Moving Day

Well, it has finally happened.  I mean, I think it's happening.  Or it's about to happen.  Or SOMETHING. 

What?  What?  WHAT is happening?!?!?

 I'm sure you are dying to know.

And if the force were stronger with me, and if my muse weren't down at the shitty suburban bar drowning her winter woes in Coors Light from a can, I'd be able to string you along for awhile, making you try to decipher what great and momentous event is occurring.  And no, it's not a slowly developing addiction to using ALL CAPS (AREN'T I CUTE?  Or just very loud?).

No, mi amigas (and that one amigo), I am finally getting off my butt and moving my blog to Blogger. 

YAY!  YIPPEE!  CUE THE CONFETTI!!!!!!

Change scares me.  Change makes me anxious.  So even though I've wanted to do this for awhile, I have been terribly reluctant to make it so.  I feel all this pressure, on my new blog, to be only and always witty and wise and wonderful.  And all that pressure has flung my fickle Calliope--or maybe that was Melpomene--straight out of my house, into the snow, her high sprayed hair drooping in the snow storm, her knock off UGGS filling with ice as she stomps her path to a less addled and fear frozen brain.  Now, when I most need her, she is down at the local gas station bumming smokes and joy rides.  Bitch. 

It's a good thing there are 8 more where she came from.

So.  Blogger.  I'm moving. 

It's not you.  I promise.  I love you.  I need you.  I want you.  It's me.  I needed a prettier page, that's all.  Everything else will be the same.  I'll be the same.  I will.  Just follow me there, and you'll see.

I don't know what I'm going to do with this Xanga site.  I'll probably keep my photos here for now.  Maybe I'll find the time to write boring stuff that only my far flung family would care about.  I haven't figured it out yet, but if I do something really COOL and FUN (so likely!), I'll let you know.

So.  Change your url for me and come visit me at my new home (and tell John he did a great job). 

Umm, yeah.  Go HERE.

Take My Children. No, Really, TAKE THEM.

This morning Lucy punched me in the face because I couldn’t make a TV show she wanted to watch magically appear.  Later, after she’d been in time out for a good long while (hello, megamoms, what is the appropriate disciplinary response to that? Anyone?), mostly so I wouldn’t punch her in the face, she explained that hitting me had been an accident. I’m not sure which part was accidental: the part where she balled her fingers into a fist and swung it at my chin? The part where she managed to connect the fist to my face? Or the part where that hair twitch trigger in her brain commanded her to hurt me before any other impulse could stop her? I’m not writing this to be funny. It’s hard to find the humor in a three and a half year old who is becoming increasingly physically aggressive. I suppose the only upside is that she’s just like an abusive spouse: after she treats me like crap, she spends the rest of the day—or at least the next 30 minutes—being as sweet as coconut cream pie. When we went to Target today to choose Valentine’s cards for her classmates, she kept picking out items she wanted—hats, purses, other purses, lipstick—and saying, “Mommy, maybe next time when we come to Target, you’ll be nice, and you’ll let me buy this.”

Are all sociopaths so dangerously charming?

Earlier in the day, before I got beat up by my kid, I’d been on the phone making plans with another mother. Charlotte is going over to play this afternoon at the house of a little girl that we don’t know very well, even though we see the family all the time, at different activities. We’re all very good acquaintances, let’s say. The mother, who I will call Wanda, because I must not like her very much, giving her that name, was mentioning how much Charlotte and her best friend look alike (they don’t by the way, and not only because Charlotte is a foot taller than Bailey). I said something about how annoying I found the whole idea of best friends at this age, because I do, but maybe that’s only because I don’t love Charlotte’s best friend or maybe I’m envious since I am still waiting to find my own BFF. Also, I was attempting to make conversation, something at which I am not terribly skilled. Wanda said, “Oh, it’s cute. Why do you think it’s annoying?” And I replied, “Well, I worry that they might leave people out.” And then Wanda answered, “Well, Jorie has come home complaining that they are mean sometimes.”

Then I fell over and beat myself with the phone.

Because the last thing I want to be raising is one of those girls. You know which ones I’m talking about: the whisperers who pass notes and giggle at other kids in the hallway behind their hands and roll their eyes when someone comes to school wearing jeans that are an inch too short. I’ve already read up on those girls, on the alternative aggression that girls engage in, on girl bullying. I’m prepared to be the mother of a girl who is bullied. But I’m not at all ready to be the parent of the queen bee (even if I may have occasionally been one in a past life).

Here’s the thing, however, and this is how I’ve been consoling myself since I got up off the floor and wiped the blood off my forehead and off the phone: both Charlotte and her best friend are painfully shy. Both of them are more likely to wear the wrong clothes than to notice that other kids are. Neither one of them listens to cool music or has boyfriends or watches Hannah Montana or the Cheetah Girls. Quite honestly, they’re kind of dorky. In a good way; in exactly the way you want your first grader to be innocent and naïve and child-like. But they do prefer each other’s company to any one else’s. And they know each other really really well, since they're across the yard neighbors. I’m sure that for them, choosing to play with each other feels comforting and safe. They don’t have to worry about being ignored or teased by other kids. They don’t have to worry about being alone, either. So it’s difficult to know where the Mean Girl line is.

I think it moves around, depending on your perspective.

I’ve asked Charlotte’s teachers often how she gets along with her classmates, if she’s kind and welcoming, and they’ve assured me that she is a good citizen and role model, that she is a good friend to everyone. I know that when I observe her, she is mostly tender-hearted and giving, but I’ve also seen how her best friend tries to monopolize her and how their playing can be exclusionary to others. I can see how if you were a child on the outside of their friendship, trying to push in, it might feel hurtful. It might feel mean.

I talked to Charlotte this morning about being aware of how she and Bailey might make other people feel, to be careful that they’re not leaving anyone out. I told her we'd discuss it again later.  She seemed to understand what I was saying.

I really hope so.

Because I don’t want to the mother of two bullies.

Boxes

Last week at my book club, the one that caused much heart racing and palm sweating, for me, the deceptively gregarious introverted hostess, we discussed Jorge Amado’s book, Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands. In the book, a lovely Brazilian woman, Dona Flor, is forced to choose between two men. Her first husband is a magnetic and happy degenerate who spends most of his time gambling, drinking and whoring around. He comes home occasionally to steal Flor’s money and slap her around a bit. He is a terrible husband but an exquisitely skilled lover who insists on the unthinkable: sex without clothes. After this husband dies, at Carnival, dressed in drag, Flor eventually marries again. Her second husband is stable, handsome and absolutely devoted to Flor. He loves her completely but is awful in bed, regimenting their sex lives so they only couple on Wednesdays and Saturdays (“with an encore on Saturdays”), always in the dark, always under the sheets and mostly clothed. After a year of being married to this organized (“A place for everything and everything in its place”), kind and boring man, Flor pleads with the angels to return her first husband to her. His ghost arrives on the first anniversary of her second marriage to tempt her into sleeping with him. Flor is utterly confused, since she loves and respects her second husband and the place of honor he has given her in society, but she is passionately in love with her first husband.

Ahh, dilemmas.

Better fodder for discussion than for life.

At least half of the women agreed with the idea that you date the “bad boys” but you never marry them, a notion I objected to vehemently. I reminded them that the guy who treats you like crap may very well make the perfect husband for someone else. I know this having been both the person who was treated poorly and the person who was worshipped. And in all honesty, I was a wonderful girlfriend to some guys, who I really liked, and a terrible girlfriend to others. I cautioned that men are just as complicated as women and that very few men are really all good or all bad. But they didn’t listen to me. “No, no,” they retorted, “the clichés are true.”

Although I am occasionally guilty of boxing people in, I try very hard to avoid placing my faith in initial knee jerk reactions. I know how wrong they can be, since I realize that I don’t fit the clichés and stereotypes that could easily be applied to me. Jeff and I have been friends with a couple for a very long time, and before I had children, the woman, a mother who has chosen to work outside her home, cautioned me about making a different choice. “All the women I know who stay home full time, their brains are just so mushy,” she warned me. “I mean, they have nothing to say about anything.” I know that many people tend to believe this about mothers who stay at home. I was just reading a blog the other day that harshed on women who can sit in playgroups singing “Itsy Bitsy Spider” or who take frothy magazines to the beach instead of heavy, important tomes. Well, I am guilty of both crimes and yet I felt no defensiveness reading this diatribe because the underlying assumption—that my head is empty—doesn’t apply to me, no matter how I may appear during those 32 seconds you stumble by me on the beach.

I fought the same kinds of stereotypes when I told my city friends that we had decided to move to the suburbs. No one cool moves to the ‘burbs, you understand. “So, Gwen, heh heh, are you also going to get a minivan and become a soccer mom?” one woman teased me.

“Well, actually, yes. I am going to buy a minivan. And I am going to live in a sterile sub development. And I am going to sign my daughter up for soccer. But you know what else? I am still going to be the exact same person I am right this minute. My geography doesn’t define me. My external choices don’t define me. I will be just the same. I’ll only live somewhere different,” I replied.

Yeah, that kind of shut her up for awhile. But only awhile.

It’s not that I’m never guilty of an identical kind of offensive pigeonholing. I am, and if you’ve been here long, you already know that. Lately I’ve been considering how I decide who’s ordinary and therefore inferior and who’s special. Last summer when we were on vacation in Michigan, I would catch myself looking at families and writing them off as painfully boring. “Oh my gawd,” I’d opine in my head, “look at them, with their generic haircuts and their lame jokes and their pedestrian food/book/entertainment choices. Could they be any more dull?” I know! Don’t you just want to smack me in the mouth? I do. Because the truth is, from the outside, my family looks pretty damn ordinary, too. We’re not movie star gorgeous or Bill Gates rich or Marilyn Manson alternative. We’re not flying around the world negotiating peace treaties or nuclear disarmament. My children aren’t extraordinarily smart or attractive or charming or athletic or talented. We are—as a unit—about as common as it gets.

It doesn’t feel that way from the inside, though. From within this family, it can feel amazingly special. Recently, I’ve been observing the most ordinary moments—Lucy styling Jeff’s hair and chortling with mad delight or the four of us playing Go Fish together on the floor—and feeling the most extraordinary bliss, as though we are experiencing a small piece of the divine. This joy isn’t occurring because one of us has won an award or been honored for our accomplishments. It’s simply a part of mundane, daily existence, the very same mundane existence for which I judge others. Those families with the bad hair and boring food? I’m certain they have similar moments where they feel like they are drowning in happiness. It can’t just be me.

The experience of ridiculous happiness in the dullest moments—and the knowledge that every other person has that same capacity to feel transcendent joy—has me questioning what really defines being special. Because who doesn’t want to feel special, unique, somehow important? And don’t we tell our children this? That they are special, unique and important? But we can’t all be telling the truth. In fact, most of us are stretching reality. Because most of us are ordinary, and we’ve produced ordinary children.

I was raised to believe that success meant reaching a quantifiable goal, that to be special, you needed to do something special. Special people gave back; worthy people had jobs and careers and accomplishments that were externally rewarding. And I haven’t abandoned this idea entirely. I’m not saying it’s a false notion. But I wonder if that’s what I want to communicate to my children. Do I want to praise them for achievement? Do I want them to search for their gifts and talents and encourage them to use them for a greater good? Well, yes, of course. But I think I also want to help them to accept the ordinary. No, not to accept it, as though they are settling, but to find the inherent beauty in common things, to recognize the heart bursting joy that can come from discovering the divine in the simplest and most ordinary of moments.

Once You Get Her on the Dance Floor

She's a very freaky girl. When she's trying to look "fierce."

Oh, and here's a surprise:  Lucy is now sick.  Do you know the only thing that will help her body heal itself?  Chai Tea Lattes.  Who knew those were a magical elixir?  Well, now you do.  Which might be important to remember should you catch the illness, which may very well spring out of the internet and grab you by the throat. 

Call Me Martha

Yesterday I had to get a repeat pap smear. And I know what you’re thinking: how does she do it? How does she know exactly what I want to read about every single day? Because didn’t you all wake up this morning hoping, praying even, that you could spend a few of your precious free moments thinking about a virtual stranger’s hoo-ha? I thought so. See how I am all about making dreams come true? Maybe I should get a job with Disney World.

So I had to get another pap smear because my annual one was abnormal (I think, in case you care, the technical term is ASCUS or Atypical Squamous Cells of Undetermined Significance, which means exactly what it sounds like: who the hell knows). It was abnormal, but fortunately, I didn’t test positive for HPV because I’ve been married for approximately 103 years and it seems like a discussion about how one spouse suddenly contracted a sexually transmitted disease could be, well, awkward. And don’t worry. This isn’t actually a post about my personal easy bake oven, although I am tempted to use as many euphemisms for the powderbox as I can think of, just to amuse me. Yes, I AM easily amused. And distracted.

But BACK TO THE PAP SMEAR. Because it is SO INTERESTING. I am not the kind of person who panics about these yearly procedures. They do not induce worry in me. When I lived in the city, my OB/GYN was always bringing in med students to poke around in the fertile delta, and those poor kids were without question far more nervous and embarrassed about the whole thing than I was, which did make me ponder their particular medical specialty choice, but maybe they would have grimaced anxiously while avoiding eye contact with any of their patients. Maybe they were all just science geeks with limited social skills. So. Pap smears. No biggie. What I am not accustomed to, however, are doctors’ offices where everyone is friendly and appointments occur on schedule. My nurse was a lovely chatter who complimented me on my matching green corduroys and bag* and then spent a good deal of time telling me exactly where I should place my money and valuables in the bag so as to avoid being the victim of pick pockets. And not in an annoying way. More in a “Hey, I’m friendly and you’re a person; let’s talk” kind of way. Then my relatively new doctor was funny and self-deprecating and kept up an interesting conversation the whole time he was checking out my yoni. He was informative without being vague or too technical. And he was efficient without making me feel like he had a tiny chip implanted in his neck that jolted him every time his HMO recommended 82 seconds were up.

I seldom had pleasant doctor experiences when we lived in the city. My primary doctor was fine and competent but never gave me a warm feeling. And all the offices were staffed by unpleasant women who’d as likely give you the Stink Eye as smile at you. Even if you were there with your squeezably darling newborn. I’d wait for eons for the doctor to show up, shivering in my paper gown, my ass crack dangerously exposed. And then it was, “Blim blam bling! My neck is tingling. See you next year!”

So for all the interior monologues I conduct about how pathetic and sterile the suburbs are, a few positives do exist: friendly, efficient medical professionals, grocery store cashiers who greet me with small talk, instead of pretending they’ve never seen me before even when I shop there bi-weekly, neighbors who inexplicably shovel our driveway for us in the middle of the night after a hefty snowfall.**

And this, I keep reminding myself, is what makes living in the ‘burbs a Good Thing.

*I was actually embarrassed when she pointed out that my pants and bag matched, since I try to avoid matching as a rule. Not that I want to look like this. But the whole red bag, red shoes, red lipstick, red jewelry look has been known to induce quivering.

**I know! First they get my meds; then they shovel my driveway! And I do give them baked treats weekly and feed and care for their daughter, also transporting her to and from school, at least twice a week, so I suppose the karma wheel isn’t completely out of whack. It just feels like it right now.