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Off for a week, folks. Seven whole days without seeing the kids; seven days to be Non-Mom, to connect with an old friend in Oregon and then go do lit'ry stuff in Park City, Utah. I know you'll struggle through without me. Especially you, you little heckler in the back row. Yeah, you.
Come to think of it, wasn't Kim Philby a spy?
I don't know how they do it. I've been a single parent for four days now, while hubby is on a business trip, and while things go well most of the time (especially meals, since when he is gone the kids and I basically eat over the sink), there are times when I just do not know how children of single parents grow up to be adults without being murdered by the overwhelmed person with the sole responsibility for their care.
Yesterday I got up at 6, slugged down two cups of coffee, got the kids up, dressed, breakfasted, teeth brushed, hair done, backpacks packed lunches ready and out the door; then I worked in the office for four hours or so; then I mowed the side yard and pruned the azalea bush; then I went to physical therapy for the arthritic back, then picked Rebecca up at school to take her and the sewing machine (which keeps jamming) back to the sewing machine place so the two of us could learn how to operate the damn thing. Endured one snit fit from Rebecca on the way because she wanted to eat dinner at McDonald's and I said no, but got past that, arrived at the store and then had to wait while an old lady in front of me told the proprietor about her vacation in minute, excroooooociating detail. Finally get my turn, get the kinks out of the machine, back in the car, go pick up Suzanne, get back home and announce that we are having meatballs for dinner. The kids have requested meatballs on many occasions, mind you, but somehow this announcement now creates mass consternation. "We're having WHAT?" Suzanne yells, as if I have just announced we are eating sauteed monkey shit. (She was the one who really really wanted meatballs.) I serve them anyway, ignoring the gagging noises. Rebecca eats two and then asks for a brownie. "No," I say. "You didn't eat enough dinner to qualify for dessert."
"WHAT??" she says, as if I have just announced I am running away from home with the front singer for Counting Crows. Suzanne, meanwhile, is whining that Rebecca has a sewing machine, can she have a sewing machine too, please please?? Somehow, while she is doing this and I am clearing the table, she manages to spray shaving cream all over the bathroom and spill a glass of water on the floor in the family room. I decide to distract her with the promise of an art project, which we will do as soon as we take Rebecca to her math tutor's house. I have to take the project out of her hands at least six times while Rebecca is putting on her shoes, saying each time: "Wait." This word is not in her vocabulary. We drop Rebecca off, but not before Suzanne has a snit fit in the car because she wants to set up a blanket tent over her seat and will NOT sit down until it is configured correctly, and thus is not in her seat belt. "Just a minnit," she keeps saying calmly, while Rebecca and I both scream at her, "SIT DOWN AND FASTEN YOUR SEAT BELT!!" Back at the house, Suzanne and I embark on the art project, which involves bangle bracelets and beads--millions and millions of tiny little beads. Why I thought this was a good idea I don't know, but Suzanne takes to it at first and has a great time, even though we are making a huge mess. Then, when we've made all the bracelets, I get the brilliant idea of glue and construction paper and sprinkling beads on the glue to create designs. Suzanne is entranced until she tries to write her name and messes up a letter.
"I CAN'T WRITE MY NAME I CAN'T DO IT!!!!!" she wails, and proceeds into meltdown. Ooo-kay. I figure we have just enough time to vaccuum up the mess before picking up Rebecca so I haul out the vaccuum cleaner--and then I have to fight Suzanne for it, because Suzanne has never met a vaccuum cleaner she is not in love with. We have managed to scatter teensy little beads over the entire house; I even feel them between my toes when I walk into the living room. The clean-up, obviously, takes three times as long as the art project, especially when it's being done by two people snarling, "GIVE ME THE VACCUUM THIS MINUTE!" "NO I WANT IT GIVE IT TO ME!!" But we get it done, pick up Rebecca, I send the kids to the showers, and suddenly the end of the day is looming. Thank. You. God.
Then Rebecca appears, sopping wet from the shower. "I'm hungry, Mom," she says plaintively. This is the kid who swore at dinner that two meatballs stuffed her so full that another bite would result in projectile vomiting. "Eat an apple," I say.
"WHAT??" She recoils as if I have just suggested that she should go lick the toilet. "Have a glass of milk," I say. She looks at me as if to say, You are not my mother, you evil alien woman. Meanwhile, "I want chocolate milk!" Suzanne wails, so I serve up chocolate milk to her while Rebecca storms upstairs in a huff. "Go pick some books to read," I tell Suzanne, and head into the living room to turn out the lights....to discover that Suzanne has somehow, in the 30 seconds of free time she has had since arriving home, constructed ANOTHER pillow fort in the living room. Pillows and blankets are strewn around, the chairs are overturned so as to hold the blankets in place, and I scream, "WHAT???" as if I've just discovered a corpse. "Goddammit, I spend all day picking up this house and 10 minutes with the living room in order is all I ask!"--and as I rant I snatch up blankets and a teddy bear and hurl them into Suzanne's room, while Suzanne wails, "I'm sorry Mommy!", hurls herself into bed and burrows under the blanket.
Five minutes later, I crawl in beside her. "It's been a long day, sweetie," I say. "Sorry I yelled."
"It's okay," she says. "But mommy, next time, don't throw the teddy bear. It hurts him. He's alive, you know."
"Okay," I say. I pat teddy on his stomach. "Does teddy forgive me too?" She puts her ear up to his face and listens a minute, then waggles her hand. "Eh. Maybe."
I don't know why cats like to hang out around computers, but I've always had cats (with brief hiatuses due to landlords, spousal objections, etc.) and they have always displayed an inordinate interest in what I'm doing on this machine. It's almost as if they think....there's cat food inside. In this picture, I think it's beginning to occur to her: Maybe...not.
The idiocy of cats never ceases to amaze me, especially when you consider that it's pretty clear they have domesticated humans, not the other way around. (Not a roaring endorsement of the supposed superiority of the human brain.) Cats will, when it's raining, go to the front door, meow to be let out and then, confronted with evidence that torrents of water are pouring from the sky, look at you accusingly, as if to say, "I could call the SPCA on you for this." They then trot to the back door and meow to be let out. When you open that door, they always look stunned, absolutely poleaxed with horror. "GodDAMN, it's raining out the back door, too!" I figure the basic tabby cat domesticated humans millions of years ago because it was becoming clear that, evolutionarily speaking, they were slated for that Big Slag Heap in the Sky. Yeah, they hunt. But I have seen Roxy spend loooong moments stalking... an oak leaf. My former cat, the dear departed Ralph, used to catch rodents all the time, but he worked on a catch-and-release basis, somewhat like U.S. immigration policy: he nailed the little critters at the border, brought them inside the Big House and then said, "Now, getouttahere, you wild and crazy guys!" Which they did. Some people get a cat to rid themselves of a rodent problem; we never had a rodent problem until we acquired a cat. The only thing Ralph ever learned to do, and this was absolutely seared into his tiny little brain, was to come running when he heard the can opener. He lived to be 19 and this behavior continued up to the day of his death, some 12 years after I quit buying cat food that required a can opener to get into. "What? Tomato sauce? But I thought..." Ralph, bless his heart, keeled over and died at the food trough, which is the way I suspect he would have wanted to go. His interest in food was not just a hobby; he was One Big Mother. Part Maine coon cat, he tipped the scales at 22 pounds; a veterinary assistant who had to carry him upstairs once accused me of feeding him concrete. Roxy, in contrast, is svelte, and quite beautiful, which she knows; periodically, she will throw herself on the floor and roll around like a naked Marilyn Monroe on a bearskin rug, and you can just read the thought balloon above her head: "Ain't I purty?" That's it. That's her One Big Party Trick...sort of like some women I have known. Unlike them, Roxy is assured of Tender Vittles for the rest of her life, which just goes to prove my thesis: as dumb as they are, they are smarter'n us.
Just read a post on Dooce about relationship deal-breakers, and I can safely say that my dating history is a vivid testimony to the fact that you can have too few. I have friends who spent the better part of two decades slapping their foreheads and saying to each other, "What is she thinking?" when they met my boyfriends. Well, I was lonely. I wanted to get laid. These are horrible, terrible reasons for dating someone, and they are at the top of my advice list to my daughters when they reach dating age, but I was a sloooow learning in the dating department and accumulated more than my share of painful, awkward, stone-stupid moments in my quest for Mr. Right. Here are a few:
1. I, too, dated a Handyman. He was the son of my doctor, who set us up, and if you don't think THAT's wierd--having a boyfriend's father who has already peeked at your nether regions--well, you just don't know what weird is. Mr. Handyman was nice, and gave me a flashlight on our first date. I think we went out three times. What can I say? It was just too weird to last.
2. Then there was the guy who, after an argument, went into my bathroom, raked my nail file across his wrists enough to get a little blood flowing, and then announced that he would die before he would live without me (or some melodramatic pronouncement to that effect). I dated him for several months after that. Yes. I know.
3. The psychologist who grabbed my hand as I was gnawing on a thumbnail during a movie--this was our first date--and said, "Don't do that" and then couldn't for the life of him figure out why I never wanted to see him again. Operating principle: You can slit your wrists in my bathroom, just don't tell me not to chew my nails.
4. The sweet Jewish guy who told me on our first date that he was was willing to talk about marriage providing I converted to Orthodox Judaism, where I'd keep kosher and have a ritual bath every month after my period was over so we could resume having sex. Which, mind you, there is nothing whatsoever wrong with. But I was raised a Southern Fundamentalist, and the culture warp this represented, not to mention the thought of our families in the same room, threatened to fry my synapses like a mess o' squirrel brains. Plus: first date??
5. The genius writer who slapped me around, cut me off from my friends, routinely humiliated me in public and once threw a public tantrum because he had caught a band member in a nightclub looking at me. (My eyes were closed at the time; I was sleepy.) Operating principle: you can slap me around, humiliate and isolate me, but DON'T, goddamn it, tell me not to chew my nails.
Finally, like an alcoholic, I reached a point where I realized that my dating life was out of control, that I couldn't fix it, and I asked for help from a Higher Power: i.e., a dating service. Here I rapidly learned that a) the Washington, D.C. metro area is full, I mean FULL, of approaching-retirement civil servants who have ditched Wife #1 and are look for a newer model; b) most of them live at least 40 miles outside the Beltway; and c) they really think they can get away with lying about their age and weight. This was an old-fashioned dating service (Internet dating was still in its infancy), and the way it worked was that after I'd signed up and put my profile in their books, anybody who saw your profile and was interested in you would tell the dating service, which would then send you a cheery little postcard in the mail that said, "Somebody wants to meet you!" The first time this happened I schlepped down the road to the dating service office, opened the book to my admirer's profile number, and was greeted with a 60ish looking guy with a combover and a truly enormous beer gut, whose profile said he weighed 180. (Yeah, but which half?) Another time, I was leafing through the book, looking for a particular number, happened to see a really odd picture and thought, "Well, thank God, at least it's not the guy in the Star Trek costume." Oh, yes it was the guy in the Star Trek costume.
Finally, after I'd gotten completely jaded, I got one more card in the mail, put off going to see who it was for a week or so and finally went down to take a look--expecting, maybe, a Klingon this time. When I saw the picture my first thought was, "This guy is much too handsome to have a Ph.D." (the old "nobody good looking has any brains" bias, though usually it gets applied to women). The second thing I noticed was that he was five years younger. My third thought was: "Too young and too good-looking to be interested in me. There must be some mistake."
He was my first dating service date; I was his second. Exactly one year later, we got married. Today, after 12 years and two kids, he still puts up with me and my manifold neuroses. And he's still better looking.
When I was at the Washington Post and male editors got into some turf war over something, we reporter/hirelings would often joke about how the guys were repairing to the conference room for a Schlongfest--otherwise known as whipping our one's dick, slapping it on the table and announcing, "Mine's the biggest!" (Women editors could play this game, too, but were obviously disadvantaged.) It was more sophisticated than that, of course; these were grown-up men we're talking about, highly intelligent and accomplished in their professions. Still, a schlongfest was pretty much what it amounted to: the Alpha Male usually got his way or, on rare occasions, a new Alpha Male would be established after the bloodletting was over. Meanwhile, out in the newsroom, we would snicker amongst ourselves and--among us women--secretly gloat in our belief that women would never do anything so dumb.
It ain't true, ladies. When it comes to turf wars, women, too, revert to the rules of the playground. The only difference is that instead of comparing dick size, women (and here's the interesting part) resort to "shaming" behavior, in which one grown-up talks to other grown-ups as if they are children who have been doing naughty, naughty things. As in this classic of the genre, an e-mail I got this week on a loop I used to participate in. The title: "Cease and Desist." The message:
"I want to convey my deep sadness, disappointment and apologies to all of you for allowing a small group of individuals to use this member loop that belongs to you to stage some sort of demonstration. I am particularly saddened to see, for the first time in the history of our organization, a board member participate in such a self-centered, childish and disrespectful act.This loop belongs to all of you, and I cannot allow this acting out behavior to continue."
Now what, you ask, could have prompted this? Did somebody use the C word? Talk about their sex life in graphic detail? Talk about somebody else's sex life in graphic detail? Advocate overthrowing the government? Start dunning folks to buy Pampered Chef?
No, ladies; the crime here was that somebody (the "board member" in question, now a former board member) brought up a book for discussion that wasn't on the "approved topics" list. (This organization, by the way, is a volunteer group "dedicated to improving the lives of mothers through support, education and advocacy" and by promoting "the value of the work all mothers do." Yeah. Well.)
The interesting part here is the language. "Saddened to see." "Childish and disrespectful." "Disappointment." "Inappropriate." We've all heard stuff like this before, though rarely after, say, the age of 21 or so. Your mommy knew how to do this. Maybe, if you went to Catholic school, you could name a few nuns who were gifted in the finger-shaking and tongue-lashing department. Nurse Rachet, from "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"--now, she could dish it out. But what this reminded me of the most was the scene in "Dumbo" where all the fussy old lady elephants band together to exclude Dumbo and his mommy for a) looking different (Dumbo) and b) behaving "inappropriately" (Dumbo's mommy). But surely that's not all. Why else does this sound so familiar? Oh, yeah--now I remember. It's the kind of thing men say to women when they want to keep them in line. As in, "She's a bitch." (Translation: not ladylike.) As in, "Nice girls don't (fill in the blank)."
You gotta hand it to the guys here. A schlongfest is pretty straightforward: either you have the biggest dick in the room or you don't. Women, having no external genitalia to compete with, are forced to more subtle methods. We do the moral version of the schlongfest: my morals are so much better than yours; your behavior is so much more inappropriate than anything I would ever do; it's so unfortunate you have descended to such petty behavior. We don't compete over who has the biggest dick; we compete to see who has the highest moral standards. This is nothing unusual. It's the pattern of oppressed groups everywhere--to borrow the same language that's used to keep us down and apply it to each other.
So, okay, enough of this. No belaboring the subject; the worst thing to do when people behave badly is to keep hanging out with them, because your reputation will suffer. But it occurs to me, however, as I leave the building (so to speak) that women have no need of men to oppress us when we do such a damn fine job of doing it to ourselves.
So here's the deal: I have just finished a book. It's getting decent publicity, people are buying it (you can buy it too, from Amazon, by clicking on The Ghost in the House: Motherhood, Raising Children and Struggling with Depression), and if you don't want to do that you can read all about it in USA Today. So I have nothing whatsoever to complain about. Except that now I have to figure out what to do with the rest of my life.
This happens to me every time I finish a big project. I don't celebrate getting things done; I go into mourning. This is because I am neurotic as all hell and because I wouldn't know happiness if it rose up and bit me in the butt, which it has several times in my life. I am just way more practiced as misery, and so when I get to these interstices in my life, between projects, my first thought is always, OH MY GOD THIS IS IT. I'LL NEVER FIND ANYTHING USEFUL TO DO AGAIN.
Today I was thinking about how young you have to be to check into the Old Folks' Home, since obviously my usefulness to the human race is done and I have no further business taking up space on the planet.
My husband is familiar with these desolate stretches of my psyche. "Here we go again," he says, and straps on his headphones to watch ESPN. The kids aren't interested in anything except whether they get to stay up past bedtime since there is no school tomorrow (election day). There is nobody here to share my angst except the cat, Roxy, who will share anybody's angst as long as they know how to open a packet of Tender Vittles. So it's me and the cat tonight, sharing our long, dark, lonely night of the soul. It's okay; don't mind me. I'll just be sitting here in the dark, facing the abyss. I'm fine. Really. (Sound of stifled sobs). And so....(deep, heartfelt sigh) to bed.
Me, going into the bathroom last night to prepare for an evening engagement at the local bookstore:
"Okay, people! I am going to get ready now! I promise you, when I come out of this bathroom I am going to be BEE-YOO-TI-Ful."
Suzanne, who is five: "Yeah, but you'll still be OLD."
My nine-year-old daughter absolutely loved crocodile hunter Steve Irwin, who died this week while swimming with stingrays in Australia. But she wasn't surprised he got killed. Like me, she was only surprised at the way it happened, and that it hadn't happened sooner.
Irwin was stung to death by a stingray, which normally are pretty docile creatures. I've been scuba diving and encountered a stingray or two, but when I did I mustered every ounce of physical courage I possessed (which isn't much), hung absolutely still in the water and let the stingray swim over me. It passed up my face, over the top of my head and down my back, as if it were checking my pockets for crumbs (which it was, in a way) and then it swam away. It was an interesting moment--but would I ever seek out a stingray and horse around with it? Hell, no. Those things have stingers. That's why they call them stingrays.
Irwin, however, was famous for, and made millions of dollars out of, getting up close and personal with wild animals. He said, and I believe him, that it was because he loved them and wanted the world to appreciate them in their natural glory. Maybe so, but the reasoning still seemed a little faulty to me. I love my husband, too, but if I got in his face all the time I do believe he would get a little testy. It always seemed very odd to me that a man who said he loved animals couldn't give them the basic respect of letting them have their own space. Which, in the case of wild animals, is a healthy distance.
I am sorry for his wife and children; no family should lose its dad so young. But Irwin's death did not surprise my daughter--and maybe it will serve as a cautionary tale for our Sea-World, Crocodile-Hunter, circus-going society that nature is not a Disney production, animals are not put on this planet for our entertainment and that wild things should be observed respectfully, from a distance, and left the fuck alone.
The Blogging for Books contest at The Zero Boss blog invites us to celebrate the back-to-school season by writing about some point in our lives when we:
Okay, I'll bite.
I'm choosing number 2, because it was such a wonderful, empowering insight.
The year was 1984. I was in my 20s (okay, late 20s). I'd never left my hometown of Atlanta. My lifetime dream had been to write for the Atlanta Constitution, and I'd gotten there three years earlier. By this point, I was discovering that maybe my lifetime dream had been too small. I was restless and bored, so I applied for a one-year fellowship for legal affairs reporters at Yale Law School--and, much to my delight and terror, got in.
It was severe culture shock. New Haven, outside the rarefied confines of Yale, is a gritty, Northeastern city, not particularly lovely; the people were not particularly friendly, at least not in the Southern way I was used to; there was more snow in one week than I'd seen in my whole life; I kept falling down on my butt trying to walk on the ice; and the law school itself was a scorpion's nest of rivalries and snobbery--much of which was too subtle for me to even recognize at first. (There is no dumbness dumber than being snubbed and not realizing it.) It probably wouldn't have been such a noticeable problem for me had it not been for the fact that Yale was undergoing one of its periodic labor convulsions: the Clerical and Technical Workers' Union was on strike, which severely disrupted life at the law school and, among other things, shut down the Commons, where normally you'd eat and meet people. The strike lasted for months.
By the middle of the year, things had pretty much reached their nadir. I can be slow, but not that slow, and I was picking up on the fact that there were people at Yale who were the products of elite private schools and who thought they were several hundred IQ points smarter than me, a mere journalist who had squeaked in through the back door, the product of a very mediocre Georgia public school system. And I was beginning to think they were right. I was, in short, thoroughly cowed.
At this point my constitutional law class was given an assignment to argue a case involving a free speech issue in front of a moot court. I was assigned to "represent" the school board in this case, which involved a student who was penalized for praying in the cafeteria during lunch hour. My sympathies were with the student, but what the hell: I started preparing my case. And then I came down with a severe--no, let's say crushing--case of stage fright. I have no business being here, I thought. I can't do this. I'm going to sound like an idiot. All these other people in my class are going to talk rings around me. Please, please, please, just don't let anybody laugh out loud.
I remember buying a new blouse to boost my confidence. It didn't work. I remember sitting on the back steps of my apartment the day of the moot court, in tears, thinking about how humiliating this experience was going to be. Oh, well: some things have to be done. When the dread moment came, I rose and stood before the panel of judges (i.e. professors) and started my speech. Right away (this was designed to operate like an appellate court, where the judges and the lawyers engage in a free exchange of questions and answers) I was interrupted by a question, and something in my head went ding! and I gave them an answer. It was not in my notes. But it was a good answer. And from that moment on, my fear left me and I knew that I knew what I was doing.
Not only did I not embarrass myself that night, I earned special praise from the profs. But that wasn't worth as much to me as what I'd taught myself: that fear can be crippling, that other peoples' opinions of your worth don't necessarily have anything to do with reality, and that though, yes, there were people at Yale much smarter than I, they were heavily outnumbered by the people who just thought they were smarter--by virtue of wealth or social connections or family legacy or just an innate sense of personal superiority. In a way, they were just as much prisoners of their own self-image as I was, just in a flip-side kind of way.
That evening was like breaking out of a plastic bag--one in which I'd learned to breathe, but which had not really given me enough air and space to do the things I was capable of doing. I will always be grateful for being put on the spot, being forced to face my own self-loathing, and to have gotten through it. Did it end my propensity for self-doubt? Nah. But it's made subsequent battles so much easier. And today, 22 years later, I can tell my daughters with the ironclad conviction born of experience that they are capable of ever so much more than they may dream of.
Dooce posted something today about how her darling daughter has been exposed to Barney--arguably, a worse fate than being exposed to head lice--and it occurred to me that, being a little further down the road, motherhood-wise, in the raising of girls, that I could alert her to Coming Attractions. So here, in no particular order, is a sampling of what she, and any other mother of a pre-school daughter, can expect in the years between, say, five and nine:
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