The Frantic Garden

Cooking TV

2011-11-20T16:17:00.000-08:00

I love cooking shows. I dirty love cooking shows. They are captivating. My favorite thing is to watch a cooking show while eating, which is like eating with your mouth and your brain, all at the same time. It's fantastic.

But I've noticed, in my 7+ years of cooking-show watching, that I have developed some opinions about the programming, most of which is irrelevant to anyone but me. Which is why I'm blogging about it. I'm throwing a very wide net. As my sister said, blogging is like monologging in an echo chamber. I'm monoblogging. (Monoblogging...monoblogging...monoblogging...)

We used to have to go to my mom's to watch food tv, before the advent of Netflix, Hulu and...my husband. I have spent a long and illustrious soapbox shift, proselytizing about the perils of cable television, and once even had a "KILL YOUR TELEVISION" bumper sticker on my car (I killed the car before I could get to the tv, unfortunately, so the tv remained intact). Then I met my husband, whose unapologetic and complete commitment to total tv immersion was as unequivocal as it was ardent. And I love me some husband. So, I caved. I caved big time. There's pretty much a tv in every room of my house (except the bathroom, which is the one room where it really, really makes sense to have a tv. Not on the edge of the tub, mom! Chill). And you know what? I totally love it. There is, of course, the possibility that I am more likely to purchase a Chevy or Febreeze item against my will for this decision, but I'm cool with that.

Because now, I can watch all the crappy Sci Fi I want- hour upon hour of battles between Hollow Earth and the Surface, every vampire and werewolf show my little weird heart could desire, and not just a show about quantum mechanics as a creation story, but its freaking' prequel! I can also watch hour after hour of strange, nerdy foodies prepare impossible, disgusting gustatory combinations in 30 minutes or less, or food "personalities" bat their falsies or rotate their burgeoning bellies at a crowd of millions, while they show me how to finally prepare a proper brined turkey.

It's fantastic.

Let's start with Rachel Ray. Rachel Ray makes good food. I know because I've used myriad recipes, and own two cookbooks, and the results are 100% excellent. But I can't watch her show anymore. She's got those crazy cheek implants that make her look like the Joker, and her voice is so raspy from doing so many kabillions of tv appearances that it's like taking down a recipe from my emphysemic Aunt Rattle, whose cigarettes smoked cigarettes. It makes me want to mail her cough drops. While I can indeed prepare a tasty meal in 30 minutes or less, I cannot wince for that long.

Jamie Oliver is delicious in every way. Although his recipes often overlook some important differences between UK provisions and American ones (if he tells you to use Bok Choy, he means baby Bok Choy, for example - take note, or your stir fry could rapidly become your hot, weird coleslaw), the man's got it all: a passion for real, accessible food, a genuine love of intrinsic food nutrition that extends to cleaning up school lunches around the developed world (where there are both schools and lunches, and obesity is a problem, not a daydream), and 17247025172 small children who look like little hippie angels. And he taught me to cook a leg of lamb that will make your eyes roll back in your head. I love him. I'd watch him wash dishes, if it was a show.

Anthony Bourdain is like the food version of Mark Mothersbaugh, although he hasn't released his shtick yet so he's still sort of making edgy and snarky retorts, but he's no longer making them from the mouth below two gaunt hollows of booze-addled rheumy eyes, peering skulkily from the corner of a Philipino dive bar where he's smoking his 143rd cigarette of the...morning... and nursing a shark-blood cappuccino and a helacious hangover. Now he's on the Riviera, with the nicotine patch, some kind of champagne-thing and a special quail dinner that requires you to wear a velvet napkin on your head while you first bite its flesh to hide the gushing release of liquid fat and juice the bird emits when first pierced by epicurean canines.

Not the same.

I'm willing to learn to love him, though. I'll just need to find another food program to get drunk to.

Cooking with the Neelys is like soft-core porn. I feel embarrassed even writing about it. And their food is morbidly fascinating to me- it's makes Paula Deen's food sound like Weight Watchers. Don't get me wrong - it's freaking delicious. One time I made marinated steak with shrimp butter (which, by the way, is basically just a 1/2 pound of shrimp, chopped up in a 1/2 pound of butter), with creamed spinach, cheesy flat-bread (essentially pizza), and a cocktail. I still feel guilty about that one, and, just to put that in perspective, Totino's Party Pizzas are one of my favorite foods. Whoa. Add that to the whole, "are they gonna actually DO IT on this show?" experience, and you have an untenable culinary environment for me. Seriously. I just looked up a roast turkey recipe by them, and felt a little dirty just looking at it online. I'm running my antivirus software right now to make sure I remove anything I might have gotten from their site.

Anything Paula Deen makes is delicious, and will kill you. It may take a decade or so, but mark my words, eat the banana cream pie and seafood po' boy, and you are a goner, my friend. She jokes about her use of butter, as does Julia Child. The primary difference between them, in my estimation, is that while Paula seems to have taken a few important and buttery pages from French cuisine's book, she's missed all the nuanced delivery footnotes on the pages - for instance, that mayonaisse and beurre blanc are meant to be sauces, not soups. Nobody should eat a whole bowl of bechamel sauce. It takes like you should, but you shouldn't. Because it will kill you. I like watching her, anyway. She says y'all like it's really my name.

Bobby Flay sold his soul to the devil. He loses that "Throwdown" competition all the time, but let's be honest: those local contenders could be making ham and cardboard melts, and if they had been making them in Our Town for a decade, and Our Town could claim them as their own invention, then nothing B-Flay comes up with is going to win him any cred in Our Town. Watching that show is like watching a documentary on how cliques work. In every other situation, B-Flay calmly destroys everyone around him with his delicious, inventive, expertly-prepared and sourced food. And then he goes home and sacrifices a baby goat in his basement, rubbing the blood all over his belly button while he summons the Evil One for a quick chat about the Tex Mex possibilities of a pepperjack bearnaisse.

Out of respect for the dead, I won't even start with Emeril. Because he's a zombie. You didn't hear it from me.

From me...from me...from meeeeee....

On Parenting

2011-08-16T14:36:00.000-07:00

This is NOT a "mommy blog." Though I am definitely qualified to write one, I lack many of the requisite characteristics from other mommy blogs I read. Namely, I lack good taste. I also am acutely aware that what I write here should not be read to a teenager to convince them that parenting: a) is beautiful, b) is meaningful, or c) was done properly by the person reading them this blog. Also, the Mommy Blogs are all devoid of bitter sarcasm, heavy drinking, swearwords, or despair. Those are four of the five major foodgroups in my pyramid. (The fifth is rage or righteous indignation, depending on the subject, and whose fault it is.)

But since I had my daughter, and since they've become so prevalent, I've been reading a lot of Mommy Blogs. It's like watching the opposite of a car crash. I don't know how anyone's life could be so sunny, coupon-discounted, and toned. I read them because everything else in my life is going swimmingly, and it's starting to get to me. I need to be reminded that I have a long, long way to go before Kraft will put a banner ad on my blog.

I don't think I could sustain a Mommy Blog. Don't get me wrong- parenting is a righteous adventure, and one that has paid me in stories, but an all-parenting diet is the shortest distance between me and shouting lascivious nonsense at passing motorists from the highway median. So, this isn't a mommy blog. But this is definitely a mommy post. How about that?

When I decided to become a mother, I was 21 years old, and imagined the whole thing would be much like a Hallmark card or sitcom. I would be beloved. I would be the hot mom. I would be perfect- the house would be clean and decorated impeccably, I would lose the baby weight within hours of delivery, and my marriage and baby would be demonstrative of the female ideal. White picket. Fullbright. Antics and overnights. I thought having a baby would be a passive experience- I would get a baby, and then I would be a mom. The baby would be cute. And beyond that, I hadn't given motherhood a whole lot of thought.

And then there was labor: hint #1 that perhaps I had underestimated what the Mama gig might require. For the first 16 hours of labor, I was the world's best mom: I huffed and puffed and generally kept everyone entertained by cracking jokes between contractions. Then my water was broken, to move things along. With the next contraction, I tried to crawl away from my own body. I panicked. And it just kept getting worse and worse, until finally, I was in a kind of pain delerium, at the apex of which an enormous baby was placed in my arms.

I stared at him all day long. He slept, but I couldn't. We went home the next day, and as I lay him down next to me on the bed, I stroked his head and adjusted his little hat and thought, "If you cry, I have to come. For the rest of my life, I have to come. Not because anyone will see me if I don't, not because it's wrong not to, but because I have to." The love was catastrophic. It wasn't Hallmark-y at all. It was too big to even look at with both eyes open. The whole of it expanded like a nuclear blast in every direction: someday he would go to school, and kids would be cruel to him. Someday he would throw up, get the flu, break a bone. He would drive a car, fly in an airplane, fall in and out of love. Someone would break his perfect heart. It was monstrous and beautiful, mashed together cataclysmically. I squinted and examined the thing peripherally, and realized that now, my worst fear lived outside of my body. I would just have to learn to stand it. I would have to accept the danger and badness of the dangerous and bad things, and I would have to live in the abundant love and goodness around me- make every moment he was alive and with me the best it could be, since I couldn't really protect him from his own life. Eventually he would belong to himself, and I could neither protect him, nor protect myself from loving him. This, I realized, was the real Mama deal. It squished my previous paradigm like a fat little bug.

So, this was how I became a Mama. And from December, 1994 to today I have been the mother of about 200 versions of my son. On the long and fascinating list of things no one tells you about parenting is that every time you have your kid all figured out, they change. And when they do, you fall in love with a whole 'nother tiny, expensive tyrant, and mourn the loss of the last one. My quiet, shy toddler? Gone. My noisy, boisterous three-year-old? Gone. My lisping, imaginative, giddy preschooler? Gone. There are shadows of each in my son today, but essentially, they are just gone. And I would give almost anything for five minutes with each version of him, to smell his head and feel his little hand in mine. I miss them all. But it makes you stay in the present, realizing that these changes leave you with a feeling much headier and molecular than nostalgia. I can see my beautiful boy right now through the memory I know this moment will become. I can put my hand on his shoulder now, watch him walk up the walk now, make a joke and listen to the crack in his voice as he laughs, now.

It's important to be present: Over these last 16 years, nearly everything has changed. He has taken over one after another of the things I did for him, learning self-sufficiency and confidence, preparing himself for his own path. The one he will walk with or without my help.

Some highlights: I got back my ability to use the bathroom in private, without even so much as a through-the-door detailed discussion of any action figure's weapons and/or fighting ability. I can sleep past 6 am, although initially this required my five-year-old watch "The Lion King" on the bed next to me. I no longer need to pick out clothes for him, brush his hair, his teeth, or have any relationship whatsoever with his potty habits, although I am wont to make the occasional recommedation (i.e., "Not syling your hair is the same as styling your hair badly," and "the bathroom cedar spray is merciful. Please use it."). I can trust him to walk home, call me from the movie theatre, and finish his homework.

By the time he turned 13, he was scarce. Gone to his room for hours at a time, and over at friends as often as he could be. He didn't care if I came home at 6 or at 9- he could forage for food, make it himself, and actually enjoyed the time alone. I didn't have to be anywhere. No one would starve without me. At first, it was incredibly liberating- I met girlfriends for happy hour drinks, went grocery shopping alone, and tried on jeans at 7 o'clock at night. (Can you imagine!) It was as if an enormous weight had been lifted from me. But, over the next year or two, I started to feel an emptiness in the spot where the weight had been.

I wasn't done Mama-ing. I wasn't ready to just be a woman and a wife.

So, my husband and I decided to go for it, have a baby together. I would get to keep doing all these things that I so deeply love. And I wouldn't have to say goodbye as big- not now, not yet.

And so begat Lyra. A baby whose entire personality seems designed to insure no one within earshot ever has a baby again. I'm kidding. She is as ridiculously delightful to me, as interesting and precious and complicated and just exactly right as her brother. At 18 months old, she has already abandoned several permutations of Lyra, and I already miss them acutely. (Except the screaming "colicky" version of Lyra. That one can stay gone. Maybe I'll change my mind about it eventually. They say time heals all things, but I think "colicky baby" might be attending the asterix beneath the cliche.) This time, when I laid her next to me to sleep, I thought, "I am going to love every single moment of this." And mostly, it's been true. I can let go faster, easier. I am here in each moment with her, and more aware of how ephemeral this incredible relationship really is. Standing over that crib with my son, it sounded like forever - 18 years - but 16 years later I can avow that it happens one tiny, short minute at a time. A minute ago, he was brand new, in my arms. I was fixing his hat.

So, adding a new baby took no sting from the changing Mama role I play with my son: The truth of it is that there will never be another moment identical to this one. Each one is unique, equally, and meant to pass. This one is the only one of its kind, and it's perfect.

Feel free to remind me of that at 3 am, when my daughter is trying out for American Idol, Banshee Edition, or the next time my son asserts that he's the decider while walking around the house with his shirt zipped up in his fly.

Pornography, or, "Worst First Dates"

2011-07-06T19:41:00.000-07:00

In 1999, my ex-husband gave me a computer.

I was pretty glad to get it- I had mastered emailing, and was ready to move on to the really exciting things, like AOL and internet porn.

Let's get this clear right away: I'm not a huge porn fan. My porn experience at that point was limited to the following: 1. A couple of magazines unearthed by a 13-year-old me, in ~1985 in my mom's friend's attic. They were evidently from the 1970's. My suspicion was based largely on the unusual prevalence of mustaches and floppy boobies. (Throw in a headshot of Spiro Agnew and my argument is airtight.) They were disturbingly graphic and unaltered. Sans digital enhancement, the naked people all looked like slabs of pork tenderloin. With mustaches and floppy boobies. 2. A porn movie a boyfriend rented to watch with me. Everyone seemed really, really angry in it. With the volume down, their sexing faces all looked like they were watching Newt Gingrich pole dance in assless chaps and an American flag tank top. (He has bootstraps tattooed on his inner thighs, by the way. Interesting tidbit.) 3. My parents' copy of The Joy of Sex, which was hidden under some sweaters in my dad's closet. Finding that book in that spot was the single best abstinence education any parent could possibly provide. The idea of my disgusting parents contorting their old disgusting bodies into those disgusting and inexplicable configurations was enough to keep me from so much as holding hands until I was 16 years old.

So, my experience, such as it was, seemed anemic. But now I had a computer, so I needn't remain so provincial. I was ready to be educated.

It took a long time. There's a lot of porn. At first, me and a couple girlfriends searched for the basics: "boobs," then "big boobs," and eventually, "colossal boobs." Rapidly boring ourselves with women hosting breasts as round and tight as giant tan boils posted on their chests, we started to search for things we'd always heard about but disbelieved - "Crazy fetishes," "LITERAL horse lovers," and "Diapered and 40-Plus." All there. In plenitude! We had to choose which sites we looked at, there were so many results. So, we got even crazier. "Blindfolded sex with big nosed ladies on the hoods of Le Car, model years 1984-1986" and "llama mustard fetish." Still there. The results got increasingly disturbing, and, in spite of the wine we'd consumed, less funny. There is a guy out there, pining away for one other soul who is only aroused by a woman riding a llama covered in spicy mustard. He wants to talk. He wants to relate. He made a webpage. And that is too much for me to worry about. So we wrapped up, with high-fives (universal hand gesture of the morbidly uncomfortable) and the uneasy feelings that accompany a large scale porn investigation.

It was like the X-Files, only instead of Area 51, we found a secret warehouse of sexual deviants so weird that Area 51 seemed like a GAP Outlet in comparison. Seriously, those people don't want to know what genetic secrets the alien corpse is keeping. They want to have sex with it. And a donkey wearing fishnet stockings and a fez.

Anyway.

Well, over the course of the next few months, my computer starting behaving strangely- opening up windows full of gobbledygook, refusing to shut down, and generally acting like I had shoved a PB&J sandwich into its floppy drive (which existed, and was approximately the size of a carport- it was 1999). At about the same time, I began dating a man who specialized in computer coding- he was one of the html front runners, schooling himself in the dark recesses of his apartment, fascinated by ASCII. He came over one night during our initial courtship to watch movies. For the purposes of this narrative, let's call him Stu.

At this point in our datinghood, we hadn't even kissed each other. We were in preliminary nest-circling mode, evaluating what things the other found important enough to incorporate into the infrastructure. Stu was a quiet guy. He was not a particularly overt fellow, and generally preferred the company of computers to humans. But he thought I was nice, safe- a good person to joke around, listen to music, and discuss computer things with.

While we were watching our movie, I mentioned that my computer was behaving strangely. He offered to look at it, and I gratefully agreed.

If you were planning to stop reading before the story inevitably degenerated into me burning everyone and everything to the ground while standing in front of my eight-grade English class naked and clutching a picture of Andrew McCarty, this is your chance to jump off.

Stu started up my computer, brows furrowed and finger tapping as the initial "Safe Mode" message flashed on and off the screen. "Weird." he said. "Yeah! It just started doing that!" I replied, enthusiastically. Stu hit "Escape" a number of times, and evaluated the resulting screen of green text carefully."Something has corrupted your DOS kernel," he said. "We might have to restage your machine." Or something like that.

"Great!" I said. "You can do whatever you want to that kernel. Stage it, restage it, whatever." Stu laughed. (Wasn't I cute? And innocent? So uncultured I don't even know what a DOS kernel is? Tee hee.)

Stu downloaded some things from a disk he had with him in his bag, and a black box with a large green progress bar began rapidly listing files, directories...and then it started. One after another, internet browser windows began popping up, filling the screen with a high-speed montage of the most disturbing pornographic images I had ever seen (which, at this point, was really saying something). Hundreds of screens, one after the other- a lady riding a donkey in a non-classical equestrian pose; a guy and a donkey, similarly engaged; two donkeys, a goat and a fat lady with a pinwheel, perhaps celebrating?; a lady with a stiletto shoe in a place which indicated a particularly vigorous disagreement with someone who had, until the disagreement, been wearing at least one stiletto shoe; two men in enormous diapers, hands on their hips, staring sultrily at the camera; and a bunch of guys in black leather Porketta-roast-looking get-ups, eating what appeared to be, well, poo.

Stu sat, hands frozen over the keys like claws, his eyes wide, watching the seizure-inducing procession of horrors. I sat behind him, hand clamped over my mouth, cryogenically frozen somewhere between mortified and fascinated.

"Whoa." I said.

Stu said 10,000 years of icy silence. A conversational glacier.He turned to look at me, and he was suddenly looking at me the same way he had been evaluating the computer. Did I expect...this?

There was no way to really explain- I could tell him that my porn exploration had been 90% ironic, or that I hadn't been the only one at the helm when "donkey SEIKO farmer handjob" was typed into the searchbar. Here are the things I thought of saying: "We were drunk!" = not better. "We were curious!" = the same could be said about the farmer. "We didn't know it would do this!" = ditto. "Haven't you ever looked at porn?" = inappropriate timing. Like asking the Ted Bundy investigators, "Haven't you ever had that urge to just freak out on somebody?"

What I said was, "Can you fix my computer?"

"Not right now." Stu said. "I need to figure some stuff out." I'll bet he did. I don't blame him. That's a whole lotta first date.

Now, I limit my porn exploration to what I accidentally read on my cable guide. Teaser: if you are looking for gooey encounters with human life preservers, get into plumbing or DJ-ing.

Cats and Dogs

2011-05-20T09:31:00.000-07:00

My neighbor - we'll call her Tonya - verbally abuses her pets. It's like living next door to a David Lynch biopic of Joan Crawford.

A few summers ago, I was digging a fire pit in my back yard. It was the middle of a nice, warm summer day, probably in June. Suddenly, over the fence that encloses my back yard, I heard a woman's voice talking reasonably to what sounded, inferring from what she was saying, like a small child: "Autumn, remember what we talked about? You promised to play on this side of the yard, away from Callie's sandbox. If you don't do what you promised, we'll have to go inside." Huh. I must have neighbor kids. Cool. I kept digging my fire pit. Three feet in diameter? Four? I tabulated the number of edging stones I would need. The voice from over the fence started up again. "Autumn! You stay away from Callie's sandbox, like we talked about!" I had hardly dumped my shovelful of dirt before she started up again, this time plaintively, "Autumn! You are ruining this for both of us! I said NO!" And not even five seconds later, crazy time. Full scream. "AUTUMN! Come back here right now! I told you to stay away from that fence! I TOLD YOU TO STAY!! AWAY!! FROM!!! THE!!! F#*KING!!! FENCE!!!" She was almost roaring now, she was screaming so hard. It was all "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" up in here. "AUTUMN! YOU NEVER LET ME DO ANYTHING! YOU RUIN EVERYTHING! WE CAN'T EVEN BE OUT IN THE G%$DAMMED YARD FOR FIVE G%$DAMMED MINUTES BEFORE YOU F#*K IT ALL UP! WE'RE GOING INSIDE! INSIDE AUTUMN! ARE YOU HAPPY NOW? ARE YOU? ARE YOU HAPPY NOW???!!!???"

I called 911. The dispatcher asked for my address and said, “ohhhhhh. That’s Tonya. Those aren’t kids. She’s got some kind of pets over there. We see a lot of her.” I was relieved. Although I don’t think it’s right to derogate your animals, I feel much less concerned about that than if she had been freaking out at human children.

I should cop to something right away: I am not a huge animal fan. I like to eat them. If I had to hunt to survive, I would be thinner, but very much alive. That said, if you leave an animal in my care, I will eventually come to love and understand the creature. But I will never spontaneously take pictures of it, or celebrate its birthday. I'm sorry about this, but it's the truth about me. I inherited a cat (who my neighbor rescued but was too allergic to care for), about ten years ago. We named her Bella. Bad things had happened to her- she had half as many teeth as she should have had, all broken in half on one side of her mouth. The vet thought it was an abuse injury, since a car couldn't have done damage so precise, but a boot could've. (What is wrong with people? If you have that irresistible a compulsion to lash out violently, punch yourself in the face a couple times. You'll satisfy your urge to maim, and be able to immediately quantify the impact you had. And, you'll definitely grow as a person from the experience. I digress.)

Bella got what I affectionately referred to as "the tax return infection," or, "TRI" every single year around tax time, forcing me to spend all that hard-earned money I had loaned to my government on boring things like life-saving feline antibiotics, for which she thanked me by removing most of the skin on my forearms when I administered them. (I went through one pair of oven mitts a year, for exactly that reason.) Every year I owned her, the vet said, "I don't know if she's going to make it," when she'd get the TRI. She'd stop eating, lose so much weight that we called her the Karen Carpenter kitty, and lay around, looking like the kitty embodiment of Morrisey lyrics. And every year she'd rally, responding to the antibiotics as though they were dehydrated capsules from the river of life, flipping the Grim Reaper the bird while sock-hunting and packing on the old lb's, until she blew past Karen Carpenter and most resembled Marlon Brandon, circa "Isle of Doctor Moreau" (which is unintentionally ironic). She would get so fat she would lean back on the couch and, with her little stick arms out to either side, lick her upper belly area, which projected so far that she needed only crane her neck a but to get some good licking surface area. She got so fat she bounced off the radiator, trying to leap up and enjoy the afternoon sun.

But one year, she didn't respond to the antibiotics. She got thinner and slower, and finally just lay in the corner, crooning and mewing. We did everything we could to save her- most of it crap our parents, friends, or other animal enthusiasts recommended. We gave her ice cream. We gave her lard. We gave her olive oil in a dropper, and in a last fit of desperation, we even put olive oil in her kitty butt. Finally, we realized our efforts were bordering on things they did at Abu Graib. So we called and scheduled an appointment with the vet to end her life.

That turned out to be a really, really big deal. I had no idea.

When we got to the vet, we had a long conversation about what we would or wouldn’t be willing to do to save or extend her life. The conversation, while sympathetic and compassionate, was pretty brass tacks. Would we want to run $3,000 worth of biopsies and diagnostics, knowing there was a 50/50 chance she wouldn’t live through the tests? No? Would we want to do $500 worth of blood work, knowing the results would probably indicate the $3,000 worth of biopsies and tests were necessary? Before I had this cat, I scoffed at people discussing vast, expensive medical procedures they had done on their pets. Spleen transplants? Hip replacement? Really? If you had told me then that you were going to spend $3,000 trying to figure out what was wrong with your cat, I would have thought, “You know what you can get for three thousand dollars? Three thousand cats.” But now, standing in the vet’s office over Bella’s shivering body, I was mentally calculating how much space was on each of my credit cards.

I didn’t know I would feel like that. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do- what Bella would want me to do, if she was capable of “wanting” anything in the way I thought of it. What was the value of her pain? What did her life, her death mean to her? Was I taking something away from her by ending her life before she did? I needed to know these things to make the right decision, and there was no one to ask but Bella. And she couldn’t tell me. It was kind of like every other critical decision I’ve ever made in my life- decisions in which no matter what I choose I’ll always wonder, always revisit the whole situation and make the decision over and over again, because it never feels right, never settles itself. And, in those situations, every phone call I make to get advice, counsel, or reassurance just rings and rings. Nobody ever picks up. I kept looking into Bella’s eyes, and the phone just kept ringing.

We went ‘round and ‘round with the vet, asking a hundred different versions of, “will that save her?” and getting a hundred different versions of “probably not for long” until we all kind of arrived at the answer we knew in the first place. We knew she was going to die – now, or very soon.

And in the absence of any new information, we would do what we could to make that suck as little as possible.

She was so skinny by then that her body felt like one of those rabbit’s foot keychains, all whispery-furred and hollow. We held her paws, touched her face as the medicine began to work. Her body relaxed, her chest slopped rising and she was gone. It was almost immediate.

All those things - her love of my socks, her wild-eyed destruction of our couch, her fat belly rebounding off the radiator like a bad lay-up, the years of purring and warm fur against my feet – gone. That’s what we get to know about death – that it removes all of those connections, all of those threads tying that being to the world, and pulls them through the eye of a needle, the other side of which is beyond our vision. It seems impossible for so many threads to just vanish, but they do.

We stood there with her body, crying and petting her, and then her body became her “body” – not her at all. It wasn’t hard to leave her there, because she was already gone.

So, I loved that cat.

I told you this story, because I don’t want you to think I’m a monster when I tell you the rest of the story. Or at least, I don’t want you to think I’m that kind of monster.

So, the vet called me two weeks later to come pick up her boxed ashes, assumedly to bury them in some shady corner of my yard, with pomp, circumstance, an acoustic version of “In My Life” by the Beattles, and somber prayers to Rascal, the kitty version of Jesus (Duh, God would send his only cat to die in place of billions of cats so they could live forever. What did you think, that post-rapture, it would be cats, cockroaches and Twinkies down here? C’mon. Jesus loves a furry pal, just like the rest of us). But I didn’t do any of that stuff. Instead, I put the box in my trunk. It made the most sense. The box was clearly marked, “BELLA O. REMAINS.” What was I supposed to do, buckle it into the front seat? I just kept having visions about getting into n accident on the way home and the box exploding all over the inside of my car, like Mt. St. Helens. There I’d be, with ash outlines of my sunglasses, coughing and sneezing Bella dust while I exchanged insurance information. (“No, my car’s not on fire. These are just my cat’s ashes. No! She was already dead. Just driving ‘em around…”) I could try to put some spin on it, make it meaningful and hippy dippy (like I do), be all like, “breathe her in…she’s all around us…” because she would literally be all around us (especially if I turned on the heat, I’m sorry, but it’s true). See? The trunk was a better idea. It was February at the time, and the ground was frozen solid. So, when I got home, I left it her in the car. Not her, the box of ashes. And then I forgot all about them.

I will be the first person to admit this is horrible. I didn’t mean to do it, but I just kept forgetting they were in there until I needed to put something in the trunk. Which was usually groceries. (I know, I know.) I would open the trunk, see the telltale black box, and say, “Sh*t! Bella’s ashes! I have to remember to bring those inside!” And then I’d angle the Totino’s Party Pizza’s between the box and the jumper cables. I’m not proud of myself, but I’m not ashamed either. And anyway, it was winter and the ground was frozen, so I couldn’t bury her even if I did remember the box, although I didn’t, so it didn’t really matter. And then we cleaned out our basement, and I began driving around with every soccer item my son had used from 1998 – today in my trunk, piled on top of the box. So, I put my groceries in the back seat of my car, and Bella’s ashes became a distant memory.

As a result, I drove that cat’s ashes around for three years.

Finally, my son and me dropped the trunk stuff off at Goodwill, and he spotted the box. “What is this, mom? Does it go in the bin?” I want to point out at this point in the story that I could have said, “yep,” and been done with it, no shame, no ‘splaining, but I am better than that. Not bury-my-beloved-cat-in-a-timely-fashion better than that, but better than donate-my-beloved-cat’s-ashes-to-Goodwill-to-avoid-telling-my-son-they’ve-remained-in-my-trunk-for-three-years. See? I have morals.

“Those are Bella’s ashes.” I said.

“MOM!!!!!” My son said, in a combination of horror and disgust. “Are you kidding?” I was not kidding.

“It was winter, and the ground was frozen!” I pleaded.

“For THREE years?”

“For part of the three years…” I said, finally.

He held the box of ashes on his lap on the way home from Goodwill.

“Aren’t you worried if we crash, the box will explode all over you?” I asked. (What? I asked it gently, with my hand on his knee, like Willford Brimley.)

“The ashes are in a plastic BAG, Mom!” he said.

“Really?”

“YEAH.”

“Ah. I see. We should bury them.”

“You think?”

“Shut up.”

So, that was basically the funeral Bella got.

My son went out and buried her ashes in the corner of the vegetable garden, which I said nothing about (even though now I feel like the zucchini is going to taste like cat ashes or make us all get mad cat disease or something), because I had lost all ground to offer direction when I took the cat’s ashes on a three-year road trip. Sigh.

I continue to have the very best intentions. And, it may come as no surprise to you, no pets.

Some Things I Have Learned From My Email

2011-03-19T06:25:00.000-07:00

1. The Postmaster has a deep and persistent concern for the size of my penis.
2. My Good Friend, Shanghai Kingstronic, cannot understand why I still work at this dead-end job, when I could be working at home for $4000.00 a month, filling out surveys.
3. Shanghai is also the hook-up for Canadian Cialis, so, should I ever make my penis both exist, and exist big, Shanghai can make sure it is rock hard (for a period of no more than four hours, guaranteed), which Shanghai asserts will "make my lady moan and snnaa great day,ay. He'cream." I think he meant "scream," but maybe not. You'd think I'd know my "Good Friend" better than that, but I am really blanking. To be honest, I don't remember Shanghai at all. Maybe I was drunk when we met, or something. You know how some people think one good conversation means you're best friends, or how when you're drunk, everyone is really interesting and friendly? Maybe it was like that. I feel badly about it now. I clearly also told him that I was a man. I guess we all have a tendency to embellish when we're drunk.
4. Which reminds me, I've been forgetting a lot lately. Apparently, I sent out an entire batch of emails, the subject of which was "hi" and the body of which is a complicated macro thing, the intent of which is to show the user some kind of optical trick. You send the email to 10 people, then click on the macro, and a picture of someone from your graduating class is supposed to appear in a pop-up box. I never got to see the whole message, though, because my computer began singing "Fur Elise" over and over, which ultimately melted the hard drive. Incidentally, I don't remember installing "Fur Elise" on my computer, either, nor playing it on repeat for 6.75 hours. That made the people in the cubes around me really, really grumpy after a while. I understand. It's a pretty song at first, though.
5. For whatever reason, every single email I send out about maximizing your computer performance bounces back to me. I have about 200 messages from the MAILER-DAEMON every day, apologetically letting me know that my message has permanent, fatal errors. Tell me about it! I have utterly no idea how to maximize anyone's computer performance! If I can't even remember sending the emails, I'm obviously the wrong person to ask. I really hope none of those emails made it through. I'd have to just make something up. Which ought to be pretty easy, since I convinced Shanghai I was a man.
6. I had no idea there was a furious civil war in Morbesia. To be honest, I didn't know Morbesia was even part of Andromeda, which is apparently one of the new eastern-European states formed by the Bosnian conflict. It makes me really sad to hear that region is in turmoil again. I am seriously considering laundering some money for their Prime Minister, Akkesaili Xiximova. C could really use $35,676,792 Dubnooks. Which is, like, two hundred bucks U.S. I'd probably do it if they weren't going to pay me a dime, though. I believe in freedom.
7. I am thinking I'll use that $200 to invest in Google. You get an interactive CD that, if the picture in the email is accurate, I can watch while having foamy sex in the bath with my handsome, muscular lover. Who is also a man.
8. I have won the New Hampshire lottery six times this month alone, but there is something wrong with my bank account information, and they haven't been able to transfer any of the $15,000 total in there. Which is starting to really bum me out, since somebody got their hands on my account information, and stole the $437 I had in there, so I could really use the cash.

Some Thoughts on God

2011-03-18T12:58:00.000-07:00

I am always having glancing conversations about what I mean by "God". By "glancing," I mean that I say or imply something about my relationship with God, my beliefs about the mechanisms of the universe, or why I think Scott Walker has more than bad legislation on his CV, and I inevitably get it wrong. Either I say too little (i.e., "Jesus was definitely a Union guy...") or I say too much. Which I'm about to do.

The briefest possible way I can explain what I believe is to say that believing is an act, not a feeling. Feeling is an act, too.

When I was a teenage girl, alienated from my family because of years of strange and painful things that no one really wanted to talk about, I moved in with my boyfriend, because I could. My father, absent from my life for five years, and someone I was deeply angry with at the time, wrote me a letter. The front, an old toothless man, laughing a huge, gummy guffaw. The back, the following: Every moment of your life is a divergence from what the universe would have been without you.

I put it on my bathroom mirror, and when I moved out hurriedly, to better pursue my career in hardware and drug use, I took it with me. I found it hollowly inspirational- like a Hallmark card or a cliché involving animal behavior. Three years later, I was pregnant, and decidedly much more concerned about the universe. I wondered about it then. I postulated, in a feeble, pot-head Buddist way, that people were like oceans- if you stuck your little finger in one spot, the water would be equally displaced everywhere.

Everything you did, breathe, eat, sing- changed the universe in some, finger-in-the-ocean type way. Then my son was born. I needed to know the world was good enough for this child. I began to look for God.

I found him in Iceland, on the back of a physics book, in the italicized principles of thermodynamics (ironically, just as I was discussing the sad reality that he did not exist with my friend Kate, in Maine).

“Matter/Energy is neither created nor destroyed. Only changed.” I choked on the phone. Matter/Energy is not created or destroyed. Not created or destroyed? Only changed. Where did it come from?

Everything would have to be recycled, making Solomon's “nothing new” comment a little more empirical than prophetic. That meant that everything I was now was something else before it was me. That meant that everything I was would eventually be something else. And nothing was coming from anywhere. It was all here, just shuffled around. Changing from one to the other. So some organizing force, some God, in some form, had to exist. We were all eternal. Already, before I noticed. And after. There is no past, no future. It is and has always been now.

There is a line in Michael Ende's book, Momo, when Guisseppe asks Momo how old she is, and she replies, “As far as I know, I've always been around.” I think it's true. What would that mean to us? Is a human life what eternity means by “tomorrow?” Not "time" or "begin" or "end", but change? Can we remember? Can we learn? Can we learn right down to the most microscopic delineation of “we?”

How much of what happens to us is primarily ours alone, not yours, but mine, particularly? How much do we share? How are we changing the universe in every moment?

If our own consciousness does indeed dwell in our cells, then when our cells die, so does our consciousness, right? But within the cells are more tiny universes, and within those, more still. The cells are to consciousness what the body is to cells. Where does memory, learning, wisdom reside? We struggle to make a distinction between our minds and our bodies, eager to consign our bodies to the ether, our souls like ghosts that hover over our heads or lurk inside our flesh, waiting to be released like balloons from a net. But the mind is at the mercy of the brain- damage the brain, and the mind suffers.

Our thoughts are matter or energy. They are made of stuff. Our feelings are, too. We are organizing and sending our own patterns of stuff around the universe -of the universe - all the time. We are touching everything, in our regard of it, all the time. And everything, every new pattern of thought that corresponds with out own experience, our own soul or mind, was something else before, and will be something after. How much do we share? What of me is you, too, right now?

When I think of it, it breaks my heart with precisely the same crushing strength that it uses to open me wide, like a nascent star.

And brings up an interesting question, one I'll be wrestling with for the rest of my life (maybe longer, depending on how this whole God thing turns out): So, if my intentions, my feelings and thoughts are capable of moving and changing the literal fabric of the universe inside the confines of rules I can't and will never understand, what can I do to/with/for God? What am I? What can we do, really?

I don't know. I don't know why I am this and you are that, or why Rwanda happened to her and not to him. I don't know why cancer, why Powerball, why war, why quadruplets. I don't know where or what God is or understand the conversion of matter and energy with any wisdom but hindsight. What I know is that my beliefs are more plentiful, more powerful than my tiny hands, and the most powerful feeling I am capable of is love. My love is the most powerful transformative force I can wield. So, while I don't know how the whole thing works and likely never will, I know that my love is a creative act. It's a thing I can do. And I want to do good.

If it was always now, according to our stuff, another conformation of now doesn't have to include this hate machine or that constellation of shared sorrow, which are using the building materials that might otherwise be devoted to moons or oceans or God. We could recycle the machines of the tragedies and the injuries and the wars and wars and wars and add them to the air in pieces; sent out as benign components of a malignant structure, the whole of which is less than the sum of its parts. We could return them to God as love, so He can build impossible things from them.

We have such power over each other, and such importance to each other. Could I forgive your father? Could you stop my grandmother being abused? Could we stop Dahmer? Hitler? Could we create deities, demons, miracles, planets? Could I change all the horrors by focusing my love toward them? Could we heal your ailing body? How much of those memories, the responsibility for continually affirming the sadness and anger and wretchedness they evoke, do I share? If I can change the world by moving from one end of the room to the other, by bearing children, by eating more spinach - then I should be able to change, at a molecular level, the lessons we learn from the memories we share. And the events, the memories themselves, will actually, really change.

All you have to do is change your mind.

When I say "God," when I pray, I pray to this- the magnificent force of creation and entropy that is shuffling all this stuff around. I believe with my love and my hope and the best, most beautiful parts of me in the story that makes me best understand the meaning of my own life, and the relationship it has with everyone else, because my belief helps build it. I have faith in God because my faith is a creative force, and because it's something I can tangibly give back to the God that made me. It is the only power I have, but it's a pretty good power.

The story of you, Soo Bean

2011-02-06T10:27:00.000-08:00

I woke up at 6 am on Friday, February 5^th feeling like I was starting my period- no pain, but that heavy-wombed, crampy and juicy feeling of the first day of my typical menstrual cycle. It might have been any other day - except, of course, for the fact that I hadn’t had a menstrual cycle in about ten months, so that made it fairly noteworthy. I anticipatorily went to the bathroom to discover I was bleeding. Again, just like the first tricklings of my typical menstrual cycle. I, as most people close to me know, am not a relaxed person. I relax by worrying. Some people knit, some people decoupage, I fret. I fret like the wind. I knew the biggest hurdle for me in having and then having a baby was going to be mastering the art of letting go. Let go let go let go. It’s my mantra. For how well I do with it most of the time, I might as well be saying, “Abra cadabra banana.” But I keep on keepin’ on. I am, at any moment, trying harder to relax than anyone else in the world, except maybe prisoners being tortured or wealthy socialites.

But I began my morning determined not to let fear take the wheel. Not on this morning, not for this experience, not for my daughter. I would welcome her as her mother - as the mother I meant to be. Brave, honest, patient, present, in faith and love.

I made it about a half-hour. Then I became convinced that I was bleeding too much- probably my placenta going all placenta-supernova, worn to bits by my aging body and too many jelly doughnuts clogging up the filtration system. I called my doula, April Harries, who knows me and explained that my bleeding was normal, and that I was probably about to go into labor, if I wasn’t already. Whoo hoo? Whoo hoo? Maybe a whoo. It was too unreal. Apparently, I thought, I am going to have a baby. Like, now. Or as “now” as labor gets- it’s more of an “infinite now,” really.

In my preparations for this moment, I had done some fairly exhaustive reading about birth, pain, pain management, and deep relaxation. I knew, from my experience with my son, that Lamaze was a great way to get through early labor, passing time and encouraging a calm restfulness. But from active labor to end-game transition labor, Lamaze is like one of those teeny little Band-Aids in the multi-pack. Cute, and useless in 99% of Band-Aid situations. I needed something a little meatier - think, ace bandage.. My doula April recommended I read Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth, as well as A Thinking Woman’s Guide to Childbirth, and I did. I also picked up a copy of Hypnobirthing, The Mongan Method. In the interest of using my hamster-wheel brain for good (helping me have a healthy, happy labor) rather than evil (memorizing all of the symptoms of black mold inhalation) I had decided to focus my crazy intense thought stream on all forms of open- open jaw, open lungs, open yoni, open cervix, open heart. Prenatal yoga had pointed me to a vital discovery: it’s impossible to clench your jaw while making deep, sustained, throaty “oh” sounds. The key to “open” for me was sound. I decided to use what I’d learned in my spate of power-reading about relaxation techniques in conjunction with what I’d learned about the power of sound resonance to help me through my childbirth experience. I was prepared to relax so hard, it would boggle the mind.

April asked me what I thought of everything I read, and I explained that I was really struck by the significance of fear and previous negativity in the birth experience. I said the biggest thing I was going to need to do was to manage my fear. April responded that the best thing I could do was to get out of my head, and into my body - wild animal style. I thought about this a long time, and although she was (and continues to be) obviously right, and as much as I wanted to do exactly that, I didn’t think I would be able to make that kind of change in time. I told April that I believed that kind of change was a my-whole-life thing, not so much an in-the-next-five-weeks thing. For now, I thought, we’d need to use, not overcome, my cerebrality to get me through. As it turned out, you don’t have to pick one. Your own nature is exactly what you need. As Barack Obama said, you are the person you’ve been waiting for. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Anyway, since a baby wasn’t hanging out of my hindquarters, I went to work. I thought I could knock out a few more projects before things got too big time- I wasn’t even having contractions yet, so what else was I going to do? Sit around and relax?

When I got to work, I called my doctor. She asked for me to come in for an exam, so I put in a whopping half-hour of work before I left for the doctor’s office. Dr. Mueller poked around, and informed me that I was effaced to 75%, and dilated to nearly 3 cm. I was delighted! All this progress and I hadn’t really felt a thing! Maybe my body had grown stronger since my son. Maybe all my visualization and relaxation had yielded! Maybe a baby would just suddenly drop out of me, into my clasped hands, like a precious little honeydew melon. “You’re in labor.” She announced. And so I was. I went home, ordered pizza, and began a “Dexter” marathon (because nothing says “miracle of new life” like a lovable serial killer). My husband and sister joined me a couple hours later, and we took pictures of me in my bikini, for the baby book.

By 2 pm, I still wasn’t having any contractions, although I continued to bleed steadily. So, around 3 pm, I suggested we go for a walk to see if we could get the party started. Because it was February and cold and windy, my mom thought this was a terrible idea, because it was slick outside. She suggested instead that I walk around my house. I argued that I would have to walk around my house 194375529507 times to equal one city block, and wanted the cold wind on my face. Mom asked what we would do if I really started laboring far from the house. My sister suggested one person stay back at the house in case that happened. This incited a full family argument about how we would manage ourselves in the event that our walk took us too far from home for me to make it back to the house because my labor had been walked into a frenzy, forcing my husband and sister to deliver this child on the side of the road, using their winter parkas as towels and swaddling the wee beasty in wooly long underwear. Maybe, I suggested, we could stuff the baby in one of my mukluks, before huffing and puffing the long blocks back to my house so we could drive to the hospital. After about fifteen minutes, we all sort of simultaneously realized this was ridiculous, and that if the walk really sped up my labor, we’d just walk slowly back. I promised I wasn’t going planning to walk to Two Harbors - just hump around the block - and my mom finally agreed. We all laughed at how serious it had become. Too much “Dexter.”

Off we went. We walked around my hilly neighborhood, and sure enough, my uterus began a steady rhythmic drum beat, much more powerful than any of the cute little clenchy attempts earlier in the day. Yes! The weather was challenging- forcing me to work, which my uterus met with squeezy adulations. I still felt lucid and connected to the people around me, able to talk and make jokes and generally connect.

Having accomplished our mission, we headed home. Once we got back inside, my contractions remained steady and strong, but a little erratic. I still felt lucid and connected to the people around me, able to talk and make jokes and generally connect. An interesting tidbit about my contractions: they are as flighty and erratic as me. Sometimes they are like diligent little work horses, rolling in every five minutes as predictably as the tide. And then, they go all crazy, stealing their step-dad’s car and staying out all night drinking forties behind the old high school gym. And they stay like that until a baby appears. So, that can happen. Also, after about three hours of contractions roughly five minutes apart, April began timing the length of my contractions, which were around 90 seconds long. With my son, they were around three minutes long, so I knew this was possible. I’d be lying if I didn’t say that all of this made me feel like something was wrong with me- like I wasn’t built right to have a baby. When I had my son, my contractions never grew closer together than three minutes. This was great for breaks between, but made pushing him out take forever (see “infinite now,” above). That, and I was so terrified that I’m pretty sure I all but had my legs crossed against his arrival. I was clenching on the molecular level. So I was apprehensive about experiencing the same thing this go ‘round. But I released the fear, because I was already in labor, and April didn’t seem concerned about my wacky contractions at all. Lots of people have long, random contractions. I returned to my pleasant assumption that I was exactly the right person to have this baby.

At 10 pm, April recommended that my husband and I try to get some rest. The contractions were steady and steadily stronger, and inching closer together. We decided that we would take a hot bath before we tried to nap, because I was more wound up than tired, and thought the bath would relax me. Shortly after we got into the bath, my contractions intensified. I started breathing through them- the deep lifting breaths described in the Hypnobirthing book. I took bottomless, energy-filled relaxing breaths in between, picturing my body swirling with red-gold light, wrapping my womb in warmth and power. My husband squeezed hot water over my back, gently touching my skin and reminding me of all the other nerves in my body. After about 20 minutes in the tub, we felt it was time to go rest in our bed.

My body was languid and soft, the only tension in the rhythmic pulse of my uterus. I felt myself begin to brace against the contractions, and I stopped myself, deep breathing and opening my yoni into the contraction. We curled up in our bed, but I was not anywhere near sleep. After one episode of Dexter/my husband snoring, the contractions got much more intense. I started to use the sound techniques to help me through the contractions. I focused intensely on the humming. As I felt the contraction first stirring in my uterus, I drew a deep, slow, red-gold breath into my lungs, drawing it deeper and deeper, beyond my lungs, into my uterus. As the contraction began to pull and compress, I began to release my breath and red-gold energy in the form of a steady, deep, strong hum. I found my voice’s natural frequency, and pushed the air forcefully through my body, vibrating my lips, my nose, and filling my throat with warmth and energy. I pictured the deep hum separating me into two floating layers, like sound or light wave frequencies, isolating myself with the sound and relaxation- not the pain.

I woke my husband, and told him I needed to go downstairs. It was around 11 pm, and I knew the baby was coming. My whole body was beating like jungle drums, alive with some awesome energy that felt simultaneously completely familiar and utterly foreign. Going into labor, when things get rolling, is not unlike discovering that, if you squeeze your eyes shut and hold your breath, you can make yourself invisible. It’s kind of a “what in the hell?” realization that there is this crazy thing your body can do. And by 11 pm, my body was no longer screwing around. Having spent the last several hours checking the turn signals, testing the brakes, revving the engine and generally idling fast, my body had peeled out of the driveway and was burning down the road, gaining speed with every mile. I was scared of the power of my body, at exactly the same time as I was comforted by the incredible power of my body. It knew how to do this. I knew without knowing. I was not in control of the labor, the pain, or the way it would unfold. I was only in control of my reaction.

Naturally, I tried not to flip out.

From 11 to 11:45, things had gotten to the point that I could no longer chat with anyone. My sister’s jokes were less funny. Everyone around me seemed sort of fuzzy and far-away, as though they were projected images on a screen. They all seemed to be staring at me as though I was Willy Wonka’s character Violet, swelling to massive roundness and turning bluer and bluer, threatening to explode right before their eyes.

My contractions were steadily 3 - 4 minutes apart, deep and intense, and April asked if I wanted to head to the hospital. Because of the level of pain I was in, I said I did, and bundled up to head to St. Lukes. Before I was in labor, I believed Duluth’s number one priority as a city was to address the education shortfalls facing the city. Since my labor, I think the city needs to drop everything and fix the streets. Retiree healthcare? Pshaw. Balanced city budget? Whatever. Streets. Stat. Every single bump was bone-crunching. I asked my husband to slow down, but he couldn’t go slowly enough to eliminate all impact from the car’s motion. (With my next baby, I am buying a helicopter. Or a jetpack.)

Also, before I was in labor, I lived three minutes from St. Lukes. When I went into labor, I entered a wormhole, which dragged me 29872575979257 light years from St. Lukes. How we were able to get there on one tank of gas is beyond me.

But get there we did! We slowly made our way to the birthing center, walking another 29872575979257 light years to the elevator. I had to stop every three minutes to experience my contractions. It was difficult while I was walking to welcome them and remain open- I buried my face in my husband’s chest, hanging my arms around his neck and continuing my deep humming. It was impossible to clench and hum, so I hummed and rocked my hips, doing a little hug-dance every time I contracted on my way to the birthing center.

We had called ahead to request a room with its own bathroom, and in hindsight, I can’t imagine what it would have been like without my own shower. Before and after the baby! We checked in, and pretty quickly I was in the bed, in the butt-shot robe, waiting to find out how far my cervix had come in the last few hours. I was anxious to hear how much I had dilated- more so because my labor with my son was 24 hours. 24 hours is a long time to spend doing something super fun and pleasant. It’s longer when it’s something hard and painful. With that labor, I was blind sided by the intensity of the pain, and by how long it took to get from zero to ten centimeters. I had been expecting pain, and had reels of Hollywood baby deliveries playing in my head (Mom screaming at Dad, “you did this to me! We are never having sex again!” and dad passing out...). I thought I knew what was going to happen. But I was wrong. It wasn’t like anything I had ever felt before. The pain transformed me in enduring it. I had felt, during my son’s birth, that I was in as much pain as I could survive. About ten times. And each time, the nurse would check me and tell me I was, basically, nowhere near done. Two cm. Four cm. Eight cm. Every time I felt like I was at my limit and discovered I was nowhere near complete, I felt like a failure, as though I was weak and inadequate. But 24 hours later, I had managed to survive, and my beautiful son was in my arms. I wasn’t inadequate. It was just really, really hard. Thank God for this lesson.

Our nurse came in to check me, and introduced herself as Lois. She was a soft-spoken woman, in her mid-fifties or so. As she introduced herself and started to examine me, she asked me what kind of labor I was planning, with or without any medicine or intervention. We explained that we were committed to a natural labor. Lois was such a gentle woman, and she sincerely listened to every word I said. She hooked me up to the mama and baby monitors, and then checked me for dilation.

Three cm. Three cm? What the flying flip? For reals? I’d be lying if I didn’t admit there was a nanosecond of self-pity temper tantrum, but it never made it past my reptile brain. I immediately reminded myself that this was what had happened with my son. I made it through that, and I would make it through this. The big difference was that this time, I knew that I was the mom. I would safely bring this baby into the world, as my first act of badass mama-ness. (Knowing, from my fifteen-year-old son, how many times that badass will be on call. The mom position ain’t for lightweights. Although, as a side note, I would totally have gotten an epidural when they had to put an IV in my then 10-month-old son’s head if that would have made the experience any easier for me. But not for this. But I digress.) I took a deep breath, and got in the shower.

As I stood in the shower, I had a little conversation with myself about labor. Labor, I reasoned, was not unlike a really onerous household duty, like, say, painting the exterior of your home. You have to do it. It’s definitely going to suck, and take a long time. But when it’s time, you have to do it. I leaned on the shower wall and rocked my hips, slow-mo-Shakira-style, and said a little prayer of welcome to my baby, and to God, too. “It’s okay for you to come, now, baby. I am ready to do this. I will make a safe passage for you into this world.” Saying this over and over in my head made me feel calm and ready, sinking into each contraction, opening my yoni and my throat as I hummed deeper and more intensely with every passing contraction. I actively welcomed the pain as much as I was able.

I stayed in the shower for an hour. When I got out, I laid in the bed and tried to rest. But we were beyond rest time - it was labor time, and April started to play a much larger role. She kept giving me choices, somewhat reminiscent of the “would you rather?” game people play, i.e., “would you rather fall out of an airplane with no parachute, or fall out of a 120-story window?” April would gently present the world’s crappiest idea, immediately followed by a slightly crappier-sounding idea. “Would you like to sit on the toilet for a while?” Absolutely not. Nope. “Would you like to rock on the birthing ball for a while? No, no I wouldn’t. But I did, because I knew it would make the contractions come harder and faster, and bring my baby to me. April and my sister began massaging me as I worked through my contractions. As time went on, my humming opened with my cervix, and my humming became a singing of sorts- from a sustained “mmmm” sound to a low sustained “ohhhhh” sound. The massage touch was light during the contractions, and harder between, which seems to balance my sensation.

The f*%$ing monitors came off 273540925474512438439 times.

I am not sure what those things are for, but if your belly isn’t flat or cubical, they are going to slide off. Overandoverandover. (I suspect the same people that are making women’s jeans are making those monitors.) Thankfully, I had Lois. Wonderful, gentle, birth-fan Lois. And she would episodically come in, church-mouse style, and oh-so-carefully re-establish that both me and the baby were alive. She was so respectful of my birthing process, and so kind. She was truly a gift. After another stretch alternately on the birthing ball and the toilet (which is an awesome way to make your contractions go crazy), Lois came to check me again. I was at seven. I had gone from three cm to seven cm in about two hours. I was so happy, and so proud of my powerful body, doing its amazing thing. The pride lasted a few minutes, because things started to get very hairy.

Somehow, the news that I was at seven seemed to really inspire my uterus to get cracking. The contractions started to come harder, and stay longer. I knew my body was in control, and that I was about to experience the hardest part of my labor. This part of labor is the strangest, and the hardest, both on your mind and your body, I think. The incredible otherness of your body in labor versus your body in, let’s say, aerobics class is so profound it’s frightening. I wondered with my son and with my daughter if my body was even mine, if it would kill me trying to expel the baby. But it couldn’t kill me- I was my body, I was the pain, but I was not in control of it. My body was protecting me from the weakest parts of myself - the parts that would withdraw from the contractions, not clench so hard, try to make it hurt less. My body was doing what needed to be done to abet a miracle. I didn’t have to design the plan. I just had to be brave enough to go along with it.

As the contractions changed and deepened, I was astonished by the pain I could feel without dying, or at least passing out. As each contraction began, I drew my breath as deeply as I could. I opened my mouth and expelled the air in juxtaposition with the pain, balancing, balancing the energy flowing out of my mouth against the awesome clenching of my uterus. As the contraction gained momentum, I would first feel nauseous, and then, as the pain mounted, the hair on the back of my neck and scalp would prickle. At the apex of the contraction, the pain was so ferocious that my breath was taken from my body, and I had to fight to maintain my song, because it was so hard to maintain a strong exhalation. I had to work very hard to stay ahead of the pain, and my focus was absolute.

Over the next two hours, I started to see an image in my mind as the contractions crescendoed- a hollow tube or column, with two oval holes along the length, on both sides of the column, allowing me to see right through. When I think about it now, the ovals formed sort of a raised infinity symbol. The image, for some reason, was what the pain looked like. My contractions lost their boundaries, coming one on top of the other, lasting five, ten minutes, one arriving immediately after the other. I was lost in this sea of pain, and I lost my voice somewhere in the waves crashing into me harder and faster. I could no longer get ahead of the pain with my breath and separate myself from it, there was no time before the pain was at its most intense. My song became a high moan, my lungs unable to produce sound enough to balance the pain. I started to weep, great, racking sobs. I rolled to my side, clinging to the railing on the bed, grasping and pulling it as though I could pull my conscious self out of the pain, like a drowned woman from the water. I wept and finally said, “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t. It hurts so much.” The room erupted in affirmations and love. At the peak of the next contraction, I felt a bone-crunching pressure at the bottom of my uterus. It was an utterly new sensation, and completely distinct. It felt as though the pain had a target inside of me. It had changed from a wide, tidal pain, and become directional, heading down. It sounds crazy, but the pain felt like it was heading out. I needed to push it. “I feel pressure!” I shouted, and everyone flew into action. Within seconds, Lois? Dr. Mueller? Someone was checking me, and announced that I was “complete.” Ten centimeters. Ten. I could not believe it.

The next twenty or so minutes are both utterly clear and utterly chaotic in my memory. I can’t remember who said or did what. “It’s time to push!” Someone said. I immediately began crying again. “I don’t know how!” I said. The fear and sadness lingering in my memory from my son’s birth poured out of me. “I don’t know how!” Dr. Mueller explained that I was going to just take a deep breath and bear down with my bottom. April said they would help me. And my husband held my hand and said, “you can do it.” I was shaking like a leaf. “Okay,” I said, through chattering teeth, “okay.” My legs were handed to me, and I felt like a car accident victim being asked to kick her way through the windshield with her broken leg. “Take a deep breath, and bear down as hard as you can!” The contraction was already on me, ripping through me from my uterus toward my vagina. “Push!” Everyone was yelling encouragement, but I felt as though I was standing at the very edge of a deep, rushing river. I couldn’t wade across gingerly. If I stepped in, it would carry me away, and I was frightened. I took a deep breath, and threw myself at the river.

For me, pushing exerts an inexorable force. In a way, it’s like throwing up. Once you start, you absolutely cannot stop, and you will allow your body to do unthinkable, impossible things. You have to abandon yourself in trust. Trust in your body, in God, and in the wisdom of the pain.

The second I started bearing down into the contraction, my body and I transformed back into a single unit. Instead of separating myself from the pain, I joined it and it possessed me. It was a raging, roaring thing, and I was transformed by it, illuminated and powered by it. I bore down with all my strength. The room was full of shouts of encouragement. I dragged in as much air as I could hold and threw myself at the river again. I felt like a wild animal, like a hurricane or comet, hurtling through the contraction. Again, and again. The baby crowned, and Dr. Mueller rushed to get her scrubs on (my sister, who could see the baby’s head, said in a panicky voice, “ISN”T SOMEONE GOING TO CATCH THE BABY?”). “Hold it right there,” Dr. Mueller said, “Just keep her right there, Anna.” I struggled to control the energy. It was like holding the door closed on a submarine as it dove - I shook with the effort. “Okay! Push this baby out!” I drew as big a breath as I could, and bore down with every molecule in the universe that was me. My breath, and my breath energy, caged in my chest and thundering against my uterus to force the baby out, roared from my mouth like I was a wild animal. My daughter was born.

And now the room was perfectly still. My uterus was still. My breath softly returned to my body, and my daughter was placed on my breast. Her face was so familiar and so beautiful. She looked like an ancient eskimo, her eyes opening in a sort of mystical confusion, like she was being woken from a dream in a house she was not yet familiar with, looking sleepily around to try and reconsile the place her dreaming mind thought she was and this place. I sang her the song I sang every morning of my pregnancy.

"Morning has broken, like the first morning. Blackbird has spoken, like the first bird. Praise to the singing, praise to the morning. Praise to them springing fresh from the word."

Abortion Contest

2011-01-23T19:36:00.000-08:00

In 2003, George W. Bush was running for re-election. (I don't want to talk about whether or not this was a re-election campaign or an election campaign, after the Florida funny business. I'm just glad he's not the president now.) The campaign was ugly. The issues were suddenly intensely divisive and personal - particularly where Roe v. Wade was concerned. You couldn't turn the radio on without hearing ferocious, fervent diatribes surrounding the issue of legal abortion. I was accustomed to avoiding the conversation, and, hopefully, allowing each person to reconcile their own reproductive decisions between themselves and God or whomever they like to reconcile themselves to.

But it was all over the radio and television, in conversation overheard in bank teller lines and grocery stores, and, it turns out, on the playground. My son was only 8 years old. I'm not sure how the political pogwank wove itself into playground diatribe - perhaps between games of four-square and soggy rectangle pizza slices, the little ones polarized and debated the benefits and disadvantages of prison reform and estate tax in hissed, lispy whispers. Anyway. I think it was sometime around October? The campaign rhetoric was bitter, loud, and everywhere. I fielded ten kabillion questions from my son about everything from homosexuality to terrorism, providing spanky PBS answers to everything, neatly avoiding genitals, hate, and murder. Then, one day, as I drove us to the grocery store, my son piped up, "Mom, what's an abortion?"

There are moments, as a mother, when you feel a cold heaviness descend around you, when time briefly stops and birds are frozen mid-air, and you feel the heavy hand of God on your shoulder. "Hey," says God. "Don't f*ck this up."

"Well," I said to my son, "an abortion is when a woman decides to end a pregnancy." Not bad, right? Even-handed.

My son had obviously been told another definition (see "playground diatribe," above). "Is it when a mom kills her baby?"

I knew I was on very fragile soil. I didn't want to sound off on my own political views, but I also didn't want to leave him with the impression he had. I wanted to leave his mind open, so he could make it himself when he had the maturity and information with which to do so. When he was 36.

"Some people think so. Some people think it's more important for the woman to be able to choose when she becomes a mom. When a woman ends a pregnancy, it's because she isn't ready or able to be a mom."

"Why wouldn't someone want to be a mom?" (This is a hard question to answer from your own child, because all the answers boil down to, "because you and your kind are megalomaniacal a$$holes 98% of the time. It's like living with a giant bacterium. Your moral structure isn't formed yet, and you can't wipe your own butt, which means you literally and figuratively sh*t on everything around you.") I measured my response carefully. "Well, sometimes a woman doesn't get to choose if she gets pregnant or not. And, sometimes a woman knows her body can't make a healthy baby. And, sometimes a young woman gets pregnant, and knows she's too young to be a mom."

My son scrunched his face. "But you were young, Mom."

Now, I was 21 when he was born, and that was young, for me. What I had meant was young young. But I didn't want to say, "I mean like, 14, honey" because my son would've freaked out. I also didn't know yet what he'd be like at 14, and didn't want to inadvertently give him any ideas. So, I said, "Yes, I was young." He said, "So, why didn't you have an abortion of me?"

I knew I needed to be particularly careful how I responded. So, I said, "Well, when I found out I was pregnant, I thought hard about all the possibilities, and I just knew I wanted to be your mom." My son smiled. "Oh." Then we talked about what he was like when he was a baby, and the time he almost killed the daycare lady. (I'll tell you that one later.)

So, good conversation, right? Way to field a series of very sticky subjects with finesse and love, right? Those Mother of the Year people are waiting for me on line three, right? Wrong. So, so wrong.

Flash forward, to around May.

I was driving my son to school. We were chatting about random items of preparedness (the location and status of his lunch, mittens, and homework) and dinner plans (chicken spaghetti, no cheese). At the light that precedes his school by some five blocks, my son smiled at me and said, "Mom! I forgot to tell you! I wrote a story about you."

"Really?" I said, smiling into the rear-view mirror.

"Yes!"

I was touched. My heart was warmed. I smiled my way through the recently greened light."That's so nice, honey! What's it about?"

"It's called 'The Light of Love.' Everybody had to write one. It's supposed to be about the person who did the nicest thing for you ever. I wrote mine about you."

"What did I do that was so great? Is it about how you never have any clean underpants?" He laughed.

letterman's jacket. Wait for it...wait...for...it...

"I wrote my essay about you because you did the nicest thing for me. I wrote about how you almost had an abortion of me, but you didn't."

Hi-yah!

I slammed on the brakes, whipping over the car to the side of the road. "You what????!!!!" I hissed. "You WHAT???!!! YOU WHAT????" My son had gone invisible, his skin had changed to the color of the backseat, and he had stopped breathing to avoid detection. If it wasn't for his Buzz Lightyear sneakers, I would never have found him. But I found him. I reached behind me between the seats and clenched his little hoodie in my fist. "You wrote an essay about telling everyone that I almost aborted you? Why would you do that? WHERE IN THE HELL DID YOU EVER GET THAT IDEA?"

"Well, you said you found out you were pregnant with me, and you thought about all the options, but then you had me."

And this is why, children of the world, your mother won't answer the question, "Why would anyone not want to be a mom?" I buried my face in my hands, too simultaneously furious and mortified (a sort of Mom form of Zen) to do anything. "Did you turn the essay in?" I asked.

"Yes." My son replied, his face stricken. So, now I was faced with a very unpleasant task. I would have to sit down with his teacher, a lovely woman who I knew very little about save her excellence in the classroom, and discuss several very intimate and delicate matters. I walked my son into the classroom and waved her over to me. "Can I talk to you for a minute?" I asked.

"Sure," she said, stepping into the hall. "What's up?"

There was no gentle way to do it. I dove in. "I don't know you, and I promise I would never put you in this position if there was any other alternative. And before I go any further, please understand that I am not asking for your position on this issue, or asking you to agree with mine. But, my son wrote some essay for you called, 'The Light of Love?'" She looked thoroughly perplexed. "Yes?" She said. "About the nicest thing anybody ever did for the kids?" I asked. "Yes?" She said. "Well, my son wrote his essay about how I did the nicest thing for him because I didn't abort him."

Her hands flew up to cover her mouth.

"Wait, wait, wait! Before you speed-dial Social Services, I have to explain. I didn't almost have an abortion. Although, if I had considered an abortion, that would have been fine with me because I think that's my right to do. But in any event, I sure as hell wouldn't have told him about it! He talked about it like I sat him down and was like, 'You are lucky to be here, kid. That was a close one.'" I dragged my finger across my throat. "I didn't almost have an abortion, although I am pro-choice and think it was my choice to make. But I wouldn't tell him that, either. I wouldn't talk to him about any of this!" I was babbling, rattling away like a crazy person. She stood, stock-still, hands over her mouth. "I'm sorry to have to tell you all this, and like I said, I don't expect you to tell me how you feel about it. But I needed you to know I'm not some monster who tells her kid he almost didn't make the cut," I said. "And I'm sorry I said it that way," I said.

She held up her hand. "It's not that." She said. "It's fine, of course you didn't tell him that. It's just that, well, those essays aren't here."

Do you still have that ominous track cued up? Just put it on continuous play.

"What do you mean, they're not here?" I hissed.

"They're not here. We sent them away. They're for a writing contest."

Ohhhhhhhh, nooooooo.

"A writing contest?" I asked.

"Yes." She said, moving her palm to her forehead. "God. This is bad. They're being judged by the long-term care patients of St. Mary's."

Perfection! But of course they are. I could see it now; frail, shaking, blue-veined hands manipulating old-timey letter openers, cooing and clucking as they read the adorable missives contained therein: "Agnes! Listen to this! 'The nicest thing that anyone ever did for me was bring me to church, where I learned about Jesus.' What a precious angel."

"Marjory, did you read the one about the little boy who says his puppy did the nicest thing for him ever when he licked his face after his dad had been killed in the line of duty, saving an entire orphanage? Just beautiful." Meanwhile, in the corner of the room, poor Margaret held my son's hideous homage in tiny, arthritic, clenched fists. "What kind of monster would tell their sweet boy he was almost an abortion? What has happened to the world I knew? You know what? I'm changing my living will to 'Do Not Resuscitate.'" Not only did we not win, we might have killed people. I briefly contemplated going to the long-term care facility and explaining this whole thing to them, but just couldn't imagine how I could do it and not seem bonkers or offensive, or both.

This is the real reason I won't allow my mom to ever end up in one of those places. I don't know if any of those residents are still there, and I can't be certain they won't recognize my name.

Poo, of the Non-Winnie Variety

2011-01-07T10:17:00.000-08:00

Unlike the butt post, this post is not actually about poop. Well, it kind of is.

Let me back up. (Have you noticed how, when you lead with poo, everything that follows becomes a double-entendre? 'Cause I have.) Anyway. It is a well-known and oft-ridiculed fact that all things concerning defecation make me wildly, morbidly uncomfortable. I realize it is a natural bodily function. I also realize that everyone (except for me, of course) does it. But it's so yucky.

I don't understand how some people are so nonchalant about it. I've worked with people who proudly carry a magazine to the company restroom, nodding and smiling at anyone they meet en route. "I'm on my way to poop, peers and direct-reports! Pooping! So, now you know that about me. Hold my calls until I'm done! Poowooowooping!"

I've also worked with people who announce in the smoke room that they need to do some heavy lifting. Oh, fine. Go! But for God's sake, don't tell anybody! Keep it a secret. Be ashamed. Once, I walked into a restroom in bar and there was a line to the lone stall. A woman in the stall called out, "I'm sorry everybody. I'm going to be in here a while." Just announcing it to an entire room of strangers, who would, after that announcement, stand around listening, smelling, and generally witnessing her most private moment. We should all have given her high fives as she exited the stall. (Maybe after she washed her hands.)

Finally, I once shared a restroom with a woman who used to discuss potential dinner selections with her boyfriend while nature was calling on line #2. Why would she do that? How busy, how painfully overscheduled could she be that she would be forced to multi-task that most private and revolting of personal jobs? I vividly recall her asking her boyfriend if he still wanted fish sticks, or if she should pick up some ground beef for burgers. If I had to do all my menu planning while in the bathroom, we would never eat again.

So, if I walk into the bathroom and the room is clearly heavily in use, I'm outta there. I will wait until I go home. 10 hours later. If I am in the washroom and someone enters a neighboring stall and gets right to work, I will pee like it's my job and get the h#ll out of there so fast, you'll think Superman was changing in my stall. And if you tell me about your own poo situation, or worse, ask me to examine a poo you made (oh, beloved hippie friends, with your colon cleanses and sawdust granola), I will never speak to you again. And when people ask me why we no longer hang out, I will tell them you've changed. Which in my mind will be true, because now you're disgusting.

(I'm kidding, of course. I'm not this big a baby. Speaking of which, I am utterly unimpacted by my baby's poo. No problem. And she is more unabashed about her BMs than any creature on the planet, save a spider monkey or reality tv contestant.)

As with most unreasonable preoccupations, my poo-hangup (sounds like the worst closet accessory ever) has caused me some trouble. Once, it even forced me to violate my own ethical code.

I was out to dinner with a friend, and she had brought a friend of hers along to join us. I had never met this friend before this dinner adventure, although I had heard a lot about her. Conversation was lively, and the food was franchise faire- we ordered cheesy appetizers, and settled in to our 16 oz. beers. I got up to take a call from home in the restaurant's foyer. After I finished the call, I decided I should take the opportunity to use the restroom.

Because I have a sixteen-year-old, I have spent more time dunking my kibbles in the toilet water than the average woman. My son leaves the seat up, uses the last of the toilet paper, and generally boobie traps the bathroom seven out of eight times he uses the bathroom. It has crossed my mind to build him a small outhouse in the backyard, so that in February's 20-below weather, I can shout out the window at him, "who's butt is chilly now, my little friend!" but I have not. 'Cause it'd be me that had to empty the receptacle, like an enormous human litter box, and I will do no such thing unless it will save lives. Period.

I digress.

So, short story, I've learned some lessons in bathroom re-con from my son. I always check that the seat is down, and free of liquid adornment. I always check to make sure there is TP at the ready (because I have walked, plastic army guy-style, to fetch a roll of TP from the hall closet more times than I care to recount). So, when I entered one of the two bathroom stalls in the restaurant washroom, I immediately ascertained that the situation was untenable - no TP at all. Shreds on a naked roll. I went for the second stall. I should mention that I also detest speaking to anyone while I'm in the stall. It's not talky-time. It's business time. When I am done with that business, we can catch up on all the fun stuff happening in the office, our lives, Top Chef, whatever. But while I'm actually midstream? Quiet. So, when I saw the shoes of my friend's friend enter the neighboring stall, I thought, "There's no toilet paper in there!" But what I said was nothing. Because it wasn't talky time yet. And then a terrible thing happened.

In the approximately 15 seconds since her arrival in the stall, sounds of havoc and destruction emanated from her body. I don't know if maybe she had just finished a twenty-day diet of refried beans and espresso, or maybe just had two-thirds of her intestines removed, or what, but bad, bad things were happening, and happening fast. It sounded like a hundred angry ninjas, fighting their way out of her butt.

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh noooooooooooooooooooo. Now I was in an awful position. I knew something she didn't know- there was no toilet paper in that stall. And she definitely needed some toilet paper (plastic gloves, tarp, etc.). I stood there in my stall, wringing my hands and shaking my head. What could I do? If I gave her some toilet paper, she would know that it was me over here, and that I had witnessed what she just did. And if I didn't, I would abandon her to somehow get toilet paper from my stall, and I couldn't even imagine how she would accomplish that task without another set of clothes, or one of those claw-things they sell on late night tv. I'm no abandoner! I'm a sister! Yes, I have a tampon you can borrow! Yes, I will check if you have any pee on your white pants! Yes, I will tell you if you have spinach in your teeth, your bra shows through your shirt, and if your butt looks blimpy in those jeans. But I was frozen. And I fled.

I didn't even wash my hands.

I practically ran to the table. I hurriedly sat down, bright red and sweaty. Then I scrubbed hand sanitizer all over my hands and forearms, and sat there holding my arms away from my body to dry, like a surgeon.

My friend's friend came from the restroom almost immediately. She seemed like she was feeling great, which honestly was confounding to me. Millions of totally inappropriate questions fought their way to my mouth, and I bit them back: "Are you feeling better?" or, "Do you want a Rolaids?" and, "Did you accidentally put Drano in your coffee this morning?"

When the waitress came, my friend's friend ordered a Buffalo Chicken Strip sandwich. Don't do it! Round two is just a few hours away! I thought. I fought the urge to suggest Chicken Noodle Soup, and silently asked forgiveness for failing her in her moment of need.

I'd like to say I learned an important lesson that day, but the truth is, I'd do exactly the same thing if it happened again. Which it never will, because I'm holding it from here on out.

The French Flu

2010-12-30T08:39:00.000-08:00

I am finally sitting down to write! Sorry about the gap. I got Christmased.

We have had four Christmases so far, in two states. Thank you, divorce and remarriage, for amplifying this particular holiday from one holy birthday to five. (And I immediately imagine five tiny baby Jesuses in five little manger troughs, Mary, beleaguered and covered in holy spit-up, shoving around a five-bay wooden wagon full of squirming, grabby toddler saviors..."Jesus 1! Stop bringing the dead flies on the apple cart back to life! Jesus 3! Leave the warts on the toad! They're supposed to look like that. Jesus 4! Just because you can crawl on water doesn't mean you should! Mama can't swim out into the middle of the Red Sea to get you every time you want to go freak out a seagull.")

Hee hee.

Over the holiday(s), my beloved Mom (aka tinyangrymom) got really sick, hacking and coughing, and generally making a phlegmy nuisance of herself. She weighs about 100 pounds (literally, not "soakin' wet!" or any other cute aphorism to indicate petititude). So when the doctor prescribed cough medicine with codeine, some other antibiotic crap, and another mysterious medicine, all of which cautioned that they would cause drowsiness, I was logically concerned for her safety. That's a lot of drowsy for not a lot of lady. So, I did what I do. I didn't offer to stay with her or have her stay at my house or anything-I just announced that I expected her to check in with me regularly and lucidly, or I would send the 911 door-axers over to her house to fireman-carry her to the hospital. After she sent me the same question in a check-in text session twice, I decided to go visit her and bring her some soup or something to throw her off the fact that I was checking to see if she had gone all Hunter S. Thompson on me.

She was okay, of course, albeit a little crusty and maybe more creative in her clothing selection than she would normally be. She's not one to veer far from the fleece ensemble or plaid flannel jammies for loungewear - she looks like a page out of an LL Bean catalogue most of the time, bedtime included. She has penny loafers, and there are actual pennies in them. She owns at least ten pairs of knee-high, wool cabled socks. Pleated denim t-length skirts? Check. Crisp white button-downs and tiny pearl earrings? Check. Navy blue...everything? Check.

So, when she's wearing the hot pink fleece pants over the plaid flannel jammies, I am logically worried.

Further, as she puttered around her kitchen, coughing and impotently cleaning up (moving dirty dishes from one spot on the counter to the other), I glanced over her to the tv in the living room and noticed two things: one, the tv was tuned in again to the Hallmark channel. Two, the Closed Captioning was on, in French.

There are a number of things about this that are confusing. First and most obvious is that my mother was definitely deliberately watching the Hallmark channel. In fact, almost every time I come to her apartment, she is watching the Hallmark channel. Have you ever watched the Hallmark channel? It's the television network equivalent of a melted hot fudge sundae; room temperature, disgustingly, sense-thwartingly sweet and thick, thick, thick. I know the Hallmark channel is no worse than the reality-show channels, or the shop-at-home channels, or the kind-of-sex channels, and I like to get my Murder She Wrote and Golden Girls on occasionally, I'll admit. But my mom is the opposite of the Hallmark channel.

For example: my mom and I were walking through the gym at the YMCA, where we walk together sometimes. Some guy was shooting hoops, sinking almost everything he put up. I mention that not because I'm a fan, but because it's important for you to know that he wasn't firing off the basketball like a toddler lobbing wooden blocks. We needed to walk under the basket into which he was sinking said basketballs. He politely put the ball under his arm and waited for us to pass. I smiled, and said, "Thank you!" sincerely as we walked by. My mom stared resolutely ahead, walking 1508871375981 miles an hour to the walking track entrance. "You're just like my friend Alice," she said. "You walk by that guys and say, 'oh, thank you for being soooooooo nice...'" - my mother widened her eyes and mocked an expression of over-the-top gratefulness, like Oliver Twist or an incredibly sarcastic French waiter - "you say, 'oh, thank you' like he did some HUGE favor for you. You know what the difference is between you and me? I walk by that guy and I think, 'Go ahead and hit me, motherf*cker. You just go ahead.'"

She's right- there's a subtle difference.

Once, in a conversation my sister and I were having about what the worst present ever would be, my mom said that the worst Christmas present you could ever get somebody was to tie them to a chair, duct tape their eyes open, and force them to watch the entire "Touched by an Angel" library. (We can talk about the fact that this was a "present" to her later. It might support my point here.)

So, it surprised me that she is not a tourist to the Hallmark channel, but a regular visitor. A resident, if you will.

The next obvious irregularity in the scene was the presence not just of subtitles (lest she miss any critical Hallmark channel dialogue, and get lost in the complex plot twists and turns), but of French subtitles. "Mom, why do you have the subtitles on?" I asked her.

"Subtitles? What are you talking about? Those aren't subtitles! That's Closed Captioning - haven't you ever heard of that?" (See? Subtle. A subtle difference between us.)

"Yes, yes I have. So, why do you have the Closed Captioning on? And why is it in French?" I asked.

"It's not in French." She retorted. I looked over her head. Tres bien. Merci, mon ami, said the Closed Captioning. "Yes, it is." I said.

"No it isn't." She said. And then, we both turned to look at the screen, where the French words zipped by in their little black box at the left of the screen. "French." I said. And a weird thing happened - we were both staring at the screen, staring at the French words on the screen, confounded by their presence. Then, the French words disappeared, and a series of paragraphs in English appeared.

"They must have been saying something in French," My mom offered. We both started laughing.

"For a second there, I though you'd been watching this movie the whole time in French, without even noticing. Like you just started speaking french spontaneously. Learned it accidentally from watching the Hallmark channel with French subtitles on," I laughed.

Mom covered her face, trying not to laugh so hard she started coughing.

"Closed Captioning," She said.

I Made You Say Underwear

2010-12-22T21:33:00.000-08:00

I have a tiny butt.

Bear with me! This is a story. It has a plot. Which only circumstantially includes my tiny butt.

So, tiny butt. I have fought this reality for many a year. My counterassault has included many key components, fought on many fronts. These include squats, of which I have done 45 a workout three times a week for seven years. Let's see, that's 45 x 3 x 7 x 52 = 49,140 squats. The result? My tiny ass is so freaking strong, I could kick holes in bank vaults. So, if you are ever looking to get into or out of one of those, I'm your guy. No discernable increase in size, however. Just density. My ass is the muscle analog to Pluto.

I also am a butt-clothing expert - I can spot a pair of butt-flattering pants from fifty paces. I also know a thing or two about undergarments. Regular underpants won't do at all for us cupcake butts. All those do is scoot what tiny bottoms we have into the center, making sort of a sack of butt in the middle, like a roll of socks. Boy shorts make me look like I have Barbie's butt, sort of a topographical void- a nonanatomial feature.

All forms of underwear immediately gather in the central area of my butt, forming a sort of loose, elastic-y wedgie, because there is no buttflesh to obstruct their inexorable journey to the crack. So, that leaves g-strings, whose design is overtly sadistic. G-strings don't mince words. They go right for the butt crack, safely ensconsing themselves between the two globes of flesh. "Boo-Yah! How you like that, butt? I was made to be a wedgie!" And because they don't actually touch or attempt to contain the butt, for the tiny-bottomed folks of the world, g-strings are really the only undergarment that doesn't detract from or visibly diminish what we have.

It's not about sex appeal. It's not about comfort or panty lines. It's about careful protection of the teeny tiny bit of non-planar profile we have. I am not Kim Kardashian, but neither am I a two-dimensional line drawing.

Let me make something clear: I do not wear g-strings anymore. G-strings, on a post-partum mom who has yet to really recover her body are horrific, making her look like she's been prepped for roasting with kitchen twine, like Porketta. I am not sure what look I am going for lately, but I am certain I don't want "culinary" to be in the list of adjectives used to describe my lingerie collection.

I used to wear g-strings all the time. In fact, I had a few trusty pairs that were my go-to's for nice butt pants. As is often the case with crap you don't really want to pay for, gradually my g-strings got older and older. The fabric got natty and grey. The elastic got softer and weaker, until it was really just a long rubber rope. Still, I wore them. One by one, I was forced to throw them away, until I had just one pair remaining of my original collection. One day, I was wearing the last surviving pair, with a nice pair of low-rider slacks, a long tank top, and a little babydoll top. I thought I looked great, but the outfit was torture - the tank top kept creeping up, while the pants kept slinking down. Everytime I moved, I had to tug the pants back up and then yank the tank top back down, and then adjust the babydoll top again over the whole precarious shabang. It was infuriating- I looked like I was doing some kind of Macarena choreographed by Mr. Bean. Stupid.

After a full day of yanking and tugging and generally acting like I was having an enormous OCD episode, I went to pick my son up from his latchkey program at the school. The kids had gone on a field trip, so they were all in the school gym, sitting next to piles of outwear and squirming. The gym was full of parents, too, and the place was generally chaos. I squatted next to my sullen 5-year-old, who was emotionally very involved in an issue he was having with the lace pf one of his shoes. I cajoled and encouraged him to just tie it again, or better, wait to do it in the car, but no, it was all wrong, he would need to cry for a while about the tie gone wrong before untying both shoes and retying them overnadoverandover again until the were identically tight, and uniformly centered on his foot. (Crap like that makes you want to punch yourself in the face until you pass out. I can't even tell you how many times I have lovingly tied and retied shoes whose terrible tightness disequilibrium was practically killing my poor son. And don't even get me started on lining up the hem of jeans with the second row of shoelaces. Sigh.) So, of course steam shot out my ears, and suddenly, tying his shoes became a form of martial art. While I was tying, my tank top getup started to creep, creep, creep up my back, exposing the lower flub-chunk area of my midsection, and the upper part of my butt crack. That was it. I snapped. I reached back and grabbed the stupid effing pants with one hand and yanked up, and grabbed the stupid effing tank top with the other hand and yanked down, as hard as I could. Only it wasn't the tank top. It was the loose, floppy exposed band of the last pair of g-string underwear. The first thing I noticed was that the elastic, such as it was, really, really stretched. I think I had it about a foot and a half away from my body, well below my bottom and probably down nearly to the floor before I realized that it wasn't my tank top. The second thing I noticed was that the front of the g-string underwear was destructively embedded in my kibbles, as though I had fallen from a considerably height onto a narrow tightrope. I was in shock, so I took the long, floppy band that was now hanging out of the right side of my pants, a loose loop in my hand, and furiously tucked it into the waistband of my pants. Then I scanned the gym to see who had seen me give my self the most ferocious and authoritative wedgie of all time. Nobody. Not one eye, not one person pointing and wincing, nothing.

When I got to the car, I used a pair of nail clippers like the jaws of life, and carefully extricated the g-strings from my person. I threw them in the trash outside of Mr. Bagel, and my love affair with g-strings came at last to an end.

A Love Letter to My Son on His Birthday

2010-12-21T08:11:00.000-08:00

16 years ago today, at 4:52 am, nine pounds, four ounces of your precious self were placed in my 21-year-old arms. At 23 inches long, you didn't even fit into the Christmas stocking sleeping bags the in which the birthing center was putting all the new arrivals. So, problem solvers, they just draped the stocking across you, like a throw.

You made the other babies look like little toys, you were so long and rangy.

Your hair was jet black and plentiful, and within hours had adopted the Conan O'Brien gravity-defying style you still wrestle with today. Your nose was so angular and pronounced that you most resembled a tiny little man, not a newborn baby. A top hat would have made more sense on you than the little stocking cap we had.

You were as you were in my womb- gentle and slow, sweet and ruminative. You spent hours staring at unadorned white walls, watching intently as the light changed in our little bedroom. I wondered what you knew, what thoughts you carried with you from there to here, and how you were reconciling one reality with this new one. You were happy, serious, and so lovely. I can't describe the smell of your little head, but I hated washing your hair. (I feel better about it now.) I would bury my nose in your hair and, much to your chagrine, your cheeks.

As you have grown, I have tried to balance my desire to raise you with my desire to know you well. You are hard to know - slow to share your feelings and most intimate thoughts. You prefer to think than to speak, and when you do speak you'd rather crack a sardonic quip than share your insights. In desperate times, you are ten thousand years old. You seem to understand the rules of the universe on a fundamental level- like you are connected so closely to the veil between energy and entropy that you are the oldest and youngest person I have ever met, simultaneously. I have never met a gentler, kinder person than you. There is a light, a deep and powerful force that hums away inside of you, and is apparent to everyone close to you. Nothing I ever did in my life was good enough to deserve you, and I will never live long enough to love you as much as I'd like to, or you'd deserve.

I can't believe how much fun it's been so far. I can't wait to see what the next year, the next 16 will be like. Will you still love the same foods? Will I still be able to crack you up? Will you still be as generous with your secret self, sharing your tender thoughts as you fiddle with whatever's handy with your long, reticulated daddy hands?

I want to say this as clearly as I can: that moment, the moment of your birth - it was the first best moment of my life. Now, 16 years later, with the birth of your little sister, and the addition of your step mom and step dad...we have had so many beautiful moments in our shared life together that we'd never get done if we made a list. But I know where we'd start - sixteen years ago today, when you came through the universe to my waiting arms, to change every single thing. I love you, my baby boy.

On Sleep, or the Lack Thereof

2010-12-20T18:25:00.000-08:00

Everybody's sick around here. Including, unfortunately for everyone, the baby. Oh, the baby. She is a fierce creature. It's funny, because two nights ago, when she went from angellic slumber to human seal horn, I had really gotten used to sleeping three or four hours in a row. Then kablammo! Done. We sleep in squirrell-shifts. At about four in the morning, as my ten-month-old daughter bounced up and down in her crib, squalling and rolling her tongue like an angry little Spanish baby, (note to self: patent baby castanets), I thought, "I don't rememeber smoking a bunch of crack before bed..."

And you do start to wonder about exactly how much baby Tylenol is too much- she now points to the little basket I keep it in and makes hungry grunts, like a little addict jonesing for her hit of "goofy grape" relief. How inflamed can she be? She hasn't even had a year to mess herself up yet. It took Lisa Minelli like, sixty years. But, between teething and her cold, the kid is beside herself with misery. I remember my own experiences with tooth pain and the first delightful twinklings of a serious cold. How your mutinous body begins to swell up, closing your nasal passages for business, while simultaneously running a molecular microplane lovingly up and down every surface of your respiratory system. Sucky.

The last time I got really, really sick, I had just given birth. Like, ten hours before. Every hysterical coughing fit was like some new experience that the Bush Administration wouldn't call torture. Coughing would make my poor nether regions, most recently famed for passing an 8-pound human into the world, feel like all my business was going to come flying out, a la Braveheart. I was absolutely certain my stitches were popping out like the Hulk's tee-shirt.

Also, everytime I would cough, I would pee. And not just a little whoops-a-daisy pee. Full on. Pee, by the way, feels very bad on your stitches. Ditto open wounds, i.e., a genital region which is covered in tiny abrasions from passing an eight-pound human into the world. Think lemon juice, paper cuts, uhh, vagina.

And then there was the time I had two abscessed teeth, and a 105-degree fever. I was cookcoo. I was also in so much pain that when the doctor shoved a huge needle full of novacaine into my jaw so she could numb the area to drain the abscesses, I cried and kept saying, "Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!" which is not how I usually feel about having that done. For example, if you were to do that for me right now, I would probably repeat another locution over and over. While beating your ass.

When I think about these things, I feel like the baby has really been pretty chill.

I've been giving her some homeopathy pills, because I don't have enough other ridiculous shit to spend my money on. ("What, no Tooth Fairy tax? Well, I guess I'll have to start buying homeopathic remedies...")

In seriousness, they work. I swear to God, you have never met a person more ready to reject homeopathy than me. Just the word "homeopathy" is hilarious to me (mostly because it has the word "homie" in it, which makes it sound like "sickness in my homies."). All the ingredients are things like shark farts and sage vibrations. The Keebler elves make it, when they get done making those waxy chocolate effigies of themselves. (Keebler elves must not be very into voodoo, huh? I digress.) But I give my daughter a couple little...nubbins of the homeopathy meds, and she is chill. Not Nico chill, but chill. No seal horn. SO, I'm not getting any teeshirts made, but I'll keep buying the stuff.

I'd rather explain why my daughter salivates at the sight of tye-dye than why she has more acetaminophin in her blood than, say, blood.

Hand of God

2010-12-05T19:34:00.000-08:00

Ever wondered if there: a) is a God, who b) has an express destiny outlined for you, and also c) has a really solid sense of humor?

So, these two folks were flying a small aircraft to some Minnesotan destination that couldn't be conveniently or efficiently reached by another means (most likely delivering human hearts for transplant or antidotes to snake bites, I'll wager. It is impossible for me to imagine boarding a steel mailbox with wings for any reason other than livesaving necessity and undeniable expedience). I imagine the conversation included such highlights as the fall foliage, the potential for snowfall this year, and, of course, how many times the pilot had ever crashed. At least, that's what I would want to talk about, if I was a thousand feet in the air, locked into an airborne steel coffin.

And then, they crashed. I'd be lying if I didn't say this was a "duh" part of the story to me. Crashing is as likely as landing in this scenario, as far as I am concerned. But enough about me - this story is about not me.

So, they crashed. But they didn't just crash. They crashed into power lines. Which, for us laypeople out there, is bad. You are really not supposed to press your flesh suit against power lines, unless you would prefer your spleen (or human hearts) cooked to restaurant meat safety standards. Remember also that they were ensconsed wholly in metal. Metal loves electricity. It just can't say no, regardless of whether electricity has been off, tramping it up around town with gasses and other conductive transmission media like some bad high school boyfriend. Metal gives up its carrier density like it's prom night, New Years's and Armageddon at the same time. So, metal plane = giant fork. Power lines = giant outlet.

Somehow they didn't die. In spite of the fact that they crashed their plane into a power line.

This story is already miraculous. I already want these folks to kiss my baby and pray over my father. But wait! It's not over. There's more.

After they crashed their tiny metal plane into huge power lines, they careened into the farm over which they were flying, and crashed into a combine. A combine is, according to my research, an enormous Steven King flesh stripping device. It's terrifying. So, this couple survived a plane crash, an electrocution, and a major farm accident, all at once.

I think I speak for everybody when I say, "no way!" "way."

Read the story here: http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2010/10/10/plane-crash/.

Angry Baby

2010-12-01T20:21:00.000-08:00

It is obviously ridiculous to be mad at a baby. I like to have a little talk with myself about this sometimes. Tiny babies, I reason, are not driven by motivations. They are incapable of metacognition on any sophisticated level, which makes them incapable of planning in advance. It also makes them incapable of manipulation. Or, speaking more to my own feelings, it makes them incapable of revenge. No matter how compelling the evidence to the contrary. Sometimes, the sheer number of instances in which the baby seems to be mounting an hysterically aggressive and effective retaliation campaign sways me to thinking seriously of them as perverted prodigies; precocious sociopaths. (I.e., “Look, my Timmy is starting to walk an he’s only five weeks old!...” “Well, my Laura is plotting my imminent ruin, and she’s only three months old…”)

It sometimes feels like I am raising the exact opposite of the Dalai Lama.

Small babies are driven by needs, right now. Little reptiles. Or, as my mom says, little puppies. She often jokes, “Ask any dog what time it is, and they’ll say, ‘NOW!’” Babies are on the “now” program, as well. There is no upper brain thinking at all. Hungry? Scream. Poop sitting too long on bottom? Scream. Scared? Scream. Screaming? Scream. But of course. You get the idea.

I calm myself down most times by watching shows about people with ridiculous numbers of children- quintuplets, three sets of twins, two sets of quadruplets, etc. These shows remind me that I have it easy. It makes my one screaming infant seem like a walk in the park, which, by the way, I can take with one normal sized stroller, not a weird Dr. Seuss contraption. If it’s a real bad day, I watch the shows when the new parents bring home the squirming hives of children, and some sadistic camera crew documents their first days as parents of 2470875102759 newborn babies. They use night-vision goggles so the viewer can really appreciate the midnight wake-ups, clearly showing bleary-eyed postpartum moms yanking addled bosoms from night shirts over and over and over, while dads fumble with tiny diapers full of black tar and jam enormous, traffic-cone pacifiers into tiny clenched faces.

The truth of it is that taking care of children, particularly babies, is hard. And awesome. Like, really awesome - not “this new flavor of Mountain Dew is really awesome” awesome. The awesome that changes you into something bigger and better than you were before, that tears a hole in the veil between you and infinity, and allows you fleeting glimpses of the nature of God, the meaning of life, and the relationship between love and the relativity of the universe. There’s also a lot of poop.