldn't yet eagerly cultivate them, all the while letting her children run wild and free of the Borg as the others, the beautiful and different others. She gained strength as the seeds caught hold and forced life through what was once covered in concrete; in enough time she became aware that not only were the bricks and mortar gone,but a wilderness grew in its place, one abundant with a resolute energy she had almost forgotten. She claimed it, exclaimed it, reclaimed it her own and not theirs, and not to be destroyed, and not to be concealed.

His family, reacting to these system-threatening circumstances, solved their assimilation malfunction problem by proclaiming a collective choice not to assimilate her, in the spirit of, "you can't quit; you're fired," which is the only way the Borg can survive in the wake of one who reclaims what was thought to be theirs, of one who escapes with her self and her family intact.

Touching on Various Subjects

2008-06-30T20:21:00.008-05:00

A glimpse of what's been left unsaid.
I'm off this week, originally because we'd planned another cross country adventure circa Summer 2006, but as it turns out, so far the time has been spent turning Hannah's old room into an office for me. She moved out two weeks ago and has been having a ball socializing with John's family, the same people who outcast us six months ago for daring to question their inappropriate meddling in John's kids' lives. If you're confused by that sentence, join the club. In response to our statement that we weren't going to participate in dysfunctional dynamics of passive aggression, denial, and character attacks, we were told by John's sister and brother-in-law that we would never be spoken to again. Nice. Ever since then, John's mom, aka Leader of the Pack, has told us (despite our clear requests not to do certain favors for his oldest son --like ENABLING him, for instance-- as he learns about the consequences of his adult choices) that she would "do it all over again" and has wondered aloud with complete innocence why she feels she doesn't get to see our five- and six-year-olds. Gee, I don't know. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that not only do you have no respect for me as parent and undermine me with small jabs at every turn when you're around any of my kids or stepkids, but you also blatantly told me this is how you plan to operate over and over again. No, we won't be lining up at your door for babysitting services. She thinks it's "unnatural" to call and ask to see the kids, by the way -- we aren't stopping her from seeing them, as much as she tries to convince us that we are.

No more excuses not to write.
Anyway, while Hannah and the in-laws burn pictures of us, brew stolen toenail and hair clippings, and sew the final touches on the voodoo dolls they plan to stab in our honor, I've been busy trying to create an office for myself. Our (still new) house still feels huge, but most of our space feels shared to me; I haven't had a place to privately sit down and work, think, read, or write other than our bedroom, where there is usually a small child or children bouncing on a bed or having a sword fight - despite the fact that they each have their own beds on which to bounce as well as a huge gameroom full of their toys and plenty of space for whatever mutual maiming they insist on doing for the 14 waking hours that make up each day. My new office has inherited lots of individual pieces of furniture that were randomly placed up until now, as well as previously unhung pictures, and it is fast becoming the coziest room in the house. In addition to a writing desk and a comfortable chair, we lugged the huge bookshelf from the gameroom (the only place we had to store it until now), which means it's like a real, live office of someone who would habitually read and write. My only remaining excuse for NOT reading or writing will be the ever-present time factor, which won't exactly hold much water if I continue to spend my evenings halfway to coma status in front of the TV. The transported furniture means, of course, that there are now gaping holes in our larger-than-we-realized master bedroom, which has turned Project Office Creation into Project Master Bedroom Completion, something I wasn't prepared to deal with in the measley five days I have off work, a few of those we have supposedly set aside to do something that resembles a vacation with the kids (and that is literally as much planning as we've done so far).

Free entertainment, until you cave and buy a pet (we haven't yet).
So, the past year has been, shall we say, full of ~~surprises~~ ~~crap~~ ~~stress~~ -- well, just full. One of the results of said fullness has been our focused buckle down on the finances, which means all of our planned trips this year were either drastically simplified or eliminated completely. We've taken to finding things to do in our own locale -- and not just the SAME things we always do, either. And when I say "we" I really mean mostly John, since he is the one attempting to work out of our house all summer while two bored elementary schoolers (Quinn will be in kindergarten, so I can officially say that now - excuse me while I sob) loudly and constantly beg to swim, bowl, play miniature golf, and go to restaurants. (I really only see one activity - swimming - in that series of requests that would seem "normal" to me for a five- and six-year-old. What have we done to these kids?) John has drowned out some of the begging with SpongeBob and video games (against my useless protesting from a phone in my cubicle 15 miles away), but he's come up with some free summertime entertainment, too. They've hit pet stores, water parks, and "home school," which as you can see by the look of joy on Quinn's face in the last picture, is clearly all the rage with today's five-year-olds.

Post Title Here

2008-06-25T20:20:00.002-05:00

I've been looking for things to say here tonight. Literally, I'm looking around the room and wracking my brain for something to write about other than what has been holding my thoughts hostage for the past few hours. I'm apparently pressuring myself not to be a negative nelly, which is odd, since I rebel against such pressure when it comes from any external source. But the only subject that would flow freely right now has to do with the same boring complaints I always fall back on in this forum - work/home balance frustrations, control struggles with the kids, self-loathing for not being more fun-loving and spontaneous or appreciative of these fleeting days. Bleh. After a while I get sick of thinking about it and I'm not sure writing about it ends up being the cathartic release I expect. I've started to suspect that all of my day in, day out analysis, guilt, and planning for better responses and more appreciation each "next time" that presents itself only serves to make me that much more self-critical as I go. I guess eventually one would just explode being under a self-imposed microscope like this, which is why occasionally in the middle of just such a group of overwhelming thoughts, I give up and drink wine in front of the TV. That's completely healthy, right? I'm sure it has nothing to do with any of the very issues that drive me to that state, like the fact that the issues are recurring or that I need to lose 15 or 20 pounds.

Abduction

2008-06-23T21:18:00.002-05:00

Rather than stay and watch Bryce's hour-long Tae Kwon Do class tonight, I met John and the kids there after Quinn's shorter 30-minute class was over and took him home to start dinner. This is a rare occasion around here anymore, since dinner lately has consisted of 1.) restaurant food, 2.) four different thrown together meals as time permits, or 3.) wine and M&Ms. If anyone prepares a nutritious and complete dinner for this family on any sort of regular basis, it's John, who prepares it while I'm cursing traffic on the way home from work or while I'm attempting to act like a present and aware parent while watching the kids in their evening Tae Kwon Do classes. Tonight, we switched places. Our first mistake, apparently, was not giving His Highness Quinn enough warning: the whole walk to the car was drenched in thick demanding whines about how he never gets to eat at restaurants. I quoted him the three places I knew he'd eaten in the past week and told him that cost $100, did he have $100? No, he said, but he knew where we could GET $100. Where? He'll SHOW you, that's where.

At home when I asked for his help setting the table I was told, no, he would not do that, he was getting dominoes right then, and he'd better be having noodles for dinner. The plate I put in front of him was calmly called horrible, I make the worst dinners ever, when would dad be getting home? When John arrived and didn't acknowledge the injustice of the tripe I had placed on Quinn's plate, he crouched under the bar stools and winnied like a horse, he never gets anything he wants, this is the most horrible day he's ever had! Tell me about the best day you could ever have, I asked him. His best day is horrible! The word horrible is apparently part of his sophisticated new vocabulary (which also now includes the phrase 'pull my finger,' a sad fact I learned after leaving my kids in John's solo care for a week while I was away for a work trip).

Quinn finally gave up and stomped upstairs, disgusted with his horrible mom's horrible dinner finalizing his horrible day. I prepared myself for Horrible Dinner, the Sequel, aka Bryce's Reaction to Vegetables, but something happened. Bryce, for one thing, sat down in his chair like a normal person, not someone whose head is attached to a string held by a speed-addicted madman playing basketball. Then, mystifyingly, he picked up a fork and ate salad. Salad, with lettuce in a glass bowl. Bizarre. I got brave and told him he needed to eat his corn and green beans and he said, okay, and smiled. Huh? He took a natural and non-chalant bite of corn (which I'm not sure he's actually ever eaten before tonight) and said, woops, I forgot to put my napkin in my lap, I'm trying to be as polite as possible. Quinn made a few last ditch efforts to sound the sympathy horn from upstairs and Bryce looked at me, shook his head, and said, little kids are so crazy, aren't they? John and I tried to act natural, but we were wondering when the other shoe was going to drop, or should I say, when the spaceship was going to show up to return our real kids.

Vicious Cycle

2008-06-22T21:49:00.003-05:00

It never fails. All week long I yearn for the weekend, that peaceful time at home with my kids, those little people I feel like I never see and whose lives are passing me by while I worry about their savings and tuition fees and the daily financial demands of living in a house and driving cars. Then Friday night arrives in all its disappointing fatigue and stress thanks to the week preceding it, and I hinge my hopes on Saturday, which greets me most typically with a fairly innocent set of questions about whose turn it is for the gameboy, but ends with me cursing myself for once again thinking the kids can handle staying up late without attacking each other or me. Sunday is an on again, off again last ditch effort on my part to cling to any enjoyable moment in the hopes it will multiply if nurtured with enough of my silent appreciation for it, but inevitably the silent appreciation holds too much eagerness, which saturates the moment with expectation we can only fall short of. Sunday night, even if spent drinking margaritas and ingesting thousands of yummy queso calories, usually ends with someone yelling, in tears, or in Quinn's case, demanding to know why he never gets anything he wants. Ever.

This weekend was particularly full of expectation because I was out of town on mind-numbing business for a week beforehand. It's like the kids don't know how to handle the transition to my being back home, especially knowing that I'll be going back to the office Monday through Friday, which may as well mean I'm out of town again. In fact, now that I think about it, this weekend is probably the quintessential weekend, different from the norm not in content, but in intensity. We've played games, watched movies, told stories, and spent most waking moments together, but somehow it can never be enough. In their zeal for togetherness, they lose control and compete unfairly, testing where my loyalties will fall and then ganging up to see me squirm when they push my buttons together. By tonight's bedtime, although I was determined to end the night --the weekend -- with no yelling or crying, I was at the end of my rope and certainly wasn't the attentive and loving person the kids thought they missed all week long.

By this time tomorrow I'll be lamenting all the time spent at the office, all of the demands that take my focus off of my family and home. Tuesday and Wednesday will feel like pits of despair and guilt, especially when I lean down for good night kisses and hear, "I missed you today." Thursday and Friday will be wished away and there may even be brief evening discussions about how to change this scenario permanently (hello, fantasy world). But then on Friday night there will be shrieking and there will be hitting and there will be Bryce's quick and now predictable response, "One more chance! I didn't do it! It was Quinn's fault!" and I'll think, "Crap. It's the weekend again."

Sound of Silence

2008-06-21T21:43:00.002-05:00

As much as I'd love to say my last post was the pinnacle of dysfunction around the Fringe, I'd be lying. I'm having to hack my way through cobwebs and dust even to post at this point, but I've realized over the past six months that my written silence is punishing my future self, the self that will actually want to remember the sequence of events that led me to where I will be, the experiences that showed me what I stood for was more than just my own self-interest and pride, but something I wanted to give and teach my kids, and maybe simultaneously also myself.

There is very little point for me to try to sum up the day to day chaos and wonder and fun and fear and tears and hysteria and sleep and pain and drinking and weight gain and thanks and learning and change that has taken place in the past several months. It's not over, either, as we all know. Despite what we believe as kids, or what we want to believe in our cocky assumption that we'll handle it all better than those who came before us, adult life never smooths out and rolls before us, an idyllic dewy pasture where the only pitfalls are wet feet and grass stains. The pitfalls around here are more like pesky hidden lava pits, unscheduled beheadings, and R.O.U.S's. Nevertheless, there is a peacefulness in the realization that what lies before us may not be in our control, the people around us may live in dysfunctional and created hells, but we are here anyway. There are other, smaller, admittedly more high maintenance people with missing baby teeth and Tae Kwon Do belts to receive and emotional meltdowns over missing Smarties dosages that, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, need us to stay out of the lava pits a day at a time.

Weiner Takes All

2008-05-19T14:39:00.006-05:00

Dachshund races, May 19 2008.

Disaster Zone

2007-12-18T22:33:00.000-06:00

It's official. Home on the Fringe is dysfunctional enough to be called a disaster area. Oh, sure - the worst ice storm in the state's history is technically to blame, but it's all a lovely coincidence, isn't it? What else could possibly explain the horrifying list below, which anyone reading this will assume I am embellishing, but oh no, I am not:

1.) Stepkid #1 re-entered our lives six months ago - via a phone call from roommates suspecting he'd stolen something of theirs to pawn for gambling money. He'd told them we were dead. WEEEE!!!

2.) Mother-in-law took the prime martyrdom opportunity related to #1 above and thought, "hey, how convenient, my martyrdom will further this family's dysfunction, PERFECT!" and (against our wishes) allowed said stepkid to move in with her, drive her car, eat her food, and continue to pretend those pesky thousands of dollars in Stepkid #1's unpaid bills were all a bad dream. Woops! Six months later, nope! Not a dream!

3.) I decided two surgeries in four weeks would be doable this summer, when my work life was just reaching a fever pitch. Yeah. Not so much. Hello, 15 pounds! How I've missed you. DIE, FIEND! (They say the multiple personality thing wears off in a year or two. I don't know.)

4.) Bryce has the intensity of a Tasmanian Devil and the intelligence of Calvin (of Calvin & Hobbes). Therefore, SOMEBODY PLEASE. HELP. US.

5.) Quinn is smarter than he wants any of us to believe. Therefore, I need a professional spy to help me out with him. He is now reading, but clings to the baby act and thinks I don't get it. I don't have the energy to fight it. See #s 1-4 above.

6.) Stepkid #2 turned 18 in biological years, but the whole maturity / responsibility / facing her life thing is still causing us a few minor issues. For instance, a few weeks ago she had a stomach bug and woke us up by politely letting us know she had thrown up, what would we like her to do with all the vomit? OH, golly, I don't know. Throw up in the toilet rather than all over 200 square feet of the walls and carpet on your sloth-like way to the bathroom? Or maybe in a trash can, using that brain-shaped thing inside your head, when you figured out you wouldn't make it? Oh, I know! Let's ask the six- and four-year-olds, who manage to NOT leave chunks of puke all over the house when they get sick. Perhaps they can give you some pointers while we're STEAM CLEANING THE ENTIRE UPSTAIRS AND RE-PAINTING WALLS COVERED IN YOUR VOMIT.

7.) Also, stepkid #2 recently got her driver's license (why not two years ago when she could legally drive? Oh, because she is literally that unmotivated: my friends give me rides, I guess I don't need to take the time to get my license. Look at that! Nap time!), which compelled John to get her a cell phone for safety. How many text messages do you think one human being can send and receive in three weeks? 3,500, apparently! Know this, world: we are unreasonable in our decision to cut the phone off of our plan because we no longer want to monitor an 18-year-old's every move to avoid paying or recovering hundreds of dollars in overage fees (she's paying, not us, but still, the monitoring! GAH!). Yes, we are definitely the ones with unrealistic expectations.

8.) I decided to take a certification test practically out of the blue at the end of the summer. The test was scheduled for November, and I figured I could study in the evenings after the kids were in bed. You know, because at our house, there is all sorts of peaceful free time in the evenings. My trip to Chicago in October for a prep class served only to horrify me about what I had gotten myself into, and so for the next few weeks, I spent every night at the library and burned myself out beyond what I even knew was possible. The test is over, but I think there are parts of my brain that are permanently damaged. Oh, and I also never saw the kids. THAT certainly didn't cause any issues, except for the pesky fact that every Saturday and Sunday morning within 15 minutes, they still ask me what I'm doing at home for so long.

9.) I got screamed at by a psycho co-worker who had spent months not doing his job and creating complete havoc for me on a daily basis, and my department is so conflict-averse that nothing is being done about it. I'm too attached to the whole paycheck / job thing that I'm moving on and not making an issue of it against every fiber of my justice-obsessed being.

10.) I offered, like an idiot, to host Christmas dinner. Both sides of the family will be there, including Stepkid #1 who has never stepped foot in the new house and hasn't seen or spoken to me or the kids - his brothers - in two years; also including mother-in-law, who feels stepkid #1 has really turned a corner and deserves lots of praise (Lies about our deaths be damned! Possible future break-ins to pawn our belongings, pshaw!). Don't worry, there will be ample alcohol. I don't know what the rest of the poor saps are going to cope with, though, since I will have consumed it all by 10:00 a.m.

Yeah, the storm that just took out half the city's power for over a week was only the tip of the iceberg. Or the straw that broke the camel's back. Tonight on a whim I dyed my hair red. It's been blonde since birth. Somehow I think it all means something, but then I also have this feeling that it might just be my way of signalling to the world that if it eats me, if it tries to attack me, if it makes the mistake of thinking I'm its prey, it will be very, very sorry.

Dress the Trash

2007-11-13T05:31:00.001-06:00

I grabbed this shot while I was downtown last weekend. Later that day, I heard a report on NPR that estimated we throw away $45 Billion in food every year. I don't know if he was looking for something to eat, but it made me pause, and wonder what was my contribution to that number.

Trash the Dress

2007-11-07T17:21:00.000-06:00

A local wedding magazine contacted me about submitting some recent wedding pictures for the next issue. "Recent wedding pictures" is code for detail pictures: flowers, cake, table settings, a bride and groom shot, letter cage, bridesmaid dresses. Nothing of substance, thank you very much.

I asked them if they had heard about Trash the Dress. Oh, it's all the rage. Get a bride back in her dress after the wedding and have her roll around in mud, or climb in a dumpster, or put her floating face down in a pool of stagnant water - all in the name of art - and trash the dress. The idea is that unless the dress is going to be sold, it won't get worn again. If the marriage doesn't last, it won't get worn again at the next I Do and the bride's daughter certainly won't wear it at her wedding. I had something a little different in mind, though, from the sessions I have seen. Something a little more fun, a little more high fashion.

They agreed to a two (or three) page spread with a little write up about Trash the Dress. Here they are. Click the picture to see them all.

Plenty of Room

2007-10-24T18:05:00.000-05:00

I haven't been back here since I graduated from college, so after dinner with an old friend last night, I rode around the campus and community where I spent several years of my life. I gasped over some major changes to a few of the university buildings, but the community itself was virtually unchanged. "I told you," my friend said, laughing as she pointed out the same local hole in the wall restaurants we frequented for years. "It's like Hotel California. This place never changes."

We went to a liberal arts school and I'm pretty sure we and everyone we knew all assumed that we didn't need "useful" degrees and we would spit on the idea of going to school to make ourselves "marketable" - but now, all of us are in careers completely unrelated to our idealistic degrees. In fact, despite my worry about explaining how I got into the field I'm now in, as soon as I started talking, she nodded understandably and just said, "but you like it. You found something you like. I, on the other hand, worked in the field related to my degree for four years and realized that I hated it." Then she told me about her husband, also with a liberal arts degree from the same school, who also now works in a technical, "useful," and "marketable" field -- by choice, as shocking as that would have been to us all 10 years ago.

For a while I've had this inner struggle going on that could be summed up with this title: What I Do vs. Who I Am. I've resisted getting close to people I work with because I've told myself I don't really identify with them, I'm not really "supposed" to be there, I'm only paying the bills, this identity is only one I use for a paycheck. I've (sub-consciously, I think) resisted staying in touch with people I knew in school out of some sort of attempt to distance myself from having to explain why I'm not (fill in the blank with whatever way an English Language and Literature degree could meet my career expectations and simultaneously create some kind of ideal, whole identity). I'm only now starting to realize, though, that there's really no need for me to separate those identities. I don't actually have to explain or justify, because the biggest secret of all is that we're all ultimately just doing the best we can. That's what I was doing in school when even while choosing that liberal arts degree path, I didn't actually know what I "planned" to do. That's what I'm doing now as I prepare to get certified in an area I always automatically assumed I would avoid at all costs. Who I am really hasn't changed, though. At the core I'm still like Hotel California, too.

And last night we had drinks with some retired Floridians.

2007-10-23T08:10:00.000-05:00

I'm in Chicago for training right now, which means most of my days are taken up with treks across paisley carpeted floors to hotel conference rooms set up with stiff white cloth-covered folding tables, and a few gasps thrown in to express my sheer disgust and dismay over the cost of two eggs and a cup of oatmeal brought to my room before classes start. John got to join me on this trip, though, and just left the room armed only with his camera, so at least one of us will get to enjoy the vibrant scenery around here.

There is a world boxing championship going on here this week, and an inordinate number of European boxing teams are staying in our hotel; last night before dinner, we were on our way to the elevator when we heard what sounded like some primitive form of laser tag ahead of us. Turns out the entire Latvian boxing team was practicing, and the "lasers" were short bursts of breath with every air-punch into the fancy gilded elevator lobby mirrors. Ah, Chicago. It's great to be back.

Why do I bother?

2007-10-20T20:58:00.000-05:00

Today I had one of those moments of sheer emotional survival. The scene: a seven-year-old's birthday party, the parking lot of a gymnastics warehouse. I'm at the trunk with two helium balloons, chatting politely with the mom of one of Bryce's classmates. I tell Quinn to let himself into his side. Suddenly I hear an angry male voice, "DID THAT JUST HIT OUR CAR?" I walk around to Quinn's side, see his door has made definite contact with the back passenger door of the car next to us - the car of Bryce's classmate's next-door-neighbor, the car holding a young friend of one of Bryce's oldest friends. I flinch, I grab Quinn's door and move it, I see a scratch on their back passenger door and say, "I am SO SORRY!" I know it was an accident. I look at Quinn, whose eyes are wide and confused, I scold him and tell him to sit down and buckle up, we need to be more careful. His formerly happy eyes well up with tears and his face flushes with shame and fear: "I'm sorry! I didn't mean to! It was the wind - it was an accident. I was TRYING!" I am brought back to reality, to true priority, but the owner of the car isn't. I tell Quinn it's okay, I know it was a mistake, just buckle up, but the friend of the friend's mother is standing there yelling, "you've gotta be kidding me! I just got this car three months ago! OH COME ON!" while my four-year-old cries in shame. I look at her and apologize again, offer to give her my insurance information even against my own instinct. She scolds all of us again, "I don't know, I haven't even SEEN IT YET!" a clear indication that I am in her way. I push down my own desire to remind her that FOR THE LOVE OF GOD IT'S JUST A PAINT SCRATCH ON A HUNK OF METAL; PLEASE TELL ME YOU HAVE MORE IMPORTANT THINGS TO THINK ABOUT, AND IF YOU DON'T: PEOPLE ARE DYING AND BEING TORTURED RIGHT NOW, and I take my rage out on the trunk, where I toss the balloons and slam the door shut. I shakily and in shock and disbelief search for my car insurance information while she dramatically circles her car and undoubtedly discusses the unacceptable scratch with her husband, who has yet to make eye contact with any of us, but sits and stews in the passenger seat while my two children observe in confusion and fear -- there is no telling what his own child is seeing or thinking in the back seat of her shiny three-month-old punk skeleton sticker-covered car. Another classmate's friend walks out and notices me. I tell her the story while her own kids clamber into her car without thinking of the swing span of their car doors. She looks at me in disbelief: "It didn't matter that you were just at the same kid's birthday party?!" "Apparently not," I say. She looks up and whispers, shocked, "SHE JUST TOOK A PICTURE OF THE DOOR WITH HER CELL PHONE!" I look at her while I write the last three digits of my insurance policy number. "Yeah." I say. "I told you." Her breath catches in her throat. "I am sorry," she says, "I would rather have a mark on my car than treat someone the way she is treating you." "Me too," I say appreciatively.

The angry woman walks around to my side of the car and I hold out my information while I say, "I'm sorry this is so important to you that it makes you this upset. I apologize again for the scratch." She grabs it and, shockingly, makes her face look even more offended and entitled than it already did. "I didn't think I was that upset. But cars are expensive, and I just got this a few months ago." "Yeah," I say, walking around to my door, my obligation fulfilled. She continues in her huffy state, "don't you want my information so when I call you know who I am?" "Sure," I say. "I mean," she continues, "weren't you at the birthday party I was at?" "Yes!" I cry. "We were at the same birthday party!" "Well, yeah, we're C's next door neighbors." "Okay. Yes, cars are expensive. I've apologized, and I apologize again that my four-year-old accidently scratched your car door when the wind caught hold of it as he was getting in AFTER THE BIRTHDAY PARTY. Goodbye."

I make sure they pull out before I do. Behind them and silent for the first time since the ordeal started, I notice all the cartoon character stickers plastered on the back window and license plate. Oh yeah, presentation is definitely important to these people. A paint scratch on their car door would be a HUGE DISTRACTION FROM THE PUNK SKULLS.

I'm always telling my kids that it's all about the choices we make. I see today's event as another opportunity to point out how I made some difficult choices because they were the right things to do even in the face of a self-centered, petty jerk. But I also see the situation as something an older, more sophisticated child would (and undoubtedly will) point to as a way to prove me wrong. That ultimately there is no way to rise above the pettiness, that ultimately we're all petty survivors, we're all out for ourselves, we're all jerks out to prove something, even if that something is how "above" the petty people we are. As we drove home and I tried to explain to the kids why I was upset with the angry car owner's behavior, as I tried to use this moment as a teaching moment and an example of what not to do, I realized the most they were going to take from this pathetic ordeal was that I had called someone a jerk. What brought the realization home was when, as I drove along the highway listening to Bryce's constant question stream, he said he'd wished I had let him have a word in edgewise while at his grandmother's this evening, because he'd really been wanting to tell her that I'd "called that lady a jerk."

Fall Break

2007-10-19T10:45:00.000-05:00

Even though it still reaches into 80's in the afternoon, and there is nary a colorful leaf to be found, it's still fall break time from school so the boys and I went on a hike at a local nature reserve. Click the picture to see the slideshow.

Don't Go Out in Public With Them

2007-10-18T20:17:00.000-05:00

"How many kids did that lady have who ended up drowning them all in the bath tub?"

"Five," I said, sighing and rolling my eyes, shooting lasers out of my eyes at John for asking such a horrible question with such a horrible motive. It was horrible, I knew, because when he'd asked I'd secretly thought it was pretty hilarious, actually. But just as soon as the hilarity washed over me, the guilt and misery did, too, or at least a sense of obligation to guilt and misery, hence the eye-rolling and laser shooting. I couldn't pretend to endorse that type of humor, even as the kids, now 6 and 4 1/2 -- well beyond ages where writhing under the booth with dirty napkins on their heads would be acceptable -- mewed like cats or some kind of mutant baby creatures and clawed with greasy, alfredo-covered fingers at my work pants because the 40 minutes of conversation and participatory menu coloring apparently hadn't been an acceptable level of parental attention for them, these precious offspring of mine.

I'd had enough. "We're leaving," I said through the sawdust remaining in my mouth where teeth used to be. Then in the awful clenched-mouth, growl-snarl language I've perfected for them, "Get. Up. Here. NOW! COME ON." I'm not sure why in my anger I still think this form of aggression-speak will be effective or somehow won't create more problems. "Soooo-rrrryyyy!" Quinn whined. At this point I wanted to stomp my feet and pound my fists on the table. I grabbed the styrofoam containers of half-eaten cheese pizza and successfully cracked the little non-hermitically sealing tab with my passionate clutch. I did that dramatic thing where I just walk away as if I'll leave them orphaned if they don't immediately snap to military attention and march dutifully and solemnly behind me to the car. Bryce crawled out from under the booth, grease-stained cloth napkin sliding slothfully to the floor, that faux Italian villa floor on which he'd just been "sleeping" due to the sheer fatigue of eating two slices of gourmet cheese pizza. In the parking lot he was still whining about wanting dessert, and I was still using this victorious moment to relish the fact that I was the adult here, I was the one with the power. Right.

At the gas station while John was filling up the car I continued to lecture the kids about their behavior. It's unacceptable, it's embarrassing, there's no need to act that way, I'm so disappointed that they make these choices. "Poopy Stupid Poopy!" Quinn screamed, like a two-year-old, while flinging his milk straw across the car. I wanted to open the door and sell the kids to the gas station owners, but I just said, "you're going to your room when we get home." A few minutes later Quinn made a quiet, funny joke and I grinned at him. He caught my eye: "I want to hug you, mom." This is the Quinn I've come to know and love - the physical, sensitive, wanna-be comedian, that kid who doesn't understand why people don't crack up laughing at his slapstick comedy just because, for instance, his grandmother didn't want to be hit comically by that hard cover book - it was funny, what's the problem?

While John gave the kids a bath, I had to finish something work-related, and when I went up to tell them good night, Quinn was studiously reviewing his latest "magazine," a high-quality party supply catalog (he has a collection in his room - don't you dare throw any of them away, there might be a rubber duckie in a pirate costume he hasn't yet admired). He climbed into bed, drowsy and soft and blinking long sleep-blinks at me. I kissed his cheeks and forehead and realized that an hour before I'd wanted to eat my young and had felt only marginally guilty about that. "We should really just stay home for dinner from now on, shouldn't we?" I asked him, stroking his silky, still baby-fine hair. He yawned again, his soft, pudgy hand on mine. "Yeah," he said.

Top Ten, Schmop Ten

2007-10-17T20:01:00.000-05:00

Recently I read over the entries of the past several months and realized that I'm actually no busier now than I've ever been. I'm simply making different choices with my time, my energy, and my brain. There is so much to say but I'm choosing not to say it. I haven't yet determined why, but I think I'm trying to work something out; I think I'm expecting that one day I'll find myself "done" or "ready" and suddenly things will be clear, I will have only one well-lit path stretching before me, no tangled brush to slash through, no distracting wild creatures flapping around my head, no darkness or confusion stopping me in my tracks while I deliberate over the road that led me here.

I am several different Kristens despite my belief to the contrary. The dominant one is the one who thinks she shields the rest from failure, but in the process she also holds back alternate realities and darkens what might in other contexts be the most obvious paths. She has my best and worst qualities, and her strength has been unmatched. I think, though, that it's not unlimited; she tires and shakes with fatigue more frequently, and begins to know that there are others whose time is coming to light different paths and to make her finally lay down that comfortable, familiar shield.

Top Ten Things I Haven't Mentioned: #8, School

2007-09-13T22:25:00.000-05:00

One of the major life changes that accompanied our move to the dream house was the kids' enrollment in the small city -- I mean huge elementary school -- down the street. Over the summer I was apprehensive and concerned about the size, the schedule, and the curriculum after two years of taking for granted the competence and comfort of the small, specialized schools at each kid's disposal. I pushed past the fear all summer mainly because there were a few pesky demands on my time like surgeries and trips to Canada and clinging to sanity one minute at a time, but also because I was hoping the positives of having free education available to both kids within a mile of our house would outweigh the negatives of whatever paranoia I had created in my head about large schools.

Hey, guess what, world? You know that saying, "just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get me?" Let's see. Bryce spent the first eight mornings at school crying in class as his easily over-stimulated self tried desperately to process the chaos of recess, bathroom trips, lunch room confusion, and unfamiliarity with everyone around him. Quinn is so different from his intense older brother that he had the world's happiest transition, but his teacher is apparently the school's version of PigPen, papers and chalk dust constantly swarming around her, kids careening with glee from one end of the classroom to the other, no routine to speak of, no communication to parents dropping off and picking up kids, deer-in-the-headlights stares and one-word answers when asked for basic information about the day, the expectations, the progress. The curriculum for both kids' classes is the same material they were covering last year (and the year before in Bryce's case). In an effort not to taint the kids' view of school, I try to ask neutral questions and sound supportive of the teachers, but it's all I can do not to grind my tongue down to a bloody stump in the process. Within two weeks, we'd had conversations with coordinators, counselors, teachers, and principals. The school district uses words that suggest they are willing to work with us, but I haven't seen any major change yet.

For the first two weeks of school, at bedtime, Bryce would regale me with stories of playground and classroom fun - from his old school. When I'd re-focus the conversation to prod about his new school, his eyes would well up with tears and he'd launch into the details evidencing his misery. "There are three things: One, there are so many kids in the morning that sometimes people run into me. Two, like I've told you before, at recess when I try to make friends with people, they just won't listen to me. And three, I really miss dad because we had a great summer playing games and going to the park."

Quinn's teacher called John one day in the middle of class: "Here, I need you to talk to Quinn because he's made some bad choices. During free play, he and two other kids made a HUGE mess and dumped out three tubs of toys in the play kitchen." When I saw Quinn that night and I asked him for details, he said she'd yelled at him and hurt his feelings, so he'd said, "I'm going to tell my dad on you and you're going to get in trouble!" That tidbit of information combined with the suspicion that her emotional maturity leveled out around age 15 made her phone call (over which we'd previously been bewildered and confused) seem like a perfectly logical conclusion, which is really quite horrifying when you think about it. Oh, and then there was Quinn's attempt at telling me the whole story, her response to his threat: "NO, when I talk to your dad, YOU are the one who'll be in trouble."

Various circumstances led us to this move, this decision. I knew there would be transition and challenge, and I knew John and I would have to be more directly involved with the school administrators than we'd been in the past. But I wasn't expecting stories of being lost and alone in the cafeteria, or days of watching movies in class with no explanation or communication from teachers, or so many talks with administrators in such a short period of time.

Bryce has stopped crying in class but still refers to his old school almost daily. Quinn's typical happy nature has carried him through a less than ideal first "real" classroom experience, and he is on a waiting list for a class with a teacher that will provide a better environment for him, but I am more than uneasy about the associations he's making with the ideas of school and teachers. I want the kids at the same school and I know this particular district has the resources to do a better job than what I'm seeing right now, but at this point, I'm not ruling out any possibilities.

Top Ten Things I Haven't Mentioned: #9, Fade to Noir

2007-08-20T00:59:00.000-05:00

Almost two years ago I wrote about Bryce's security item, a pastel blue generic brand thermal blanket he dubbed "Noir" and gendered as female at the age of two. For whatever reason, he thought of his blanket as a cat, and the only cat whose name he knew was the cat he toddled after at my mom's house; she'd adopted him from me by default when I left for college. Noir the blanket has never spent a night away from Bryce. She has become tattered and torn, strings trailing from her limp, worn, faded cat-blanket body. She has a scent that Bryce relies on as he cradles her in his sleep and holds her to face while he scuffles through the morning hours. When one of us sneaks her into the washer and dryer while Bryce is away at school, he angrily and desperately scolds us when he greets her that evening: "Hey, what happened to Noir's softness? This doesn't feel like Noir!" Years ago we caught ourselves referring to Noir as "her" even when Bryce was out of earshot. Even as I write this I struggle to think of her as anything other than another member of the family.

Two nights ago as I took out my stress whipping the cake mix for Bryce's sixth birthday party the following day, John walked in to the kitchen and in an attempt to dampen the potential hysteria whispered "we can't find Noir, have you seen her?" The house was turned upside-down in the ensuing search for Noir the blanket, the first time she'd been truly lost since Bryce was three. Delaying the emotional turmoil, I grabbed the blanket at the top of Bryce's closet, the faded yellow generic brand thermal blanket that, in an oddly eery twist, used to be MY security blanket. Bryce coped with it all by crafting an agreement with us that we would search high and low until Noir had been found. He was willing to settle for my old blanket as long as he could refer to it as "Noir's cousin, Noir," and between that band-aid and the excitement of the next day's swashbuckling pirate party festivities pillaging through his mind, the night was as drama-free as we could have hoped. As we waited with anticipation for Bryce to fall asleep, John made a comment about how sadly fitting it would be if Noir disappeared right before Bryce's sixth birthday, after months of sidelong glances at her tattered edges and growing holes, the two of us silently wondering how much longer Noir could endure being the recipient of Bryce's emotional intensity. Perhaps she'd finally been worn down to nothing and had simply vanished into thin air having dutifully and sufficiently served her noble purpose.

This summer, the original Noir -- the (male) cat who graciously shared his name with Noir the blanket -- also vanished into thin air one night during a storm just months after my mom and stepdad moved into a new house where his jungle cat role playing had to take place in more unfamiliar territory. We assumed he'd been hit by a car, but his body was never found and none of the neighbors reported seeing or hearing him. It's possible he was attacked by an animal in the undeveloped land behind their house. It's possible he was sick and wandered off to die without having to face the dreaded veterinarian. Whatever the case, from our perspective, one day Noir was there, happily purring and head butting his humans the way I'd taught him when he was a kitten by holding him at eye level and talking to him all day long, and the next day he was just.... gone. I had developed an allergy to cats during college and so he'd stayed with my mom all these years, but when I visited I occasionally threw caution to the wind and let him greet me with his roaring purr engine sound track and his slick black face aimed at my cheeks, then the soft THUD! of contact, the cheapest therapy available. It seems grossly unfair that we didn't get a goodbye head-butt from Noir -- unfair and profoundly sad after 14 years of knowing him.

When Noir the blanket went missing the other night, I thought it was the final heart-wrenching parallel between the cat who'd always happily taken on the emotional intensity of a decade of major change in my life and the blanket Bryce had latched onto in infancy as a place to curb and comfort the emotional intensity that makes him who he is. I was amazed that he accepted my old blanket as a one-night substitute, but I knew the sadness I felt at Noir's mysterious absence was just the tip of the iceberg of the distress and heartbreak I knew Bryce would feel if she weren't found. After Bryce's birthday party yesterday, John was cleaning up the game room and found Noir the blanket under piles of legos and puzzle pieces. After the celebration and lecture about keeping her on his bed so she'd stay safe in the future, John and I heaved a sigh of relief. A few weeks ago Bryce had come to John with Noir the blanket held gingerly before him, having decided that the trailing pieces of this tattered, cherished being should be surgically removed. When I'd come home from work that night, they'd both told me she'd had her long pieces cut off. John told me after the drama of losing and finding her again that he had put the cut off pieces into the box of Bryce's baby keepsakes. "Oh thank God," I thought, "when she really is gone, at least we'll have some remnants for closure." Hopefully it won't happen as suddenly as Noir the cat's disappearance, but maybe now we're all more prepared to say goodbye.

Top Ten Things I Haven't Mentioned: #10, Gliding

2007-07-23T22:08:00.000-05:00

Quinn, the one we used to call "clumsy" and "slow" is apparently the only one with any natural athletic ability or grace around here. Months ago we finally bought a bike with training wheels for Bryce, knowing full well that it would sit in our garage and collect dust after one or two frustrating attempts at faking patience and forcing gleeful "you can do it!"s during Bryce's shrieks and spasms resulting from his illogical in-born fear of movement not completely, 100% within his physical control. When we moved the cob-web covered bike to the new house a few months ago, though, Bryce became interested in riding it as we'd walk by our neighbors' five-year-old boys zooming through each other's driveways with unbridled joy. After a few weeks of only slightly less frustrating walks than we'd experienced before, with slightly less blood-curdling shrieks and less humiliating spasms over the fact that the bike was GOING DOWNHILL AT A SLIGHT ANGLE AND HE MIGHT CRASH INTO THAT HOUSE FOUR MILES AWAY OH MY GOD PEOPLE HELLOOOO!!!, Quinn was demanding a bike of his own. He'd try to ride Bryce's during the times Bryce would be cowering in the corner and nursing the latest imagined bike-wound, but it was too big for him and his stubby little four-year-old legs couldn't produce the speed Quinn was obviously harboring.

John came home with a smaller bike one day and was beaming about how Quinn rode it happily throughout the grocery section of Wal-Mart and charmed everyone in his path. I assumed this was just John's typical over-zealous optimism coating the truth, but when I looked out the window and saw the blurry, zippy mass on the back patio, I was shocked at how well he handled the bike around the tight corners of the patio beams and the ridiculous amount of outdoor toys that littered concrete surface. Never one to shy away from competition, Bryce hopped on his own bike in a sudden change of heart about how terrifying it should be. On the flat surface of our back patio, he was fine. On the 10-degree death-defying angles of our suburban neighborhood streets, though, the shrieking re-commenced while his little "clumsy" brother -- quite literally -- rode circles around him. Bryce would not stand for this, and taking his next cue from the neighbor kids once again, asked strategically for a scooter.

When I came home the day of the scooter purchases, I didn't know what to expect. "Oh sure," I thought, "Quinn was fine on a bike with training wheels, but this, THIS is a two-wheeled scooter! It takes balance, precision, timing, SKILL! These kids can't handle this!" They strapped on their helmets and prepared for the launch. Bryce was giddy with excitement and raring to go, ready to prove that Quinn, the measley four-year-old, could never out-do him. His left foot on the scooter, his right foot on the ground, he lunged forward and jerked ahead; his hands clutched the foam handles and the sensitive steering equipment caused him to lurch suddenly to the left, then the right. Commence shrieking, commence spasms. While John and I started our fake encouraging tones and resisted offering shallow, teeth-clenching "you're okay"s, Quinn's scooter passed us by like a sailboat gliding on the sea. We all stopped, breathless, to take in the beauty of this formerly galumping bull-in-a-china-shop kid, now gingerly holding his right foot over the ground floating smoothly, evenly beneath him, eyes straight ahead, head held high, fine blonde hair wisping over the tops of his ears, perfectly at ease. "That's a story worth telling," I thought -- and I think so every time I see it.

Out

2007-07-06T00:19:00.000-05:00

Here I am again, with nothing substantial or intelligent to say. I think back to a year ago and am shocked over how drastically my perception of time has changed. I used to sit with my laptop and wail over how my only time to write was scrunched into a mere two to three hours in the evenings after the kids were in bed. Now, I barely touch my laptop at home. Just as I reached the point of comfort with a transition to a busier work life, we bought a house and moved, and entered a whole new reality to which we're actually still adjusting. In the midst of that, I discovered unhappily that I'd be undergoing two surgeries (both requiring general anesthesia), which took me from the category of "busy, tired, and frazzled" to "rocking back and forth in corner while drooling."

Last week I had the second and worst of the two surgeries, and the recovery was, to put it mildly, pure and utter misery in the form of large facial incision pain, bad anesthesia reactions, and near-narcolepsy. My dad drove twelve hours to help take care of the kids while John worked on the annual pile of wedding photo edits and I involuntarily slept. I woke up every few hours and shuffled out in dirty pajamas, mumbling and groaning and grabbing pill bottles and referring to myself as a homeless person. Occasionally as the days have worn on, I've slept less and done more laundry, spoken in complete sentences, and even started yelling at the kids again to keep it down and stop quoting T.V. commercials to me (although it did give me a genuine laugh when I was smearing Neosporin on the incision down my jaw and Bryce walked in and said, "oh good, mom, you're using Neosporin: Cuts Heal Four Times Faster!"). As I've started coming out of the fog, I've become aware of the fog's breadth and density; it's hovered over me for months as I've juggled more and more china dishes in the air, sweat pouring down my face, eyes always darting from one fragile trinket to the next, thinking at any minute failure would strike and shatter them all, and in my stupid constant worry I'd look up blindly into the gray and try to catch the china shards in my weak, small hands, finalizing my tragic failure in a painful, preventable, and ugly mess.

When I woke up last week from the surgery that removed a benign tumor from a large salivary gland, I looked at the clock in the recovery room and noticed that only an hour had passed since I'd been wheeled into the operating room and had panicked over the feeling of not being able to breathe through the brand new plastic odor of the oxygen mask ("you're 100% oxygenated" they'd said, "just keep taking deep breaths," which sounds very simple to people who feel like they can breathe - but - note to the medical community - to people who feel like they can not breathe, these instructions only incite panic). I'd been told the surgery would take three hours, but somehow I knew this was a good sign. I could feel the left side of my face, and I was able to speak, despite the pain and swelling around my jaw, and asked the nearest recovery nurse what had happened. Her answer was generic and non-informative, but it really didn't matter. The fact that I'd been able to speak normally told me I didn't have any nerve damage, which was the big risk of the surgery, and the sense of relief and gratitude I felt rivaled all the ensuing days of physical turmoil. My most prevalent thoughts on the recovery bed as I waited to be wheeled in to my own room where John was waiting for me had to do with being better, coming out of the fog, and coming back to my life. I might have forgotten that if the following week had been an easy one for me, and so I guess in that sense, I'm glad it wasn't.

Summer, Part I

2007-06-18T10:00:00.000-05:00

Yeah, yeah, we're busy. And we've been dealing with some of life's curveballs, so blogging has taken a back seat. Actually, it's more like crammed in the trunk. But to keep things moving forward, and shed a balanced light on our home on the fringe, I offer up a medley of our summer so far. It's not complete by any means and it didn't all happen in one day, but sometimes it sure feels like it did. just click the picture.

Pleomorphic Adenoma

2007-06-12T21:10:00.000-05:00

As it turns out (according to WebMD), between .002 and .003% of people "in the Western world" poke around enough on their jaws every year to find salivary gland tumors and subsequently face the risk of facial paralysis at worst, temporary pain and numbness during a long surgery recovery at best. This year, I am one of those people. I've touched on this subject before, and it is this subject that led to my recent blacklisting of the medical community. Had I listened to or trusted my general physician, I wouldn't 1.) know I have a tumor, 2.) know there's a 25% chance this tumor could grow an aggressive personality and decide overnight to become malignant and metastasize to other parts of my body, 3.) be preparing for the inevitable and obligatory surgery to remove it. I haven't decided the best way to communicate my alarming disgust and displeasure directly to my former doctor (who told me she "didn't think a parotid tumor was what was going on with me" and that "it was just some swollen lymph nodes"). John thought I should print a copy of the WebMD information with a sickeningly sweet thank you note, referencing her remarkable attention to detail, high level of concern and personal responsibility to her patients, and prompt, direct communication. Given the fact that she missed one of two bullet points on a one-paragraph radiology report, though, I'm not sure she'd be able to read between the lines on that one. I'm still thinking through my strategy, but I know nothing about complaints to medical boards and only assume the whole ordeal is going to be confusing and time-consuming.

Blink of an Eye

2007-06-05T22:18:00.000-05:00

I miss writing regularly here. When I write, I feel like I can't get my thoughts together and I usually end up deleting several attempts at starting. Eventually enough time will go by that I'll be too overwhelmed to even try to write anymore, but when I think about that, I feel a sense of failure or sadness or challenge, and I force myself to post something, no matter how rambling or boring or disjointed. Part I of me thinks this is a phase of life, that in a year or two or five, I'll look up and realize I've been writing a lot more and wave to a distant memory of the days I thought I'd never write again. Part II of me thinks that's a stupid fantasy and that the reality is that a year and a half ago, even though I didn't know it then, I had more time on my hands than I'll ever have again. Part III thinks, loudly, SHUT UP I AND II, WHO HAS TIME TO THINK ABOUT THIS?

Mostly I regret the fact that I'm so pre-occupied with Small Scheme, In My Face things these days that the original motivation for keeping this blog-- chronicling our life as a family -- just isn't being addressed anymore. The Big Scheme is being thrown by the wayside as I fool myself daily into thinking today, this day, will be the last day I work late, the last day I don't see my kids because I'm gone when they wake up and gone until minutes before they go to sleep. The kids are full of life, noise, mischief - much of which doesn't even make me angry these days - I'm enjoying it for once. Maybe it's because I hardly see them anymore, maybe it's because they're genuinely playing together, with each other (!), without requiring constant intervention from us. All I know is that Sunday morning, they didn't wake us up until 8:00 because they'd been quietly and non-destructively entertaining themselves for more than 20 seconds. Granted, the way they woke us up was disturbing on some levels: we heard the doorbell ring and bolted out of bed to find them at the front door, in plucked two-year-old Oktoberfest feather masks. "Would you like to buy a game? We're not your kids," they said, youth dripping from their mask-muffled voices. John and I avoided eye contact and pretended to scold them for sneaking out of the house, but potential kidnapping aside, you've got to appreciate that imagination, people. (And the extra sleep.)

The last several nights when I've come home (late), John and the kids are in the back yard, John with a beer and the kids on their bikes, circling the patio and pretending to be doing something healthy and/or harmless, like driving through McDonald's or shopping at Wal-Mart or killing a rainforest for their consumer convenience - you know, because we set really good examples around here - and I see them through the windows in my bedroom and notice something different about them from the day before. Quinn's hair looks longer, Bryce's legs look lankier, their faces look older, their voices sound more mature, their words more articulate. When I'm here and I'm recognizing this and trying to hard-wire these details into my memory, my heart aches and I think I'm going to start doing a better job of recording all of this. But then I blink, and the night is over.

One Down

2007-05-30T21:33:00.000-05:00

The first of two surgeries involving my head/face for 2007 is done. Today I learned that my sinus structure is "unsual" - rather than one large opening on each side, I had several small ones - all of which just cements my status as a freak of nature. Well, actually, John learned this from the ENT who performed the surgery, because I was in the recovery room groggily but persistently asking the poor guy assigned to me a series of probably annoying questions - how long did the surgery take? how many patients do you go through in a day? am I swollen? why did the surgery take longer than the 40 minutes I was quoted? so, do they just basically shove instruments up the nostrils and suck everything out? - oh yeah, he loved me.

I am considering removing some of the medical community from my blacklist. Everyone I dealt with today was competent, communicative, patient, and accomodating. The ENT especially has restored my confidence that there are good doctors out there if you're lucky enough to find them. Of course, he's still on the hook to remove a walnut-sized tumor from my neck/jaw later this year - and that surgery is legitimately more extreme, involved, and risky - so the pressure is on now, doc.

Now I get to spend three days at home checking work e-mail at my leisure and spraying saline up my recently excavated head. I feel okay other than some grogginess left over from the general anesthesia. By the way, WOW. One minute I'm answering questions strategically posed by what felt like three dozen people in scrubs standing over my head - My kids are 5 1/2 and 4, they're out of school for the summer, we just moved into a new house - and the next minute I hear voices yelling my name and telling me I'm in the recovery room. What is UP with that? Time doesn't pass when you're under general anesthesia? For all I know, there was no surgery - they just knocked me unconscious, rolled me into a new room, and woke me up. Hmm, maybe that's why I'm not in pain. Perhaps I should re-think my blacklist revisions.

Unqualified

2007-05-27T21:08:00.000-05:00

Until I had my kids, I believed that I was a competent and hard-working enough individual that I could handle whatever challenges may come my way. Parenting, as one of those things to come my way, has bitch slapped me back to the reality that there are some things I'll never feel that I've mastered. I flip back and forth between believing my kids are truly unique and I've been put on Earth to make sure they only terrorize really deserving people (these are the times my blood pressure goes up to the level where I become conscious of it coursing violently through my veins), and believing these kids were born "normal" to me, inhabitor of Bizarro World, where every parenting tip I implement is the exact opposite of the one I should have, and the poor, confused creatures are a prankster's experiment gone wrong, not manipulative or controlling tyrants (appearances - so very deceiving). Either way, I am clearly ill-equipped.

After last year's Memorial Day trip to the woods, John played dumb and "accidentally" booked two weddings this year. With sinus surgery looming next week, I decided to keep it simple and take the kids for one night. My brother called at one point during my drive, and asked if the kids were with me. "Oh yeah," I said. Before long, you'll hear Bryce complaining about wanting to get out of the car." (Stupid. I knew it before I was even done speaking.) Bryce, aka Super Sonic Hearing Boy, piped up in his most fingernail-on-chalkboard, everything-within-a-mile-wants-to-keel-over-to-end-the-agony whine: "MOOOOMMMMM, I'M TIRED OF SITTING! AAAEEEAOOOHHWWAAAA!" Suddenly my brother wanted to get off the phone. I don't get it.

When we got to the cabin, my mom had games, toys, bubbles, and the kids' favorite snacks ready and waiting. The kids waited five or ten minutes before they started fighting and complaining about whatever petty thing they could come up with. I can't stand it when they do this. I want to pick them up by their shirt collars and scream into their faces, "WHAT? IS ALL THIS CIVILIZED GIVING AND SHARING AND PROVIDING JUST TOO MUCH OF AN INCONVENIENCE FOR YOU?" but I don't. I drink wine instead, and when they've pushed my buttons for long enough, I engage in stupid conversations and ultimatums like, "That's it! If I have to give one more ultimatum, I'm getting rid of all your books and vegetables." (I learned that one in my Bizarro parenting class.)

I end up saying things I regret, or using a tone of voice I shouldn't, or threatening something I won't follow through on. I'm smart enough to know all of this compounds my never-ending problem, but not smart enough, or focused enough, to effectively change it. The result is frustration, guilt, a constant sense of failure.

At the cabin area park when Quinn walked up to an older, overweight, shirtless boy and said, factually, "you have a fat tummy," I saw the boy's younger cousin / brother laugh and repeat Quinn's statement, and I called Quinn over to ask what he said. "I was talking about his fat tummy," he said. "Quinn, we don't say that to people. You could have hurt his feelings. You need to go apologize to him." He did, and the next day we passed the same boy on the path the park again. Quinn looked at him and I stiffened, expecting the worst, but he only said, "That boy is playing basketball. I wish I was big enough so I could play basketball." When we got to the sand box, he sat next to Bryce and built a big sand pile, Bryce's "ant world, with an emergency exit," and after a few minutes Quinn looked at me and said, "am I playing nicely today? Not like yesterday when I was throwing sand at everyone?" I thought for a second that I should have handled something differently, that his emphasis was on his bad behavior, and that I'd been the one to create that, and my brain started to shut down in its self-criticism and over-computing, but I just said, "Yes, Quinn - you're playing nicely. Thank you, good job." and immediately felt ridiculous for praising him for doing the bare minimum of what I expect him to do.

To make things worse, I feel a general sense of dread and pressure anymore - not just about parenting. People talk about juggling work, home, kids, parenting, blended family madness, marriage, money, and self, but the idea of juggling seems a more in control action than whatever it is I'm doing. I feel like I'm trying to walk across a chasm of unknown proportions using rapidly moving, invisible, multi-dimensional steps. I don't know where they are, when they'll appear and disappear, and if I stop before I reach the other side (the location of which I'm clueless), I'm not sure what will happen, but whatever it is will be really, really bad. I'm pretty sure it involves falling. In whatever way possible while stepping without sight through unknown space, I go through the motions I think I'm supposed to: wake up, go to work, work frantically and attempt to come home in time for dinner, get home late (again), attempt to be engaged, focused, and patient with the kids through bedtime, fail within 20 minutes, blame failure on sheer fatigue and stress, put Quinn back in bed multiple times, end up yelling at the kids to stay in their beds, sit on the couch and feel like a scumbag parent, go to bed planning a different tomorrow, wake up and re-live it all again.

Next week I'm having surgery on my sinuses. "Don't bend over or your head will pound excruciatingly," they've said. "Rest for a few days," they've said. "Take your pain meds," they've said. All I've heard is, "good luck getting through this with your kids on summer vacation." I'll have to come up with some new ultimatums. How about water removal? "You guys come scream into my aching face one more time, that's it. Dehydration punishment."

Tonight after the 25th meaningless ultimatum, Quinn came downstairs after I'd put him to bed, and I told him to go back on his own. He said, "but I just want YOU to put me in bed, I forgot to get a hug and kiss." I said, "well, come here and get one, then go back to bed." He repeated himself (typical), and I sighed with frustration and said, absurdly, "this is the LAST time." All the way up, I wondered what would compel this kid to even want to be near me after so much strife. When will he start wondering that same thing?

Alarmingly Complicated, Eh?

2007-05-19T23:22:00.000-05:00

I'm really losing the ability to sit down and write. Hmm, take two more bites of frozen custard or type something about my trip to Canada? Custard.

At the airport after I confidently handed over my nine-year-old passport and while I chatted non-chalantly with my co-workers and fellow travelers, the airline rep rifled through the passport pages and tapped tentatively on her keyboard, eyes darting from the screen to my passport and back. "There's a different name on the passport than the ticket," she said in an accusatory tone. Before the whole sentence was even out of her mouth, and in front of all of my curious co-workers, the blood drained out of my face but I tried to look nonplussed while I grabbed for my driver's license. "Oh, my passport has my maiden name on it - I didn't even think about that. Ha, ha! Well, here's my driver's license!"

"That won't work. You'll have to have a marriage license, the passport, AND a driver's license. They won't let you through customs without that."

Forty minutes later, after multiple cell phone conversations and lots of "we're calm and cool even though we should be panicking" moments, John drove back through the airport drop off lane and slowed down only to hold our marriage license out the window. I grabbed it and yelled goodbye to the kids, and then spent 20 minutes attempting awkwardly to dash through the airport with what felt like 80 pounds of laptop and work files over my right shoulder, a purse unnaturally on my left and therefore sliding off every three steps, and a coat (because it's supposed to be cold in Canada, even though it really wasn't while I was there) resting over my forearm and flying out cape-like from behind me. I sat down and panted for five minutes before the flight started boarding, at which point I proudly walked up to the gate attendant with boarding pass, passport, driver's license, and marriage license, and said, "the name is different on my passport, but I've got a marriage license!" The gate attendant looked at me, said, "okay," tore my boarding pass, and waved me through. I was confused, and if I'd had more energy, would have been downright incensed that he didn't even look at the document I'd almost missed the plane for. "Well," said a co-worker, "I guarantee you they'll look at it when you get to customs in Canada." We changed planes in Denver and I waved all of my paperwork at the gate attendant again, and this time I was practically mocked. When we arrived in Canada, I was nervous, anxiously awaiting the moment of truth. The customs official said, "what are you doing in Canada?" and I said, "I'm here on business," and she said, "when was the last time you were here?" and I said, "I've never been here," and she said, "are you bringing anything that will stay in Canada?" and I said, "No." and she said, "have a good trip." I blinked a few times and gingerly pushed my marriage license toward her, hoping it would catch her eye, but she just waved me on, like I was confused.

I dejectedly approached my anxiously waiting co-workers. "They didn't even ask to see it?!" I was jaded now, not to mention dehydrated and probably slightly delirious (I don't travel much, can you tell?): "I'm pinning the damned marriage license to my shirt. SOMEONE IS GOING TO LOOK AT THIS THING."

(Nobody ever did. EVEN ON THE WAY BACK TO THE U.S. The border official at U.S. customs in the Canadian airport did not say ONE. SINGLE. WORD. to me. I gave him my passport and ticket, he looked sort of bored and irritated, picked up the passport and grunted, then threw it back at me. I'm guessing he looked at my passport picture, but I can't be sure. So I'm here to tell you that if you want to sneak into the U.S. from Canada (yeah, right), it's pretty easy.)

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You crazy Canadians! You're so darned friendly and helpful and smiley, people can't help but LIKE you! Even you, hotel representative who had to deliver the news to me that my new room was still not available 10 hours after our morning conversation regarding the problem with the ethernet connection in my first room, even YOU were remarkably full of smiles, tense ones though they were, as you explained in a mildly high tone that there was nothing you could do because the computer said you were waiting on housekeeping (pronounced endearingly to us midwestern accent-less drones, hOsekeeping) -- so really all you could do was check with ho(u)sekeeping -- even for YOU I couldn't muster any of the real disappointment and derision I usually find so easily for people I meet and create unrealistic standards for (I'm a peach!). And you, office receptionist, coming over every couple of hours -- not so often that it felt annoying or overbearing, but often enough that we realized you hadn't forgotten the coke-chugging, overweight, under-nourished U.S. citizens using up all of your "big paper" (I love that you call it that! It's so simple and to the point - why do we have to name the exact measurements, right? 11x14. 81/2 x 11. Yeah, yeah, we're all so smart and sophisticated. It's just 'big paper' - we all know what we're talking about. COMMUNITY! AH!) -- stopping by just to see if we needed anything. If WE needed anything! We were using up all of your supplies and kicking your employees out of their spots because they had the prime network spots and we were on a short timeline, and you wanted to make sure we weren't going without. Can you please come teach this alien mentality to us? We don't really know what that is down here. I'm sure you figured that out, among other things, when several of you walked us through your fabulous downtown tunnel system -- oops, excuse me, Plus 15 system -- to an Indian food buffet and at least half of my co-workers gawked at your plates in confusion and masked disgust as you sat down in your simultaneously unassuming and worldly way to eat the traditional Indian dishes. SIGH. My people are uncultured slobs, what can I say? But you guys with your maple leaf and your cheery acceptance of frigid cold and your genuine appreciation for other human beings, even selfish and hateful ones for whatever minimal value they bring to society - you rock, eh?

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Coming off the plane, delirious with fatigue and feeling appreciation for the U.S. only because my bed resides here, I headed towards the luggage claim area. I was talking to a co-worker and still struggling with coat, purse, and cruise-ship-anchor-weighted laptop when I saw Quinn's tiny face about 50 feet in front of me. The next few seconds went by in slow motion. First, I noticed his ecstatic expression and felt a pang of... something... when I realized I hadn't known if the kids had noticed much difference during my absence until that moment. Next, I noticed how his hair was blowing back from his forehead, indicating the speed at which he was heading for me. Finally, I realized too late that between me and Quinn stood 1.) an armed airport official and 2.) a very loud alarm system and 3.) a sign reminding all airport visitors that the terrorist threat alert had just been raised to orange. The armed airport guard saw the darting four-year-old, looked at John, looked at me, and stood up with his arm outstretched, yelling, "go back, go back, you can't cross that lllliiiiiiiiiiinnnnnne!" Quinn kept running, but his face flushed and his smile disappeared, and he looked at the guard and back to me, then kept coming for me, which tripped the Very Loud Alarm Next To the Sign Re: Terrorist Threat Alert.

I ran up to Quinn and grabbed him, his face still flushed with fear and confusion. "I'm so glad to see you, buddy," I whispered in his ear. "I just wanted to hug you. I couldn't see your nose and eyes and mouth and I wanted to get close to you. But next time you go to Canada, I won't make the alarm go off." I hugged him again as Bryce walked up. Expecting him to melt my heart, too, I reached for him, and he buried his face in my shoulder. "Mom," he said, "Do you have our presents?"

Yep. Welcome home.

Fair(e)

2007-05-13T12:31:00.000-05:00

I'm leaving for a week-long business trip today, so John and I took the kids to my mom's after schlepping Bryce to a friend's birthday party on Friday night, and had a late dinner date. This week's activity level made it feel like four weeks rolled into one, and while I shoveled down chips and margaritas, I vented about work and the insanity therein. At one point I used the phrase, "not fair" and John pointed out that the job I've (for the most part) loved and enjoyed for the past year has become a source of frustration and the target of my claims of injustice coincidentally ever since the incident of the incompetent doctor and some ensuing news that I do indeed have a (most likely benign) parotid tumor that does indeed have to be surgically removed regardless of whether or not it's benign. "And it's not fair that you have to have major surgery for this walnut-sized tumor in your neck, and it's not fair that there's a 20% chance it's malignant, and it's not fair that you have no choice in how to treat or get rid of it, and it's not fair that your life will have to be put on hold while you deal with it. It's really not fair."

"No," I said, "I don't think about the tumor as something 'fair' or 'not fair' - or at least not consciously." And then I sat there like a kid figuring out algebra after months of staring at equations. "Wow," I was really intrigued by this now, "I didn't even really realize I was using the 'it's not fair' phrase about anything while I've been rambling about work. I usually hate that mentality, and I definitely wouldn't outwardly use that phrase about a tumor...because when - or for whom - would a tumor or a major surgery be 'fair'?"

I'd rather call work unfair - there are people involved, and predictable sets of expectations, and someone specific I can blame for my frustration. That's healthy, right? I think I'll go with that. After all, I'm closer to my tumor than I am to any of my co-workers anyway.

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I went with my parents to take the kids to a "Renaissance Faire" yesterday. It was hot, and the kids were constantly whining about seeing the cave again and buying a sword and wanting ice cream or their legs being tired. We walked into the maze and Quinn ducked into a small opening and disappeared, then refused to answer when we called for him and subsequently panicked. I scolded him and ruined the fun by yelling every time he walked more than two steps ahead of me after that. Another precocious and freakishly maze-talented kid showed us the way out of the maze but only after telling the kids he'd show them a short cut and the "tall adults" could just meet them at the exit, followed by more screams of "NOOOO" from me. On the way out, my parents agreed to buy the kids swords and Bryce naturally went for the one as tall as his own body, and then threw a fit when my mom tried to convince him to get the smaller one. The sword salesman intervened and showed the kids the "test" for proper sword size (tip of sword under arm, arm stretched out, grab the handle - if you can't reach the handle, the sword is too long), then gave them a speech about brotherhood: "You train with your brother, you practice with your brother, but you do not SLAY your brother. If your brother were slain, there would be no one to protect you in battle." The kids were mesmerized, and now if you ask them, "what do we do with our brothers?" they'll say, "Train and practice, but we don't SLAY our brother, because we need him there to protect us in battle." Utilitarianism: the new brotherly love.

It is what it is.

2007-05-08T14:04:00.000-05:00

In the car the other day, the kids were taunting each other with a baseball cap in the only way kids who are strapped into five-point harnesses can, reaching out across the chasm of the back seat and waving the item of the moment their brother's face, then yanking it back just before the other one can grab hold in triumph and elicit screams of agony. Because Quinn is younger and smaller, Bryce continues to assume that he'll always have the physical advantage, and this assumption is causing much strife. In this particular instance, Quinn's formerly slower, less sophisticated reflexes seemed suddenly cat-like when he reached out and clutched the baseball cap before Bryce managed to pull it back to safety. John and I have been working on our reactions to the kids' fights and screams, and so rather than impatiently sigh and slap my knee in frustration about Bryce's wailing over his loss of the baseball cap, I just said calmly, "well, I guess next time you won't wave your things in front of Quinn's face." Against all odds, Bryce quieted down and about 30 seconds later John and I heard a deep, gleeful "ahaHA!" from the back seat: "Mom, YES! I got it back! I nabbed it like a duck nabs popcorn!"

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There are countless of these stories to tell, but I haven't been telling them here much lately. It's true that I'm busier than I can ever remember being, but I think that has become an excuse or some kind of cover-up for something that might be writer's block or a desire to pull back into myself. There are funny and frustrating and annoying things going on with the little kids as always, but there are also dangerous, life-changing, depressing, frightening, and mind-numbing things going on with John's older kids right now. I could write about them, I might write about them, and when I come here I feel compelled to write about them because in the past that written expression has felt like some sort of self therapy or some other new-agey type of benefit, but I deal with all of it every waking moment as it is, and the thought of re-hashing it here, therapeutic as that re-hashing may be, basically and frankly turns my stomach. As a result, I go days or weeks without writing anything at all, then throwing something brainless up about the new house or my crazy kids.

My job has become more and more challenging over the past several months, and one of the phrases that gets batted around with too much ease and non-chalance is "it is what it is." No matter how ridiculously inefficient something is, no matter who is or isn't being held accountable, no matter how much re-work and wasted time is being disussed, "it is what it is." Ho hum, we're just here to do a job. We rolled the rock up the hill and it tumbled back down. It is what it is! Let's roll it back up like we've done every day for the past year. Look at our peaceful, Zen-like attitude. It is what it is! I railed against this for a long time, calling people out and stating the obvious, that the only reason this is our stance is because we have absolutely no control over what we're doing. We just say this phrase over and over like we're some deep, patient, collective wise being. After a long enough period of time went by, though, the phrase wormed its way into my consciousness and it seems to have found a permanent home on the tip of my tongue. At first I only used it sarcastically, but then I started to see its value for areas of life besides work. Rather than picturing myself with blank eyes and a sheepish shrug to the world every time I uttered the phrase, I started recognizing the truth behind it, as simplistic as it may be.

Sometimes there is just nothing to say, nothing to write, nothing to solicit feedback on. I experience the madness and the chaos and I might not want to share it or even think about it beyond the minutes, hours, or days of the actual events themselves. And when I do, those words exist as I completed them, but I may not intend to re-visit the subject(s) beyond the substance or time of their original formation. My brother recently posted to his readers begging his "real life" friends and family not to re-visit blog posts with him in conversation. I think this is because he wants the posts to exist as they are; there is no intent on his part to post a story or random set of thoughts as a conversation starter at the bar. There is obviously a balance between cognizant outward expression and the journal-like nature of a personal blog, but for the most part, I think writers have an expectation that their "publications" (whatever the nature) are complete works. Comments may be posted and may exist as readers' own thoughts or responses if they feel they need to offer them, but the writer won't necessarily feel compelled to reply or converse because to the writer, the piece exists just as it was intended to; it is what it is.

I may avoid writing about certain topics or experiences because I don't want to end up in a conversation about it with a friend or family member who has read it and wants to ask me for details. It shouldn't really be that way. What is here is not my communication with people who know me "in real life." It's just one aspect of my existence and one small, inconsistent space where I express myself. There may be exaggerations here solely for story-telling purposes, there may be stories here that I'm not really ready to delve into details over. What's here should, for the most part, just be taken for what it is, and nothing more. Having said all that, I have no idea if this means I'll start posting more or if I'll continue to whine about how busy I am and how I never have time to write. Hey, it is what it is!

Housewarming

2007-05-05T14:48:00.000-05:00

Finally, pictures of the house. I've gone back and forth about this because I have a complex about bragging, or having people assume that I'm bragging. I try to squelch this instinct because 1.) I claim not to care what people think and 2.) I rarely assume someone is "bragging" when they're telling me something good about their life, and also 3.) I talk so much about the challenges and the "bad" parts, I hope people know that if they're jealous and coveting of one part of my life, they'd better be prepared to deal with all of it - and I've laid the majority of it out here (to recap: pathologically lying stepson, internally unmotivated stepdaughter, two screaming, control-hungry pre-schoolers, spouse with self-run business and conflicting hours, in-law issues to the hilt), so buyer beware. On to the tour...

The front yard and driveway, where our kids ride, I mean fall off of, their bikes. Also known as the place where our neighbors learn the source of all that recent shrieking in the neighborhood.

Come on in. Our kids are the rulers around here, but they like visitors.

Oh come on - you just got here. You're not escaping yet. Be very careful as you turn around. This is the hallway that John coated in Pledge.

The Pottery Barn couch (bought specifically for this room after we had the contract on the house) makes everything all better. You can sit anywhere but the corner. That's my spot. I fall asleep there most nights before John comes in and finds me drooling in yet another failed attempt to watch a week's worth of The Colbert Report.

Downstairs half bath - something we never had at the other house.

The kitchen. John and I hear angels sing every time we walk in here. You could make gourmet meals here every night, if you weren't us. We just like the fact that I can toast an English muffin and fry an egg while John simultaneously makes the kids' lunches without either of us ever having to sigh with impatience about the other one being in our way (no dysfunction around here!). Who knew that was possible?

Sigh. Oh, kitchen. How I love thee.

Mudroom. The built-in lockers and shoe cubbies pretty much sealed the deal for us. If you knew of the shoe and backpack carnage at our old house, you'd understand.

John's office. What? You think it's strange that a photographer's office doesn't have any photographs? Hey, some people have been busy sliding around on their new wood floors. Give a guy a break.

DETAIL SHOTS

Pledge

2007-05-02T20:38:00.000-05:00

I was never part of the Greek system in college, but I've heard stories about the hazing rituals, and I'm starting to feel like a new initiate of Phi Beta Heart Attack. On the one hand, I am humbled and flush with the perceived welcome into the new world I've stumbled upon. On the other hand, I'm looking half-suspiciously, half-eagerly over my shoulder every few seconds and wondering what forced feat comes next, what unimaginable challenge, what unexpected combination of heart palpitations.

Some of it is work-related, some is new house-related, some is high-maintenance kid-related, some is blended family-related, some of it is possible-upcoming-major-surgery-related, some of it is unspecified, but mostly right now my heart is pounding and my muscles are aching because when I ran down the stairs in my bare feet in the bedtime search for Quinn's blanket, my smooth, dry heels made contact with the wood floors and subsquently flipped out from under me. I spent a suspended few seconds in the air looking like a ridiculous cartoon character (and letting out an involuntary cartoon-like squeal in the process) before I landed with a sadly audience-less yet dramatic thud on my left hip. By the time John made it downstairs and asked innocently if I was okay, I was stomping around with irritation. "No I'm not okay! I stepped down and slid all over the place. WHAT is on these floors?!" He stared at me as I watched the wheels in his head visibly turn, then the muscles in his face start to shake with the effort to stay straight.

"Uh..."

"John.. what?"

"Pledge. What's on the floors is Pledge."

"That's for FURNITURE!"

"Well, wood surfaces. Especially when you want to slide. Which the kids did. This afternoon."

"Pledge!!! You coated the floors in Pledge?"

Barely keeping the tears of laughter from streaming down his beet-red face as the kids triumphantly "ice skated" past me in their pajamas, he sputtered out a tentative "sorry? I'm sorry! I'm really sor--ahahahahaa!"

Well. At least the rest of Phi Beta Heart Attack is enjoying my hazing.

Chasing the white dress

2007-04-27T15:24:00.000-05:00

Since I primarily shoot weddings, I hear a good number of horror stories about bridezillas. I've been lucky. I really can't remember a single wedding where the bride freaked out - at least on me. In fact, almost all of my clients are gracious and fun, and allow me to work without interference to capture their day. Click the picture to see the highlites from my most recently completed wedding.

This is Ridiculous

2007-04-25T22:30:00.000-05:00

It makes no sense and yet it's perfectly logical that the fullest time in my conscious memory is also the least recorded one. There is so much going on, I don't even know where to start. I think about starting, I try to start, but then I look up and see Stephen Colbert on the TV screen and decide multi-tasking doesn't so much work for me anymore. I'd rather listen to someone else mock tragedy and pretend there's no choice, hahaha, ho hum let's just accept the way things are because people and their choices are stupid and harmful, also, where's the wine, anyway?

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I keep telling John to take pictures of the new house, but he always sighs and rubs his forehead and takes his glasses off before saying cheerfully, pretending sighing and forehead rubbing don't exist, "Okay, I'll do it this week!" Everything is this week, people. Let's talk about credit card debt and the budget. This week! Let's figure out the enrollment process for the kids' new schools next year. This week, totally! Let's get groceries so we can at least pretend that the "nutrition" we offer our kids consists of more than organic Tostitos. Definitely, definitely by the end of this week. I mean, what gives? Just because I'm brain-fried when I get home every night and just because the kids are abnormally high-maintenance and just because John is a month behind on his precious income-providing "photo shoots," he can't seem to make the time to document the recent move. I'm blaming him for my lack of documentation. I wanted to post when I had some photographic justification for the stultifying slow-down around here. What have we been DOING, anyway?

It's sad, really - after years of no cable TV, I caved to the pressure. The kids have a TV in the upstairs gameroom. All my good intentions have gone out the window in favor of the pleasant surprise I got when I sacrificed my expectation for pop culture resistance for the ecstatic 30 minutes of peace I'm awarded while the kids' eyes glaze over to the din of SpongeBob. This extra downstairs peace and quiet is typically filled with a healthy half hour of perusing the latest DVR recording list. I don't only watch Comedy Central - I've actually spent untold hours in front of the HD beauty of the Discovery Channel's Planet Earth series and National Geographic's Dog Whisperer (Cesar, go to my mom's house and fix Truman. Please.).

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When I'm not getting my money's worth from the TV, I'm at work practicing my deep breathing and dealing with a healthy mix of People I Love Working With and People I Could Do Without. The first category consists primarily of good communicators; the second category consists primarily of corporate alpha males. My body is thanking me for the big swings in reactivity by throwing me curve balls like temporary lopsided hairline recession and spot acne. We won't talk about the extra several layers of jiggle resulting from the new home routines and the lack of trips to the gym.

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Life has changed dramatically since the move. Last Friday night we took the kids for a walk through the neighborhood and met three families. We talked to them for an hour while our kids caused minimal damage to their kids' toys. Neither of us felt pressured to run away screaming and commit ourselves after five minutes of conversing with other human beings. We ran into a co-worker who lives in the neighborhood and toured her house; the kids played peacefully and entertained her nine-month-old daughter while we had a conversation. A conversation! This neighborhood holds monthly game nights and something compelled me to go to the women's Bunco Night last night. I. Played. Bunco. When I first walked into the hostess' house, I felt that old familiar discomfort and self-defense mechanism perfected in Junior High, but even though I walked in feeling like I'd just entered the set of Desperate Housewives, I walked out feeling simultaneously relaxed and surprised at the acceptance I'd seen extended to everyone who showed up.

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Several years ago I noticed a tiny hard cartilege-like movable bump on the back of my jaw. I thought it was interesting, but never mentioned it. Several months ago I realized since it was now the size of a black-eyed pea and not the size of a pinhead, and I might want to do some research. I did my research and found a slew of information, but deduced that most likely what I had was a cyst on my parotid gland. Luckily 80% of these are benign, but are hard to evaluate without removal, which is not uncommon but risky due to the proximity of the facial nerve to the parotid gland. I went to my doctor after my self diagnosis, she ordered a CT scan to get a better look at my sinuses due to chronic allergies and sinus infections and with the side result of getting a better look at this odd lump under my ear on my jaw. When her office called to tell me the results, the nurse said something non-chalantly like "It's just some swollen lymph nodes" to which I said, "no it's not. I know what a swollen lymph node feels like, I know I HAVE swollen lymph nodes, I didn't need a CT scan to tell me I had them. What's the lump on my jaw under my ear?" After talking to two robot-like nurses who refused to have the doctor call me back, I found the radiologist who wrote the report and talked to him, and furiously started taking notes when he said "I remember this one. I know I put a differential in there about something on your parotid gland." Since I couldn't get my general physician to call back, I made an appointment and went in today. "What's going on?" she said defensively when she walked in. I walked through the history: "I came in two weeks ago for this lump, you ordered a CT scan, when I got the results from your office, they didn't make sense and I pushed for an answer and didn't get one, and finally called the radiologist, which is how I learned that in fact there is a cyst on my parotid gland, which is EXACTLY WHAT TOLD YOU I THOUGHT HAD WHEN I CAME HERE THE FIRST TIME. How did this happen?" She fumbled around, obviously trying to decide what her stance should be. First she played dumb:

"What do you want me to do?"

"Acknowledge what I'm saying. Why didn't someone tell me this when I specifically asked?"

"I don't know."

"Okay. ???"

"I didn't think the parotid cyst was what was going on with you."

"Well if you know it's not a lymph node since you established that verbally with me when I was here the first time two weeks ago, and you're saying you don't think it's a cyst, then what do you THINK it is?"

"I don't know. I'm not an ENT. That's why I offered to refer you to an ENT."

"Yeah, the nurse said you'd 'be glad to refer me to an ENT if I wanted - how do I know? You're the doctor - I expect you to put two and two together. You examined me and know it's not a lymph node. The report explicitly states the possibility of a parotid cyst. Seems like the next step would be determining where to send me or what to do about that possibility. RIGHT?"

"What do you want me to do?"

"I want you to explain why I didn't get this answer when I asked for it."

"I don't know. What do you want me to do? Do you want to go to an ENT?"

"I want you to acknowledge what I'm saying."

"I'm listening to what you're saying. A 'cyst' isn't necessarily pathological."

"Great! Fine! Why not TELL ME THAT when I ask over the phone then? Why not HAVE YOUR NURSES tell me that when I'm specifically questioning them about this very thing? Your message to them and to me was that 'there was nothing there' which is blatantly false, and I now know that since I've talked to the radiologist."

"What do you want me to do?"

"Kill me now."

"I'm sorry if you feel you've lost confidence in me. If you want to get a new doctor, let me know."

"Great apology. Thanks."

Medical community, you've been blacklisted.

Transition

2007-04-14T17:53:00.000-05:00

Bryce
The Under Six crowd has been pushing the limits like nobody's business around here. We thought, par for the course, that Bryce had been saving his best tricks for us, but his teacher stopped John after school one day and literally said, "what's up with Bryce's attitude?" John blinked twice, distractedly mumbled something like "I have no idea what you're talking about, Bryce is the model citizen, I am insulted," and then ran away.

Bryce's spunky new "I refuse to acknowledge my confusion over this transition and will instead scream my every demand at you" attitude is mostly a painful high-maintenance addition to his already high-maintenance self, but it's made for some entertaining moments, too. At dinner the other night he crunched heartily into a tortilla chip and then gagged dramatically and loudly slurped down the nearest glass of water. Heaving in and out as if his airways had almost collapsed, he announced for everyone's clarity on the situation, "that chip stuck into my throat the way a sword would stick into the side of a mountain!"

Quinn
The bedtime madness has drastically decreased since the kids have had separate bedrooms in the new house, but that is only because Bryce miraculously stays in his bed and goes to sleep. Quinn, on the other hand, is bound and determined to re-live the glory days of puppet master night time control. He gives up more quickly and easily than he did before, because Bryce sleepily tells him to leave his room every time Quinn sneaks in there to organize a rally, but he's up later than Bryce in his rebellion.

The first few nights in the new house, Quinn woke up around midnight with what I can only assume, based on my experience with him and this condition as a baby, was reflux. John and I came up with all sorts of theories about the reflux, and methods for dealing with the reflux, but basically we walked around like idiots with big question marks over our heads until a friend of mine asked if we thought the reflux return might have anything to do with the move. When she asked that, I had a flashback to one of the "reflux" nights when I walked into Quinn's room and he was (while sleeping) sitting up in his bed, wringing his hands, and crying, "I don't want this. Take it away!" Earlier that night at bedtime he'd asked to have his old baby furniture back. Um, yeah, I think the reflux could possibly be stress-related. Maybe, just maybe the changes of losing his pacifier, going to underwear at night, moving out of his toddler bed, moving into a big bed, and moving out of the only house he's known since birth (all in the past six months) is taking a toll on this kid. Most of the time the toll is paid with screams and tantrums on the stairs when I unreasonably request that he come downstairs and ask humanely for help returning his sock from inside-out position rather than screeching and stomping his feet - but occasionally it's paid with night time reflux.

The House
Despite the (expected) challenges, we can't complain about this place. It's huge. John thinks it's enchanted, actually. The other morning while I was in the bathroom getting ready for work, he walked in to get something out of the closet and we rejoiced in the fact that we could both be in the bathroom simultaneously without bumping into each other, or having to wait in line for access to a sink or drawer. "And the food cooks better here!" he said jovially. I looked at him skeptically, but I knew exactly what he was talking about, because I'd noticed it too. He continued, "the clothes dry faster, too! I mean, the way things are going, pretty soon we'll start getting younger and thinner!"

Maybe. But if the enchantment ends with kids incapable of screaming or acting out their deep-seated displeasure with life changes, that would be enough for me.

Busiest Week Ever

2007-04-07T21:32:00.000-05:00

We haven't dropped off the face of the earth, but I don't know how capable I am of giving an adequate update, either. The main points are these: 1.) Monday, we closed on the purchase of our new house. 2.) Tuesday, the movers a.) couldn't fit everything onto their truck and b.) requested custom-made Subway sandwiches for lunch and c.) got exactly what they asked for due to my ulterior and insane motive of being completely moved in and settled by my return to work next Monday and the resulting necessity that the movers not leave the vicinity of the truck(s) or our house. 3.) Also Tuesday, my mother-in-law asked me as she walked through our newly built bigger house if it "felt like getting out of prison" to be here, and since she was agreeing to sacrifice her sanity and watch our kids all day while we moved in and unpacked, I just let the remark go and assumed outwardly that she meant only to compliment our new house, not insult our old one, the one we'd lived in for eight years and the one we'd completely transformed since moving in. 4.) Wednesday, after spending the previous day and night unpacking and prepping the kids' rooms, I temporarily returned to work for mandatory training (weee!). John stayed home and let the cable company in - something that should have taken an hour or two, but actually sent him into a time warp, or a fourth (fifth?) dimension from where he did not return until well after I arrived home from work to find our new house entangled in countless multi-size and multi-color wires. 5.) Thursday, we closed on the sale of our old house, then breathed a collective sigh of relief that our real estate experience was ending fairly painlessly. We're still in legitimate shock over that one, actually. 6.) Friday, as the pile of empty boxes grew and our attempts at personal hygiene and patience sorely diminished, the kids' constant demands for "commercials" (their term for cartoons) resulting from the newly "installed" cable (and by installed, I mean "punched into our walls and then knotted into oblivion on a visible and reachable shelf in Quinn's closet") pushed us into some realm of dysfunction typically occupied by Jerry Springer guests. The kids ended up outside riding bikes on the back patio, screaming at one another and then being screamed at by us to - what? - stop screaming, obviously.

There is more to say (as always), but my eyelids feel like thick, heavy sandpaper, and I think I now understand why they say sleep is some sort of requirement or serious recommendation for good health, or survival, or whatever.

Gettin' Jiggy

2007-03-30T07:54:00.000-05:00

A couple of Sunday mornings ago, Kristen and I were sitting at the dining room table with the laptop and morning paper and we asked Bryce to go upstairs and get dressed. He soon appeared at the bottom of the stairs in his underwear and socks, Noir in hand, and announced he was going outside to dance. Quinn quickly realized the opportunity at hand, stripped out of his pajamas, and followed Bryce outside.

From the dining room we saw them walk by the front window and I grabbed my camera. The following will provide a small sliver of proof of what we deal with every. single. day.

Click the picture to begin the slideshow.

Perfect Timing

2007-03-28T21:39:00.000-05:00

You know what we've been needing? Some more reasons to make appointments and accept phone calls and assess our financial situation. John is always trying to go above and beyond accommodating our needs, and so he went out and broad-sided an old lady's car today. Ho hum, he thought, driving along, with our four-year-old no doubt shouting demands for "lack-a-loni cheese" in the back seat, I think I'll ram my small vehicle into the side of this Buick since the 65-year-old driver conveniently decided to pull out in front of 40-mph traffic and provide the PERFECT solution to our boredom and thumb-twiddling of late. Presto Change-O! Now, instead of just sitting around (while magical servant elves pack our belongings and answer the dozens of suddenly urgent phone calls from mortgage brokers and title companies and builder reps who looked at the calendar three days ago and realized, yes, this deal is actually going through next week and we should probably, ya know, process it), we'll have something productive to do! Insurance adjusters to schedule appointments with (APPOINTMENTS! YES! We hardly have ANY appointments coming up in the next 10 days, because the magical elves are going to tend to whatever pesky scheduling needs this whole house-buying thing requires - something about "closing dates" three days apart with a moving van and furniture delivery in between... who cares? I mean, the elves are dealing with it!); rental cars to arrange; claims to submit; body shops to pick; forms to fill out (FORMS! YES! The elves have been hogging all the forms lately - apparently there are a lot during home buying and selling!).

After John slammed on his brakes and heard the deafening crunch of metal on impact, he looked in the rear view mirror at Quinn and asked if he was okay. Quinn wasn't crying and hadn't spoken or screamed during the ordeal, and when John spoke, he said only, "That scared me." John got him out of the carseat and made sure he wasn't hurt, then spoke to the Buick lady, who was fine, but according to John, had ice in her veins. Strangers were running up to John after seeing the carseat in the back seat and watching Quinn's small blonde pre-school sized head climbing out of the back seat while they waited for the police to arrive: "Is he okay? Is your son alright? Should we call an ambulance?" He was fine, but the Buick lady never bothered to ask. John's impact into her car actually pushed it into another, and that driver came over to check on Quinn, too. But not Buick lady. She barely spoke at all. Once the police arrived, she got a ticket. No one else did. Waaa.

Tonight at bedtime in a last-ditch effort to eliminate the chaos, we decided to let the kids fall asleep separately. As we waited for Quinn to exhaust himself and his attempts to lure me back to his room hundreds of times, I noticed myself feeling less annoyed than usual every time I'd hit the doorway and hear "I need to tell you something, though!" Once after several "last" urgent comments, I tried to ignore him and walk out without answering, but then he started to cry. I came back into his room and he asked when Bryce was coming to bed. I explained it calmly for the fifth time, because I realized that sitting on my four-year-old's bed at home and wishing he would go to sleep already was an acceptable alternative to sitting on my four-year-old's bed at the hospital and wishing for the opposite while plotting my revenge against the Buick lady.

Luckily the new house has lots of extra shelves for all the wine.

2007-03-27T20:59:00.000-05:00

Something is wrong with our kids. No, seriously. We follow all the damned parenting rules, we constantly communicate, establish boundaries, take deep breaths, pick our battles, seek out "learning moments," watch SuperNanny, blah dee FREAKIN' blah. It doesn't matter, though. Not really. Because the little puppet masters thrive on the nervous breakdowns they cause every night at bedtime. The screaming, the crying, the laughing, the kicking, the demands, the pleas, the stomping, the guilt trips, the claims of severe dehydration and severed limbs - it's never the same combination, the same order, or the same intensity, and so it effectively keeps us scrambling and sandwiching grumbled "your turn"s between teeth-clenched profanities as we walk by each other in the dark, usually tripping over a god-forsaken piece of plastic crap along the way.

"Have you...tried ignoring it?" our well-meaning family members ask. I know this is always the first thing that comes to mind for everyone - what are they not doing that I might helpfully suggest? I admit that when I hear other parents wailing and gnashing their teeth over the latest behavioral problem, I too make tactful suggestions. So let's just get this out of the way right now: YES, WE HAVE TRIED IT. Whatever the suggestion is, we've tried it. Ignoring, cajoling, negotiating, playing along, yelling, punishing, threatening punishment, pleading, being consistent, using the element of surprise, bribing, setting expectations early in the evening, small animal sacrifice, selling our souls to the devil, contacting the FBI, running away shrieking and waving our hands in the air - nothing has worked.

In a week, we'll be moving in to a house where the kids will be in separate rooms at night. On the one hand, they'll no longer be able to feed off of each other's frantic night time energy without getting out of bed, walking across a room, opening a door, and walking into another room. On the other hand, for the puppet masters, this is nothing. I'll tell you what we need: some nice person to come reverse the locks on their new bedroom doors. Heh. Heh heh heh. "Oh, what's wrong kids? Can't make eye contact with your evil puppet master partner? What ever will you do? Here's a thought: GO. TO. SLEEP."

This Week Happens, Sleep Eludes Me

2007-03-17T13:02:00.000-05:00

Quinn Turns Four, Three is Banished
We have officially bid a final farewell to the threes, which is a nice way of saying we flipped Three the bird and gave a hearty, Don't let the door hit you on the way out! Three left behind some of its belongings (whining, writhing on the floor, public humiliation), but we're shipping those to Three some time in the next few days. I'm not too worried about it. Four is here now, and we're much more used to Four's quirks, since they've been around since Bryce first introduced us to his version of Two.

I Hold My Tongue, Victory is Mine
We celebrated Quinn's birthday with the infamous in-laws. Since we're in the process of packing to move, we told everyone to meet us at Quinn's favorite restaurant. Half an hour after the agreed-upon time, when our kids and their gang leader cousin (who had spent the day teaching Bryce all about how two older kids can have a great time destroying a younger kid's confidence, even (hell, especially) on his birthday - this family rocks!) were wailing about hunger pangs and throwing cutlery across the dining area, they finally showed up. My mother-in-law walked up to me in the middle of my attempt to convince Quinn that this restaurant really does have food and he really couldn't spend the next hour running circles around the table, grabbed my shoulder and said in a creepy, serious voice, "Are you going to keep me for your mother-in-law?" The tone of voice didn't match the sarcastic words, and I was distracted by the 35-pound child hanging from the right half of my body, not to mention the din of Chili's dinner hour as well as the screaming thought, YOU MEAN I HAVE A CHOICE? THEN HELL NO!, so I just looked at her while I tried to formulate an acceptable answer. She didn't like that, so she repeated her question, this time more seriously than before. Now I was getting confused, but mostly I felt like this was a prime example of how she puts people on the defensive every time she opens her mouth. What answer would possibly be okay? If we were great buddies who joked around with each other, I could answer any way I wanted to with no repercussions. In this case, if I said "no" to meet her sarcasm and make a joke of it, she'd be offended and awkward. If I said "yes" it would sound like I was taking her question too seriously, and she'd be offended and awkward! There is no correct answer - it's a constant power play with her. I went through this thought process while she stood there and waited for an answer to her stupid question, and I decided to say nothing. Finally her eyes darted away in frustration and she sputtered, "it's a joke! I'm late again." and went to her seat. "Oh!" I said. "I hadn't even noticed."

My Employer is Generous, I Lose Concept of Free Time
This is the time of year when everyone in my company gets a salary increase and an annual bonus. Because of a good year for the company and the fact that I think I was hired near the low end of the salary range for my position, I had two well-timed financial surprises this year, hence my general laid back attitude about buying the new house and taking on the expenses of moving. Not coincidentally, immediately after recovering from the shock of working for people who don't mind when I use my brain, who actually want to compensate me for such, I suddenly found myself buried in work. I'm no longer the "new" person in the group; I'm expected to train new people (which seems ludicrous to me since half the time I feel like I have no idea what I'm doing). This means if someone walks in with a question when I'm simultaneously participating in a conference call, typing up a report for a different project, and scheduling my next four consecutive days of meetings, I have to find a way to drop it all and hold a mini-training session. I'd much rather be buried in work than be bored at work, but I think this is the first time in my life that I've actually understood what that means. John used to call me just to say "hi," but now if he calls, he knows I'm expecting some specific information about something house-related - otherwise, he'll ask how I'm doing or somehow try casually to converse, and be greeted only with the sound of my rapidly firing keyboard. It's no real skin off his back, though. He has plenty to keep him busy these days: he is single-handedly packing our entire house while I spend my days and evenings rushing around like I'm someone important, when in reality I now know they pay people like me to do all the stuff they just don't want to do.

I Fight Law of Nature, Law Wins
Between the ice in January, the cold and my birthday in February, and the recent house buying and selling activities, my trips to the gym have become less and less frequent. This week I decided I was just making excuses, and sleepless nights and harbinger-of-illness sore throat be damned, I was going to get back on a decent workout schedule so as to avoid the summer time crying sessions before work every morning when my clothes mock me and dare me to try them on so they can stretch in disgusting cruelty. I happened to arrive at the gym just as a Strength Training class was starting. "I can do this!" I thought to my stupid self. "I worked with a trainer who thought I was in boot camp for four months - if I can get through that, I can handle a measly little women's Strength class." This would have actually been true - two months ago, when I was still strong and energetic after three solid months of almost daily workouts. In the past two months, though, I've barely made it to the gym three times a week, and then all I've done is moderate cardio on the treadmill - most of my muscle is gone, or at least covered in a lot more flab. The class started with squats, and I was a little concerned because of my knee, but to my pleasant surprise, my knee was fine - it was my quads that were the problem, shaking and quivering after two sets. Luckily the instructor moved on to lunges. And then shoulder presses. And then bench presses. And then push ups. And then crunches. And then some insane request that we balance with our back on a squishy half-ball with our heads and feet perfectly straight out, off the ground. I got through the class and was concerned at how much strength I'd lost in the past several weeks, but glad that I'd at least been able to do everything without keeling over. I was a little concerned when, 20 minutes later, I lifted the hair dryer to dry my hair and noticed a strange sensation in my arms, but the real problem came the next morning, when I couldn't get out of bed. I forced myself up and pretended my legs weren't shooting flames of pain through my entire body, but all day everyone at work that passed me on a way to a meeting looked at me with a pained expression and said, "what's wrong?" It might have been the limping, or the way I had to spend six awkwardly positioned minutes every time I wanted to sit down in a chair.

Step Right Up

2007-03-11T08:36:00.000-05:00

It appears that we're moving in three weeks, because apparently in some fit of insanity we bought a new house, stuck a sign in our yard, and agreed to sell this place all within the span of the past month. I keep thinking it's entirely possible that I'm lying in a coma in a hospital bed somewhere and all of this is just a series of misfiring synapses, because too many things are suspiciously, happily falling into place every time I turn around. The only way things could improve at this point is if I were to come home from work in two and a half weeks to find all of our belongings already packed and organized for the movers. In this fantasy, the kids would have "off" buttons and would be stored surfboard-like on the bike rack of the car.

In all seriousness, I'm not sure what we're going to do with the kids during the move. They're not "sit over there and wait" types of people. Earlier this week we took them into a furniture store for 30 minutes while we signed away what was left of our life after the new mortgage, and when we left the store, as the kids were screaming something akin to "Geronimo!" and flailing from one concrete decorative retaining wall structure to the next, John said, with no sarcasm whatsoever, "that went well." "Yeah," I said, "except for when Quinn used the scissors on the display desk to cut the display notepad to shreds. And except for when Bryce almost knocked over everything in the lamp showroom because he was pretending the recliner was a rocket ship. Mmm-hmm, it went really well."

Our standards have lowered to such a degree that mild humiliation during a public outing seems perfectly acceptable. Anything that doesn't end in our family being banned from the location feels like a huge accomplishment. Really, anything that ends with us having accomplished even half of what we set out to accomplish falls under the category of success. While I've been trying to type this, I've had Bryce in a chair next to me repeatedly singing at the top of his lungs the latest songs he's learned at school, and Quinn has been - literally -hanging from my neck demanding peanut butter on a spoon. They don't want to play with toys or watch TV or go outside like everybody led me to believe kids would do. They stay in whatever room I happen to be in, waiting for me to provide some form of entertainment like I'm David Blaine or Bozo. Washing dishes or checking e-mail doesn't count as entertainment, in case you were wondering.

Lately I've been thinking I never have time to write because I'm swamped at work, and we're so busy preparing for a big move and tending to the finances and logistics of buying a house. This morning I've finally realized it has less to do with all that and more to do with the fact that my kids have turned me into their personal circus.

I'm an enigma.

2007-03-07T21:33:00.000-06:00

A few weeks ago, standing in my mom's kitchen, I listened to a long-time friend of hers tell a story about 8th grade Kristen:

--Ring ring.

--This is Patty.

--Mom! We're out of sandwich bags. SIGH. What am I supposed to do without sandwich bags?

--You're calling me at work for this?

--SANDWICH! BAGS! There are none! I'm making my lunch. And there are NO. SANDWICH. BAGS.

--Have you checked all the kitchen drawers?

--THEREARENOSANDWICHBAGS!

--I'm at work, you know.

--AAAAAAAAAAA!!!

--Sigh. Is there any Saran Wrap, Kristen?

--What? Saran Wrap?! Why would I need Saran Wrap? I'm talking about SANDWICH BAGS here!

--Use Saran Wrap to wrap up your sandwich, then put it into your lunch bag.

--OHMYGOD!

--What now?

--THERE. IS! NO. SARAN WRAP EITHER!

--Good lord. What about wax paper?

--I don't even know what wax paper looks like, but I don't think there's any here. And besides, how would I get it to fasten around the sandwich?!

--Okay, here's what you're going to do: Fold the sandwich into a paper towel and write "sandwich bags" on a grocery list. I have to get to work. Goodbye.

--PAPER TOWELS ARE UNACCEPTABLE. THIS IS RIDICULOUS.

--Click.

At the end of her story, my mom's friend laughed and laughed, then said, "boy, you've really come a long way, Kristen!"

I thought about it, looked at her, and said, "actually, no I haven't. I'd pretty much freak out if we ran out of sandwich bags today, only John would be the one dealing with it."

That's when my mom choked on her hors d'oeuvres and slapped the kitchen counters in all her comedic glory: "That's EXACTLY what I just told her before you got here!"

Buying a new house out of the blue? Piece of cake. Being thrown into a new job as the youngest and least experienced in the group and having my every move scrutinized for a year? No problem. Risking financial hardship by betting on real estate luck? Ha. Carrying out the most difficult and often least rewarding parenting philosophies? I scoff in the face of life-altering decisions.

But by God, when I open the sandwich bag drawer and find them missing, there BETTER be someone around with a good solution for me or MY HEAD WILL EXPLODE.

Trust In Me: A Video Essay by Jonathan

2007-03-03T07:32:00.000-06:00

My brother is at it again. (Despite Jonathan's affiliation with Safety Patrol, this is not a video I would watch with kids. Although most of the gruesome images pass by in less than a second, you'll definitely remember seeing them.) Regardless of your political stance, this is something to be appreciated at a bare minimum for its sheer ironic value.

A Balanced Account

2007-03-01T21:36:00.000-06:00

One night last week, John and I both ended up in the living room with the kids in no particular hurry to feed or bathe them, with no ringing phones or unfolded laundry or other obligation to tend to. We found ourselves the two-person audience for a spontaneous talent show consisting mainly of a twist on charades wherein one audience member provides the charade subject to the perfomer, and the other audience member proceeds to guess what it is. With Bryce, this setup was no problem. John would whisper something in his ear and he would climb onto the coffee table stage and act out something physically obvious, like typing on a computer or slithering like a snake. I would take a guess, and he would squeal with shock and glee at my unmatched charade-interpretation abilities. When it was Quinn's turn, John would whisper in his ear, he would climb onto the table tentatively, place both hands straight in front of himself, start to lift his feet dramatically and say, oblivious to our sign language reminders to keep it to himself, "I'm going shopping with my cart!" Bryce would immediately keel over with contagious laughter, causing Quinn to think he'd accomplished his mission. Soon all of us would be gasping for breath and wiping away the tears of hilarity. After three or four of these instances, Bryce exclaimed with the most innocent and genuine tone I could ever imagine, "it makes me so happy when we're all together like this. My heart feels so big."

I tell this story because I need to remember it tonight. Although my day started with a phone call from Bryce while I drove to work, a phone call that ended with him saying, "I think now I can be happy," it ended with a bad combination of early spring colds, work exhaustion, five-year-old limit-pushing, and the unexplainable, indescribable intensity I've only ever witnessed in Bryce. The last words out of his mouth, which I heard through a fog of clogged ears, pounding feverish heart, and near loss of self-control after holding onto my sanity throughout his explosion were a sobbing, "I'm really soooorrryyy. I can't stop thinking about what I diiiiid!"

I don't know if all of this evens out for him eventually. Does his heart swell enough, memorably enough, to block out our mutual failures? His explosions never happen in a vaccuum; like SuperNanny, I look back on the emotional re-play of the worst moments and feel complete condescending frustration towards the mother in the "video," her stomps through the rooms, her sarcastic comments, her heavy sighs, her quick temper, her loss of control mirroring the child's. For me, it's almost an instant re-play, the condescension and disgust starting to work their way in while my heart still pounds in anger as I leave his room for the night, the air from my lungs being pushed out violently, having no way to fill up the cavity so swiftly taken over by anger, rage, fear, and almost immediately, self-loathing and regret.

But then I hear his own teary sigh from under the covers and his well-timed "I love you." He says it right before I'm out of ear-shot.

Polarized

2007-02-28T21:19:00.000-06:00

I'm getting a little sick and tired of multi-tasking. I even multi-task when thinking these thoughts. On the one hand, I lash out with complaints, why is everything always so frenzied?! On the other hand, I chastise myself for not being more grateful, it's frenzied because you asked for all this! Right now I'm simultaneously trying to relax and write. This is consistent with my attempts at writing for the past several weeks, which is why I've basically puked over everything I've posted here since January. I don't want to stop writing, but I know I need to fool my brain into thinking I've had "down time" so I don't end up in a straightjacket with drool running down my chin. So I prop myself up on the couch with the laptop, turn on the T.V., and proceed to feel frustrated about how the deafening commercials are distracting me from my attempts at writing. Relaxing, yes! This is a brilliant solution!

I'm constantly on the edge of either falling into an exhausted coma or exploding into some kind of irrational, psychotic tantrum; I'm like a narcoleptic rabid dog. I didn't think the kids had noticed, but last weekend during Quinn's nap, he hid under Hannah's bed, which is across the house from his bedroom, where I assumed he would stay and from where I ran frantically shrieking his name after I glanced upstairs and noticed his door was open. There was no possible way he could have passed by my sentry post on the living room couch without my seeing or hearing him, and so my first reaction was more of anger and frustration, but after I'd checked every known upstairs hiding place, my exhaustion and rabies took over. I was running through all the possible scenarios in my stress-addled mind, and here is what I narrowed them down to:

1.) The alien abduction stories really are true, and now I'd have a horrible explanation for the mysterious unchanging birthmark on the bottom of his right foot (a beacon to our future overlords, of course).
2.) Someone had made their way into our house and was holding my three-year-old hostage in the attic. They were terrified by my shrieking, which was why they hadn't demanded any payment yet.
3.) Quinn was always only a figment of my imagination. Maybe everyone was!

In this sorry state, slamming doors, ripping curtains out of my way, probably foaming at the mouth, a flash of brilliance came to me and I yelled, "Quinn, say, 'what mom?'!"

Quinn is sneaky. He is manipulative. He is apparently a champion hider. But he is a sucker for words, and so my flash of brilliance was immediately rewarded with a muffled, amused, dusty "What, Mom?"

I bolted toward the sound, "WHERE ARE YOU??? I'VE BEEN CALLING YOU! YOU COME WHEN YOU'RE CALLED! AAAAAAAAAGRGHGHGHRGGHGHGG!!!"

Silence.

"Hmm," I thought. "He seems to be, what's the word, afraid? What kid would be afraid of a narcoleptic rabid dog? Uh. Oh yeah." Once I stood still and the stress volcanoes stopped spewing deadly lava all over every living thing in my path, Quinn crawled, giggling, out from under Hannah's bed - a place I never would have checked.

There is nothing really "bad" among the list of things on which I'm blaming the stress volcanoes -- in fact, everything causing my head to spin simultaneously in eight directions is all good. I'm busy at work because I have a good job; I'm busy at home because my kids are healthy and they like to spend time with me, and because we found a house we love and there are countless things to do before we jump into an eternal pit of debt (weeee!). The winter blues are being replaced by moving plans, arrangements for business travel to places I'm happy to see for the first time, trips to the thawed, breezy parks with the kids, birthday celebrations, and, after discovering I'm capable of both holding a book and walking on an inclined treadmill, actual reading! I just wish I had more time to enjoy each one of these things at a time, rather than witnessing the full range of experience like a fast-forwarded movie, or feeling like I'm trying to shovel in too much food all at once, dessert and dinner together, the clashing but delicious tastes of each trying to ruin the other one for me.

Holy Mole-y

2007-02-23T10:11:00.000-06:00

A few months ago I made reference to a night when we found some adorably tiny baby rabbits in our back yard. We briefly considered the fact that they could be moles -- after all, we never knew rabbits could have such short ears, even as babies, not to mention the fact that they were burrowed in their soft, mewing cuteness into a hole in the ground, one that might have been connected to a system of tunnels under the suspiciously soft and lumpy soil of our yard. But that flash of reality we allowed ourselves to consider was quickly extinguished when we remembered that our back yard is just a formality, not something we actually use like normal people, and also we needed to go open a bottle of wine: "I'm sure they're just rabbits. Their ears are small because they're babies. There are no tunnels, that's crazy! We just need to take better of our grass. I'm sure these holes out here are entirely related to the fact that we haven't fertilized. So it's settled. Now, Pinot or Cabernet?"

When we put the house on the market, the realtor told us we would probably have better luck selling the place if we took the time to remove from our back yard the two or three dozen faded, broken plastic walkers and lawnmowers and sandbox toys that haven't been touched in three years so it wouldn't look quite so much like a garbage dump. People apparently don't like to purchase homes with garbage dumps in the back yard. (People are so picky and demanding, GAH!) When I walked out there to start gathering it all up, I thought it felt pretty weird walking across the grass. Hmm, yes, I'm pretty sure my shoes didn't used to sink six inches into the ground out here. I could be wrong, but I don't think so.

Yeah, we have moles. I'm surprised they haven't popped up through the wood floors in the house by now, to be honest. The guy who came to "get rid" of them (I like to imagine he "gets rid" of them by luring them out with lots of yummy mole food, maybe some nice field greens or shallots thrown in for extra enticement) placed bright orange flags everywhere he "treated" the yard. Being the deceptive and sneaky homeowners that we are, we removed all the flags before two potential buyers walked through yesterday. Oh, WHAT?! We're paying for all three of the gourmet field green "treatments". The moles will have moved to a new mole condo in Florida by the time the house sells. I just thought it might be a little unsettling for someone to look out the back door and find a sea of orange flags flapping in the breeze, harbingers of doom that say eerily, moles and rabbits are not the same thing.

Eustress

2007-02-20T22:14:00.000-06:00

Cliche thought of the moment: Everything changes so fast.

Seriously, though. You're going along, content to drop a complaint about boredom or fatigue every few days, whining here and there about the hum drum nature of your life, comfortable in your spoiled, western guilt over complaining about a life 90% of the world will never have the luxury of pretending to scoff at. And then all of a sudden, you look up and realize that all of those fake complaints are becoming null and void, sinking into oblivion under the weight of - what's this? - a lot of really good, exciting things happening all at once. It all happens so quickly and feels so unreal that you're completely in the thick of major life changes before you realize that your heart seems to be a lot more woodpecker-like than usual. You wonder, "Self, what is wrong? Everything is going right ALL AT THE SAME TIME!" You fight off paranoia and the temptation to seek out the inevitable tragedy sure to befall you as soon as the universe lulls you into a false sense of security regarding the recent and sudden set of unbelievably good and exciting things happening to you: "What will it be that finally ruins everything, self? A fire? A heart attack? A kidnapping? Cancer?" You talk to yourself like Annette Benning in American Beauty, but instead of "I will sell this house today" (which would be entirely appropriate), your mantra is, "I will not mentally sabotage myself with paranoia." But you can't help it. You've grown so accustomed to defending yourself against threatening changes, bad changes, changes requiring rapid response and slashing of resources, be they financial, emotional, logistical, that good changes don't compute. Your body and mind respond with the same fight-or-flight mechanism they've spent years perfecting.

Kid stories of the moment: Too numerous to recount, but I'll try.

Yesterday after Quinn's nap, he was incensed that John had dared to close the laptop and put away the mouse while tidying up in preparation for someone to look at our house. He remedied the situation by re-opening the laptop, finding the mouse, hooking it up to the laptop correctly, and resuming whatever game he had been playing on pbskids.org before being so rudely interrupted for a nap. I live with this not-quite-four-year-old kid, and yet I still find it patently unnatural that I'm telling a story about him 1.) playing an online game 2.) hooking everything back up correctly in his huffy, "the-world-burdens-me" frustration after his nap.

During dinner last night, Bryce informed me that the way he knew the grapes on his plate were clean was that he himself had washed them a day or two before: "They looked thilthy," he stated with his clear and simultaneously incorrect pronunciation of the word filthy, "so I decided to wash them." I beamed in pride at his attempt at maturity, and five minutes later when we told him to eat one single black-eyed pea, he gingerly, with his front teeth, bit off half of one, sloshed the nearby glass of water to his lips while his eyes filled with tears of disgust and near-nausea, choked dramatically, and then yelled, sputtering, with his arms flailing about his head in a final black-eyed pea-related decree, "I told you I do NOT like black-eyed peas. I will NEVER. Eat them! Again! They are disgusting and I might THROW UP."

Final thought of the day: Just a wafer thin mint.

John and I went to the Cheesecake Factory over the weekend to celebrate my birthday. Avocado eggrolls + cheesecake + wine = no more stress. In theory that sounds great, but it's really because your entire body's focus is on surviving the impending Monty Python explosion. Whatever works, though. Whatever works.

Who knew?

2007-02-17T14:08:00.000-06:00

So, it turns out that buying a house involves a lot more than writing a check and moving. Yeah, can you believe it? It takes, like, work and thinking and time and stuff. And you know, sometimes there's only so much work and thinking I can take in one single week. By the time we get to the closing table, we'll be so confused, exhausted, and frazzled that we'd probably sign off on a $5,000 breathing fee without noticing, or caring. In fact, we'd probably find some way to justify it: "A breathing fee? Well, we DO like air, after all."

In addition to trading in unknown piles of money for pretty kitchen counter tops and a mud room the size of Texas, we've lost any spare time we may have thought we had at one time before two weeks ago. I have the best intentions of sitting down to write every evening, but after restoring the house to "show" condition, writhing in agony over financing decisions that just won't make themselves already, and researching time travel to determine how best to wake up after all the money has been spent and all the thinking has been done and all the heavy lifting is over, I'm barely capable of keeping my eyes open, let alone typing, let alone thinking a coherent and complete sentence.

Speaking of finishing a thought, those two paragraphs you just read have been sitting in draft form for THREE DAYS. I've added a paragraph here and there when I have ten unused minutes at work, but when I go back and re-read, I start dry-heaving in disgust and end up deleting whatever crap it was that I just added, saving the whole thing as draft, AGAIN, and going back to pretending there is no blog, there is no "sit down and write" goal, there is only work and keeping a house show-ready. As it turns out, those two things have quite effectively taken up my time, and by "taken up my time" I mean taken over my entire life. Kids? What kids? Are those the little beings whose encrusted dinner mess I'm frantically cleaning off the dining room table and floor every night? They must also be the ones whose sharp, tiny legos I step on right before I launch into my red-faced, foot-holding, profanity-screaming sessions. Yeah, I think I remember the good ol' days when I used to spend my time telling them to stop throwing things down the stairs as opposed to scrubbing baseboards and ceiling fans.

Maybe it's just the recent house buying excitement warping my perception of time, but I get the feeling I'm entering into a phase of life that will require one of two things: sleeplessness or no more writing. So far when given the choice of sleep vs. something else, something else has always been the loser. So, given the fact that it's taken me three days just to come up with a post that says, "buying a house takes time" and "I'm brain dead and uncreative," I'm thinking my goal of posting here at least once a week is becoming more and more unrealistic. Maybe I'm wrong, and I hope I am, because when I'm not writing here, I'm not writing at all, and I think for me that's a bad thing. I'd like to think work would start to calm down, or we'd find a comfortable groove for the next six weeks (before we move out of the show-ready house and into the house nobody else will set eyes on until we've got boxes unpacked, hopefully by next Christmas), but I'd also like to think I could go through life consuming potato flautas, nachos, and margaritas every night with no negative repercussions, so I'm not exactly getting my hopes up.

The Latest from the Fringe

2007-02-09T19:35:00.000-06:00

Watch out, because some day he's going to be in authority.
Just as I'd finished getting ready for work and had sat down to check e-mail this morning, I heard some muffled knocking at the bedroom door. I knew it was Bryce, since Quinn just barges confidently in regardless of the time of day or level of fatigue. I opened the door, and Bryce stood there, holding his wadded blanket under his chin and squinting as his eyes adjusted to the lights in my room. Before I could even speak, he said, "Can I tell you a story about me and Connor?" I ushered him into the room and he kept talking. "At lunch, he really infuriates me? And when the teachers clap to tell us how long we have left at lunch, we're all supposed to clap with them like this, CLAP-CLAP-clapclapclap, but Connor just says BOP-BOP-bopbopbop instead of clapping." John walked in from the gym and I told him about Connor "infuriating" Bryce, and Bryce began to re-tell the story while John and I tried to giggle and shake our heads in disbelief as subtly as possible.

As much as I've talked about his intensity and his constant struggle for power, it doesn't seem like I would ever call Bryce a rule-follower, but he definitely is. It drives him absolutely insane if he knows there are clear expectations for a group of people, and certain individuals choose not to meet them. We are supposed to clap with the teachers, NOT SAY BOP! The other night on the way to his piano lesson, a motorcycle passed us right before Bryce started a 20-minute monologue from the back seat consisting of variations on THOSE PEOPLE AREN'T WEARING HELMETS! THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO BE WEARING HELMETS. IF THEY WERE TO FALL OFF THE MOTORCYCLE THEY WOULD BE HURT AND WOULD HAVE TO GO TO THE HOSPITAL BECAUSE CONCRETE IS HARD! I DON'T THINK THEY SHOULD BE RIDING THAT MOTORCYCLE WITHOUT HELMETS ON BECAUSE THEY AREN'T SAFE!

We are masochists.
Last Saturday, as John and I walked through a newly built house for sale, the realtor representing the builder asked, in that prodding, unavoidable way, "how long have you been looking for a new house?"

"Seven years," I said seriously. She looked at me with a little fear and uncertainty, like she wasn't sure how to continue a conversation with a psycho. She did anyway. "Well, what is your motivation for looking for a new house?"

I kept walking and looking around. "We need more space. We need a better layout. JOHN! OHMYGODHAVEYOUSEENTHISLAUNDRYROOMINHERE? AND THE MASTER CLOSET IS THE SIZE OF A FOOTBALL FIELD!" She ran out of the house at that point, but only after throwing her business card at me. I'm sure she thought doing business with us over the phone would be fairly safe.

Meanwhile, between keeping Quinn from swinging on the chandelier in the dining room and keeping Bryce from climbing on the fire place, John was busy measuring the study and drooling over the size of the pantry in the kitchen. There is so much closet space that Hide and Seek in this house could last for hours. Given that fact, if we lived there, I might actually find some time to read again.

We put in an offer and haggled for a few days before we settled on a price. Aren't those games fun?!

--Ten dollars!
--Fifteen dollars!
--Okay, Eleven Fifty plus you have to add a phone jack and bring a dollar to closing.
--Fifteen and we'll add the phone jack and bring the dollar.
--Sigh. Twelve, no dollar at closing, but we still want the phone jack.
--Thirteen dollars and the phone jack.
--If we say okay does the madness end here?

So, we're going to buy our "dream" house. Of course, there is one tiny detail we have to address first. It's just a minor thing, really; it probably won't affect our lives at all. We have. To sell. Our house. The one full of tiny sharp objects strewn everywhere by three-foot-tall dictators. Also the one with the room occupied by a sullen, pack rat teenager.

Oh god.

What horror have we brought upon ourselves?

Don't worry. I'm sure it will be documented thoroughly for your "better them than me" pleasure. Glad we can help.

Somebody pray to the real estate gods for us. Maybe sacrifice a couch or something, too. We need everything we can get over here. Seriously.

Mutiny

2007-02-06T20:49:00.000-06:00

Tuesdays are piano lesson nights, and as much as I appreciate the hour of shooting the breeze with a few parents of Bryce's classmates, the return to the music teacher's house and the subsequent 10-15 minutes of hissing at Bryce to stop writhing on the floor while I try to listen to the piano teacher's varying methods of politely reminding us that the kids are supposed to practice, and hahaha, they're still pretty rowdy, these little quirky kids! really sucks every last drop of energy from my crazy little introverted self. By the time I get home with Bryce on Tuesday nights, he's asking for food and yawning, and I'm stumbling around trying to change out of my work clothes (no time before music class, yippeee!), finding him an appropriate snack (not a pop-tart), and trying to fight my guilt and make up for the evening I missed with Quinn (read: yanking his unnaturally strong pre-school arms from around my thigh every two minutes), all at the same time.

Usually by the time the kids are in bed, after Quinn has inevitably remembered that he Has To Tell Me Something, Uummm at least four times, my head is pounding and my eyes are glazed over, and even though I really want to do a better job of writing here on a regular basis, I just can't bring myself to do it. I mean, sometimes I even (pathetically) stare at the blank screen and try to force words to appear there through sheer willpower, but of course nothing ever shows up and I end up slamming the laptop closed in disgust with my stupid lack of magical powers.

Tonight, just before I shook my fist at the universe (with not much passion, given my near comatose state after the nighttime piano lesson energy-sucking session), John walked in with the wine and the Thai food (recent commitment to spend less money be damned!), looked at the (blank) screen and said, mischieviously, "did you see my pictures? Did you check the blog?"

I'll admit it, I was concerned. If you haven't all been transfixed and/or confused by the left column before now, then let your eyes wander over there and take a look-see. For months, he's threatened to post his urinal collection but I've managed to distract him with shiny things until now. He used my Tuesday night weakness against me. Traitor.

Let's start right here.

2007-02-04T22:15:00.000-06:00

Hi, friend.

I thought you'd written me off. Eight months ago I even wrote about it here; I realize now you may have read those words, which ironically means I could have instigated or exacerbated the very abandonment I railed against without even knowing it at the time (though I've suspected it, and knew there was a slight chance when I wrote those words in pain and self protection). I have no way to contact you directly other than in writing, and I thought since I might have inadvertendly begun this lonely phase of our relationship here, I should come here to end it, and (hopefully) start a new phase.

I dreamt about you several weeks ago. I was driving in my neighborhood and saw your son run across a yard - it made no sense because you're hundreds of miles away. My heart stopped, the car stopped, and I ran to him, asking where you were. He pointed you out, in the shadows of your open garage. You weren't yourself. You'd been sick, you said. Your body had grown dependent on things that would eventually kill it, but you weren't ready to change that. I tried to relate to you and I tried to compare my situation to yours, but you weren't really there. I saw a flicker, but then you sat back and your eyes glazed over in complacency, for now, for then. It was too much for you to deal with - that was the implication. This relationship was just one more thing you couldn't juggle. I told you how close I lived, and that I hoped you would visit me, or would welcome my visits, and I left. I wasn't angry or hurt anymore; I felt sad and hopeful for you at the same time. And then I went back to my own rather insane juggling.

John and I were recently talking about Dylan, and the fact that he has essentially removed himself from our family. He won't return phone calls (when he has a working phone), and even locating him is difficult and only possible through mutual contacts (which grow fewer by the day). I asked him if he was going to call the one remaining friend of Dylan's whose contact information we still have, but John just shook his head. "It won't do any good. When Dylan works out whatever he needs to work out, he will contact us." This felt like giving up to me; it felt like accepting the unacceptable. But I recognize now that what he was saying was that you can't force someone else to love you, or to communicate with you, or to be with you. It isn't right or wrong, acceptable or unacceptable: it just is.

I've started to think in the past few years that I'm some kind of weird category of friend. It felt over time that people befriended me out of convenience. I was able to fill some need - usually therapeutic or philosophical or professional in nature - and then once that need was filled, I was kind of a guilty pain to keep around. My friendships with other people seemed to be perceived as high-maintenance and burdensome to all involved besides me - the one left alone looking like a deer in the headlights when everyone else had gone on their merry way. This felt grossly unfair given the amount of effort and energy I thought I'd put into the friendships - and that train of thought lead me to believe I was some horrifying Saturday Night Live, Mary Katherine Gallagher version of myself - just clinging to people in annoyingly breathless, desperate attempts to have someone like me, to force someone to be my friend - the thought of it was enough to make me vomit and then bury my head in the sand, in shame, and in hiding (a la Kramer's Look away, I'm hideous!).

Given all this, imagine my shock and wonder when I saw your name pop up in my inbox. The sadness, defensiveness, guilt, and shame all came rushing back, and then I remembered the dream I'd had about you and everything fell away except concern for you. I don't know how much you've read from this site, and I'm sure you know that even it doesn't contain all significant details, but it sounds like our lives have run similar courses over the past year. (That would be consistent for us, wouldn't it?) I wish you had contacted me to let me know. If nothing else, I could have reminded you that you weren't alone, despite how I know you probably felt. I've missed you, friend. I'm sorry you were hurting, and that you didn't tell me, and that you thought I'd moved on in anger and had closed the door. The door is always open, no matter how much the surroundings may change over time.

Should Be Outlawed

2007-02-02T23:30:00.000-06:00

Some details about the pit in my stomach.
A few nights ago John's out-of-town sister called and asked if Hannah would be interested in coming down for a visit this weekend. It was tentatively planned: Hannah would accompany John's other (mildly developmentally disabled) sister for a weekend of shopping and babysitting her younger cousins. The next morning, when John checked Hannah's grades online and found that she was failing three of her six classes (three weeks into the semester), he called his sister to tell her that Hannah wouldn't be able to make the trip. I've thought about detailing the reasons why (for those without similar parenting philosophies who won't fill in the blanks on their own), providing in detailed written form all of the justification for his decision, our decision - but I finally realized that the reason and justification don't matter or make one bit of difference to this story.

When he called to tell his sister not to make the flight arrangements for Hannah, here were her responses:

"What difference is one weekend going to make? Would she be studying over the weekend anyway?"

"What if you hadn't looked at the grades this morning?"

"Wouldn't a 'natural consequence' be her failing and being forced to wait tables for the rest of her life?"

If John's sister weren't pictured in our mental dictionary next to the entries of "self-centered," "flighty," and "shallow," these responses would have puzzled us, possibly even made us question our decision. But in this case, they only served to add to the heap of exemplary reasons why we avoid discussing anything related to parenting with her whenever humanly possible. John's mom was involved in the planning, so he called to let her know the disappointing news as well: "Hannah's not going to be able to go out of town - she's failing three classes... again." This is going to seem impossible, but her answers were suspiciously familiar.

"What does the trip have to do with her grades?"

"Would she be studying if she were home anyway?"

Not long after this series of conversations that made John want to cut himself off from all society, his sister called me: "He needs to take a Prozac. Why did he have to look at her grades today anyway?"

Those chills down your spine? That was the result of my metaphysical transformation into RUNFORYOURLIFESHE'SPISSEDNOW (henceforth known as RFYLSPN, or more visually simple and faster for me to type, Rifflespin). Rifflespin is not confined by space or time because Rifflespin is fueled by eight years of pent-up rage and the desire to inform my in-laws that I know their dirty little secret of dysfunction hidden behind the thin veil of utter bullcrap. Rifflespin wasted no time in verbally ripping John's sister limb from limb, and then I took over when Rifflespin needed a rest.

During a conversation with his brother the next day, John learned something: his sister had wanted Hannah to come visit mainly so she could help escort her other aunt through the airports. Well my, my! Doesn't this change things? Nobody ever mentioned THIS as a problem when Hannah suddenly couldn't come! No, it was all about how harsh John was, how inappropriate this punishment was, how she should get to go on this trip JUST BECAUSE! "Well I'm just sure we made it clear that that's what we needed," said John's mom when he called to address the issue. No, you didn't make it clear. If you'd made it clear, the conversation would have been about the fact that you needed Hannah's help, not that John was a horrible ogre-parent. Of course, if you'd made it clear, you couldn't look like such selfless advocates for poor, victimized just-going-through-a-hard-time (even though that hard time has lasted seven years and makes up her entire mentality) Hannah, now could you?

There is so much more, and maybe I'll expound in a later post, but I think you get the gist - the gist being, wow, where's the wine?!

Rock out, knock out.
Because of all this, I walked in the door from work like I was drowning in a sea of rocks. Rocks in my stomach, pebbles I'd swallowed in the struggle; rocks on my back, bruising me with every muscle twitch; rocks on my chest and even in my chest, squeezing on my heart and making it impossible to breathe comfortably; rocks in my hair and somehow oozing, plopping sharply out of my ears in blasts of pain. When I spoke, the rocks shot out of my mouth but they were in the shape of deadly arrow-heads, having been chiseled to lethal perfection by the rocky chaos inside - so whoever I spoke to winced in pain and stepped back, at once hurt and worried about my imminent rock-drowning death. I could see what was happening and tried to stop it, but finally removed myself from the vulnerable creatures and spewed my rocks at the inanimate objects in the kitchen while I unintentionally burned, par for the course of this week, every frozen convenience food item known to humankind.

While we sat at the table eating our burned, dried black bean burgers and charred crinkle-cut french fries, Quinn said, "Knock knock." Most of the rocks were gone, but I felt a few try to arm themselves at the back of my throat. The kids don't understand knock knock jokes - they always get them wrong. When you say, "banana who?" or "lamp who?" they string a series of random words together ("banana lips house magnet!") and crack up laughing, leaving you to wonder a.) what the hell they were talking about, and b.) if they'll be intellectually compromised as adults if you don't more effectively explain what makes a knock knock joke work. I didn't want to open my mouth and start lecturing him on the finer points of proper joke-telling, but I didn't have to. John stepped in: "Who's there?"

"Cargo."

"Cargo who?"

"Car go beep beep!"

The arrowheads in the back of my throat dissolved next to the remnants of dried out black bean patty and burned fries, and the entire table erupted into laughter, and shocked glee: "THAT WAS AN AWESOME JOKE, QUINN!" "WOW!" "Good job!" "That was so funny!"

Bryce was ready to try. He could barely contain his excitement and almost fell over trying to get us to listen to his joke. "Knock knock," he said through excited, gaspy laughter.

"Who's there?"

"Stairs!"

"Stairs who?"

"Stairs table head hair!"

The rocks tried to re-form, but I thought of something I'd seen on a blog in the past several weeks. "Bryce, knock knock!"

"Who's there?"

"Interrupting Cow."

"Interrupt--"

"MOO!"

We all slapped the table and squealed in the hilarity. Bryce was ready to try again, he told us he had a joke like mine, only different: "Knock knock!"

"Who's there?"

"Horse."

"Horse who?"

"..... uh. Oh. Neigh! Neigh!! Hahahaha!"

Oh, we were all rolling now. If I hadn't been cracking apart with laughter, the arrowheads probably would have come back, because if I hadn't been laughing, I would have sounded critical. "Bryce, here's what you might try next time... say 'interrupting horse' and when I start to answer, make sure you actually interrupt me when you say, 'neigh, neigh.'" I was laughing so hard when I said it, and he was laughing so hard at his perceived comedic victory, that this just seemed like another joke. And now Quinn wanted back in: "Knock knock!"

"Who's there?"

"Cargo."

"Cargo who?"

"Car go LIP LIP ahahahahahah!!!!!!"

I realize now why the kids don't understand knock knock jokes. His nonsense ad-lib was confirmation that the first successful delivery had been just a memorized set of words, but we laughed so hard after the series of randomness leading up to this that the kids assumed, as they apparently do every time, that knock knock jokes are a blank canvas that should only be filled with stream-of-consciousness brilliance.

-----------------------------
I don't know how to end this. I know that this morning before I left for work, John and I were discussing the need to cultivate some couple friendships, the need to force ourselves to socialize and stop hiding behind the excuse of being busy. By noon, we had discussed and or dealt with the issue of Hannah going out of town at least once each. By 5 p.m., we had discussed the general lack of motivation in Hannah, the fact that John's sister is clueless about such, and the fact that she had called the entire family to tattle on John's too-strict parenting rules since she wasn't getting her way. By 8 p.m., we were catching our breath after a rowdy game of "hide Elmo under the bed while one kid is out of the room and see if he notices" so we didn't have to role-play AS Elmo, which was our alternate option. And I think I remember now why we don't have a whole collection of couple friends knocking down our door to invite us to dinner parties and wine tastings, or even just over for Friday night pizza. We can barely keep a handle on the family obligations - the logistical, emotional, financial, and physical requirements of this household demand more of us than we can consistently give - hence, my near rock-drowning, hence, no social life. At least we have nonsense knock knock jokes to help us keep our perspective. Car go lip lip, indeed.

The pit of my stomach: where anxiety goes to die.

2007-02-01T22:46:00.000-06:00

Hi, nervousness! You've been missing me, haven't you? All those months of predictability were really getting you down, making you jealous, but I've learned my lesson. Oh yes. Do not leave Nervousness out in the cold. Nervousness loves company. Nervousness loves Kristen. Today alone, every single aspect of my life has welcomed Nervousness back in: personal, professional emotional - Nervousness all around! Weeeee!! Aren't I lucky that I have naturally low blood pressure? Yes, I am. Also, wine helps.

Not enough family dynamics making your heart beat a little faster? Well, why don't we bring back the issue of the disagreements between the in-laws and the parenting of the stepdaughter? That should get the ol' blood pumping again!

Getting too complacent with the nice people at work thinking you're "hard-working" and "worthy" and "deserving of a salary for another year"? A quick teaming up with an incompetent co-worker to bring your work ethic into question should do the trick!

Starting to be too damned optimistic about the future of your quirky children's education? Here's a thought: submit an application for your younger child to the school your older child attends. Then, when the school calls and says, vaguely, "uh, would you consider placing your younger kid - who consequently doesn't have the right numbers printed on this test paper - placed in a class 18 months below his chronological age?" go ahead and express your honest opinion that, no, that would not be a good option, because putting your then four-year-old into a class full of three-year-olds seems like it would be detrimental to a kid who clearly needs more challenge, not less, and wait in silent, nail-biting anticipation for the reaction on the other end of the phone. "Hmm. We might have to put him on the waiting list, then." Yeah, that'll bring Nervousness right back in to warm its hands by the raging fire of unknowns.

And after a day like today, all I can do is thank my lucky stars that I have naturally low blood pressure. I think it's what's keeping me alive at this point.

Lecturus Interruptus

2007-01-30T21:22:00.001-06:00

Tonight during the typical ridiculous bedtime routine, John got stern with Quinn, which caused Quinn to cry and make loud accusations of child abuse like only a kid can who has never been abused. "He scared me!" he sobbed as he clutched my hand on his way back from the third trip to the bathroom where he'd hidden, giggling in rebellion behind the shower curtain and had caused John's patience levies to break unexpectedly. My own were rumbling and creaking beneath the pressure of my fatigue and frustration, and I squeaked out through my tightened vocal chords, "well, Quinn...dad was angry at the way you were acting, and because you ran away when you know it's bed time. So he yelled. Now it's time for bed." I picked him up and told him to take a deep breath, but the hysterics continued, so I started walking toward the bedroom and telling him it was time to calm down and stay in bed.

Bryce was having none of this "be the quiet kid in bed" nonsense, so as I walked into the room with gasping, sniffling Quinn, he hopped up, whimpering, then wailing, "I THINK I JUST FEEL LIKE I'M GOING TO START CRYING!" My patience levies cracked and the superdome doors began to open for the hordes of potential victims, and I turned around, still holding Quinn: "No! You are only crying to get attention because Quinn is upset. Get in bed and be quiet RIGHT NOW!" Then I realized Quinn was lapping this whole thing up, and luckily we were next to his bed, so I plopped him down, pulled his covers up and said, "Stay in bed this time. Do not get up again."

"But dad scared me and hurt my feelings!" More crying.

"Quinn, I'm sorry your feelings were hurt. Dad did get angry because you disobeyed and ran away and yelled and hid after it was bedtime."

Bryce sat up in bed, and I continued. "You know why it was so frustrating to him? Because EVERY SINGLE NIGHT, we go through the same thing! We do this whole elaborate bedtime routine - stories, maybe a puzzle or short game, bath, teeth brushing, pajamas, hugs and kisses, lights out - and then you both get up and run around the house and yell and act wild!"

Bryce said, "Well, I don't know how to go to sleep. I haven't slept in a million years. You'll have to teach me!"

I kept on. "Bedtime is not playtime! Bedtime is time to be quiet and go to sleep! When dad and I tuck you in and turn off the lights, we want to go get ready for tomorrow and get our own rest. But EVERY NIGHT we end up having to come up here and put you guys back in bed 20 times! We end up running up and down the stairs like...! Like...!"

I had cut myself off with my own boring yet impassioned lecture, but Bryce wasn't going to let my pompous adult mentality stop this intense discussion: "Like escalator people!? Fixing the escalator!? With tools? Running up and down the escalator going bang, bop, bam!?"

The lights were off and I thought I could get away with cracking a smile, but the smile was accompanied by an unwanted breath of audible whispery laughter and after that the only lesson the kids came away with was, mom is a wuss. I know because the next two minutes involved both kids mock hammering the footboards of their respective beds, demonstrating escalator people (since I apparently thought that bit was so earth-shatteringly funny) while I kicked myself for showing a sign of weakness at such a critical time. If Chris Farley were there to dramatize how I felt, there would be a loud forehead-slapping session followed by some guttural and angry exclamations of "STUPID!"

So I give up, people. I. Give. Up. How can I be an effective dictator when the court jester clearly has effortless control over me?

It's not about the drinking, Meredith.

2007-01-26T17:06:00.000-06:00

Last week at the doctor, I answered all the normal questions about my health and bodily functions with all the same answers I have every year, because I'm a lucky, healthy person with very few physical ailments. When the nurse got to the family history and behavioral questions, Has anyone in your family ever had a stroke? Or heart disease? Or breast cancer? and all of my answers were basically "nope," she had her hand poised over the "NO" box, happily checking away, and when she got to Do you smoke? and I gave my trusty "nope" she kept her head down while she read the standard list of questions and practically checked "NO" before I even responded. And then she got to the final question, Do you drink?, and let's just say she should use a pencil when filling out that form, and maybe also ear plugs, because as she robotically checked "NO," I busted out a hearty, "UH, YEAH!! I HAVE TWO KIDS, REMEMBER?" I thought this was hilarious, but then immediately felt guilty because her quick sideways look at me and her lack of even the slightest grin clued me in to the fact that she didn't understand that I was joking -- joking about my hedonistic alcoholic lifestyle, and about the poor, neglected children amazingly still in my care after years of being parented by people who drink wine and margaritas IN THEIR PRESENCE. ALMOST DAILY. She didn't ask about cocaine, THANK GOODNESS. Imagine the glare I would have gotten over that one.

It hit me a little at the time, enough that I even mentioned it to John, but I forgot all about it until I saw this ~~setup~~ interview between ~~Slanty McSlantsALot~~ Meredith Vieira and Melissa Summers today.

Here's what I want to say:

Dear Today Show,

You suck.

Love,
Kristen

But that really doesn't do this subject justice, although I'm not sure I ever even could. Furthermore, I normally don't get into subjects that 1.) originated from Blogland (because I don't consider myself part of the crowd, per se, etc. etc. blah blah you don't want to hear this) or 2.) are related to the blommy boars *shudder.* But in this case, I'm loosening my rule reins. How can I not? I know thousands of people will be talking about this and everyone will be so sick of hearing about it, but COME ON. Did you watch the video? The shots of the kids playing behind the large, looming glasses of wine? The clip of the woman saying she'd love to see a mom who doesn't drink while hanging out with her kids 15 hours a day so she could determine whether or not "she's a great mom" (I'm sure this is very indicative of the response you'd get from any parent who drinks...yeah)? The question, "would you let a group of babysitters drink while watching your kids?" and the unbelievably harsh, aggressive, and mostly STUPID follow-up, "well, you don't want THEM drinking, so what's the difference when YOU do it?"?

What is this crap? Is this honestly something we're concerned about? The "growing trend" of "moms who drink at playdates"? Who says it's a growing trend, anyway? It's not a growing trend. I'll tell you what's a growing trend: Playdates, and titling them as such. Socialization between adults who have children at any age has become completely warped. U.S. middle class adults are expected to center their entire lives around their kids. Parties and get-togethers have turned into Playdates and Little Gym classes: regular social outings specifically for and because of the kids - there is no other purpose (so if you meet a new friend who is there with his/her child, just accept the fact that this isn't about you, and focus on your kid, you narcissistic jerk). So extreme is this warped, Puritanical, surreal mentality that now if any adult socialization is ever combined with the Social Life By, For, and Of the Children, it is seen as taboo, selfish, irresponsible - so much so that there are articles written about it and morning show interviews with questions and scenarios and condescending facial expressions from famous TV personalities that reinforce, in case any of us had missed it, that our kids are not the number one priority, OUR IMAGE IS.

So, dads? You don't count. Only moms take care of kids. And they do so with no help from anyone, because moms are super duper amazing people whose abilities you could never master. That's why if you have a beer while watching a game in the same room with your kids, it's not really a big deal - because no one expects anything of you anyway! But moms who get together with some friends and drink a glass of wine while their kids play nearby should be labeled as irresponsible and selfish - not actually because they're drinking, even though that's what we'll make this pathetic argument all about, but because they're daring to have a social function - I'll go so far as to say even that they're daring to do anything at all during waking hours - that isn't 100% centered around the under 18 crowd. This is not part of the acceptable image for a U.S. middle class parent. U.S. middle class parents are all female (dads, see above). U.S. middle class parents are their children's business managers and administrative assistants, "on the job" if you will, where socializing with adults is slacking off and cheating, and drinking is just the straw that breaks the camel's back, that makes this entire argument somehow seem legitimate by playing on the lingering Puritan guilt complex around any pleasurable experience.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go. I'm leaving work to see the father of my children, the one who stays home and cares for them the majority of the time. And we're probably going to go somewhere that WE like for dinner, dragging along the kids who are undoubtedly dirty and cold and thankful to be allowed to whimper quietly in the booth next to the gruel we'll shove distractedly at them while we drink irresponsibly, right before we throw them in the back of the pickup and swerve home in time to pass out. Hopefully they'll figure out how to bathe themselves.

Parent-Teacher Conference (or "Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean he's not out to get me.")

2007-01-22T13:55:00.000-06:00

"You're doing a great job with Quinn - he's a sweet, precious child. I'd take him home with me in a heartbeat!" John and I must have looked bewildered, confused, and more relieved than we should have when we walked out of the parent-teacher conference. We'd gone in prepared to hear about how Quinn needs to learn to control his emotions, to share, to negotiate, to ask and not demand, that he screams and yells and stomps his feet entirely too much, that he really acts more like a two-year-old than an almost four-year-old; a part of me almost wanted to hear these things so I could commiserate with his teacher. I know, right? Man, he can be such a brat sometimes! GEEZ. Well, I'm glad it's not just me! Ha! Ha! Ha! Instead, his teacher looked at us like she couldn't understand why we were clutching the edge of the table in anxiety, and later, why we were slumped over and smiling gleefully in extreme surprise and relief to hear that "Quinn is friends with everyone" and that even though he is strong-willed, when he's told to stop a certain behavior, he always does, without fail.

I've lived constantly on the edge of anger with Quinn for the past few months. He goes from one extreme to the other with me, and I think my personality requires more stability or warning before loved ones decide instantaneously to flip a switch, in Quinn's case a switch that I think must be labeled, Loving and Gentle / Demonic and Horrifying. Because I'm the adult in the relationship and because parenting my older child hasn't exactly been a cakewalk, either, most of the time I'm actually able to overcome my own selfish personality quirks and deal with his bipolar behaviors without stooping to his level. There are times, though -- times involving sleep deprivation -- when I stoop.

Last night, like almost every night for the past several weeks, I woke up to the sound of Quinn turning on his CD player, followed by his yelling some unintelligible demand from the top of the stairs. You see, I'm the lowly servant who must come running anytime his highness screams for me angrily. So I did. I ran up the stairs and asked him what was wrong, but I couldn't understand his answer, so I figured he needed to go to the bathroom, and guided him that way. The switch, which had only been halfway activated prior to my mistake of suggesting he empty his bladder, now flipped fully to the Demonic and Horrifying side, and he stomped/marched/pulled against me and growled/screamed I DON'T NEED TO GO TO THE BATHROOM NOOO NOOO I DON'T WANT! TO! GO! I had been half-asleep before that nonsense, but now thanks to my bleeding eardrums and pumping adrenaline I was awake enough to be just as demonic. I told him through clenched teeth and my last effort at seeming remotely sane that we'd have to change his pants because his pull-up had leaked (probably waking him), and he growled/screamed again I WANT MY RACECAR PANTS I DON'T WANT TO CHANGE MY PANTS GRRRGRRRGRROOWOWOWOW. At that point I stomped out of the bathroom and left him there to cry in anger over the Injustice of the Wet Pants. When I came back, John was trying to talk some sense into him and looking at me like, has this house gone crazy? but all I did was hand Quinn the pants and take deep breaths. He put them on and I told him in a not-very-nice voice to go get back in his bed and to be quiet, Bryce was miraculously still sleeping. As he walked back to his room he turned around and looked at me with every intention of scorching me alive with the flames of hatred shooting out of his eyes. I followed him to his room and he climbed into his bed, turned around, and held his arms out for me to hug him. HUH? Oh, right. The switch. It's back on Loving and Gentle. I bent down to hug him and said, "Quinn, you do not yell at me and dad, and not only that, but at night, you have to be quiet because everyone else is sleeping. You know that!" He whimpered something nonsensical as his head sunk into his pillow like, "I just didn't want to change my pants and I just didn't want to go to the bathroom and that's so because."

The interactions between us in the middle of the night are almost always some version of that experience, which makes me flinch in fear and anticipation of the agony every time I hear him wake up and wail something from upstairs. By the next morning, after losing the requisite extra hour or so of sleep (and that's if Bryce doesn't also wake up for something separately, like he did last night when he tapped me on the head at 3 a.m. after I'd finally fallen back asleep and said, "my cat blanket fell off my bed. I straightened up the other one really neatly, but my cat blanket is on the floor."), I'm not full of eagerness to greet him, which is a result of a combination of issues: 1.) I am a mean, grudge-holding person, especially when it comes to losing sleep, especially when it comes to losing sleep every night for weeks for no real reason, and 2.) The kid is clearly manipulating me and I. don't. like. that.

It's not like I've never dealt with kids at night. Bryce still wakes up occasionally with various nighttime kid problems, but as I've established, even in the dead of night, he's very articulate about what he needs, and he knows that waking up anyone in the household is considered taboo, so he whispers, and he says please and thank you, and once the problem is resolved, he goes to his bed and covers up because I have to assume his brain is also telling him that we humans really prefer to sleep at night. For the most part, dealing with Bryce at night is amazingly low-key and low-maintenance. Dealing with Quinn at night is like fighting an absurd battle. As soon as you ward off one enemy, you're caught from behind by a completely random and unexpected one. Combat does crazy things to people, and I think I'm starting to experience PTSD - or just TSD, since this is still ongoing.

When Quinn's teacher told us about his sparkling personality and appropriate manners, even -- dare I type it? -- patience with particularly bossy classmates, I realized something: I'm not paranoid. My kid really IS trying to drive me to the brink of sanity. There is no other explanation. On the surface, he's saying, everyone else in the world has only good things to say about me, mom. I don't know what YOUR problem is. But in the dead of night when his impressed teachers are getting an amount of sleep acceptable to humans on earth, he's saying, bow to me mere mortal, for I hold your weak dying soul in my hands. And then he laughs maniacally. After changing his pants.

On Being a Piece of Fuzz

2007-01-16T13:37:00.000-06:00

A year ago I made an appointment. It's not an appointment I love, even though it means I get to see the people that I associate with the birth of my children, but I made that appointment anyway. I know I made it because I do the same thing every single year. I stand at their little window with the thin pink sheet of paper with all the obsolete lines and acronyms on it, waiting to hand over my co-pay, and the girl behind the little window taps on her keyboard and looks at her screen and says, next year, January 16, 11:15? And because this is the only appointment I schedule ONE YEAR in advance, I assume there is nothing else yet on my calendar at that time so I say, as if I've thought about it and determined myself to be free one year from now, sure, yes, next year at 11:15 will be great. And then I go back to work and open my trusty Outlook calendar and click on one year from today at 11:15 and type "the appointment you don't love even though you get to see the people you associate with the birth of your kids." I'm responsible that way; I record my appointments in advance, so I don't forget them.

Today the people I don't love even though I associate them with the birth of my children came very close to experiencing my Wrath. If I hadn't already expended a good portion of my Wrath in the first parking garage as my breath billowed out in the freezing cold air, SIGH, HEAVE, HO, SIGH, ARRRRGH, kicking broken sheets of ice out of my way as I returned to my car after reading the sign that said, cheerily, something like "We've moved! Our new offices are not in this building, and there is no way to GET THERE from this building, so have fun driving to the other parking garage," I would have had some Wrath left over. As it stood, and luckily for the receptionist at the new, professionally-designed, designer chair-lined, wavy-walled, pretend-you're-going-to-the-spa-and-aren't-these-miniature-shiny-lavender-tiles-lovely?-themed doctor's office, when she failed to lift her eyes from the computer screen and asked me my name three times, all I had left was Desperate Disdain; the Wrath was basically dead by then. Clickety click click click, "I don't have you in here for an appointment."

"I made the appointment a year ago. The only reason I even knew about it was because it was on my calendar, from A YEAR AGO."

Clickety click click click, "I don't have you in here. I see you in here for last year, but there's no appointment for this year."

"Well there WAS an appointment, because I MADE the appointment, the same way I've been doing it for the past six years, which means I walked out with your computer-generated appointment card and subsequently put it on my calendar."

Clickety click click click, "I don't have you in here. And he's not here right now, he's in surgery."

"......"

Clickety click click click, "And he doesn't have anything the rest of the day."

"Huh. Well you know, I just went through about seven levels of hell to get here this morning. So. You know. This is really frustrating."

Clickety click click click, "He doesn't have anything until Friday."

"......"

Clickety click click click.

"......"

Clickety click click click.

"What. Time. On. Friday."

"1:00. Here's your appointment card. I'm very sorry about that."

Yes, yes, she was very sorry! Kind of like how I feel sorry for the fuzz balls when I yank them off my old sweaters. I mean, did I say I felt sorry for the fuzz balls? No. That's not what I meant. For me, for me! Sorry for me! Because it's such a colossal waste of my time pulling off all that fuzz. Stupid annoying fuzz. I'm very sorry about that!

The Ice Storm

2007-01-14T08:33:00.000-06:00

Friday
I head downstairs to meet some friends for lunch in the crappy on-site cafeteria, in which I've agreed to risk my health and sabotage my diet with the only "vegetarian" option available, taco salad with a most likely lard-filled pile of refried beans and chicken-stock cooked mexican rice, because the ice storm scheduled to hit the region has everyone running around like madpersons, stocking up on batteries and candles and non-perishable food items, and my friends don't want to leave the building unless it's to drive to their houses. Personally, I'm not fazed by the panic. It's either denial or realism, I haven't yet identified which. I only know that I feel uncanny amounts of indifference towards the frantic, almost gossip-like way I'm being approached by everyone I know, "Have you heard? It's already 27 degrees! They say the cars parked outside are already iced over! They're letting us leave early! You should go!! GO!" I eat my crappy lunch next to two people who are interrupted with phone calls or co-workers stopping by our table every five minutes - all storm-related interruptions. All I feel about this storm so far is annoyance, inconvenience, it is butting into my day. I know the drive home will be uneventful because every time this town panics, it's for nothing. Yes, there will be wrecks, but it will be because someone drove too fast on the ice, not because the driving conditions are too treacherous. I am irritated with all the panic around me, and when I hear that people are flocking to grocery stores as if the apocalypse is approaching, I roll my eyes and sigh. My friends leave their half-eaten food in a sudden decision that RIGHT NOW is when they should head home. As I walk back upstairs, I pass someone from my department, bundled up and carrying her laptop. "EVERYONE IS GONE! YOU NEED TO LEAVE!" I try to seem concerned, but I'm sure I fail, and then I decide I really don't care. "Really? Okay. See you Monday." I drive home after picking Bryce up early from school and he asks if we can stop for ice cream. "No," I say as if programmed, "the roads are too dangerous, we need to get home." He looks out the window at the normal amount of traffic traveling at normal speeds, as if he's trying to figure out why some rain makes the roads any more dangerous than any other rainy day. I'm wondering too, but I don't tell him that. Everybody is saying the ice storm is coming, so we all must act the part.

Saturday
Bryce has been coughing since I picked him from school on Friday; he's getting worse, it sounds like we have a circus seal living with us. The cars in the driveway are covered in ice and John heads out to thaw one of them so we can go to the gym. I call the gym to make sure they're open despite the end of the world, and they are, but their kids' area is closed. John goes alone and I stay home with the kids. TV has grown old so we spend two hours getting dressed, doing puzzles, playing games, and making lunch. John comes home and tells me to drive slowly on my way to the gym. I do, but there are hardly any cars out, and I don't slip anywhere during the entire five-mile drive there. It's the same on the way back, and I think while John is at his wedding this afternoon, I'll drive over to my mom's house to break up the kids' day since we've already spent the entire morning wearing out the novelty of all the new Christmas toys. I get home and the kids are napping. John tells me they played outside, and as Bryce wakes up an hour later barking and hacking, I think maybe that wasn't such a good idea. My mom calls to tell me their garage door is frozen shut, and also it's sleeting now, so I really shouldn't get out and drive. This storm is starting to piss me off, I think. The kids have been in the house for over 24 hours; at this point I'm not sure how to spend the rest of the day. She suggests making cookies, and I'm shocked to find that I have all the ingredients I need. The kids take turns playing games on my laptop and stirring the dough. I think, this is a great way to burn an hour, and then as I'm cleaning up and the kids are still on the laptop I think, okay, so it was a great way to burn TWO hours. Now it's dinner time and the kids haven't watched TV since breakfast, so I'm golden. Dinner and a movie, kids. Then bath and bed. By bedtime, Bryce's cough is worrying me. My mom tells me pneumonia is going around, I better not let that cough go too long. I kick myself for not calling the doctor this morning because now I'll have to wait until Monday. Quinn gets a second wind while Bryce is trying to drift off into a drug-induced, vapor-assisted rest, and he gets up several times to tell me what he wants for breakfast tomorrow morning and then starts making la-la-la-do-do-do-ding-dong-ba-ba-ba sounds in an effort to annoy Bryce; it works, and I threaten to make Quinn sleep by himself in the playroom. My meanness pays off and he goes to sleep after that. I flip through the channels and the only thing on is the news - storm coverage. The main points are that power is out for some small towns, it's really cold, and more sleet is coming tomorrow. The roads will get worse. Dammit, I think. We're going on three days in the house with the kids at this point. I'm running out of options, and cough medicine, and sanity.

Sunday
Tap tap tap tap tap. I jerk awake and wonder if a woodpecker has made its way into our house and has mistaken my head for a tree. Bryce is standing right next to me. When he sees my eyes open and hears me gasp in fear, he immediately whispers all of this: "Quinn got out of bed and he went into the bathroom, I didn't even hear him go, he just went in there? And then he knocked a washcloth off the banister onto the stairs, and he closed the gate and slammed my door, the playroom door I mean, and our bedroom door? And I just thought that you should handle that. Because he isn't being very nice, and I wanted you to handle it." Then the circus seal bark assaults my sleepy ears. I look at the clock: 6:15. I remember that more ice is coming this morning according to the doomsdayers on last night's news. I'm sure we won't be leaving the house; John saw someone lose control of their car as he came home from his wedding last night, so the conditions are legitimately dangerous now. Fourteen hours to go. I toast Quinn's waffle and turn on cartoons and tell him to let me go back to sleep, but both kids are in and out of our bedroom with full bladders or requests for chocolate milk or tattle tales, so at 7:00 I decide to give up. Thirteen hours to go. We have cookies, which are helping me cope, but not really part of my attempt at a healthier post-holiday eating plan. The circus seal barks again, and I wonder how hard it will be to get to the store for more cough medicine. Stupid storm.

The Alex P. Keaton Gene

2007-01-12T21:14:00.000-06:00

Several months ago, Bryce and Quinn became obsessed with coins. I think it may have started when my dad mailed them some smart-looking miniature leather pouches filled with foreign coins from old trips; the idea was that the kids would think the foreign coins were really cool and different, but since the kids are deprived little urchins who barely even recognized U.S. coins, I think they just assumed the coins in the pouches were the same jingly shiny fun that John and I hoard from them every time they longingly pass a machine full of bouncy balls or candy. Those coins (Czech, I think) are long gone, probably under various couch cushions and possibly even in the cash registers of some unsuspecting local shopowners who assumed the cute pre-schoolers buying a new 50-cent dinosaur figure were paying with money distributed and guaranteed by the U.S. government.

Quinn lost the pouch that his coins came in at some point after all the coins were gone, and so he started picking up and pocketing any spare change he happened to find. Anytime John or I would get change back from a store, Quinn would demand it, adding it to the small stash in his pocket. Things have now progressed to the point that by the end of most days, Quinn's pants are lopsided with the weight of dozens of coins, and as he prepares for his bath, the first step he takes is to fish all the change out of his pants pocket and place it authoritatively on his dresser - always in the same spot next to the lamp. He's like a pint-sized middle class stereotype, going through the motions day in, day out, tomorrow this harrowing existence of coin collection and transportation starts all over again, sigh. It's become such an integral part of his life, though, that he becomes frantic if we dare not offer him coinage anytime we happen to make eye contact. I met John and the kids for dinner after work the other day and the first thing Quinn said to me was, "do you have any money? I need some money!!!" John, desperate for five seconds of quiet, handed him a dollar bill, which made Quinn livid: "I don't want this paper, I WANT SOME MONEY."

The other night at the dinner table, John said, "when I picked Bryce up from school, his teacher told me that he kept raising his hand and answering correctly on every single money problem." I looked at Bryce and asked what kind of problems they were. His eyes lit up in pride and excitement: "One of them was 37! One of them was 24!" I had no idea what he was talking about, so John said from what he'd been able to deduce, the kids had to figure out how many cents the teachers were displaying in random collections of coins...somewhere. On the chalkboard? In a PowerPoint presentation? On Bryce's desk? We have no idea, but after dinner he got some coins out and tried it with Bryce. I was reading to Quinn across the room with one eye on Bryce and John. John would lay out several coins and Bryce would scan them, then shout a number, "18! 18 cents!" "39!" "42!" and John would flash me a look that said, "yep" and then tell Bryce he was right and start over.

I've known for a long time that Bryce is a quick learner and very bright, but I have to admit that this new coin trick surprised me. To be honest, I've wondered for the past few months if he's in over his head with his current class. They have reading assignments where they are expected to read to their parents for a certain amount of time each day. Bryce is a year younger than 3/4 of his class, so when we started trying to do the reading assignments, it was a very frustrating experience. Bryce would whine and demand that *I* read the words, and I would start out patiently helping him sound things out, but within two or three pages of him slumping further and further into the folds of the couch and the pitch of his voice changing from whine to wail, I'd be sighing and grunting with failed attempts not to make my disdain for this whole reading assignment too obvious. There are a few books he reads now with minimal frustration, but even sitting through that exercise can be agonizingly slow and robotic. When? Tiny? Was? Tiny? He. Ly- like- liked? Licked! Me. Heee? St-stil-stilllll? Do- Du- Doooes! Reading assignment time: not my favorite 15 minutes of the day. (But, don't get me wrong, it's still much better than Teeth Brushing Time, with the obligatory protests and the nightly ear-shattering "AA- AA- AA- AAA!" which means "I! Need! To! Spit!" in Bryce's Mouthfulloftoothpaste-ese.) The difficulty he seems to have with the assignments has made me wonder if the demands of the class are too much for him right now. But when I heard about the money counting in school and then watched his tiny body jumping around in ecstasy as he correctly shouted out the amount of coins on the kitchen table, I realized that, to use a trite pop culture Dr. Phil term, his "currency" is -- literally -- currency. And judging by the weight and jingle-jangle soundtrack of Quinn's lopsided pants each night, apparently his is too.

Huh. I wonder why the thought of my kids one day simultaneously on Wall Street strikes fear into my heart.

S.A.D.

2007-01-09T22:14:00.000-06:00

My brother sent me a book that reminds me of all the intellectual things I don't do. When I read it, I feel a combination of appreciation for other people's intellectualism and shame for my lack thereof. I think, gee, I should really read more, I should really write more, hey! I know! I could post more frequently and make myself write! But I don't have time, or at least that's what I tell myself, because the reality is that I don't have the strength to face what's in my mind and on the tip of my tongue, that what has spent its time running through my mind lately has been NOT thinking, but turning up the radio on whatever inane station I've tuned into in my car, during the traffic battles that force me to recognize that in reality, right at that moment, I do have time to think. I just don't want to think beyond whatever noise is blaring in my ears because if I do, I have to ask myself hard, critical questions about things like lifestyle, priorities, long-term choices.

If I don't think about self-centered topics like that, the next natural progression is the rest of the world, and damn if I'm going to depress myself further by putting any thought or, god forbid, action into something that might help other people or improve someone else's life in some way. Oh no, I'd rather wallow in self pity for a while, then get up and go to my gas guzzling automobile and transport myself somewhere with shiny plastic crap and bright lights and ways to spend money, because when I spend money I kill two birds with one stone and accomplish both distraction and self-loathing, the two activities that most often keep me from admitting I have time to think.

It's a beautiful system I've worked out, really. Well, I should say it would be beautiful if it worked. But it doesn't work, because my brother sends me books with smart things typed on the pages, and I'm involuntarily pulled out of my distraction / self-loathing machine and beaten to an intellectual bloody pulp, left to cough and wheeze out my last pity-seeking breaths on the imagined Turkish rug of some imagined quintessential intellectual stereotype's gothic library. Dammit, I gasp, why can't you just let me listen to Kelly Clarkson in peace? Why must you make me think? I went to college, I gave at the office, now let me eek out my miserable suburban existence as if this never happened. I would love to be able to blame someone other than myself for my Sybil and Fight Club meet Dead Poets Society crazy-making, but I bring it all on myself. Or rather, I brought it on myself when I picked the comfortable corporate suburban existence over the socially and financially awkward option of moving stepkids and husband across the country for some vague, unknown potential life of urban intellect and some randomness involving dinner parties with eccentric, too-smart friends, old clunky desks piled with paper taking up more room in some small and probably smelly-but-endearing campus apartment than the necessary living and sleeping spaces. And sadly for me, I'm smart enough to know that even if we'd done something as insane as that, life would be even more chaotic and I'd have even more Intellectual Fight Club moments over which to torture myself because hi, I don't like chaos, I like my personal space. Smelly but endearing campus apartments don't afford someone with a large teenaged stepchild and two high maintenance mini-terrorists and a photographer husband whose office resembles a war zone a whole lot of Go Be A Big Smart Organized Intellectual Person space. Also, dinner parties? Yeah. They don't work so well when the hostess comes home and puts on her pajamas. Smart people prefer to discuss the latest Smart People Topics with other adults who wear something other than flannel elastic-waisted pants after 6:00 p.m. And somehow I know that the corporate politics I loathe would look suspiciously like the academic politics I would be initially, stupidly shocked to encounter; I know that my Denial-Anger-Bargaining-Depression-Acceptance cycle of shaking hands with corporate america would look exactly like the Denial-Anger-Bargaining-Depression-Acceptance cycle of crying in disappointment over life in academia. Still, I can't escape the quintessential intellectual in his/her/its gothic library of torture and forced reflection, no matter how long I stare at the blank screen or turn up the radio or rant about traffic, my hair, my job, or some other fleeting and empty topic germaine to my chosen life.

This is a difficult time of year for me. In college, winter quarter was misery on ice, a seemingly endless cloud-filled, freezing day. It was the quarter when the authorities charged with monitoring undergraduate behavior were most concerned about suicide. Each of my three winters there felt like an eternity; I considered leaving the school every single year during that time. No matter how many assignments and responsibilities I had on my plate (and there were always a ridiculous amount), the days dragged on in a dark, depressing haze. For years, I thought this was because of the drastic combination of Chicago weather, the school's demands, and the culture of the campus. Now, almost a decade later, I realize those things were merely icing on the cake for me, because every January and February find me in the same basic funk. Three years ago as my birthday approached, my sister-in-law asked me what I was planning. I had just started a new job after being home with the kids for 15 months. In theory I should have at least felt stressed and invigorated. Instead, I told her I didn't have any plans, I really didn't care about my birthday, I just felt like I was in a funk. "Yeah," she said, "birthdays just don't hold as much excitement as you get older." Huh, no, that didn't seem like the right sentiment, but I went with it. This year, as the holidays ended and I endured the mini-flu from hell and later saw the doctor for my resulting trusty winter sinus infection and hack-hack-hack-up-a-lung-and-forget-ever-working-out-again cough, I realized that the past few weeks of waning blog posts and the vague unidentifiable frustration and the sickness are recurring. I even checked the archives on this site and found confirmation. The blog was still pretty new at this time last year, so the irritability and depression might not come through as strongly, but re-reading the posts was like a swift kick to the head. Hello, seasonal depression, you sly dog, you!! Introduce yourself sooner next time, 'kay? I would have offered you some damned hot chocolate or some Wellbutrin if only I'd known you wanted to hang out and watch Fight Club together!

Hodge Podge

2007-01-03T15:02:00.001-06:00

I feel compelled to write something here just because this space exists as an open tablet, and because we originally started this site as a way to record things about our life. But lately it's hard to find a lot of time to write about our life, considering how much time we're spending on the acutal living part. And that's not to say that the living is all grand and amazing or even stressful and demanding - just time consuming, all of it. Even the parts where we're sitting around staring at each other in a little bit of irritation and a lot of fatigue are too time-consuming for me to stop and sit down at the computer to try to record it. We'd rather sling mud at one another and dredge up old arguments, because that's a lot healthier, and it sets a much better example for our kids, who we're obviously hoping will grow up and make some lucky therapists very, very rich. Vacations tend to take their toll on us, whether we stay in town or trek across the country in a moving prison cell with our own miniature wardens sitting behind us dictating our every move. All that togetherness combined with the Chaos Extravaganza that is Bryce and Quinn on Vacation...well, it's a challenge. Let's just leave it at that.

I took a week off of work and rather than spend that time lounging on the couch and watching Christmas movies all day, we thought running the family ragged would be a good idea. As always, by the time John's birthday rolled around on the day before New Year's Eve, I was shivering and groaning in pain with every step, my body hosting some biological version of a show called, HEY STUPID! I TOLD YOU TO SLOW DOWN. It was a traveling show; John hosted the next night, and there was a bonus performance at 2:00 a.m. on New Year's Day courtesy of Bryce. Hello, 2007. Are you done sucking the life out of us now? Thanks.

On the bright side, thanks to the new furniture, the kids are now sharing a bedroom. Why I consider this a bright side, I don't know, except for the fact that the months of anxiety leading up to the act of putting the two little plotting terrorists together are finally over, and now we're left to deal only with the actual reality of the situation rather than the horrors our own minds were concocting. To be honest, they aren't staying up any later or causing any more nightly chaos than they were before, which is why we decided to go ahead and take the plunge to combining their rooms in the first place. That doesn't mean things aren't chaotic and the kids aren't getting out of bed six dozen times after the fourth or fifth good night kiss - just that it's no worse than it was before.

During all of the running around and subsequent death bed avoidance, we learned that Quinn is a puzzle master. You put a puzzle in front of that kid, he'll put it together. He has anger management issues as we all know, so he still grunts and pounds on the table in frustration if a piece doesn't click into place within .067 seconds of his initial try, but other than that, a puzzle buys us at least five minutes of relative peace. I'll have to tell the SuperCuts people about that. They'll be interested, because when I took Quinn there the other day for a hair cut, he sat peacefully on the waiting bench while they all avoided eye contact with me, then when one of them reluctantly called his name, he unleashed his special powers and shattered their crooked mirrors and melted their cheap scissors and caused mild panic in the tri-county area. Today he went to school with shaggy hair. I dare someone to mention it to either of us.

Christmas logic can last all year, you know.

2006-12-28T23:16:00.001-06:00

On Christmas Day, I ate some eggnog scones we ordered from a bakery we love. I remembered tonight, at what felt like the 14th restaurant meal in two days, why we don't order from that bakery more often. Eggnog Scones or a glorious loaf of Pumpkin-Chocolate Chip Bread (read: CAKE. Yummy, yummy cake) seem innocent enough on their own, but when combined with the anti-logic that is the holiday spirit around our house, a simple scone with Christmas Brunch quickly turns into an extra roll or three at Christmas Dinner, which quickly turns into a few cookies before bed that night, which quickly turns into a five-pound bag of sugar for breakfast the next morning and seven or eight tons of fried cheese for lunch, not to mention the harmless few bottles of Bailey's Irish Cream, because it's Christmas! Everything is justifiable!

The kids could be whining at a volume level of SOMEONE IS IMPALING ME and my nostrils would flare in anger as I brought another bite of something lard-filled to my mouth and John would look at me imploringly and say, "oh, let them have the chainsaw. It's Christmas!" It was this same logic and attitude that led to an inordinate amount of money (post-Christmas presents) being spent in an inordinate amount of time (post-Christmas). (Note to self: Do not take vacations and stay home with sugar and alcohol anymore. You will be broke within 2.5 days.) Looking back on this phenomenon, I can't even say what started it all. Oh, sure, I could blame it on John's perfected psychological torture method - the method whose very nature requires that he deny its existence, because it consists of months worth of planning and careful product placement and orchestrated scenarios involving coincidences that would never occur in real life, all so he can present his case for a brand new ridiculously expensive gaming/networking system in the most seemingly innocuous and un-obvious ways so as not to incur the famous Wrath of Kristen, that impenetrable force of logic and practicality that always, without fail, shuts down any idea that involves fun, money, or frivolity. But as it turns out, when I'm in a sugar coma, distracted by flighty, crazy in-laws and said in-laws' kids and also my own ceaselessly moving, screaming, demanding children, John's psychological torture method is quite effective - and I'm not sure if that says more about the method, or about how I just publicly declared my weak spot to my nemesis.

Once I'd acquiesced to the technology playground for our house, a new set of bedroom furniture for the kids seemed a perfectly acceptable way to spend any leftover money we might have wanted to use for groceries or the mortgage, which we can totally put on credit cards if we need to, DUH. And because our vacuum cleaner exploded in a burning flash of light and screeches as we prepared for the new bedroom furniture, we were able to combine the two necessary trips through Satan's Butthole, I mean Best Buy, into one. Within 24 hours, John had come home with a trunk full of electronics and I'd come home with a few blue pieces of paper detailing delivery times and serving as a constant reminder that, wow, furniture is expensive.

I guess it's good that our house has been the gluttony capital of the world for the past few days, because I've at least been able to temporarily drown my financial sorrows in mounds of chocolate, wine, cheese, bread, and scones. The few trips to the gym I've managed have felt a little phony, I'll admit, but I'll still be clinging to those trips in June when I'm bemoaning my lack of progress. I'll say something like, "this year was so much better than past years - at least I WENT to the gym, at least I TRIED to keep exercising...imagine if I HADN'T!" and then I'll loudly sip the last of my half-cup serving of Bailey's, pop another truffle into my mouth, and tell Bryce to walk the four steps across the living room to pick up the remote control for me, because July will seem like a GREAT time to start over, kind of like January does right now.

The Longest Santa Claus Line Ever

2006-12-24T14:10:00.000-06:00

As you would expect of us, the Christmas season is one of the more chaotic times of year around here. In addition to the holidays, about 50% of our extended family has a birthday between Thanksgiving and New Year's. Not one year has gone by since we've been married that we haven't experienced at least one car trip where I'm wrapping a just-bought gift, John is speeding because we're running late, and we're both on edge, Happy Holidays, damn it! This year we tried so hard to avoid that scenario. As soon as John had some free weekends, we were the picture of efficiency - grocery shopping, cleaning, making gift lists, scheduling shopping times - we even, for the first time ever, prepared tins of goodies for our neighbors. They weren't really sure who we were when we dropped them off, since they probably all identify us as the Dysfunctional Family Who Should Remain Behind Locked Doors, but that's just a small detail. We delivered goodies; so what if it took us eight years to be decent human beings?

The other night, though, as we were scrambling to wrap all the presents we so efficiently bought in time for Christmas, I realized that we had forgotten a pretty major, time-bound activity: taking the kids to see Santa at the mall. I was willing to let it go, but the next day I had to buy one more thing for John, so Bryce and I went to the mall together, and there was Santa's lovely green velvet chair, and there was the garland-bedecked photo background, and there was the mile-long line of blank-faced parents and strollers and wound up toddlers, and there was Santa himself, looking almost as blank-faced as the 12,000 parents forming two semi-circles of a line around him, an only partially in-control mob, holding his biggest fans at bay. Bryce's mind visibly raced, then he looked at me, alarmed: "Today is the day before Christmas Eve! If I don't tell Santa what I want today, it will be too late, and he won't know what to bring!! Mom!" I couldn't think of a way to get out of this, but I made a feeble attempt: "You wrote him a letter. Besides, Santa knows what you want. Don't worry. And anyway, look how LONG that line is! We'd have to wait FOREVER. And Quinn and Dad aren't here."

Yeah, that didn't work. We drove home, picked up John and Quinn, and went back to the mall. Where. Santa. Was. On. Break. We thought we could wait it out. About half an hour went by before Santa came back, and then the line started moving about four inches every ten minutes. Dinner time was approaching, it was hot, the kids hadn't eaten since lunch, and we had nothing with us to keep them entertained in an enclosed, small space around dozens of people with quiet, still kids - if there has ever been a more perfect recipe for disaster, I haven't seen it. Quinn was, at all times, either writhing on the floor or calling Santa's name from 30 feet away. I kept telling him that he had to wait his turn to talk to Santa, but he would only turn and scowl at me and say, "I NEED TO TELL SANTA SOMETHING!" The only way we could get the kids out of there was by promising that we'd come back on Christmas Eve and be the first people in line.

The Head Elf told John that Santa would start his Christmas Eve shift at noon, but when we showed up today at 11:45 (Early! Look at us!), the line was suspiciously long, and Santa was already in his chair, smiling / staring blankly at the eerily happy elf in the green vest snapping pictures without warning. By the time we made it to the front of the line, John had walked Bryce to the food court, ordered food for the kids (who we apparently prefer to drag into long lines while they're starving, because we really enjoy being stuck in one spot with kids whose blood sugar is low and who already have a penchant for screaming in public), presented a veritable picnic on the waiting line bench for them, cleaned up their fast food aftermath, and taken about six dozen pictures of the whole thing. The sign at the entrance said Santa started at 9:00 a.m. That piece-of-crap Head Elf must be a liar. Right as the kid in front of us was hopping into Santa's lap, the guy in line behind us said, "Just watch. As soon as we get up there, Santa will go on his lunch break." I looked at John with death in my eyes and said, "For the love of God, if we get up there and Santa walks away..." John totally called my bluff and said with a little sarcasm and a lot of challenging disdain, "What? What will you do?" He and that liar Head Elf are both in the Piece-of-Crap Club, apparently.

Luckily Santa didn't start his break, and when the kid in front of us was done, Bryce and Quinn, up until now quivering with excitement and barely containing themselves long enough to keep from knocking over the mall decorations or hanging from my purse strap, approached Santa as if he were some kind of exotic animal who, while enticing and tantalizing, might also tear them limb from limb if they made the wrong move. I helped them into Santa's lap while he gazed into the distance and dreamed of one day awaking from his coma. When I backed up for the picture to be taken, Santa seemed to regain enough consciousness to ask the kids what they wanted for Christmas. I tried not to make my interest level too obvious, but Bryce has changed what he claims to want for Christmas every day for the past three weeks, and Quinn just follows suit. I didn't hear Bryce's answer, but I saw Quinn mouth, "a toy house" and Bryce told me after he was done that he asked Santa for "a hiding place."

Two days in line for the kids to ask Santa for completely random nonsense. Yep, that seems about right for us.

Mouths of Babes

2006-12-22T10:19:00.000-06:00

The other night we took the kids out to look at the neighborhood Christmas lights. Every time we came within three blocks of an outdoor yard display nativity scene, Quinn's head would snap around instantly, neck craning, chest pressed with all his might against the seatbelt straps, saying with frantic energy, "I WANNA SEE THE BABY JESUS, I CAN'T SEE THE BABY JESUS!" At first we didn't think anything about it; he attends pre-school at a church where they've been busy explaining the Christian Christmas Story and he's familiar with the traditional manger scene. But it became a little ridiculous when he could pick out a nativity scene on a street littered with holiday displays that included giant blow-up snowglobes, Santas, snowmen, and light post-sized candy canes. Quinn has always had a knack for finding small details among clutter; his favorite books are the I Spy books (I haven't introduced him to Where's Waldo? yet - I need to mentally prepare for the nightly ritual of "reading" those). During our Christmas Light Tour, whenever he yelled to see the baby Jesus, we had to stop the car and let him gaze out the window, studying every detail of the nativity scene, but primarily baby Jesus; apparently, it's his newest obsession.

I don't identify myself as a Christian, but most of my extended family does, and we live in a region where the majority of the population does, too. I want the kids to have as well-rounded a world view as possible, which doesn't mean that I want to exclude any and all aspects of Christianity from their lives, but it does mean that I also want them to be exposed to other belief systems and traditions. As the years have gone by, John and I haven't exactly written a detailed plan for how we'll accomplish this, and I certainly wasn't planning on doing it in a discussion with a five-year-old, but after all the baby Jesus talk during the Christmas Light Tour, Bryce cornered me last night at bedtime. He lay there on his pillow looking from me to the ceiling to the top of his eyelids, and as always he used his hands to emphasize his deep curiosity and sense of confusion: "How could he be born a baby and then grow up to be a spirit?"

This is exactly how he started the conversation, so I was understandably confused, myself: "Who? What are you talking about?"

He sighed. He gets so tired of always having to explain everything to me. "The baby Jesus! I am asking how he could have been born a little baby and then grown up into a spirit! I just don't understand how that could happen. How did he do that? (Oh, sorry I hit you with my hand when I said that.)"

"Oh. Hmm. Well, let me see. He didn't grow up into a 'spirit,' per se. He was a human, which is why he was born a baby. Christians believe he was the son of God."

"Yeah, God is the same thing as Jesus."

"That's what Christians believe."

"What is a Christian, anyway? Oh, I know! Christians are people in churches who read the bible." and he held his hands up together in front of his face, palms facing him, creating an open book.

"Yes, some of them go to churches. There are also other people who aren't Christians who go to different types of churches and read different books, and believe different things."

"Like who?"

"A couple of them off the top of my head are Muslims and Buddhists. But there are a LOT more in the world than that."

"What do they believe?"

"Uh. That's complicated. And I don't know all the details, but Muslims call God 'Allah' and they don't believe Jesus was the son of God. They believe in a prophet named Mohammed, who taught people how to love God."

"What about the other people you said?"

"Buddhists?"

"Yeah, Buddhists. What do they believe? And I STILL don't know how Jesus grew up into a spirit!"

"I told you he didn't 'grow up into a spirit.' He taught people about God and about how to love each other, and Christians believe he's the son of God, which is probably why you're thinking of him that way."

"But that's not really true."

"Well, that depends on what you believe--"

"Well we don't know if it's true! We don't know what God looks like, or how big he is."

"And we don't know if God is a 'he.'"

"Or a 'she.' Or if God has lips or a crown....well of course he doesn't have lips or a crown!"

Lips or a crown? This is what happens when you have a religious discussion with a five-year-old. I nodded and prepared to leave his room, but on my way out the door, he stopped me again: "How come spirits never die? I mean, I know PEOPLE die, but how do spirits live forever? I don't understand."

"Dude, I have no. Idea. How to answer you."

"Well I know. Spirits are bigger than the sun, which is very big, very bright, and very hot. So that is how they live forever. Right?"

"Can't we just discuss how Santa fits down the chimney like other five-year-olds do with their normal, sane moms? Please?"

Strife, Interrupted

2006-12-20T11:31:00.000-06:00

Lately every time I try to leave a comment on a blogspot blog, Blogger forces me to sign in again, and then brings me to my dashboard and FORCES me at gunpoint to post something here. So here I am. I was trying to leave a comment for GCQ, but now she may never know. (GCQ, love your tree. That's what I was going to say. Unfortunately Blogger is holding me hostage. Sorry.)

It's funny that this is happening, because lately it seems like everything I set out to do gets hijacked out of nowhere and against my will by some completely random activity. The other night I innocently went to hang up a new suit I bought for work, but that five-second act turned into a four-hour project. Why, instead of wrapping all of the presents piling up in our pathetic excuse for a "walk-in" closet, I thought a better way to free up some space in there would be to examine / try on / categorize / re-organize every piece of clothing I own. Strangely, there is still no space to "walk" in the closet (it might be all those unwrapped presents on the floor), but there is a lot more space for the dozens of empty hangers on the rack now. And that's great, because the crowded clothing rack was really taking a lot away from my kids' holiday season, but those still unwrapped gifts, the ones they keep eagerly looking for under the tree? Obviously a lower a priority than the closet organization.

I was telling John a story the other day about how a friend I hadn't seen in a few months had told me I looked great during a conversation about diet and exercise, and that I'd responded with some or other complaint about body fat storage and what I need to work on, and John said, "You don't know how to accept a compliment." He's right, but I think it's less about not accepting compliments and more about how I tend to focus on Fixing What's Wrong. I've said before that it's not that I don't see and appreciate the positive, and that's true. But I might not always communicate that I see it, because what I do communicate is whatever I'm trying to work out in my mind at that time - whether it's how I need to increase my protein and stop drinking margaritas if I ever expect to see the changes I want to see in my body, or how I need to do a better job of addressing the kids' behaviors and not letting them pull a big reaction out of me, or how our entire household needs more structure and less chaos and it must be on my shoulders to identify exactly what that will look like.

I got an e-mail yesterday from a very nice reader that made me realize - or remember, since I'm sure I already knew this - that none of you can read my mind. You don't know about the recurring good, sweet, hilarious things that go on around here unless I actually mention them, which, many times, I don't. This is completely consistent with who I am. I focus intently on whatever difficulties I'm trying to overcome. It's why I don't want to give Hannah a pat on the back just for getting out of bed in the morning. It's why I don't tend to say "good job" to someone unless what they've done seems above and beyond what I would consider to be every day general life expectations (whether my expectations match others' or not). It's why what I talk about tends to be either serious and difficult or sarcastic and self-deprecating. The positive is there, but it's on the back burner for me, it's something I don't have to focus on so intently, it's something I don't have to overcome - and therefore I tend not to communicate about it. What results is a perception that all of my experiences are negative or difficult or extreme, that my kids are disrespectful of me 100% of the time, that I teeter on the edge of a breakdown every waking moment.

So, amidst my stream of intended horror stories, my attempts to mentally work through and thus solve every single large or small problem in my life and the life of my family, I'm interrupting myself to say something. It seems like a very basic experience to me (maybe even one most would consider "expected"), but it represents all of the good on the back burner: Every night after I pull into the driveway after work and struggle through the door with my handfuls of gym bag and purse and keys, those kids - the ones to whom I give hyperbolic nicknames like "demon" and "dark lord" when I'm in my "work it out mentally" phases - stop what they're doing, whatever it is, and run to me, smiling, calling my name, telling me they missed me and they need - NEED - a hug and a kiss. Last night after his bath, Quinn was watching a Christmas special on TV and I walked in prepared to argue with him about bedtime, but I said only, "Quinn, it's time to read a story and go to bed, buddy." He stood up in his chair to be eye-level with me, put his arms out for me to hold him, and said, "with YOU, mommy?" as if to say he was fine with bedtime, he was fine with anything, really, as long as I would hold him. As I carried him upstairs his head rested against my shoulder and his legs dangled around my waist; he sighed and closed his eyes and made the soft smack-smack-smack sleepy sound with his mouth, perfectly at peace, content, quiet, still. Trust me when I tell you that the miracle of that is not lost on me.

Home on the Fringe

Garage Sale

Mr. In Control vs. Mr. Entertainment

If that's not a postmodern expression of injustice, I don't know what is.

Reparations, 2009

For The Birds

A Taste

Slash

waterfall kiss

spin

saddle pillow

Bike and Basket

mannequin with hard hat II

mannequin with hard hat

While on a walk

I just want things to work: The Cement Truck Episode

MRI'm not looking forward to it.

Eating it too.

Yin / Yang

Economies of Scale

High Note

Look. Someone *invented* him.

Inevitable: Back to the Pack (of weirdos)

Fewer Volcanoes

Monday Night Summary

So much for that bright idea.

The wrong cave, indeed.

Reclamation

Touching on Various Subjects

Post Title Here

Abduction

Vicious Cycle

Sound of Silence

Weiner Takes All

Disaster Zone

Dress the Trash

Trash the Dress

Plenty of Room

And last night we had drinks with some retired Floridians.

Why do I bother?

Fall Break

Don't Go Out in Public With Them

Top Ten, Schmop Ten

Top Ten Things I Haven't Mentioned: #8, School

Top Ten Things I Haven't Mentioned: #9, Fade to Noir

Top Ten Things I Haven't Mentioned: #10, Gliding

Out

Summer, Part I

Pleomorphic Adenoma

Blink of an Eye

One Down

Unqualified

Alarmingly Complicated, Eh?

Fair(e)

It is what it is.

Housewarming

Pledge

Chasing the white dress

This is Ridiculous

Transition

Busiest Week Ever

Gettin' Jiggy

Perfect Timing

Luckily the new house has lots of extra shelves for all the wine.

This Week Happens, Sleep Eludes Me

Step Right Up

I'm an enigma.

Trust In Me: A Video Essay by Jonathan

A Balanced Account

Polarized

Holy Mole-y

Eustress

Who knew?

The Latest from the Fringe

Mutiny

Let's start right here.

Should Be Outlawed

The pit of my stomach: where anxiety goes to die.

Lecturus Interruptus

It's not about the drinking, Meredith.

Look. Someone invented him.