Harsh reality
“Old MacDonald had a Mommy, eeee-ay, eeee-ay, oh.
With a talktalk here and a talktalk there.
Here a talk, there a talk, everywhere a talktalk.
Old MacDonald had a Mommy, eeee-ay, eeee-ay, taaaaaaaallllllk!”
Four years ago today, I met my beautiful daughter
And this morning we had a very frank conversation…
Ruby: Mama, you need to brush your teeth.
Me: I already did that, honey. It was the first thing I did when I got up, before I got dressed.
Ruby: You need to brush your teeth again because your teeth are really dirty.
Me: My teeth are not dirty! My breath probably smells like coffee, though…
Ruby: Well, what are you going to do about that?
Me: (…) I think I’m gonna drink some more coffee.
Four
It’s a very happy birthday!
The fresh bikini wax pays in spades
While we were getting ready to take a bath this morning:
“Mama?”
“Yes, honey.”
“I love you.”
“Well, I love you more.”
“And I like your vagina hair. It doesn’t touch my butt anymore. ”
“…”
Golden girls: Three weeks, two friends, one dog and a compact car
The first postcard arrived within days of my suggesting that The Gaydi Project document her road trip. I bought a map of the United States to hang on my daughter’s bedroom wall and planned to line my mother’s route with the postcards as they arrived. I thought it would be fun for my kid to see where her grandmother and my godmother were headed. Also, it was my way of keeping tabs. And learning my states. And riding shotgun in absentia.
Dear Ruby, I’m in Washington D.C. with Mary Jane. We took Perrito to the White House but couldn’t find Bo (Sasha and Malia’s dog). I love you madly. Yer Tutu
My thrill at the notion of a meandering road trip with a best friend was matched ounce for ounce by my daughter’s apathy, an indifference that should have been predictable. Running to the mailbox was exciting, sure. But listening to me read the postcards was no competition for that shiny object right over there! After four years as a mother, I’m still reconciling the fact that parenting is almost always the vision of reality colliding with the reality of reality. Reading the first, second and third postcards out loud to an empty room, it occurred to me that perhaps this is why my mother didn’t invite me along for any part of her journey.
This trip was at least two years in the making. It took almost that long for my godmother to sell her house in Pittsburgh, a length of time that, one could argue, adds some legitimacy to Sienna Miller’s 2006 assessment of the city. No sooner was the offer accepted than my mother bought a plane ticket and headed east, losing her fancy prescription sunglasses somewhere between boarding and deplaning the red-eye.
Not being one to wallow in setbacks, she bought a hat and carried on. (Fifty bucks says her shades are on her desk at home.)
She helped tie up the loose ends in Shittsburgh, and then Mary Jane, my mother and her yarmulke-wearing Chihuahua piled into the car and pointed it toward Seattle in a squiggly, we-don’t-have-any-place-to-be kind of way. The goal was Route 66 via Graceland.
Dear Ruby, Here is a delicious recipe from Elvis’ Kitchen. It’s for peanut butter and banana sandwiches. Only make it in an emergency. I love you! Tutu
Though these two adventurers are not fugitives—as far as I know—I could only envision Thelma & Louise. I saw red lipstick, twisting cigarette smoke and billowing scarves. I saw Brad Pitt with his hair dryer stuffed into the waistband-holster of his jeans and a car soaring off a red-rock cliff. I saw sexy. I saw dangerous.
“No!” my mother hooted when I mentioned my visions on the phone during one of my check-ins. “We’re Lucy and Ethel and Little Ricky!”
This was hardly reassuring. Just what the interstate needs, two Vitameatavegamin Girls behind the wheel. Sexy: No. Dangerous: Terrifically.
“Well, are you having fun?” I asked.
“Oh, Aaryn—we’re having a blast!”
MJ and The Gaydi Project—I think I’ve coined a band name—visited friends in Chicago, cut through St. Louis, attended a hoedown in Tulsa thrown in their honor and survived Amarillo.
Dear Ruby, I’m getting closer to you everyday… & I’m coming via this old road. Right now I’m in the state of Texas. Pray for me (or ask your parents for bail money). Love, Tutu
They stopped in Santa Fe and scooted through bustling Prescott before detouring to San Diego, where they’d committed to a babysitting gig. The entire trip had been problem-free until they exited College Avenue on their way to my place. My mother was driving when they were rear-ended and couldn’t say definitively whether she’d slowed down or stopped. (Neither of them was hurt, thank God, because I needed a night out like Dick Cheney needs someone to cut his mic.) The silly man who hit them took off, but Thelma and Louise—er, Lucy and Ethel—tailed him until he gave himself up. You might be intimidated, too.
At first glance, these two 60-something women are totally different: MJ is reserved and L.L. Bean-y, while my mother is flamboyant and Eileen Fisher-ish. MJ is an extraordinary chef. My mother excels at preparing beige food. MJ smokes cigarettes. My mother smokes MJ. None of this really matters, though, because they’re both touched by a little bit of The Crazy and appreciate cocktail hour. At breakfast.
During college, the two of them spent a summer in San Francisco with six other women. There, they frequented bars using fake IDs and my mother picked up on men using a fake accent, which dissipated in direct proportion to the amount of alcohol consumed. I don’t know, but if I had to guess, based on their personalities, I’d say Mary Jane pretended she didn’t speak English at all and maintained the ruse for the duration.
Though they eventually did it on different coasts, each woman raised a family, ended a marriage, created a successful career and maintained a friendship that has never failed to pick up where it left off the last time they said goodbye. It truly is something to spend time with them together.
Now my unintentional heroes are making their way up the 101, the rear bumper hanging a little lower than when they set out. At last contact, they were someplace along the Oregon Coast, a tad too close to sheer drop-offs for my taste. MJ is jobless and homeless, but my mother has an appetite and an empty daybed. I think the relationship is going to last. If they don’t fly off that cliff.
I’m hoping they make it to their destination safely. Until then, I am anxiously awaiting the next postcard. I hope it’s addressed to me.
(As published today in San Diego CityBeat, sans pictures. Also, no pic of MJ not included since I sort of feel like I’ve exposed her quite enough for her taste. Again, just a guess. However, this story was written with blessings.)
La famille
Le pere
et la mere
et la fille.
C’est une artiste.
It just sounds so much better in french…as if it isn’t magnificent enough already.
A quick lesson about the universe
Ruby had a fairly good showing last night in the Piss Poor Behavior competition she’s been having with herself. I don’t know if it’s an almost-four thing or if it’s the change in her daily routine or both. She started going to a new school two weeks ago, which subsequently closed down amidst all the flu hysteria, which subsequently sent her back to her old school. Whatever the issue(s), we’ve had some special moments of late.
Shortly after recovering from her latest spit-swat-stinkeye-cry fest, she walked toward me for a hug. On her way into my arms, she stubbed her toe on her art table at the foot of her bed. Crying ensued.
“Oh, honey,” I said as I wrapped her up in my arms. “Do you know what that was?”
“Whaaaaat, Mama?” She asked.
“That was instant karma.”
!
Over lovin’: Trying to mother from the middle ground
“You know I love you, right?” I adjusted the bow on Ruby’s sleeping cap as I tucked her into bed.
“Unh-huh,” she said. Her eyes were closed and the sound of her acknowledgment was stifled by the presence of her thumb in her mouth. The sound was a pasty gurgle, as if she had pudding in there.
“And you know Daddy loves you,” I said.
“Unh-huh.” Sucking, sucking, eyes still closed. I wanted her to look at me, but she wouldn’t budge. I could practically feel her telling me to bugger off.
“Mama and Daddy love you like nobody’s business,” I said, closing in on her face. I felt myself morphing into the badgering Jewish mother who gets talked about in therapy and begrudgingly visited at holidays.
“Unh-huh,” Ruby said again.
She was ready to be left alone, and I knew it. But there’s this thing called self-control, and I had none of it that night. Anyway, I had to make up for earlier-in-the-day parenting indifference. Being euphemistically challenged, I moved in close so my breath touched her earlobe: “We adore every bone in your body, little girl. You’re the world to us. You’re Mama and Daddy’s angel.”
Could I have been any more annoying, you might ask? Oh, yes. Without question. I could actually have been about 1,400-times more annoying. It’s a mother thing.
“Unh-huh, unh-huh, unh-HUH,” Ruby fired off in rapid succession.
And with that toddler version of the pre-teen eye-roll, I saw myself in the future as an overbearing, don’t-forget-to-use-the-bathroom-before-your-solo backstage mother. I had become my mother-in-law, who, back in the day, before we had a child for her to focus on, used to come for visits and stare at my husband. Just—-stare at him. For days. It was weird.
Suddenly, I needed a martini and some steady middle ground.
I’d parented from the other end of the attention spectrum that morning when Sam and I took Ruby to visit her new school. It was the Friday before she’d be there full-time, and the plan was to drop her off for two hours as an acclimating exercise. We’d been talking up all the pluses of this Big Girl school for weeks—that the Trolley goes by every 15-minutes was the toddler equivalent of granite kitchen counter-tops—and she’d been right at home during a previous stop in. We had high hopes that were simply begging to be dashed.
In perfect form, Ruby was clingy to us and standoffish to everyone else. She was pouty and dour. But at the advice of the teacher, we ignored her pleas to go home and peeled ourselves away. I would say it was like Sophie’s Choice, what with my urge to grab her and protect her and run from the building forever. Only, a part of me could not stop thinking about pancakes, and I’m pretty sure breakfast food never occurred to Sophie in her moment of reckoning.
We watched from a window as Ruby stood alone at the side of the sandbox, kicking listlessly at the ground, her hair clips jiggling each time her toe made contact. None of the other kids took much interest in her. Most were oblivious, and those who did take notice simply rubbernecked as they pedaled by on their tricycles. Really, I couldn’t blame them for keeping their distance. While no parent wants her child to be the odd man out, my kid didn’t exactly parade her glee and enthusiasm for launching matchbox cars into each other at high speeds.
When we finally rescued her, she crawled into my arms and immediately went limp. Wouldn’t you know it, the child was en fuego. As in 104-degree-fever en fuego. It was, as parenting moments go, quite a startling revelation: We were those people, the ones who all the other imperious parents tsk-tsk. Like that poor woman in New York who dropped her arguing daughters at a strip mall and drove away (she’s my hero), we made the faux pas of sending our kid to school—the new school!—with what very well could have been swine flu. Well played, Belfers.
One could argue we should have known she was sick when she crawled back into bed that morning and passed out for an additional hour, highly uncharacteristic behavior for a 3-year-old. But we’d chalked it up to a psychosomatic thing, and there was no way she was going to feign illness to get out of her first day of school (such shenanigans will come later). This show had to go on.
And on it went, child protective services be damned. We strapped our ailing girl into her car seat and did what most other parents in our situation wouldn’t do: We drove straight to The Mission for breakfast. There was still that unresolved pancake hankering, and even Ruby in her stupor had a taste for The Mission’s delectable blueberry/blackberry pancake.
Of course, she slept on my lap while Sam and I gorged on our food, and when she didn’t eat hers, we ate that, too. Then we ate her side of bacon, ordered a round of coffee refills and two mimosas. Just kidding. We didn’t order mimosas. That would have been self-indulgent.
We paid the bill and shuttled the child home to some Tylenol and her bed. I tucked the blankets under her chin and planted a single kiss on her forehead in a tender but non-smothering manner. There was no adoring fanfare or desperate enumeration of all the reasons I can’t stop loving her. As mothering moments go, I’d momentarily found the right balance. It wasn’t too much. It wasn’t too little. It was just right. And it was fleeting.
Because then I sat myself down next to her bed and stared at her as she slept.
(This ran in CityBeat on April 29th but I forgot to post it. Mostly because it isn’t one of my favorites. But here it is, nonetheless.)
Let me clear something up on this second day of April
Jealous of Suleman? Vasectomy reversal? Eggs from Africa?? Teat suckling???
Really? C’mon, people! I thank you for the many unconditional wishes of good luck and support but it ain’t happenin’. Clearly, you are kinder, gentler, better people than I. Or perhaps just crazier. Yes, that’s it. You’re crazier. Because anyone who knows me, knows this:
Me + Another Baby = Hahahahahahahahaha! SnortGuffawThatsagoodone.
I’d rather pluck out every last pubic hair with a tweezer.
It’s my prerogative: A little change of heart means big changes at home
On March 17, Nadya Suleman brought home two of her eight premature babies. The professionally plumped and chiseled Angelina look-alike is so well-known that further description of her tale here is unnecessary. She’s incited a deafening level of disgust and outrage, all of which has been rightfully redirected to the more relevant demon, AIG, finally purging Suleman from above the fold. Except for right now, right here.
Other than one brief mention in a column a few weeks back, I have not written on the subject because, truth be told, I was deeply conflicted over the matter. Sure, my knee-jerk reaction was one of snorting indignation. But the increasingly bizarre story of Ms. Suleman opened an old wound for me, one with which I’ve been quickly coming to terms.
My initial and sustained anger, as I’ve come to realize, stemmed from jealousy. To be clear, I’m not jealous over her giant brood: Having a total of 14 children is tempting mental illness (having eight at once is tromping directly into straightjacket territory). It’s not the overwhelming numbers that make me green with envy. What makes me resentful, what makes my heart pulse with a dark, suppressed longing is that Suleman—however she chose to do it—got to experience pregnancy. This broke-ass woman with no moral compass got to carry and give birth to eight beautiful babies, and I didn’t even get to do it with one because—and here I’ll just come out and say it—I’m barren.
One night, in May of 2004, moments after Sam had stuck my ass with a three-inch syringe filled with the not-so-much-of-a-miracle-conception-drug Clomid, the doctor called. I was still rubbing the stinging injection site with one hand, holding the phone to my ear with the other as he told me the results of a blood test, which revealed my eggs to be cooked. They’re scrambled. Over-hard. Custardized. Were you thinking about having an omelet for breakfast?
I’d truly believed I’d made my peace with the fact that pregnancy would not be one of life’s experiences I would be checking off the list. And it’s beyond difficult to admit now, after having lambasted Suleman to anyone who would listen, that she—a woman I still consider to be a delusional, egomaniacal, self-important opportunist—had something that I didn’t. Generally speaking, I do not want what I haven’t got; it’s sort of a tenet of my personal ideology. To be inflamed with jealousy by such a person is humiliating to the seventh power.
Adoption has been my I-haven’t-missed-out-on-a-thing, self-preservation decoy. So there are no words to describe how small I felt as I began to take the proverbial hard look. But feeling microscopic upon admitting the internal volcano to myself was nothing compared to what I felt when I brought it up with my husband. To say there’s been an upheaval in our home is to say that Rush Limbaugh is looking a little ruddy and puffy lately.
The problem boils down to this: I want to have a baby.
Let me revise that: I need to have a baby. I have to have a baby. And when I finally said it out loud, when I finally spoke the words after a tearful dinner at Corvette Diner, while Ruby obliviously threw fists-full of Bazooka bubble gum in the air above us, and with The Beatles carelessly bouncing “She loves you, yah-yah-yah!” as a backdrop to the tectonic shift happening right there in the milkshake- and mustard-splattered booth—well. I was breathless as my husband simply stared at me like a mortgage-backed securities buyer watching the foreclosure sign go up in his front yard.
This unhinging desire that’s thrown the rotation of our life out of its natural orbit is the byproduct of two months’ worth of emergency marriage-counseling sessions. We’re no strangers to counseling, but I think I speak for both of us when I say we never imagined we’d be back on the couch for something like this.
We pretty quickly dismissed the idea of separating, so most of the brutal work involved Sam coming to terms with what will need to happen for us to have another child. And while it’s not lost on me that the money we’re throwing at these extremely expensive twice-weekly sessions could be saved for the IVF round we’re going to do next year, I know how badly we need to be talking about this not-exactly-minor decision.
The counselor has said Sam is “abnormal” when it comes to endurance and tolerance of stress. It’s really quite startling how much he can bend, compromise, forgive and accept. I don’t know a single other person on the planet who would put up with my mind-changing madness and emotional roller-coastering. It’s because of love and flexibility that he’s agreed to have his vasectomy reversed in late July and with the use of donor eggs we’re purchasing from a little-known organization in Zimbabwe, the Petrie dish mash-up and IVF protocol can begin by next summer.
This has not, by any means, been an easy decision, but I’ve embraced my need. I’ve finally admitted that I must experience a baby (or several—it is IVF, after all) rolling and stretching in my belly. I need to feel my breasts purpled and engorged, to have stretch marks map my body as proof of my loving gift, to retain water, have my ankles swell, to suffer indigestion, uncontrollable gas, loss of bladder control and hemorrhoids. And I can’t wait to experience nine glorious months of orgasm-filled pregnancy sex, followed by years of the little one(s) suckling at my teats. The way I see it, Nadya Suleman doesn’t have the market cornered on all of these goodies. If she can do it, so can I.
(As published on April 1 in San Diego CityBeat.)