Still Drinking Coffee

It’s almost 8:30, and I’m still drinking coffee. I’m soooo tired. I’m soooo stupid.

This is worse than college: I stay up all night, I regret it the next morning, but then I do it again.

All because I am desperate for a couple hours to myself.

Which are crucial. Not enough - and often, I still am not totally relaxing - I remain “interruptible” - Ariel Gore in her book The Mother Trip provides the insight that mothers are constantly interruptible, but we need time to be uninterruptible - it was really helpful to read her words and know that my constant feeling of being on call, on high alert, just ON - 24 hours a day - is not because there’s something crazy about ME. It’s commonplace, it’s hormonal, it’s motherhood.

It’s hard to explain to others that only when my kids are sleeping - and I know they’re asleep for at least half an hour, solid - can I come close to getting absorbed in something else - yoga, intimacy, writing, things that only have a benefit when you’re fully present and not leaving one ear perked like a satellite dish toward the children’s room.

Of course, by the end of the night, when they are finally both truly asleep - usually 10 p.m. - the last thing I feel like doing is yoga, intimacy, or writing. I want to veg. I want to watch bad television. I want to sleep. I want to read cheesy blogs. I don’t want to engage in anything that requires me to be thoughtful, soulful, or energetic. I have nothing left to give at that point. My body has been a source of nourishment, caring, and entertainment since 7 that morning - it wants a break.

So my relationships are suffering - long distance ones, that require phone calls - close ones, that require quality one-on-one interaction. Not to mention, my relationship with myself. Of course, the last thing I need right now is to grow distant from the ones I love. Again, Gore advocates for mothers to make time for things like sleep and meditation and sex - but god, it’s hard.

Sleep is so boring. And meditation and sex - though both can be reviving - require focus. Can I just chill with the Netflix for a good 48 hours? With some ice cream and vino, while someone gives me a massage, does my nails, trims my hair, takes notes for me when a thought of worth actually does crop up, a little crocus amid the weedy landscape that is my untended brain?

If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend Gore’s book and her site, hipmama.com. I don’t think I am at all a “hip” “mama” but it’s nice to know hip mamas exist out there. Mothers are not just saggy, docile, vapid yuppies in ill-fitting jeans driving SUVs badly. They are cool and creative and spiritual and sexual and intellectual and responsible for the human race’s various incarnations. They are not a sub-group for political pundits to try and buttonhole, nor are they a ‘they’ to be tapped and targeted by marketers.

More on that later - probably on my new blog…

The Mom Purse

When I was little, it seemed like every mom had a “Mom Purse”. You know it - it’s larger than seems necessary, and full of random crap. The stuff of MacGyver’s dreams - a rubber band here, some toothpicks there, a little lotion, some tissues, a few bottles of pills (just in case). Oh, and of course the abundance of receipts and miscellaneous scraps of paper stuffed into (and falling out of) the checkbook. Change dancing around the bottom of the bag.

Addicted to organizing as I am, I never thought I would have one of these clutter-traps. Turns out I was wrong. I think it’s a rite of passage - once you get your “Mom Purse” you’re officially an adult. I just discovered I have one. Complete randomness and chaos took over the second I bought one of those oversized bags. It’s sad, really…but also allows me many opportunities for reorganizing, which is fun…so maybe not all bad. Am I alone in the battle of the bag? Do you have a “Mom Purse”, and are you willing to admit it? What’s the strangest thing you’ve found in there?

 

DIY? LFE vs. LFE

“WHY do you always have to learn everything the HARD way instead of LISTENING to others? WHY do you have to do it yourself?”

My mother was ANGRY.

So was I. But she was completely right: My life is a study in DIY/LFE - Learning from Experience vs. Learning from Elders.

My 60s-bred dad taught me to Question Authority.

I tend to Question Everything.

Case in point: Thimbles. They exist for a reason. I discovered this, not by trusting the wisdom of the ages and wearing one before embarking on a sewing project that involved thick brocade, but by going footloose and thumb free.

I ended up with a broken piece of needle imbedded beneath my thumbnail. I ended up in the dr office for an extraction that ouch, yuck, ai yi yi, ooh, will cause me to testify to the masses: YES, thimbles, use them! I heartily advocate thimbles! I’m a thimble fan!

Meanwhile, my mother rolls her eyes in exasperation. “DUH,” she would say, if she were me.

Now, this is just one example of me just foregoing the Usual Procedures of Things, ignoring Conventional Wisdom, because I don’t see the obvious need. I’m suspicious that society has unnecessary habits. I get annoyed when people follow the rules blindly without understanding why…

Other instances involve not wearing underwear, not checking the oil in my car, art projects (some successful, some not), and other large-life things where my attitude was, Heck, I can do this my way; it can’t be that hard; why not?

This attitude is exactly what makes me excellent at analyzing processes at work and streamlining them - finding better, faster, quicker ways to do a job, because I question the current procedure in ways others just wouldn’t, because they go along with This is The Way It’s Done and Always Has Been Done. I have been valued for this capacity for critical judgment. I honed it doing critical theory papers in college and grad school.

What hurt when my mother yelled at me was that I don’t do this on purpose - it’s like there’s some instinctual Try it Yourself and Prove it Right/Wrong instinct in me that sends me riding bareback over the plains of experience - sometimes toward disaster; sometimes toward brilliance.

Of course, for my mother, her role is to protect me - not to let me test the Fire is Hot and Burns rule by searing my flesh over the stove, but to teach me to listen and to trust her to avoid that kind of pain. Obviously, somewhere along the line, as happens with all kids, I think, I discovered that one of mother’s rules or laws wasn’t as true as she had advertised.

So then I had to question everything she said.

Some things were very true. Some not. And how else to know but to test them? Good old trial and error?

But of course, this can take a lot more time and pain that necessary. We read history in order not to repeat it.

So when exactly should I test authority, and when should I trust it?

How do I decide and discern?

To my children as I lay dying…

To my children,

 

Why do people always wait until someone is dying to say “I love you”? Why do you wait until the last breath is hovering in the room to wish you had more time? What is it about Death’s presence that brings out your understanding of what you regret not doing? And yet…the lessons learned are but fleeting bits of knowledge in your consciousness. For tomorrow you will still put off reaching out to someone that you will apologize to only after they are gone.

 

Understand this, my children: you need not fall victim to this vicious cycle. Learn the lesson and act upon all you know you will wish you had – today. I beg you. For if you do not, I will surely die. As it is, the light is dimming and the air is thick in my lungs. I am weaker than you understand. I try to tell you every day just how close I am to giving up, and I am losing the will to fight. If my children will not fight to protect me, what reason do I have to continue? So I ask again – please fight for me. Please help me regain my will to survive. For without you I will perish…and I fear you do not realize what will happen then. You, too, will disappear.

 

Love,

 

Your Mother Earth

More Mary Poppins Disection: Eastern Religion Tidbits

I mentioned the idea of this post to a friend of mine, and she correctly concluded, “You are way too into Mary Poppins.”

Yes, I know.

But maybe this is my thing. Some scholars study the I Ching all their lives; others War and Peace. Maybe I will become the renowned interpreter of Mary Poppins. Maybe this is my destiny. (And maybe I need to stop watching Lost and Battlestar Galactica so much, two shows flooding with destiny-driven plots. They are making every scribble while talking on the phone seem weighted with meaning it does not have…)

Whatever the point-lessness of it, I did notice a few - shall we call them clues? - to a hidden eastern- influenced philosophical bent undergirding this movie:

1) At the end of the ‘fantasy’ scene, wherein MP takes Bert and the children into a sidewalk chalk drawing to dance with cartoon animals and ride carousel horses through various romps, it begins to rain - so the troupe has to zip back to ‘real life’ before the chalk completely dissipates in the rain.

They do so, and MP says, seeing the art has all been washed away, “Oh Bert! All your fine drawings!”

Bert says, “No matter. There’s more where they came from,” pointing at his head.

Bert takes his foot and smudges the runny drawings, and the yellow and red colors caused me to think of those Buddhist sand paintings that take such painstaking amounts of time, only to then be blown and swept - destroyed - upon completion. Bert’s attitude of acceptance models an acknowledgment of the temporal and transient nature of things, a lack of ego and clinging, very like what Buddhists aspire to.

2) The first time the children look up the chimney, Jane says, “It’s so dark and gloomy up there.” But Bert offers a poetic paen to the chimney sweep’s world that is half-light, half-dark, shadowy, that sounds very like a Taoist description of yin and yang nature of reality.

3) MP carries an umbrella not unlike the Dalai Lama’s in a photo I have of him.

4) The whole ’spoon full of sugar makes the medicine go down’ idea echoes the story in which Lao-Tse drinks vinegar and finds it sweet - because, as father of Taoism, he finds the world sweet.

Ok, I had more, but it’s gone.

I’m sure I’ll see it when I watch… again…

Hit the Refresh Button

We have this thing we do.

We’re talking about our kids, and eventually someone says something like, “… and that’s what little Frank will have to talk out with his therapist in ten years!” Or: “… hey, at least Frankie will have something to talk about in therapy!”

We’re joking, but we also kind of mean it. Many of us fully expect that our kids will end up in therapy - or avoiding it - and that there’s nothing we can do to help it. We accept the terms of parenting to be that we will screw up our kids, imprint them with Issues, disable them with emotional conditions, harm and scar them with all our good intentions and love - no matter what we do.

We go into parenting facing defeat and failure as givens.

And we joke about it because it’s kind of comforting to not live with the illusion that we can control the inevitable catastrophic breakdowns to come.

I for one have never questioned this position. My mother’s Perfect Parents - the Greatest Generation! - caused her tremendous amounts of mental and emotional suffering. She went to therapy. She, babyboomer, - the Most Moral Age of Aquarius Generation! - had me in the 70s, didn’t recreate her parent’s style at all, but still, I ended up in therapy. Now here I am, -Generation X! - having kids in the new century, and it seems like, along with preschools and colleges, I should be saving for and setting up my children’s future therapists as well. It’s just par for the course.

Or is it?

Having wanted to be an anthropologist when I was in college, I tend to read things in terms of cultural impact, so I tend to think that much of the family trauma of the past few generations has its roots in very large, cultural issues - like the fact that we (middle class, at least) moved to these isolated nuclear families - the fact that our gender roles became so hierarchical - the ideas about identity with regards to tradition that didn’t - that don’t - give adolescents a lot of room for becoming themselves and becoming adults in truly healthy ways. I could rant on and on. I could write a book. Others already have…

What I’m wondering, though, is if we are truly as doomed as we think. For some of us - for a lot of us - we’re not still reacting to our grandparents and parents - we’re post the postmoderns - we have our issues, we’re embroiled in a confused culture defined by a money-hungry mass media - but despite all that, we’re fairly sane. Even if we haven’t been to therapy, concepts about tolerance and respect and being true to yourself and other cultures and listening techniques have filtered through the seams of our daily lives (Tony Soprano seeing a therapist) and however wonky that is, it certainly has informed us - we sit at a different table than our parents and grandparents did. Things have changed.

The very fact that we accept therapy as a norm differentiates us.

And I don’t think of therapy as a sign of abnormality or sickness only - we DO live in a society without a lot of shamans or guideposts to provide guidance and meaning - we’re left to our own devices, and that can be a very lonely, sad affair.

But for all the ways in which we’re not, say, the Aborigines in Australia with their respectful and intimate relationship to the land and to their lifecycles and their history and identity - well, we’re also not like a tribe I read about where the women are constantly brutalized; and we don’t leave babies out to die… We may be ruining our planet, but many of us are doing what we can to change that…  No, we’re not perfect, but we’re also not the worst ever, either…

And I think it’s healthy to admit that. It’s a good thing that we’ve given up on perfection - we can focus on being honest and real. And if anything is going to keep our kids from being screwed up, in my opinion, it’s that: being who we are, flaws and all.

How do you wake up?

So, I would really like to find more time in my day. What working mom wouldn’t? The answer I keep coming back to is: “If I could just get out of bed 45 minutes earlier, I could…” - what? Let’s see all the possibilities. I could: go to the gym every day OR get into & out of work earlier every day OR take time to sit down & eat breakfast OR take time to read something other than “Goodnight Gorilla” OR take time to make my lunch so I don’t get tempted to eat fast food OR I could go curl up with my wife and just cuddle next to her for a bit since we never get to do that anymore OR a million other things. I know this logically, I feel it in my soul - how great it would be to get up 45 minutes earlier than I currently do. Somehow, none of that is enough to get my lazy butt to stop hitting snooze on either (yes, there are 2 - and yes, they are set ahead & set to go off at different times - I know it’s sad) alarm clock until I’m almost running late every day. I’ve seen those alarm clocks that run away from you when you hit the snooze button. Hi-freakin-larious. I would throw it into a wall when I finally found it, scream every word I shouldn’t in the presence of my angelic sleeping 2-year-old, and be extra pissy all day - so, no, that’s not an option. I’ve tried putting the clock on the other side of the room - yep, I’ll snooze & get back in bed. I think my only option at this point is to get a rooster. Can you set them for a specific time?

Rotten Neighbor Website

This Rotten Neighbor site is a real estate site where you can complain about your neighbors! How fun is that!

And the Google Earth mashup is freaky, per usual.

No one has yet said anything about us…

DMV and my 80 year-old father

So, I had lunch with my dad today to celebrate his 80th birthday. I couldn’t make it to the dinner, but felt I should acknowledge the milestone. I was pretty relaxed about the whole thing, until I heard the story about his recent trip to DMV. Bear in mind, while he’s telling me this story, he’s driving me around in his SUV that is somewhat necessary for him since he’s really too tall for most vehicles. So he recently had to renew his license & the only test he had to take was an eye “exam”. Really? I’m sorry, but when you pass the 3/4 of a century mark, you should have to prove that you can still drive safely. I understand that they don’t need to take the written test again. Fine. But AT LEAST make them drive someone around the block for goodness’ sake! But I digress. So he proceeds to tell me that he is asked to put his face in that little machine & read the top line. Well, because his glasses are SO THICK, he doesn’t fit in there properly. So he took them off, closed one eye & faked his way through it. When the woman noticed what she did, rather than saying ok - I’ll let him slide….she was so *impressed* that she decided to REMOVE the restriction from his license. So now my 80 year-old father is not only still allowed to drive his SUV around the world, he doesn’t even have to wear his glasses (trifocals) anymore to do it. ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME?!?!?! I’m so worn out by this. Not just because it is disturbing, but because he then proceeded to almost get in a couple fender-benders. Needless to say, I drove home after lunch.

The Eternal Cougher - Help!

Ok - I just CANNOT take it anymore. I sit next to a room with about 6 people in it. For awhile there were 2 that would talk incessantly about sports, electronics - anything but work. Then one got arrested and the other got moved. So it was quiet again. Then one of the remaining started with major allergy issues. I’ve got sympathy for this, but the non-stop clearing of the throat & sneezes that sounded like he was about to vomit just got to be a bit much. So then he left & got a job somewhere else. It was quiet - some minor talking issues, but my iPod helped tune that out. Now, the peace is over. There’s another one who clears his throat more than is really necessary for survival. And recently The Eternal Cougher has moved in there. I don’t know how to deal with it - sounds like he has the plague, if you ask me. And I’m not convinced he covers his mouth, as we were all taught to do when we were wee tots, right? What should I do? My only ideas at this point are to start pelting him with Halls, make him pay me $1 for every cough (might need some muscle to enforce this), spray Lysol into the room everytime he coughs, or drop down into a temper tantrum any 3 year-old would be proud of. Any other suggestions?