I think my husband has a secret life.
Me: I don’t get the difference between figure skating and ice dancing.
Sam: Well, figure skating is smooth with a series of elements that have to be shown, with dramatic air-type things and turns and jumps and stuff. The ice dancing is more dancey, if you will, with dance moves and lots of those close choppy steps.
Me: What about the long program? Good God, the long programs go on forever.
Sam: I think the longs are more dramatic and the shorts are more whimsical.
Me: Why do people watch this…?
Sam: OHHHHHHH!!! She! Just! Ate! Shit!!! She just went down on the first toss! These are Olympians?!? Isn’t that the whole point: That they defy gravity and don’t fall down? They had four motherfucking years to practice this shit and she falls on the first spin? That’s why people watch this shit! And–and!–you get bitchin’ crotch shots all day. Check it.
Me: “The Way We Were”? For real? Don’t they want people to stay awake for their long program? Hello 1973. Our century doesn’t have any music to choose from.
Sam: I like their little outfitsOHHHHHH!!! She ate shit!!! She went down on the triple salchow! That’s three for three. I don’t know…maybe one fall per deal is normal? I don’t know…Whoooa!!…She almost packed that in! She was starin’ at some serious ice right there…
Me: Okay. I’m gonna go work now.
Roller Derby Girls
I was in the kitchen, setting out the frosting and the jimmies for the cupcakes Ruby and I had just put in the oven, when I heard a couple of heavy thuds come from the front hallway. It was pouring rain, Sam was away for the weekend and my heart had already exploded into a million shimmering pieces of glitter when my One and Only—after after cracking her fourth perfect egg into the batter—looked up at me and said, “I love girls weekend.” I couldn’t have been any happier.
There was another heavy clunk! and then, “Mama, helllllp!” I stepped out of the kitchen and looked toward the front hall closet. There was my kid, hanging onto the doorknob of the front door, her long spindly legs spread wide and sliding out from beneath her because she had found and was wearing my rollerskates.
She didn’t want to take them off and I wasn’t about to deter her from trying, so I showed her the necessary side-to-side motion by gliding across the floor in my slippers. And other than letting me tip-toe behind her while she made her way around the couch two times, she was fairly explicit in her instructions when I tried to help her. “No, Mama! I can do it!”
She carried on like this on and off throughout the weekend, my big girl in my too-big-for-her skates, until I decided our Sunday expedition for Valentine’s Day cards, would include a trip to the Sports Chalet, where I bought my girl the very last pair of purple, pink and white skates they had in stock. The uninhibited joy she expressed as she tested her new wheels in the store is what makes parenting so totally awesome and instantly vaporizes the anguish of those many years of sleepless nights. And if that wasn’t quite enough, the child further transformed the glitter of my heart into a fine sparkling dust when she skated across the carpet like a foal trying to walk for the first time, lifted the bottom of my shirt and kissed me on my belly. It’s impossible not to be schmaltzy about it.
If you look closely, just beyond the wrist guards, you will see me wrapped around her little finger.
Next Sunday, we’re going to the skating rink.
All hail Tweezerman. Now: What to do about this growing up business
After attending a kindergarten forum last night, Sam and I headed to our favorite neighborhood bar for some decompression. Wasn’t it just last week that we were bringing a baby home from Chicago? How is it possible we’re getting her ready to go to school? And is that really a gray eyebrow growing in above my left eye?
My favorite bartender took one look at me and whipped up my favorite cocktail, which I sipped as I plotted an uptick in naked dancing. There is going to be an exponential increase starting ASAP, before Ruby is old enough to be self-conscious.
Uh…that was awkward
Ruby had already buckled herself into her car seat when she realized she’d forgotten the drawings for her teacher. I ignored the urge to say, too bad, kid. We’re late. Chalk it up to a lesson learned about having your shit together. (God, how I love my fantasy life.) Instead I channeled June Cleaver, set my travel mug in the cup holder, dashed back into the house, grabbed the three sheets of paper she’d worked on with her dad and headed out the door.
Ten minutes later, Ruby was handing her pictures over to Miss Sarah. “This is a castle,” I heard her say. I was distracted by her little friend G. who was hurrying to peel away his shoes and socks so I could see how beautiful his pink toenails looked. “And this is Miss Carlee as a princess,” Ruby continued her parallel conversation. I told G. that Ruby’s dad likes to have his nails painted, too. “He likes purples and blues and greens and sometimes sparkles! How cool is that?” I asked him. His mother seemed embarrassed but also relieved at my reaction.
“Thanks for saying that,” she said.
“I’m not making this up,” I told her. “He’s artsy.”
Just then, I turned to see my daughter handing her teacher this:
He’s artsy, alright. He’s 8th grade, trapper-keeper, boy-doodle artsy.
Down there in the lower left quadrant? That is a naked person bending over with an asterisk for a butthole. Up above that guy are two formerly androgynous people drawn “without clothes!” per request of the child. Since Sam decided to make these two clowns G-rated—unlike the blue muscle man bending to pick up a dumbbell—she who is obsessed with all things penis, grabbed a sharpie and filled in the blanks. And then there’s the scary monster thing with hair made of lightning bolts, a squiggly smile and a Sonny Crockett 5 o’clock shadow. Notice the sharpied-on boxer shorts with the open fly. I’m not positive, but given the severe focus of conversation in our home lately, those are either tampon strings or urine running down his leg. Could just as easily be one as the other.
Of course, the upshot—I always like to find an upshot— is that the child is accurate and has some fairly impressive fine motor skills. But back to pre-school.
I saw the drawings and gasped. Then I stammered. So much for having my shit together. I hemmed and hawed and grabbed the paper with less subtlety than I would have liked. “I’ll just take this back home,” I said, withering. “Ruby’s in a phase…she asked Sam to do it and…um…well, we don’t do everything she asks…I mean…she did it.” I was selling out my man and my kid. I was losing credibility. I looked back and forth at the teacher and G.’s mother, apologizing, swearing that we do not normally sit around the house drawing wieners and sphincters. Princesses with giant breasts and “nibbles,” sure. But wieners and sphincters?
No siree.
Normally, we prefer naked dancing.
My punkin’ across time
THEN…
AND NOW…
And I finally weigh in on Anita Tedaldi
I’m late to the party but that’s because I’ve been mulling it over and doing a little background research.
Better late than never, though. So, I’ve begun over here.
There will be more.
Grateful
One comb out, a few tears, a great new stylist and 3-1/2 hours later (no, that’s not a typo), this is what her hair looks like. She chose the “clicky-clackies” and her birthmother chose me.
Love
I wasn’t going to post anything today, but then my friend Jennifer pointed me to this poem, probably the best thing I’ve ever read in response to September 11, 2001.
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Leap
by Brian Doyle
A couple leaped from the south tower, hand in hand. They reached for each other and their hands met and they jumped.
Jennifer Brickhouse saw them falling, hand in hand.
Many people jumped. Perhaps hundreds. No one knows. They struck the pavement with such force that there was a pink mist in the air.
The mayor reported the mist.
A kindergarten boy who saw people falling in flames told his teacher that the birds were on fire. She ran with him on her shoulders out of the ashes.
Tiffany Keeling saw fireballs falling that she later realized were people. Jennifer Griffin saw people falling and wept as she told the story. Niko Winstral saw people free-falling backwards with their hands out, like they were parachuting. Joe Duncan on his roof on Duane Street looked up and saw people jumping. Henry Weintraub saw people “leaping as they flew out.” John Carson saw six people fall, “falling over themselves, falling, they were somersaulting.” Steve Miller saw people jumping from a thousand feet in the air. Kirk Kjeldsen saw people flailing on the way down, people lining up and jumping, “too many people falling.” Jane Tedder saw people leaping and the sight haunts her at night. Steve Tamas counted fourteen people jumping and then he stopped counting. Stuart DeHann saw one woman’s dress billowing as she fell, and he saw a shirtless man falling end over end, and he too saw the couple leaping hand in hand.
Several pedestrians were killed by people falling from the sky. A fireman was killed by a body falling from the sky.
But he reached for her hand and she reached for his hand and they leaped out the window holding hands.
I try to whisper prayers for the sudden dead and the harrowed families of the dead and the screaming souls of the murderers but I keep coming back to his hand and her hand nestled in each other with such extraordinary ordinary succinct ancient naked stunning perfect simple ferocious love.
Their hands reaching and joining are the most powerful prayer I can imagine, the most eloquent, the most graceful. It is everything that we are capable of against horror and loss and death. It is what makes me believe that we are not craven fools and charlatans to believe in God, to believe that human beings have greatness and holiness within them like seeds that open only under great fires, to believe that some unimaginable essence of who we are persists past the dissolution of what we were, to believe against such evil hourly evidence that love is why we are here.
No one knows who they were: husband and wife, lovers, dear friends, colleagues, strangers thrown together at the window there at the lip of hell. Maybe they didn’t even reach for each other consciously, maybe it was instinctive, a reflex, as they both decided at the same time to take two running steps and jump out the shattered window, but they did reach for each other, and they held on tight, and leaped, and fell endlessly into the smoking canyon, at two hundred miles an hour, falling so far and so fast that they would have blacked out before they hit the pavement near Liberty Street so hard that there was a pink mist in the air.
Jennifer Brickhouse saw them holding hands, and Stuart DeHann saw them holding hands, and I hold onto that.
Grace
If your life were coming to an end, and you knew it, how would you spend your last days? Would you wallow? Or would you sing duets?