thematically fickle

The Gaydi Project and I went shopping yesterday and she asked me if I’d ever seen the back room at Loehman’s. I thought this was a rather personal question and one that should never come from your mother. But I played along and let her guide me. Turns out, it’s literally called The Back Room and they have some fantastic designer stuff in there! I found a simple, sleeveless black wrap dress with a plunging neckline by Diane von Furstenberg that would be perfect for our trip next month; I remember reading an interview with the designer years ago and she mentioned she likes to create dresses that don’t make any noise when they slip to the ground. What could be sexier than a silent dress? Right. I knew I’d always loved her clothes and that comment solidified it.

But I didn’t buy the dress because I’m an idiot.

I bought a pair of jeans instead. It’s a sickness, my endless quest for the perfect jeans. In the dressing room, I wedged myself into the pants with the flap pockets and perfect amount of distressing at the hip. They were cute but they were tiiiiiiiiight. I could zip ‘em up and I could breathe, but I needed another opinion.

“Mom, what do you think?”
“They look great, Aaryn.”
“But do you think maybe they’re too tight? I mean look at my butt.”
“Your butt looks darling. I don’t think they’re too tight at all…Then again, my mother was the Queen of Camel Toe, so consider your source.”

I’m taking the jeans back right now and buying that dress.
Happy weekend.

Indeed.

The Gaydi Project: Honey, you really dated a lot of frogs. But for all your trouble, I gotta say, you ended up marrying the greatest guy out there.

Me: Yeah. I dated a lot of frogs alright.

TGP: Well, actually, that’s not true. You dated a number of really neat guys, too. Guys that I liked.

Me: Yeah. When you stop to think about it, that is true. There were a couple of good ones mixed in there. But I think the point is—and you reminded me of this when we were shopping for a wedding dress, remember?—that I had no business wearing white at my wedding.

TGP: I know I said that but I had no business wearing white, either. And who the hell am I to say that you dated frogs? I married the froggiest frog of them all! I know I shouldn’t say that to you, but it’s not like you don’t know that already. Your father was the King Frog.

Me: Ribbit.

Father’s Day in my world has historically held all the importance a birthday party holds for a Jehovah’s Witness. In fact, it’s been such an epic non-event throughout my life that I actually forgot Sam’s very first Father’s Day. A pathetic, writhe-like-a-Redworm-in-fresh-manure move, I know. I hear your gasps and tsk-tsks and would like you to know that I already brutalized myself over the fact much more thoroughly than any practicing Jewish girl could. Believe me, I got all Jewey on my own ass, so carry on with the guffaws. I can take it. I realize that I am, at times, a bad wife. I’m evil. Just be glad you’re not married to me.

My failings can probably be traced back to some father issue, although that doesn’t mean I can’t finally appreciate, revel in and, yes, even celebrate great fathering when I see it.

Take, for instance, the family I stalk in South Park. I drive past them nearly every morning on my way to drop Ruby off at “school.” He’s youngish, thin, computer-geek cute. He’s unshaven and semi-wrecked like most parents of young kids. His clothes are wrinkled and seem especially muted compared to the bright pinks and yellows worn by his children. He often wears a ball cap with his sunglasses. He always has a cup of coffee. He’s what I call Every Dad.

Bent a bit and maybe even resigned under the weight of parenthood, Every Dad pushes a towering gray stroller with an infant tucked inside. And there’s a little girl, too. Sometimes she’s walking next to Every Dad and other times she’s sitting on the handle bar of the stroller, her legs bent at the knees, feet balanced on the cup holder. Once in a while there’s another daughter, a slightly older child accompanying the entourage, bumbling down the street, leading the parade of four, their nomadic speed determined entirely by the ability of the young ’uns to stay on task.

Like any dedicated voyeur, I created an entire story about their lives: Following a noisy breakfast of animal-shaped pancakes, globs of syrup and gallons of organic, fresh-squeezed unconditional love, Every Dad leaves the sticky dishes in the sink for later, loads up his posse and together, they chaperone the eldest child to school.

He kisses her good-bye at the door to her classroom. She might kiss him back or ignore him, depending on her mood. He humbly takes both on the chin. Then he saunters his way back to their canyon-side home, where the rest of his chaotic day unfolds in a mess of finger-painting, cloud-busting and simplified explanations of why Simba can’t wake the “sleeping” Mufasa after Scar has pushed him from the cliff. Of course, during nap-time, there are always those dishes.

My window into their life is only a glimpse of the necessary and mundane parenting event of delivering a kid to school before the starting bell. What strikes me, though, is the ritual of this simple act and the reverberating effects. I can’t help but imagine what the middle daughter will one day remember of the time spent with Every Dad, riding atop the stroller, balanced between his hands, her uncombed hair stiff with cow licks and knots, watching the scene from her perch.

That guy is a madman with three, I think to myself. But he’s doing a bang-up job. And so are most of the dads I know. Fathers of previous generations—and certainly some in this one as well—were far less participatory than are the men around me.

While my father-in-law has a reputation of having been a Great Dad, he admits to never once changing a diaper. Whenever he commiserates with me about the tribulations of parenting small children, my mother-in-law will chide him about how he couldn’t possibly know the difficulties since he was never around. “How would you know, Tommy?” she’ll ask with a wave of her hand and a roll of her eyes. He admits, readily, that he doesn’t actually have a clue.

My father was an Every Man For Himself Dad. I’m the product of a cinematic divorce in which my father left my mother and then, not too long after, left me as well. In reality, he was gone long before he went, but most memories of my cleaved childhood were obliterated in the wake of their mess.

But fathers today, even those who are sharing custody after a split, are as hands-on as any mother straight from the pages of Good Housekeeping circa 1952. Today’s Every Dad keeps decent hours at work and then serves as Sherpa during family outings, schlepping all the schleppables to wherever he’s been directed to schlep. He also does dishes. And laundry. And changes diapers.

These contemporary dads shop and cook and clean. Granted, they rarely comb hair. But they do wipe noses and asses, and I’ll take a clean butt over a pig-tail any day. They catch vomit and kiss boo-boos and give baths and read books and soothe nightmares. They nurture curiosity in our kids through the kind of mind-numbing creative play that some women find suffocating. And certain dads do this stuff without complaint while certain mothers go to book club and Bunco and San Francisco and DSW.

All of this isn’t to say, Wow! He deserves a gold star! Because this is the kind of stuff any parent—mothers and fathers—should do. But given that so many fathers haven’t or can’t or won’t or don’t, I think it’s entirely reasonable that the efforts by those who have and can and will and do be recognized once a year. Which is why Father’s Day for our babies’ daddies should not be about a tie or new utensils for the grill or a shopping spree in the tool department at Sears. Those gifts are fine for our dads—or, those of us who have them, anyway.

But in celebrating our men who step up to the greasy, oatmeal-smeared plate alongside us each day, the gift should be more personal—a recognition that screams I love the way you empty the diaper pail! This Father’s Day, give him the only gift that will keep him positively Pavlovian over playdates for a whole ’nother year and which will guarantee forgiveness of even the most egregious omission: Give the man a blow job.

Every Dad has earned it.

(A slightly different and less direct version was published in today’s issue of CityBeat. I liked this version better.)

(Ten minutes or less, 250 words or less. This week, the story begins with a picture. It made me think of these three things: Wood Drake, Freedom, Wool. It had to be written in memoir form to include the words.)

It had only been three days since I left James and everything that we were and everything that we’d built. I had woken at the mellow sound of the Wood Drake on the water, before the sun had even contemplated lighting my side of the continent, and made myself a fresh pot of coffee. I walked through the thick cold air, naked and barefooted, to the front door carefully balancing the hot mug in one hand while grabbing a wool blanket in my other. It was draped across the wood chair by the door, right where I’d left it last spring, feeling no better than when I’d arrived. It smelled of dust but I didn’t care. I was older than the dust that day. I wrapped that musty blanket around my body and enjoyed how it scratched my shoulders. It reminded me that I was alive. I inhaled at the sight of the lake spread out in front of me, settled into my quiet seat on the front porch, and held the ceramic mug close to my lips, feeling the steam warm my nostrils. Daisy had made that mug for me on Mother’s Day years ago, a relic from that other life. I thought maybe I should feel depressed, sort of felt obligated toward it. But while I watched the morning fog curl around my unpainted toes perched on the railing, I felt the freedom I had wanted for so long.

While eating dinner at Cantina Mayahuel last Tuesday night, The Gaydi Project dropped mole on her long, white skirt. The sauce actually slid from her fork onto the table but since the table was made of swirling wrought iron, the mole ended up in her lap. She’d already had a couple of drinks but spills are commonplace for my mother with or without booze, so it wasn’t exactly surprising. Surprising would have been making it through that dinner with her clothing clean and not tucked into the unmentionables.

We scrambled to hand her extra napkins and she worked to wipe the mole off without rubbing it in, an impossible task that she seemed determined to prove possible. She muttered a few oh shits and I’m so embarrasseds before her friend Jon turned to me and said in his lazy southern drawl, “That Gaydi! Ah just love her…she’s so fun! When the boys and Ah go out with her, we lahk to tell people she’s a fay-muss, former Russian ballerina.”

Jon shook his head and waved his hands wide to convey the seriousness of this information. “She’s whirrld fay-muss!”

At this point, she choked on the margarita of which she’d just taken a sip and had to work very hard not to spit it out all over the porous table.

It’s nearly impossible not to forgive the foibles of a fay-muss Russian Ballerina.

My family is effed up.

I don’t speak with the small man who is my father. I rarely speak with my youngest brother and the one who is just 18-months younger than me? Well. I had to extricate him from my life more than seven years ago. It sounds cruel but it was an act of self-preservation and it was one of the best moves I’ve ever made where he is concerned.

But what do you know? With the Big Bad Internets, he’s found a way back into my life and today, he left a comment on this old post. I should have known that he wouldn’t be the kind of person to just move along in his life and let me move along in mine, but I rarely think about him so I wasn’t that concerned. Now he’s resurfaced to inform me that I’m a liar (his usual schtick) and that my memories of my childhood are wrong (he’s self-absorbed like that). Fortunately, he’s decided to grace me with his defense of my right to experience my “grief” (he’s generous like that).

I’m not surprised that he couldn’t not weigh in but I am surprised to find that my anger surfaces faster than the blissful years without him in my life sped by. I thought I was over that. Apparently, it’s just under the surface and it’s currently emanating from my pores. My skin is actually tingling. And I know I shouldn’t be writing this now, that I should sit on it, give it time to settle, be more even when I hit “publish.” But I’m not waiting.

I’ll be deleting his comments (he’s busy going through and commenting on other stuff as I write this) because I’m not going to give him a voice here, but I wanted to address something he said today and as it wouldn’t be fair to take anything out of context, I’m posting the comment in it’s entirety:

I understand your pain. I too had a father that mistreated me. I am by no means trying to diminish the profound effect that having such a parent has had on your life and development as a person.

But with all due respect, your recollection of the events in the back of the BMW are, at best, misrepresentative of what happened. I would never claim to have a more accurate account, but I think mentioning your brothers as witnesses to the event as you described it is irresponsible and downright dishonest. You’re allowed to take some dramatic liberties with your writing, but please try to represent the traumatic moments that shaped all of our lives as children as honestly as possible or to make it clear that you may not remember it all as it unfolded.

I support your grief and would fight to the death anyone who would try to deny you those feelings. But if you’re going to mention your brothers, please be truthful about the memories that are less than crystal clear.

Memories are a funny thing. Sometimes it’s difficult to discern how much of a memory comes from a story repeated and handed down or from photographs or video, and how much comes from actual experience. But whatever the origin of a memory, it’s feircly presumptuous to assert that someone else’s memory is wrong. Two people can experience the same thing in entirely different ways.

For the record, my memories are crystal clear to me. And that includes memories of my brother being a most tragic character who cannot handle the truth about who he has been in my life.

(Ten minutes or less, 250 words or less. This week, the story begins with “Dear Diary,” is set in a limousine and must include the words “missile” and “hearth.”)

Dear Diary,
I’m still trying to take off some of this weight, slogging along on the treadmill every other day. It’s miserable. My knees hurt. My hips ache. It’s boooooring. And only seven pounds off in the last month! But I do it. Yet clearly my efforts are for naught. This morning, as I lowered myself in to the limousine, my belly actually touched the bottom of the steering wheel. Touched it. As in MADE CONTACT. It frustrated the hell outta me and as I sat there, feeling the steering wheel press into my blubber, all I could do was think about Ding Dongs. I wanted a Ding Dong so bad that I coulda sworn I had a fire raging in the hearth of my stomach. I knew a pack of Ding Dongs was the only thing that would make me feel better after all these weeks of no sugar. So I said screw this! and drove like a guided missile straight to 7-11, even though I knew I would be late for my pick up and even though it was a challenge making the turns (what with my stomach impeding the steering capacity) and even though I knew it was the wrong thing to do.

I ended up sipping champagne and eating Ding Dongs in the back of the limo and thought, so this is how the other half lives. It’s nicer in the back seat, diary.
Trust me.

After using a fahncy, marble encased bathroom stall at Bloomingdale’s this afternoon, I met my mother at the row of sinks. Incidentally, for all of her outrageousness, she’s more of a rule-follower than I am and she opted for a regular stall, whereas I have no qualms about using the one intended for the wheelchair bound.

That’s actually not entirely true: I use the handicap stall only when I’m with The Gaydi Project, an antagonistic way to honor a good friend of hers who is so rigorous in his moral code, that he would never set foot in one because it just isn’t right! For whatever reason, it makes me feel good to know I’m doing something of which he’d disapprove. (And I really like like the guy. Figure that one out, Internets.) So today, I parked my ass on the toilet in an extravagant room the size of my kitchen and sent good thoughts to my favorite über-human, Jeff C.

But back to that row of sinks.

There we found each other again—my mother, my self—and while washing our hands, The Gaydi Project said to me, “I really do hope I’m past that point in my life where I accidentally tuck my skirt into my underwear after going to the bathroom.”

“That would be a good thing,” I said.

“Just promise you’ll let me know if I do that?” She asked.

“Yeah…I’ll start walking a few paces behind you from now on.”

I took a step back from the sink to assess the situation—just in case—and do you know? Her long, black-and-white batik skirt was tucked into her panties so perfectly, so symmetrically, that it created a bustle more beautiful than the one on my over-priced wedding dress. I almost wanted to let her go about her day like that. It looked so lovely, it was nearly trend-setting. But I’m a good daughter (finally) and I’d just made her a promise; truly, I’m nothing if I don’t keep my promises to the woman who once passed me through her cervix. So I un-fluffed the fluff, we had a solid laugh at her expense and headed out the door.

It’s been less than 24-hours and things are going exactly as anticipated.
Today, Ruby got a manicure Gaydi Project style.

Random thoughts:

1. Aside from the fact that Sting has grown an unbridled-growth-down-the-neck kind of beard, he looked even better on Monday night than a Double Stuffed Oreo tastes—which is really saying something because I do not go in for beards. It must be the tantric sex. But I digress. The point I’m trying to make is that The Police should be opening for Elvis Costello on this reunion tour of theirs, not the other way around. Elvis was the show.

2. The wood nymphs who only a short time ago replaced my child with Rosemary’s Baby, repeated the switcheroo some time this past week and returned my angel.

She’s been full of un-prompted pleases, and thank-yous. She slept through the night twice. She let me sniff her all day. She’s been liberally kissing her father and me and the dog and door jams and floor moulding. She’s so convincing, I almost feel like I made up that whole other nightmare. At this point, I have no idea where the truth lies. It must be that I’m crazy.

3. Gravity is not selective. It works on breasts and buttocks and, according to my husband, labia and testicles, too. He announced Saturday night on the way to a party that he “almost peed on his balls” the other day. Of course, we weren’t alone in the car during the proclamation and our friend Joe had a follow-up question in which he inquired whether Sam had “tea-bagged the toilet water.” AWE-SOME. I find this course of dialogue to be hilarious which means not only am I crazy, but I’m also a 13-year old boy.

4. I finally debunked, once and for all, my grandmother’s motto that it’s “better to look good than to feel good.” There’s a pair of shoes I’d been eyeing for a couple of weeks and, in fact, dreamt about twice, my personal barometer of what Must Be Done Next: I bought them, licked each one and then wore them to a CityBeat event on Friday night. By the time I left, I could barely walk. Literally. I’ve never, in all my years of shoe-wearing, experienced such pain. I mean, it felt as if someone had smashed flat the metatarsals of my right foot with a Kettle Bell. And God dammit! Those shoes are fucking beautiful!

It’s tragic. There should be a national holiday for a tragedy of this magnitude.

Anyway, I had to walk down an alley by myself to get to my car—and for any locals, it’s the alley just behind El Cajon Boulevard between Louisiana and Texas Streets. Nice, right?—and half-way to my car I couldn’t do it any more. I looked exactly the opposite of the sophisticated these killers are supposed to convey, what with the way I hobbled like a clueless college freshman wearing heels for the very first time. I kept imagining my feet as nothing but raw hamburger meat and finally decided that the risk/benefit ratio was worth going barefoot. Fortunately, I didn’t step on any broken glass or used condoms, which still would have been preferable to the agony I was in.

5) The Gaydi Project arrives at 9:34 tonight, so please keep your arms and hands inside the vehicle at all times.