la femme follette

happy hloene

 

Last night, we were unfortunately caught up in Ballet Town's Hallowe'en hoopla.  Fille & I dawdled after her class, having dinner at the Uzbeki place on the main drag.  When we came out, it was dark, and down the street we saw ... a throng of people, led by searchlights.  Also, the main drag was lined with spectators.  Holy hell, we have to get out of here!  I told her and we hustled it out.

I had a book to drop off at Ballet Town's library, but when I got to the parking lot behind the library, that it shares with the municipal building, there were cones & a group of bystanders.  I pulled over to the side of the road to get out and information-gather from the natives.

"You can't park there," one of them said. 

"I know that," I said.  "But you are cordoning off my usual parking space.  I have a book to drop off and --"  That was as far as I got before they started piling on with unhelpful suggestions, every one, no one getting to the answer to the question I parked my car to get out & ask.  "Are you ever going to let me talk?"  I asked, with no eyelashes.

After that, I found out that the facing street was not one-way heading on the grim course to Ballet-Town Parade, which was the confirmation I had sought.  Going around the town & coming back on Library Road, I again pulled the car over in front of the (closed) library to dump the book in the drop box.  Some Halloweeners were coming down the street with cats & bumblebees in strollers. 

"You can't park there," one of them said. 

"Why don't you mind your own damn business?!"  is what I asked him.  God, enough, Ballet Town!  Twice each week is enough of you!

 

Fille (sexy ghost!) is on her own tonight, with Mari & her best pals.  Garçon did not get to have Hallowe'en, which is baffling to all of us, but this is what he chooses.  He fell behind on his school work in a battle of wills (with whom we are not exactly sure), and Hallowe'en was at stake.  Well actually, it started out with Astro Boy being at stake, but then came into the week facing Hallowe'en, still with him stonewalling & alternately trying to get himself out of the weeds, and by the time he got down to business last night, he just did not have enough time to complete his work.

He worked somewhat feverishly today, my son, and then at 3ish (our Hallowe'en parade -- park where you feel like it! -- starts at 4) he came to me with a sad + unacceptable attempt at his last two assignments -- one-page wrap-ups of relevant extra-reading .  "This is really the best I can do with this, Mom, I'm serious." 

Mari & I had to explain to him that the truth was that this was the best he could do in the half-hour he had left, and the fact is that if a person is going to wait until the last minute to meet a deadline (never mind that putting me into the last minute for reviewing when I was trying to get my other child out the door is unacceptable, but group lead-time is not a concept we have worked on), they had better make certain they can crank out work that meets the standards in that last minute. 

So, I am home with him while Fille & Mari wind their way back from the farthest reaches of our route.  Then (!!!), Mari told him that if he were to complete his revisions, he would take him out when they returned (spoiler!), but no.  My son is upstairs in his room, right now.  Ok.  Whatever.

This is obviously larger than trick-or-treat, or homeschooling, or whatever.  People are quick to say, "Send him to school!" as the problem manifests itself aroud his schoolwork, but it is not a schooling issue, this is a parenting issue.  It is very trying and I am never sure what to do, or -- this occured to me a couple of days ago, while I was stewing over this latest -- maybe there is nothing to do. 

Much is made of how Fille is all into ballet & we go along, because it is her thing & not ours, but ballet still requires that we do something.  Maybe our job with Garçon is to do nothing.  He does not at all do anything in a way we find logical or sensible or anything.  Mari & I (and Fille, to boot), do not do things the hard way.  We choose what we want, we set the goal, find the most direct route between A to B , get in front of what we can and try to stay loose for the rest.  A. Eyelashes or B. Mind Your Damn Business, it is your choice when you get in our way.  I think that our flexibility is key and also, ironically, the thing we are not using to its best advantage with our son.

But the ballet thing was making me think -- Fille has a thing she wants to do, and it makes us go "???" but we do it for her, because she wants it, it is part of her being -- but again, it requires that we do something.  Drive the car, write the checks, think about performative gender and stereotypes & inhibitions and pervasive cultures!  Fend off stage parents!  Buy tights a lot!  So even though her way is mystifying, the doing & the direction is very familiar.

Our son is not so.  We are trying to sort out a lot lately how much of this is us and how much is him and what to do about it, or if there is anything to do.  We make our expectations very clear and we also are deconstructors and simplifiers and a lot of our previous conflict with our son has been about the fact that our feelings are so hurt because we try to make things clear and easy to achieve with him, but he blows it off, insists on doing his way.  Also, we do not get our way with our son, which is troublesome to us, and also, because we are Doers, we want to find the way to get our way.  Mari and I most certainly relate strongly to the child's will.  Just having to do with him, we feel like as he grows older, the stakes get higher, the things he will lose out on more valuable, but at the same time, he is only 10. 

Also, so what about our way?  Who can say that anything is right about it for our fin de siècle little boy?  Maybe he will develop some interesting + important method we cannot even yet conceive of!  Time travel!  Or something!  But not if he does not make it through the 5th grade.  See?  I am narrow-minded, but I am sorry!  How is this happening?  This child!  

I was talking to a girlfriend of mine the other day -- she has one daughter, who is 30.  I am not the kind of person who pretends that everything is just great, unless I think doing otherwise will bore you to death or give you social poisoning.  So, she asked, and I was halting and a little hesitant, but I told her more or less what was going on this week and how it was relevant to the whole of him, as a piece of it.  She said that we could not do more than we were doing.  So, all we can do is deliver the consequences, but we cannot, like, make him see that the consequences will be so awful before the consequence comes down. 

 

Obviously.  Anyhow.  This is way more intense than I thought it would be.  It is all that wiccan self-reflection shit in the energy of this time, surely.  If you have made it this far, internet, I salute you! 

frankie says relax

 

Today, instead of driving my car into the Delaware River, with my children in the backseat, & then blaming it on an itinerant + mysteriously-vanished black man, I calmly + lovingly dropped my little girl off at her ballet class, ditched her brother at the library, then went and got a massage.  There is a Tui Na place in Ballet Town to which I had never been and now I have.  Not so exciting, but not a bad way to kill time, either.  It was probably the stabbiest massage I have ever received.  The outfit hangs out a reflexology shingle, also, so I am thinking the stabby is really best used there.  The very idea of whiling away some ballet time having some bodywork that happens with my clothes on is almost more excitement than I can bear.  That is truly exciting.

Also in Ballet Town:  a Pilates studio.  I like Pilates Chick, but this place is walking distance from the school, and further investigation reveals that it is 2/3 the price of Pilates Chick, so ... that.  I am not one for breaking up.  I really am more about slipping out the back to hop on the bus and make a new plan.  So, secretly what I hope is that I will take a few sessions with a New Chick and find that Pilates Chick is more awesome at her job.  (She is pretty awesome, really.)  I think that is unlikely, as at the same time I am wanting to see other people in the area of Garçon's guitar instruction and I think we are looking at Season of Don't Need to Discuss Much.  That would be best, I think, a whole slate-wiping in every direction.  Fall is a good time for that.

On the way to ballet, Fille said, "Are we going to carve pumpkins for Hallowe'en?"  I told her I had no idea & asked her what her father thought.  Both children responded with a "???"  And I shrugged it off.  Three miles later, they wished again to know whatever we would do about pumpkin carving.  I said to them, "Hallowe'en is tomorrow, you know."  Then they agreed that they should have asked the Pumpkin-Manager Parent, who has been home all week long. 

Ok, but this is a first.  I neither remembered the pumpkins & etc & whatnot for Hallowe'en, and neither did I freak out and go into damage-control mode when it was revealed that my proactivity + planning was lacking.  Also, they seem to have survived.  There are pumpkins at the farmers' market, also.  I do not like pumpkin carving anyhow.  It always strikes me -- right or wrong, whatever -- as an egregious waste of food.  Not that I would eat a squash if you gave it to me.  They should carve beets, I think.

Last, I would like to document the (much-abridged) story of how I wound up wearing a pair of 14-eye Doc Martens to the ballet.  It boils down to this:  I found out 15 minutes before we had to leave that I have become too small for my go-to dress -- a jersey wrap dress from Boden; last-noted as a little too-roomy when last worn to a Museum Society Function in May -- to fit.  I should have investigated this before I was getting dressed to leave, but I had not.  One thing led to another, I wound up in a different black jersey dress from Boden, and we were off.  But the dress setback had set me back so far that when I could not find my normal knee-high boots (which were right in front of me in my closet, as it turns out) I grabbed a pair of socks, and my broken-in-but-not-worn 14-eye boots.

It felt crazily informal and inappropriate as a sartorial maneuver while I was putting them on in the car, but once on the ground, the whole effect was revealed as just fine, if rather ludicrously va-va-voom + way too superheroine-intense for the ballet matinée.  Nevertheless, it will be absolutely perfect for the next time I need to lure a beefy life scientist into going on about geckos, or finding me the score of a major sporting event from his inside pocket.

I am waiting on a couple of things to finish up in the oven right now.  I started out with banana bread; while pouring it into the pan I remembered I cannot eat bananas.  Sulking, I put together a Nigella cake, which my pal Charlie calls "The Hot Sex on a Platter Cake," but in our house is simply the cake that made my husband notorious when he cut himself a slice of the unfrosted loaf and slathered it with butter.  This is why he is my man.  

eat drink read clean

Locust trees are pretty, but those glittery little leaves get stuck to everything and will be in your house, too.  Also, pods, wtf?

 
Becky at Suburban Matron (I know, it's all,God, Femme, you got to her weblog in an accident, trying to verify some urban legend you overheard at Pilates Chick's house!  She didn't sign your yearbook or anything!and I know, that is true, however, she has a weblog, which she updates and so there) has once again called the roll of honor to share opinions about eating, reading, watching, etc.  I'm in.

So Delicious Coconut Milk Creamer is good on its advertised own, but also I successfully used it to make a dairy-free ganache, so times a million.

We saw Where The Wild Things Are and it is one of those things where when people talk about it, they reveal instead of report.  I thought the puppeteers and the set design people & the location scouts ruled the universe.  It is a gorgeous enterprise and well-scored, too.  Besides that?  zzZzZzz.  I think it is like if someone made a movie about the evening commute:  people who had not been commuters since 1978 would be spellbound by the exquisite rendering of its terror & tedium, blah, blah, blah.   The film would be engaging! & emo-roco!  For present-day evening commuters?  zzzzZzzz.  I spend all my days with one (1) 10-year-old boy, and one (1) 8-year-old girl.  Every word, every gesture in that movie was but a shred of my own tedium & terror.  zzzzZzzz.  James Gandolfini was excellent in an extended rendition of the time Tony Soprano asked Uncle June "Don't you love me?"

Everyone -- I mean, everyone -- I know is talking about Honeycrisp apples.  On Facebooks!  In emails!  Our tweets!  So, I bought some?  I think they taste just like asian pears, which is fine, but maybe no one ever knew.  They were a damn site cheaper, I will say that.

I finished reading Lorrie Moore's newest, longest novel A Gate At The Stairs.  It was like her biggest short story ever.  I liked it, but I am not too strict about things like plot and forward movement when I read fiction, which is what I have heard people are complaining about.  While I very much enjoyed it, it is not the kind of thing I would press upon other people.  Which I am used to, since the book I finished immediately before Moore's was PT-109: JFK in WWII.  Which is amusing in that when people ask "What's that you're reading?" & I say, "Book about PT-109," they get this look, like potato chips in their gums or pebbles in their shoes.  I know that ...  is that a recalled model number ... a secret operation ... a circus mission???  Then when I tell them, yk, "JFK's torpedo boat"  their relief bowls me over.

FlashForward is a fun show, fun enough to drag me back from a decade of naysaying this racket where a network doles out teevee 45 minutes per week.  So far during every episode, I have thought, "Ok, this is kind of unsustainable, this relationship with this show," and then they end on some high note that makes me wonder what the answer will be, so I will watch the next episode.  Which, when you think of it, is all teevee has to be:  the show that brings you back every week.  And the cast is pretty, every one.  I told the Israeli when I pressed it upon him that it reminded me of 24.  Concept, compelling casting, cinematic, and there is buzz.  

I have been listening to Antonio Carlos Jobim's Stone Flower and Andreas von Wangenheim playing Bach's cello suites transcribed for guitar.  It started out because Garçon's classical guitar lessons require exposure to more than, yk, strumming, but it is kind of impossible to feel harried with Bach playing on the radio, so it has stuck.

Amparo - Antonio Carlos Jobin,...

Although, it is a little weird because sometimes while making dinner or mopping, I feel like I am in some rambling indie movie, like I am The Truman Show, but I forgot about signing the papers or something.

Mopping=Casabella Eclipse.  I bought this because it was a light-duty damp-mopper that used actual soap & water in a world where Method's O-mop a. can hardly be found any more and b. feels too Mop 'N Glo dopey.  Save your money.  Save yourself.  (For regular-duty mopping, Casabella's regular mop cannot be beat.)  

It has to be three meals per week we are eating crustless tarte tatin.  Melt a half- or 3/4- stick of butter in a pan with a lid.  Slice up 4 or 6 apples and throw them in.  Cover.  After 10 minutes on medium heat, add 3 or 4 tbsps sugar.  Pay attention so they do not burn & when they look sugary & glazed (5 or 8 more minutes), put them on top of baked sweet potatoes or steel-cut oatmeal.

Speaking of steel-cut oatmeal.  I hear so many people tell me they love it (I spent some time pressing it into people a couple of winters back), but who has the time?  You do.  Assemble it the night before, in the pot.  Bring it to a boil.  Turn off the heat & cover.  In the morning, give it 10 minutes on medium-heat. 

The kids & I watched Ghostbusters last night, which I had last seen in 1991 in B-10 Commerce Hall.  Be advised, it is racy!  Among other things, Dan Akroyd gets a blow job from a ghost!  You're welcome! 

wip friday + etc

 

I left out this photo yesterday.  This is how the cowl is configured, when it is unwound.  In case there was confusion about where to pin, where to stab.

Nervousy & with too much time on my hands during the ALCS game last night (do not get me started), I cast on a new cowl.  The pattern is from Ravelry, the yarn is discontinued sale yarn I picked up at the yarn store last week.  The town adjacent to Ballet Town has a yarn store and a fabric store.  I know.  Mari has asked me to please show some restraint, and then I bought this discontinued yarn, so immediately found a pattern for it and lo.

 

This came up somewhere else on the intersphere, and also comes up a lot in our real life at this time of year, that the reason I need an array, a wardrobe of neckwear for the winter is because I wear most of it inside the house.  Mari & I keep the house, once we turn the heat on, heated to 62F, 57F overnight.  We refuse to turn the furnace on before December 15, and frequently it is closer to year's end before we pony up.  Conditions must be met:

1. The days' highs must not exceed 45F for 14 consecutive days.  That means if it is 34 degrees at noon for 13 days rolling and then on the 14th day it makes it to 49?  No.  Reset.  This is the hardest thing to check off, because the weather is goofy here.
2. It has to be below 55F inside, according to the first-floor thermostat.

That second condition is not as harsh as it sounds.  We live in a 3-story gingerbread house that was built before there was central heating.  On the second and third floors, it is possible to be warm enough.  Not toasty, but not freezing.  We have south-facing, floor-to-ceiling windows in the front of the house (on the first floor, they are shaded by the porch roof, which I guess is to protect the furniture?)  In a form + functional delight the sun pours in during the daylight hours in winter, but in the summer, the sun is too high and shines over the house, for the most part. 

 

Heat rises, obvsly, so it is usually about 60F, without the furnace, on the 3rd floor, which is where the children sleep.  60F is plenty warm enough for sleeping and taking a shower.  We are not running a spa here. 

The rest of the house is warm enough, for people who are fully-dressed, wearing shoes, base-layers, and a sweater.  One of the best things about keeping the house so lightly-heated (besides the fact that we get out of the heating season for about $600) is that we can be inside, properly-dressed for the weather, without being too warm, and then we can just leave when it is time to go, without overdressing in one big blubbery layer. 

This idea that people should be able to wear t-shirts and be barefooted indoors in the winter is silly.  Someone saw it on teevee or something.  Because then when you leave the house, what then?  Well, after living in the Midatlantic for 12 years, I now know, I have seen:  you jam on some shoes and throw on a down parka over your t-shirt.  Well, that is silly. 

I have been battling this with the public about my children all of their lives, but here is the truth:  when it is cold -- really cold -- outside, your clothes go on under your clothes.  You dress from the bottom up in layers so that when it is finally at 5F (on a warm winter's day) you are wearing all of your clothes with your outerwear atop.  So when old ladies tsk-tsk at the sight of my children "only" wearing a sweater & a hat all winter, what they do not know (besides how to be strong) is that the children are wearing silk long underwear, a couple of t-shirts -- maybe a thin wool jersey layer for Fille, who runs colder than her brother -- and then a sweater, plus the hat.  The hat is really key.  I scold the children all the time, "Hat first!  First the hat!  Before the jacket, you put on a hat!  Then if you are still cold, you can wear your fleece." 

I do not even buy them a coat anymore.  They have a fleece jacket with a down vest to put over if it gets cold enough, which it did last winter, and we were out in it all day, every day, because I was flushed & in love.  13 degrees!  So close to 9!  Which also beings up an important point:  if it is 13 degrees outside and you are out in it for 2 hours, tromping or running errands or bicycling or making trouble, 62F feels plenty toasty enough when you come home to it.   

It does make the rest of the world super-hot, though.  Lord, I was at the Met with Algren a few years ago -- and it was December in NYC, like in the teens, definitely.  I was dressed appropriately for the weather & hoofing it all over the island of Manhattan.  Well, museums are all heated to 72 degrees, which escaped me when I was getting dressed.  So, we were in for Egypt & Medicine and Spirit Photography, we checked our outerwear like civilized people, and in Egypt, I started roasting, just so hot & flushed and I was going to combust.  At one point -- because I was a little spacey and wandering because I was hot & confused -- Algren took me by the hand and dropped it, immediately -- Jesus, you are so warm! -- and I was mewling weakly, and he pointed out I was wearing two sweaters.  So I was, two thin cardigans -- one merino, one cashmere -- layered atop one another.  I took one off and stuffed it in my bag and was somewhat relieved.  

We made it through the fairy hoaxes, and along the way I took off the other cardigan, which left me in a tank top -- a cashmere tank top, but still, so much of me was uncovered -- and I was still so warm.  By the time we got to Prague (shiny!), I was just broiling and I really thought I was going to faint when it struck me that under my skirt I was wearing silk long-johns under my tights.  So, I had to go to the ladies' room & solve that problem and spend time running cold water on my hands and swooning, and that is an argument for piling up all of your clothes on the outside, but really.  It is not way to live in an Arctic-cold climate.  Not that we live in an Arctic-cold climate, but what if the children find themselves in one? 

I think that over time, this idea of expanding their ability to know what resources are at their disposal for weather issues has superceded our other reasons for the miserly climate control -- the fact that the weather here is so variably warm, the fact that we live in a big, drafty house that takes a couple of days to bring to temperature, the fact that, really, it is not all that cold here and are not doors, walls & windows enough? 

We used to think the children's total relativity about weather was a little cutiepie, the way Baby Fille would fall to the earth and cry if she had to go out when the temperature hovered around freezing, for example.  Or the way that the first morning it was a little chilly our son would put on cotton pants and a bulky woolen sweater.  We realized when that guy died in Oregon because he abandoned shelter, that weather ignorance was elementally dangerous and the very opposite of cute.  Would that he have known that never abandon shelter is a cardinal rule.  Or any number of things about the relativity of cold, but also its reality. 

I think that people outside of New England and the Midwest, Saskatoon, Siberia, seem to think that weather is something that is happening to them, but really, the weather is just something that is.  There is an essentialism to living in it.  The fact is that back home, when it is -45F, it is not toasty in anyone's house.  Cold is relative, but so is warmth.  Heating the house to 72 or cooling it to 74 just seems like escapism, like a fatal flaw that will be one's undoing.  Not to be all Jack London, but seriously. 

Mari and I sleep in the draftiest room in the house, and have an electric mattress pad.  There is a space heater in our bathroom for spa-bathing, in which Fille is allowed to indulge.  We talk about moving our winter quarters to the 3rd-floor, to the guest room and the 60F bathroom, but neither of us can ever be bothered in the end.

If I feel sad & weak about our paradigm, which I do sometimes (I swear!), I just read select passages from The Long Winter. Invariably, that reminds me of a night I spent in the North Woods of Wisconsin during a blizzard in an unheated cabin, and that was really cold, not pretend-cold like my 58-degree house.  I figure it is for the children's best interest and at least we are not starving at the same time.  Also, I have the cutest, softest winter accessories to wear around the house.  And a pair of tall Uggs in pink!  Plus, everyplace else is so heated.  Trust me.   

satin jacket required

That baseball game last night was stunning, even on the radio. If you do not know, Philadelphia's Phillies ruled the Dodgers 11-0.  At some point, my mind could not take it in fast enough and we were listening and watching ESPN's Gamecast at the same time. It was stupefying and the opposite of the ALCS Game 2, which was grim & unyielding (3 extra innings to yield one run at 1am). Game 4 is shaping up to be much better, taut & with showmanship, athleticism.

Anyhow.

 

I am so tired of my neighbors & their micromanager parenting expectations! I am going to pass out copies of the Free-Range Kids book! So, there are 11 children on the block, not counting 3 babies. So, mine, and then Beautiful Neighbor's kids, who are 4 and 8; Czarist Guy has a 4yo; Dr Mom's kids are 10 & 6; The Surfers have a 4yo, and Mixed-Up Mom has 3 kids who are 10, 8, and 5.

My children are the eldest pair, by which I mean -- I am sure there is a right-brain term for this, but I do not have it handy -- my youngest child is the eldest of all the youngest children. So, I have two perfectly old-enough children, while my other neighbors with 10-year-olds have kindergartners at the bottom of their rosters. Fine.

Then, I let my children go outside and do things by themselves. Not because I am neglectful or turning tricks or whatever, but because they live here and 8 & 10 is old enough to play outside on your own street without a parent crawling up yr butt. I tell them to go outside and play and then I lock the screen door and make dinner. We are, Mari & I, very retro in this way; we let them go around. So, to the mailbox or the farmer's market or to the neighbor's to pick up our CSA share, or whatever, in about a 1-mile radius. We do this because they are fully capable. Also, because they are willing. Further, if they are not fully capable, we should find this out while they are close to home.

Now, our neighbors know this, and we know that they are scandalized by this. But, I do not care, because it is not apples to apples. One of them cannot say, "Oh, I would never do what Femme does, with the letting the kids go all around," because they have no choice. One cannot leave a 4yo outside playing by herself or send her to the mailbox 2 blocks away, I do not think. Would they feel the same way if they did not have to be outside with their little kids? The world will never know, because they do have to be out there.

So, whenever I send the kids out to play and all the other kids + their attendant-parents are out there, I get a little attitude, like, Why don'tcha come out here & watch yr own damn kids, Femme?And my attitude is always, "Yeah, because they don't need watching, duh. Why don'tcha go inside then, you baby whiner baby Captain Helicopterpants? Huh?"

So, this is kind of how this goes. I mean, words have never been exchanged, and I try to seem at turns harried and/or spacey so that maybe they will think I am too busy or too dumb to cleave to their (busywork, dumb) expectations. Today, Mixed-Up Mom did the thing that I hate, where she puts a roadblock traffic cone at the end of our one-way street and lets the kids ride bikes up & down in the street.

Now, I am not crazy about this because I spent all that time teaching my kids to stay out of the goddamn street, and huh? But, whenever this happens, with the effing roadblock cones, I go out there to help playground monitor the situation a little and I always feel like I deserve the gift of a butter sculpture for my diplomacy. But today, I did not want to be out there. I was busy. Also, I had already completed all my outside things (major garden shite) while the children played outside earlier.

Also, why the fuck should I be out there? My children are old enough to play outside together, without me. And if you are the dope who creates a fucking situation where the neighborhood kids are running around in the road, well, then, stop acting like I have to be out here helping you. It is not as if I put traffic cones up in the street when they want to ride their bikes the rest of the time when it is the two of them playing. I tell them to ride down to the park and I walk down to meet up with them. But no one else does that, not even with the oldest kids.

Over the summer, my kids tried to get a gang together (there are 4 ten-year-olds in our everyday-play, if we include the boy in the house behind us) to take their bikes to the park & ride around? Everyone’s mother acted like they wanted to go hang out at the bus depot with flavored-lube packets pinned to their chests. Why? All those kids have wristwatches. Three of them have cell phones! There is no reason they cannot go to the park 6 blocks away to play & ride bikes and get out of the mothersucking house. But, whatever. They are not my kids.

Mixed-Up Mom & Dr Mom worry me the most, though. Their daughters are Garçon’s age, but totally incapable. The moms are always refusing to let the older girls do things, but then saying, “Oh, no, but I’ll have to deal with that soon enough!” They mean in the teen years, but I do not want to save up these things for the teen years when the children have their judgment clouded by hormones & rapid brain growth. I want some measure of common sense and competence to be hard-wired before that! Knowing that those two girls are going to be so immature and untested and not at all self-actualized when they get some “freedom” freaking stresses me out & is a recipe for disaster and I do not want Garçon & Fifille to be collateral damage.  As much as it pains me, I try not to encourage the friendships.  But, as my pal Charlie says, there is a reason it is called parenting, not feeding & clothing. 

Anyhow, I was trying to have a civilized conversation with Mixed-Up Mom about my kids wanting to go with her 2 older kids to see Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. My kids asked her kids if they could make the trip & Mixed-Up Mom presumed I was chaperoning. I was a little bit rude, I admit – “She can’t go to the freaking neighborhood Cineplex with her friends yet?” I said it with kind of a mean girls’ eyebrow/eyeroll/huff-n-puff, too – but I was trying, I tried. I followed up with a sincerely soothing, “I was going to take them there and wait at the deli across the street, if that makes you feel better."

But it was not working and the kids were all over the place and then a car came and Czarist Dad kind of barked at me, “Can you get Madison’s bike out of the way, Femme?” Because it was the closest to me, and Madison and her Captain Helicopter Barky Whiner Bossypants Dad – who, frankly, is kind of an uptight douche to my little boy -- were down the street. And I just could not take it any more.

So, I told the kids to get it together because it was time to go in – and it was; I had to make supper, I could not be standing around outside helicoptering kids old enough to mind themselves, or at least working toward mastery of this self-discipline – and then Fifille said, “But why?” (Fifille: Fail.)

When we got home I told them both that I hate to be trapped talking to all these boring people that were not my friends because they thought I should be crawling all over my kids the way they crawled all over theirs, that I had already done my time making nice-talk with dull people in Playground Dullsville when they were babies and now I am all done. I have things to do, inside my home. I told them they could play outside, in front of their house, and if their friends parents’ would deign to let their pals play in front of our house, without following along behind them, then great.  (Good luck with that sentence.) 

I cannot do it anymore with the outside playalong. These people are not in my league. I felt horrible & inadequate in my failure to negotiate or mediate, but then in what I have chosen to interpret as a sign from God, an hour or so later, a past-life colleague announced to his Faceworld that his wife sent him an email that read: Just left sandbox thanks to dickwad kids and their dickwad moms. I am sure her situation was very different from mine, but still. I felt way less lonely. Score one for social media, I guess.  Hooray.

she's like FDR, but prettier

That Matisse, he knew a couple of things about paint, huh? This is Nude in a Wood, which apparently sits in the Brooklyn Museum's permanent collection. It is crazy to me, the paintings that are hanging there, and especially if the image is iconic, you think, "Oh, I've seen that, yeah." But that is the real thing! They touched it! It radiates energy they poured into it! At the same time, people can get carried away with the icon thing.

Becky over at Suburban Matron has called the roll of honor, to request that everyone patrol their spaces & tidy up any loose ends, so to speak.  Because I am not really a joiner, but I do love a project, I immediately set about seeing what I could finish off, blogwise. 

Sadly, not a whole lot.  As it turns out, for the past few months my weblog has been way less about what is going on and way more about what I am thinking about.  Maybe even before that, I am not sure.  I did not go back farther in the archives than May, wherein you could be all, "Oh, your bike!  Whatever happened with that?"  Haha, I crashed it, don't you know?  I remember in June, right before the crash, I was all cranky & going to Bikram and saying the rosary, like, as a mental-health regimen.  But that was an improvement over the breakdown days that filled the 6 months prior.

It is probably also the case that, generally speaking, my weblog gives readers less of a Whatever Happened? & more of a What The Hell Is She Talking About?  I do not know.  Mostly, I try to link back to when I talked about it last, or with the most adjectives, or whatever.  But I am recovering from spending 7 weeks in my tunnel between the house & the pool club, and trying to remember to participate more and then make notes.

A few things, though:

1. Ponytail.  Yes, we lost it after the chop, but then yes, we found it in the shopping bag with 2 skeins of yarn for a pair of socks.  The socks were going to be for Kowalski, who opened the sock mines, really.  Then, I was going to table them to knit something else, but then he got all blue & midlife-crisis-y and then I changed my mind and then he said, "I do not want socks, why don'tcha just buy me a hooker?"  And I said, "Really?"  and he said, "No."  So, now I do not know what to do.  I really do not feel like I can get more mileage out of a gift than I did out of Pair #2, unless ... maybe if I have them hand-delivered by a sexworker, then. 

2. Harry Potter ouevre.  I let the children check out the last two books from the library because my son had been getting up at 4am to sneak the book from the bookcase in the living room so to read it and put it back before breakfast. I still do not know what my issue was, but I was satisfied by their self-sufficient defiance.  (also, I am scared of how many hits I have gotten from people worldwide googling "sexy mental patient.")

3. The phone calls have stopped.  Sure, they will start again!  Just as soon as I stop eyeballing the caller ID display before I pick up.  Could be days, could be decades.  Whaddya?! 

4.  Were those postcards the other day?  Yes, they were.  I am participating in a "bake sale" of sorts with a bunch of real artist-tradespersons.  The proceeds are to benefit a pal of mine who is having some major & unforeseen child-related emergency expenditures no one should have to face alone.  So, a plan was hatched to try to help.  Otherwise, I never would have had my images put into print for consumption.  I am very much the girl who lays low, right on top of the basket that is covering up her light.  That sale is happening this Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.  Store is on preview now, but opens at noon tomorrow for 3 days.  Check it out.

5.  Physical therapy is going great.  I can almost climb the stairs without any discomfort, though I never go up or down a floor without major consideration and/or for something of priority.

6.  My son's ghastly constitution.  Things are going better.  I read a book called [something something] Strong-Willed Child.  It basically told me I needed to stop being so thin-skinned (Mari, too) and reactive and more shruggy & tolerant.  Also, I hung around a lot of families with boys this age this summer and these kids are all a grumbling lot.  So, whatever.  The one thing about the book that impressed me right off -- besides that it was one of those books where you felt like the person had been to your home, you know? -- was that there are categories in which Mari & I parent exactly as he lays out for success and in those areas we have 100% compliance from Garçon and have been known to say, "Why can't he just be like this all the time?" Well, apparently, he can.   

Even if he is lying on the floor right now, in some kind of protest.  I am just going to step over him, cheerfully, on my way to make dinner.  Then, instead of being in an imbroglio/standoff, I will be making dinner and listening to the radio.  He will be feeling totally stupid & embarrassed for lying on the floor and probably issue a sheepish apology without me having to say a word! I know, it seems crazy, but it is totally true!

7.  2-day ballet weeks.  I am still v much wondering what the dropout rate for this class is.  The real problem is that the only thing that stands between me & the MY ANGEL IS MY TOTAL SACRIFICE moms are the whiners.  Whining about the time of day, whining about making the buns, whining about the uniform leotard, whining about the second day not being optional.  I hate whining.  It is totally repellent.  I do not mean to be a bitch, but there are dance schools all over the place that are not running pre-professional programmes.  Go there if you & the angel can't hack it.  But in the meantime, be a shield already, please, and diffuse LASERMOM'S gaze upon me.  (Because I hissed at a disrespectful Fille, "If you talk to me like that again, I will send your ass out for a manicure & a spray-tan, do you hear me?")  Plus, the fact that I am totally not at all at ballet for me.  I drive & sign checks, like always.  Bet the ranch that I will be more inside my head & on the page about ballet and very soon.     

Super Clean Nanny

Ballet’s mothers are starting to reveal themselves, here in our second week. Exciting! I have to say the ballet mothers have never been my favorite, although I did have a certain fondness for one group of women at Fille’s first ballet school. We would sit around on the floor and carefully chat. I am not much of a joiner, and always have a big pile of knitting to work on, and the only conversation I ever participated in fully, without shame, was the hour during which we energetically and earnestly discussed how good help to clean your house could not be found, not at any price.

I really appreciated this discussion because in our unqualified agreement was revealed that we all had a. high standards for cleanliness and b. been raised in houses without help, where as girls we were the help. It felt like a pajama party that day at ballet. I am glad I was smart enough even then to treasure it, because PHEW those days are long gone, I promise.

So this summer, I was on crutches for those weeks & weeks and things were not getting done at the usual pace, if at all, so when I hobbled back in the house on 2 crutches plus two feet, I could hardly believe how freaking filthy the house had become. Dust bunnies piled up all over, everywhere, sticky counters, handprints on the appliances, tiny bits of paper everywhere in their playroom. The bathrooms. Oh, it was scary. Mari was not reminding the children to do their chores, of which they have many, or to clear the table completely, or replace the paper towels, or wipe the toothpaste out of the sink before they headed off to bed, or a million other things I say or do or remind or delegate every day, all day long.

I am afflicted by many years of girlhood waitressing and I just do not leave my sidework till the end of the night, so to speak. I am usually nudging things along toward clean, wiping & sorting & throwing everything away in the minutes between the other things. I rarely walk through a room empty-handed. All this adds up, obviously, because the minute I was down, not-clean took over. And it was shocking to me. Not surprising, but shocking. And I cannot live in a dirty house, I cannot abide a mess! The question everyone has asked me in those first weeks I was out of the cast was if I would be getting help, if even only to set things right. No! For all those other moms had concurred!

I think it is funny that before I got hurt, Mari would scoff at this idea that our house was clean. I would roll my eyes right back, but knew it was because at our house you will probably trip over a rattan basket full of library books just trying to get in the door. Right this minute there is a jumble of raincoats and beach mats and empty backpacks in the hallway, tucked under the staircase. In front of me are four 6-inch-high piles, one of library books, one of papers for filing, one of papers for the shredder, and one of CDs that sort of float endlessly between our house & car. The paper recycling needs to go out. There are two bags of potting soil in the corner of the dining room and also the children’s bicycles are making egress from the rear of our house impossible.  At the same time, there are never dishes in the sink, I take handprints personally, if people come by, they can come right in, and if you, say, rip the shit out of your ankle and break yr foot and need to come home and take a header next to the fridge? You can lie down there and cry for a good, long time, cheek pressed to the cool stone flooring.

What Mari was thinking of, poor thing, was the dangerous spectre of Magazine Clean. That is because he is not the one doing the cleaning. I mean, he cleans up after himself, mostly, provided that he sees it, and I get the rest, before he sees it, because by the time you can see something needs to be clean, it is already dirty. What Mari had never realized is that our house is always clean because I am always cleaning, or delegating the rest. (Also, for perspective, he needs to go back in time & spend some afternoons on Playdate Duty. You can see some seamy stuff after the juice boxes come out.)

My Pilates instructress’s house is Magazine-Clean. Seriously. Super-scrubbed, super-tidy, every room, everything in its place: every day. You can walk in and smell the laundry and the light scent of Method cleaners. It really is amazing. Pilates Chick, I also know, has help. She has her studio in her house & does a brisk Pilates trade; her husband, a physician, rarely sees patients anymore and works out of a home office doing claim review for a medical insurance company. They have three children and 2 dogs, and their house is always, limitlessly, scrupulously clean in every direction.  It does not worry me.  I realized it was not an attainable standard to which I should aspire -- Pilates Chick also has an indoor pool, hullo.

 Wednesday, I picked up Garçon from the library and we got on our way to pick up Fille. The route between the two runs through Pilates Chick’s neighborhood. At a red light, a pedestrian was crossing in front of my car, and I recognized her as Joanne, Pilates Chick’s cleaning lady. It was just about 5:30. It dawned on me, something that had been in the back of my mind for some time – Joanne is full-time at Pilates Chick’s house! I knew that every time I went over there, it seemed like Joanne was there to say hi while I got myself out of my coat or street shoes or whatever, but I never really did a census of days or times of day.

When I saw her crossing in front of my car at after-work time, all of a sudden it was totally clear. I was distracted, the whole rest of the trip to get the baby (“baby”) by what on Earth I would get done if I had a full-time person in my house to clean my house! It would be like having me, again, but without the mothering. It would be like having a nanny for my house. The house’s very own dedicated caretaker.  My mind is boggled at the idea. 

All the time – but even more since I have been downed two years in a row by random medical stuff -- I try to keep things in perspective, for myself. What is realistic, what I really want, crediting myself for the work that I do. Our house is clean enough for everyday life + surprise visitors/entertaining + being able to lie facedown on any floor of the house without any nasty, nauseating surprises. That means someone is heading up the cleaning of it, and that person is obviously me, because once I was removed from the equation, things quickly slipped. Magic does not get the work done, all this time it has been me.  I was able to remember this from when I worked for pay: Delegating is work; managing is exhausting.  All of this has led to resting & snacking & taking breaks.  It is good.

So I have been quick to detail for Mari what the difference between Clean Enough & Magazine Clean is: a full-time employee. (Or, The Crazy.  He blanched when he remembered that aspect of having Magazine Clean in this house.) On top of that, after only several weeks, the house is back to our agreed-upon minimum standards, at the same time that Mari displayed that his minimum standard is actually way lower than mine when the regimen is up to him. Further, it has made an impression upon him that the house has been restored without me ever once performing the highly visible, compartmental act of Cleaning. Except the one day I spent a whole hour in the marital bathroom, then heralded my labor for two days. (“Yes, but I cleaned the bathroom. What did you do?”) Even the children have stopped arguing about me asking them to give a cleany lick + promise to their surroundings on a daily schedule now that they have seen the alternative is to toil endlessly after weeks of neglect.

Right after the crash, I predicted that breaking myself would be good for us, and here we are!

ship of stupid fools

We went to DC for the weekend for Mari’s company picnic. It was fun. Mari played Whack-a-Mole such that he was able to win for me a giant Kenny-from-South-Park doll. That is all there is to say about that, obviously. I was all, "However will I display such a fantastic trophy, my love?" The kids were elated because a. Six Flags and b. one of their best pals was meeting up with us, plus c. Uncle Sal’s, where there is i. Cartoon Network, ii. billion-inch teevee, mounted on the wall.

We always stay at Sal’s when we are in DC. It has its charms, mostly that it is totally Sal’s house. So, like, all of the kitchen appliances are very glamorous and cutting-edge and shiny, and the knives are very sharp, but Sal does not own measuring spoons, dishtowels, nor oven mitts. (The knives are sharp because no one uses them but me.) The bed is too hard & too soft at the same time, I think I am allergic to his new carpeting, his cats are mysterious and petulant, sneaking around at night and sneezing under the bed without warning.

On the other hand, I know where the batteries will be, or where I should put the laundry I just folded, or which in the pile of mail gets put on his desk and what goes in the trash. As if by magic, if anything mystifies me, I need only turn in the right direction, the right number of degrees & there will be a note for me, in Sal’s crazy, left-handed penmanship, like, “I left the pillowcases in the basement because the cat hair was too much, look there!” Or something.

It was funny to be awash in this kind of knowing and being known, especially because I have been parsing my relationships with everyone, holding them up to the light, in an effort to maintain perspective in difficult times. The first thing I said to Mari when we walked through the back door at Sal’s was, with this exhaling of great relief, “It smells just right!” Anyhow, I guess my father is dying . Or, if not dying, having one of those protracted episodes from which his emergence will just leave him so addled, surely people will secretly wish he were dead because he will be such a fucking burden. Or something.

I am not exactly sure what the deal is, largely because I have asked no questions nor lifted a finger, save for the desultory shipment of a dish garden to the Cardiac ICU in late August, when I received the first call. A dish garden, I tell you. With a card that said, “Hear you are feeling under the weather!” It seemed the best way for me to do nothing and even less than nothing at the same time. I thought it would convey everything and nothing at once!

After that, I got two phone calls, beseeching me to call him, and I just dialed it all the way to Vinnie Babarino. “What? Wait. I sent flowers. You mean he didn’t get them? I’ll call the florist right now! Gotta hang up!” All subsequent callers have been left to go to voice mail.

Mari said, “Why can’t you just say, ‘I’m not calling him.’” And I was all, “Because in 14 years you haven’t noticed these people can not hear the word no?” And really, he has not. My parents, their families, specialize in being controlling and distant at once. I spent my childhood meeting obligations, but volunteering nothing. When I went away, I never went back. Kowalski was my man on the ground when I was in the process of declaring emotional & familial bankruptcy, though it was only because he hacked his way into a very close contact. I was both distracted by my (s)mother's antics and also very down on intimacy because of the lot.  It was very difficult to squirm free of them and at the same time, a lot of Kowalski wanting to rescue me, just get me away from them & their hijinks, which also felt smothering, in an Are you crazy kind of way.  Like the time he planned to abduct me to Canada.  Oh, youth.   

But getting free of my father, that was easy.  That was a non-issue from the beginning. Conspicuously disinterested in me since my parents’ divorce and his immediate remarriage, he nominally fulfilled his co-parenting duty, as ordered by the court, but once I turned 18, it seemed to me he burned a very lot of his bridges to me in the course of satisfying his second wife, which I considered a worthy goal. I mean, he had to live with her, not me. No pressure, we are all adults.  Plus, in the face of my (s)mother's insanity, his aloofness was an oasis.

It was funny to me, as a girl, that Kowalski was always so impatient about and derisive of my father’s neglect. He thought, for many of the years we were involved, that my father was deceased. This came to light when I came back from NYC and rushed right into his arms. One day, we were in my apartment, and there was my father, leaving a message on the old answering machine. What a surprise for Mr Kowalski! Why? I asked him. He told me, Because you never talked about him in the present. It was always some anecdote from when you were a child.

Kowalski was actually kind of the last nail in the coffin, in some ways. My father disapproved and I told him I did not require his approval. Further, in that space, I really came out about being in a pre-maritally-sexy relationship, which bizarrely upset & disappointed him, this man who was thought by my closest, whispered-confessions confidant to no longer exist on this mortal plane.

When I got married less than a year later (to Mari, not Kowalski, obvsly) … I mean, I don’t know. He sure is in all the photos, proud of his duty in the giving away of me, which I actually found somewhat repugnant, since I had been on my own for many years at that point. That was my good deed. I knew that it was more important to my father to get to play Big Daddy than it was to me to stay the patriarchy. My mother was not invited to the wedding.

But after that … it was back to the sometimes-shocking noninvolvement of yore. I had been married 6 months and my grandmother, to whom I had always been quite close, laid in the hospital for more than a week, surrounded by her daughters and sisters and in-laws .., all family who had been summoned by my father while my phone lay silent. I got a phone call when she was dead.

The second year Mari & I were married, we moved back East. I kept in contact because my stepmother, who had spent that summer growing a gigantic tumor in her liver, was dying. I felt bad for him, worse when she died, being so far away in his widowhood. When I got over the sheer irony that he threw me over for someone who could not even stay alive, I recovered pretty rapidly. I mean, we had lived 5 miles from him for over a year and he had never called, nor returned my calls. Also, the grandmother thing? Major black mark.

Garçon was born the following year, and it was the craziest thing. He rushed to Washington, on a plane and everything, to see a 3-week-old baby, and have us shoot a whole bunch of film to send back with him and be a gigantic pain in the ass in our tiny little domicile. He was disapproving and/or snide about our parenting (of a 3-week-old!), and told me I was fat (3 weeks postpartum!).  We were silent and lip-biting and kind, and deferential to his elder status, but secretly happy to see him go, and not sad when he never really called again.

I called, whenever I remembered, but because he never returned the call, eventually I remembered less. In 2000, I was pregnant with Fifille. I called the minute my second trimester started so to tell him I was pregnant with a second child and left a message – it was right around Thanksgiving, “Blah, blah, I have a question about a roast, what are your plans for the holiday, I have some news, call me.” – and he never returned the call. It became this thing with me, just a wonderment -- How long will it take for him to return the call? Weeks? Months? 

When the baby was five-and-a-half (five-and-a-half years, is what I am saying!), my father picks up the phone, tumbles in, dusts himself off, and wants to carry on as if nothing happened. Say what? Really? Had he been cryogenically frozen? Because that is an excuse I was willing accept.

As it was, there were no excuses nor explanations. His sense of entitlement was astounding. Many demands were made, and I, wow. I would hold the phone with my mouth just wide open, then shut tight, like a fish, not knowing what to say. I mean, what could I say? Oh, it was horrible. It went on for weeks, before a few good friends massaged me into something like self-protection, at which point he told me I was “bitter” for “dwelling” and not letting us “be a family once again.”

I concocted this fantasy of having him here for Thanksgiving so I could poison him. It would look like a heart attack! No worries! That was the day I called Kowalski and tearfully confessed the whole mess. Mr Kowalski takes it all v personally, this stuff with my family. He should. It is not really a coincidence that I peeled back my family & promptly found the psychic space to get involved with the man I would marry. It is more complicated than that, surely, but they were a mighty phantom interference in our otherwise magical relationship.

Unfortunately, nothing was resolved, in spite of the excellent historical analysis from Kowalski, the handholding of Mari, and Alex as my fresh pair of eyes. My very real complaint of You have not made an effort, lo these many years and how do we have a relationship when you are acting with outdated information? was very lost in his babyish cleaving to the binary & dismissive conflict of, “I have been right, I am your father, you are being a rebellious child!” He thinks -- and this is shocking to me -- that he put in the time with the shelter & the K-12 tuition & he is all good. And I think, you know, Yeah, 20 years ago, you were all good to coast on that. But it's been 20 years since then.

I mean, to talk about the good times, like before I was a grownup?  We are talking about the mists of time.  And that, that gets you a dish garden.  Sorry. 

Mari keeps coming back to a hospital visit I made earlier this year to see someone with whom I had once been close, and in a relevant, and analogous fashion, had not seen for more than a decade. It is funny because he starts to talk about it -- how that all went down and the fallout -- so brings it up, and then has no words to really expound because it is all so night & day + black & white illustrative. My pump has been so primed, so to speak, already this year about all of the issues relating to loss and life and lingering fondnessess, and yet, this has not troubled me one whit, the mortality, loss-of-parentage piece. I do not believe, however, the liberties people dare to think they can take.

I just … I mean ... I feel like … if you are going to call a grownup person you barely know, due to your own negligence, and make demands? Well, ok, but do not expect anyone to drop anything to make an effort. I have people here -- again, bed-whispery, secret-sticky, magical confidants -- who are not even sure he is alive. I should extract myself from the smooth running of my household, of their lives, for someone of whom they have never heard? Think again, strangers. 

People used to say that to me, all the time, back when I estranged my mother, “You will have children, and you will see,” and I do see. I see how screwed-up & belligerent my parents are, how easy it is to curry favor and receive forgiveness with one’s children. Admit your shit. I fucked up, I am sorry, I think it might have made you feel _____, it wasn’t loving behavior, is there anything you want to tell me now?

I mean, three years ago, I was kind of open, you know? But now that ship has sailed.  I do not expect anyone to be perfect, but do not mix up forgiveness with docility about getting shit on in perpetuity.

And these people! Who are calling my house! They drank that fucking Kool-Aid in the last generation. But I am not going out like that. I will not even explain when they call, because they just cannot hear me. And while it sounds vengeful & repulsive, in a way I do not mean, he can lay there in the hospital and do without me just like his mother did.  It is just how it is.

Anyhow. This is what has been on my mind for a few weeks while I write intently about the minutiae of everyday development, for I have been afraid I will slide type-typing into leaking boat of crazy.  But it seems to be all out there at once, now, spit-spot!

I cling to what good people  -- Alex: yeah, it's scary & hard being in the hospital, and so it is for us all.  That's just how it is.; Mari: I don't mean to fuel yr paranoia, but it is possible that standers-by are exaggerating his agony just a wee bit to manipulate you; Kowalski: of course it's sad that his daughter won't call him, it's terrible.  And a lesson to people everywhere to live right! -- have told me,  Like Paul wrote to the Romans, "Destest what is evil, cling to what is good." I am glad to have written some of this down here. If you have read this far, Internet, I salute you!

academic

Garçon filled the dishwasher-detergent compartment with dishwashing liquid tonight.  I was not here, but Mari reports that in the child's defense, he very soberly removed the bottle from the cabinet and said, "Dad, it says right here, not for use in automatic dishwashers, but our dishwasher is not automatic.  You have to press the buttons and everything."  Aw, my little guy.

Is that the generation gap?  I mean, to our fin de siècle little boy, of course a machine that washes your dishes and has little lights and touchpads is just oh, so manual.  It reminds me of when we were watching The Jetsons ouevre a couple of years ago, and Fille asked me very nonchalantly, "If this is the future, why do they still have a Roomba?"  LIKE WHOA, DUDE!

I had a real 20thc moment today while I was over on campus -- I stupidly thought that because the students were back, but classes have not started, that it was fine to go over there in the early afternoon, of course not realizing that because classes have not started yet, they are free all day to be milling around en masse opening bank accounts and generally congesting the area with their slow-moving guilelessness.  Slow-moving and also (!) so many of them had septum piercings that I thought I was back home, caught in a field of Guernseys. 

Anyhow!  The point is that I was in the bank, which is so retro, going to the bank building, even though it was filled up with kids who should be able to do all this via their iPhones, which, even as I mused this, I considered that it was an exaggeration of my mind, but!  While waiting in the teller line I was informed via the bank's shifting LCD display that the children can link their student ID card to the bank account and this will be their ATM card.  Seriously?  The only thing we could use our university IDs for was buying beer in the union & library privileges.  And I know I have ceded this category to the next generation, for all I could think was That can not be safe.  I wonder what their parents think?  I am pretty sure I have read that this is the crew that chatters everything in a confession to Mom & Dad.  We are living in the future.

Today was the first day back at public schools here, those old Socialist, Communist, Third Reich, liberal constructs.  Free public education for all!  Balderdash!  Where does that money come from and how will it ever go on?  I will tell you!  I provide for my kids' education, and I think that free, public education is just inappropriate!  How is it the government's responsibility?  What about privacy!  Most Americans are against it, you know!   

Uh ... anyhow, sorry, (ahem), so (!) the children & I talked, while we walked over to the bank, about how to answer the questions people seem to love to ask them about school, which when we are out during the day starts generally with, "Oh, so no school today?"  Their response is usually to stammer out that they are homeschooled, which about 65% of the time leads to a barrage of questions designed to slyly elicit information from them so as to assist the questioner in their evaluation of the Quality of Their Educational Programme.  This does not happen at the library or a job interview. These inquisitive sorts are always, you know, retail-shop clerks. It is tremendously dull. It is just like, Are you trying to provoke some kind of thing with my family? About homeschool? I mean, it seems so strange, people's interrogations.  I mean, usually we are just, you know, hanging out in a peacefully taskmastering way.  They are not arsonists, or inarticulate, like that one little girl that made me so so so depressed about that baby-pageant show. 

For this year, I explored some different answers with them:

• No, no school.  What the questioner is doing, in the outset, is making small talk based on the fact that a school-aged child is before them during school hours.  This answer will satisfy them.
• Why do you ask?  I explained this to Fille -- who was championing "Mind your own business," as her favorite option -- as a way to invite grownups to recognize that they are actually not minding their business, without saying so.
• We have the swine flu, stay back!  This is from a cheeky homeschooling pal abroad, where they have national health insurance, so it is probably funnier there.  My kids are funsters, though, and I cannot be sure they will not crack it open a couple of times, just to see what happens.

There is context, of course -- who is doing the asking and how long will we be trapped by them -- and I did very carefully explain to them that no one wants a child to be rude to them, even if the child just thinks the pushback is setting a boundary (so no "Mind your own business," especially not for an opener).  At the same time, I acknowledged to them that people generally feel pretty free to just get all in the business of children without very much politeness or regard for the boundaries of common courtesy, so this was an area they would have to walk on their own.  It is part of growing up. 

God, omigod (!!) then this super-weird thing happened to us, when we were parking our car closer to campus than walking from our house, but still kind of far from the bank.  I was parking, and the guy parked in ahead of the space I was taking was opening his door, and then shutting it, then opening it and bringing it just to the edge of closing it without pulling it shut, and these kind of openy-closey door shenanigans.  Well, I cannot parallel park behind him and drive defensively at once, so I was waiting and waiting, and I could not tell if he saw me, but was hoping he would figure it out.

He got out of his car, and walked toward us, all the windows were down, and I said, "I was just waiting for you, to get out of the car."  And I was smiling & waving gaily and it was fine with me.  And he thought I meant I was waiting for him to get out of the space, and I said, "No, no, I was waiting to park, I didn't want to pull up next to you if you were getting out."  Ok, emphasis on "park," because now dude is not in his car with his waggly door, and so I could park if only he was not standing in front of my car talking to me.

Then he told me again that he was not going anywhere, that he had gotten out of the car to see what I was doing loitering behind him.  Great!  So, we have that straightened out!  He got back in the car, I pulled up parallel, put the car in reverse, backed up and then just as my front bumper cleared his door, he threw open his door and said, urgently, "I have a dentist's appointment!  And I'm late!"  Then he jumped out and ran off.

We all sat there, stunned, with the car idling, until the children just burst into peals of laughter.  I was all, "Oh my lord, kids, what the fuck?  Wasn't he all I'm Not Going Anywhere Guy a minute ago?"  I mean, we were in a business district.  It is not as though it was his residential parking space and he had to rush off.  He had driven ... well, anyhow.  Super-weird. 

sexy mental patient

Mostly, I feel bad about not liking the little girl down the street, nor her brothers, nor their mother.  (They are the non-responding, non-r.s.v.p.ers from the spring.)  It is a tricky situation and it is bound up in a lot of My Issues and My Expectations and, dare I say, an eensy bit of Judginess on my part.  Well ... there is judginess, but then there is the matter of when it comes to my children's safety & well-being, it is my job to judge, so ... it is hard for me to work out and why do I have to spend my time on this?  I mean, I have my own 2-faced, backstabbing, peer group to deal with!

Ballet starts Wednesday, and I have to suit up.  Imagine my (not-too-surprised) surprise to find that my fancyass Citizens of Humanity jeans do not button!  Quelle horreur!  Oh, the Wild Kingdom of Ballet Moms!  I could regale the internets with Tales of Ballet Moms and I am sure it would be a big hit, like that baby-pageant show or the Real Housewives of Wherever, but it would diminish me in the eyes of some higher entity, I am sure.  I will let on that the way I stay out of Ballet Mom hot competition is by being sure they understand we are not in the same league, as I am a. foxier, and b. much younger, also, c. not frumpy, and then the grand slam trump card, (drumroll)  d. foxy-ass husband, who is not some kind of sadist nor a Walter-Mitty type.  See?  Different league.  We may, in fact, be in different sports.

Anyhow, if my jeans do not fit, I am at a crisis level even before the mothereffing ballet-posturing horseshit, and I have got to lay off the baking until I am better-recovered so as to hit the gym with restored firepower.  In the meantime, couture sweatpants will suffice in lieu of modern-design denim.

I had not intended to bake anything this weekend, but I had some CSA-share pears to deal with so et voila, yogurt cake.  I have not made (or eaten) one in about 20 years, but here we are, all fashionably (and necessarily) gluten-free & everything.  Thank you, yogurt cake!  My children now think I am v smart!  We will see you again in, say, February, ok?  I will save up your pleasure.

Right, so, ok, any old way, speaking of saving pleasures (which I just was):  So, the children started reading the Harry Potter series, in the order they were written, and they got through the first two and I said, "You know what?  Soak those in for a while.  We had to wait years in between the books."  After about five weeks, I gave them the third one (Azkaban) and they read it in, like, and afternoon, over each other's shoulders, it was v sweet. But after that, when they arrived at Goblet of Fire (the one with the Amazing Race in it), I held the line.  "You know what?  You can read it next year.  OK?" 

Ok, first, I admit that the serial reading of HP is triggering some kind of issue with me.  Ok, I know, I do.  And if the children or my husband were to say to me, "Um, but that doesn't make sense," I would probably agree & relent.  But no one has challenged me.  Oh, they ask me here & there -- "Are you sure we can't read it?" -- and I maintain my refusal, and I think about backpedaling, but you know what?  I am too fucking permissive anyhow.  Let them sneak around at the library & read it.  Fine.  (I really have no idea why I am so insane about this.  Honestly, even typing it out I know I sound like a froot loop.)

Any old way, they were playing with the down-the-street family outside yesterday and Garçon came home, "Down-the-Street Girl says that if you won't let me read your copy of Goblet of Fire, I can borrow hers.  Is that all right?"  I was making lunch and left it to Mari to go and deal with answering him.  (He was calling into the house from the other side of the screen door, because the children are old enough now that I tell them to go outside and then I lock the door behind them), but this is the problem with that child:  she is unfamiliar with parental naysaying and simultaneously, I know her parents to be loosy-goosy about all the wrong shit.  It makes me uncomfortable and even besides the fact that they are all three cheeky in that way that children can be overly familiar in their address of adults. At the same time, right, they are children, I get it. Ugh.

Anyhow, while it might be helpful to me to write it all down, even if only to prove to Mari that I need to be put away, I have to finalize Halloween costume orders!  Today is the day to do that if you want what you want in the size that you need, especially if you use eBay!  I am so happy for Girls's Costume Warehouse.  Fille would say, "Maybe I could be [hyperfeminized character]," and I would say, "A SEXY [hyperfeminized character]??"  And she would move on to something not sexy.  Good. 

Yogurt Cake

Combine 1c yogurt with 2 eggs and 1c sugar.  Add 1tsp vanilla.  Mix 2c flour with 1Tbsp baking powder.  Ad wet to dry, mix, then add 1/2c oil (my (s)mother used olive oil & so yesterday did I), stir and stir, also, stir.  Fold in one diced pear.  Pour into any old sort of 9" round pan lined with buttered parchment & bake at 350 for 45 minutes or until toothpick comes out cleanish.  Cool in pan for 15 minutes, turn out onto serving plate. 

vegetability

Yesterday, the children decreed it warm enough to spend a couple of afternoon hours at the pool.  I helped them pack a meal and sent them on their way; Mari was good enough to drive them over.  When I went to retrieve them later, it was just about 6, they were hanging out together on the dining deck, eating lentil salad, tomato & cuke salad, and watermelon slices. 

Between their table and me was another woman I know, not well, but from around the neighborhood.  She is nice enough, as is also her husband, though one of her daughters steered mine very, very, gravely wrong once on a matter and I think that Fille will never recover from the fallout of that one conversation, as she has ever been lukewarm in the category of the girl. 

Anyhow, on the way to sit with my babies, I made some nice talk and greetings, and then, before even three minutes had elapsed -- oh, and I think that while they were on "vacation" a few months back, she had a boob job, but ok, later -- she said something like, "I am kind of embarrassed about our lack of nutritious dinnertime options," while she waved at the pizza box open on her table and glanced sheepishly toward my children, devouring their pioneer picnic. 

Ladies, do not do this.  It minimizes us all.  Also, can we get past this, at this age of elementary-school mothering?  I can almost excuse the behavior from Mothers of Toddlers, especially the first time, when it all seems so critical, the feeding, and the information from pediatricians is so varied and/or poor, and it is very interesting, surely, to some of us at least -- Are you feeding strictly hypoallergenic?  Do you spoon-feed or encourage self-regulation?  Pretzel Goldfish or Cheerios?  Earth's Best?  Gerber?  DIY, and if so:  food processor or special BabyFood-Making appliance?  Diluted juice or never-never juice? -- and if I may be perfectly frank: our parenting crises are very small, as are the children.

Those days are past us now.  Trust me when I tell you, I do not care what your children eat.  Mostly because I did not have to prepare it.  Additionally -- though I will never explain it, because I am amazed that you, a stranger, would be interested -- my children do not eat pizza or chicken fingers or hot dogs because of either their allergies or their vegetarianism. 

Also, I am an irritating, clean-living, holistic-O, health-nut sort, and plus, we have this whole CSA-Share thing happening?  Which means that twice per week, I get a load of locally-grown, seasonal produce, and we have to stay on top of it.  As my friend Charlie pointed out, it makes you feel like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. 

Please be assured, we in this family have had our share of meals consisting of frozen broccoli served with a side order of potato chips.  And, I am the sort of girl who goes wild & acts out by eating homemade, gluten-free brownies for breakfast.  You see now? 

Additionally, to my friends:  The fact that one or both of my children might eat candy while in your orbit?  Do not fall all over yourselves apologizing for it.  As long as they read the labels and -- again -- it will not trigger their allergies?  I do not terribly mind if they eat candy while at your house, nor if they watch teevee with your girls all afternoon.  I know that you know that we do not have that sort of behavior at my house, but the way I think about it is this:  the deprivation here earns you a credit there.  Be a hero!  SpongeBob and chocolate-covered caramels for everyone! 

I must confess, however, on the eve of the start of school here:  Lunchables make me uncomfortable.  For Uncrustables, my mind is not too narrow; largely because I think it would be cool to be able to eat a round PB&J out of a cello package.  But Lunchables?  Really? Because I know children who are grossed-out by Lunchables, so I feel I must beg you, please, don't.  Think of the children's future, or the Earth's, one. 

You may all keep calm & carry on.   

sun. rain.

I keep thinking of a poem I wrote a few years ago:  Challenges/pleasures, the smell of death, the smell/of salad, flowers in bloom.  We have all of that, right now.  Also, a lot of summer fruits, which I chop & slice and then tuck into a lasagna pan under a blanket of tomatoes, with the last of last-year's tomato ice cubes chucked in for fair use, also, because it is almost time for the next batch of 31 pounds of tomato-pops to be put away.

I am, I would say, 70% on my formerly-wrecked foot/ankle.  We are, of course, always very busy and I am catching up on a great number of things and also having to let go, because lost time is never found again.

In trying to make up my mind between what to keep, what to scrap, the temptation to want to skip physical therapy is very great.  Two things stop me:  1. the health insurance reform debate, because I have it, the PT is paid-for, and so should I make use of it, and 2. simply walking around forces me to remember it might be nice to not limp for the rest of my life.  So, that!

The beans in the backyard have finally blossomed and there are probably beans, but it has been raining and also humid so that avoiding working the wet vines is not possible and we shall see.  This evening, I hope.  Oh, that lasagna pan gets in the oven at about 350 for 2 hours.  I know!  À bientôt!

une recette

We are having a weekend's weekend chez nous -- Fille is off for the afternoon at a backyard birthday party (mais non!) in the neighborhood, Mari is re-reading the Dune novels, Garçon is into the third Harry Potter novel, I am in the garden, a little bit on two feet. 

That is surely to be the only squash I harvest this year, from a total of seven plants.  However, I have not ever grown so much basil in my life.  I am pulling out a crop this size about twice per week. Of course, I make pesto, but mostly, I throw it into everything else we are eating this August : basil chiffonade on the new potatoes; basil in the scrambled eggs; basil in the lemonade; basil in the vinaigrette.

Cook's Illustrated has two pages on vinaigrette in the September/October issue.  Also, two pages on making "a perfect cup of coffee."  I have instructed the Israeli I am sure to be capably hot on his heels.

There are so many fruits and vegetables in the CSA shares, and while we certainly are capable of eating them before they go wrong, the problem is that we run out of room in our refrigerator.  Mari has forever wanted a second refrigerator -- both for the sake of tidiness and also because I think it makes him feel less patriarchally-conlicted about having a genuine housewife if he sees to it that I have all the major appliances for which a girl could ever long -- and this year I am willing for the first time to admit that one would be genuinely useful, if only during the growing season. 

Then conveniently, I broke myself in a crash, so we never went picking (except the day before my crash, oh, what fun it was shaping up to be, this summer), so we never really had to grapple with the smallness of our refrigerating space with extra volume plus also our quotidian intake.

I think we might have to go to the farm, however, just one time, to pick eggplants and tomatoes and to see if they have any zucchini.  The farm's zucchini harvest is rarely anything special.  I think it is because zucchini is just not a showtime crop that draws families.  It hardly matters, most Jersey farmers are practically giving the stuff away right about now. But in the face of this inequity, plans to make ratatouille --  Garçon's favorite food -- become more complicated than just having the time to knife up 37 pounds of hot-weather vegetables and wait around for them to melt in the heat of a medium-hot oven. It goes back to procurement, and I just cannot manage different-place, same-time purveying issues. It takes the wind out of my sails.

In the meantime, I have every week for the last three dealt with the crowding in my fridge with the peaches and the nectarines and the raspberries, carrots (?!), lettuce, fennel, eggplant, tomatoes, and zucchini, all jumbled up in a refrigerator that has a tendency to have bad, too-much-cold behavior, by making a one-meal-sized pot of ratatouille.  Also, we had an unfortunate CSA-glut of green bell peppers.  It is a volume-reducer, the ratatouille, and also, a place to put excess basil.  If we get to the farm, our freezer will be rich with bags of this stuff for this winter.

Ratatouille
If you use too much eggplant, the whole endeavor will turn gray, the gray of old, drowned corpses, which ... I guess if one runs to grim, as with me, is kind of unappetizing, the color. Red tomatoes will cancel out the gray quite nicely, but I think a heavy-eggplant ratatouille has the richest, most savory taste. I eat it with my eyes closed.

Ratatouille does not really need a recipe; it is sort of the opposite of a recipe. Also, it is totally slattern process-wise. I have spent the last three years wrangling old McCoy mixing bowls, and while it was exciting to realize that the largest bowl held about 30 cups of sliced vegetables, I was diminished to realize I could not lift it hot from the oven. Well, that's why I got married, anyway.

3 medium eggplants (teapot-shaped, or eyeball an equivalent volume of ichibans or whatever), any color, sliced into 1/2-inch thick rounds
7 or 8 summer squash (if they are pattypan, about the size and heft of your whole palm. If crookneck or straight, just large enough that people might talk, but no bigger), hacked into 2-in chunks
3 or 4 bell peppers, seeded & cut into strips or rings, or whatever
5 or 6 tennis-ball-sized onions, sliced
Tomatoes: slicers, sliced; paste tomatoes, halved; cherry tomatoes, left whole
At least 3 cloves of garlic, but as much as a whole head
Olive oil
Fresh basil or parsley, or marjoram or fresh oregano. (I have also chucked in pesto I have made, with its walnuts and pine nuts, to no ill effect)
Salt & pepper, to taste.

You can do this in an oven or atop the stove, or start it on the stove & finish in the oven. If I am working on the stove, I pick a 5-quart sautese, heat enough oil over medium-high heat to cover the bottom by a half-inch, then add the eggplant in the first (and second, maybe first and a half) layer. The eggplant will immediately absorb all the oil. Sprinkle a little salt on them and don't think of it again. The eggplant will release the oil as it cooks.

Turn the heat to medium/medium-low. Pile everything else in the pan and cover it. The lid will most likely not fit, but you will need it to smash everything in, like a funny post-vacation suitcase. If it just rests atop, it is fine. Leave it, leaving it on medium-low heat.

In about 30 minutes, the vegetables should have cooked down enough so that the lid can be removed without anything falling out. At this point, I either leave the whole pile to simmer, uncovered, poking at it a little now & then, or I move it to the oven at 325 degrees.

I think the oven gives a more flavorful, drier, more carmelized product, with less attention than on the stovetop. I also think that eggplant is less temperamental in the oven, so if you do not have the very freshest eggplant to use (impossibly plump, impeccably shiny & taut), I do not recommend using the stove.

The oven does take longer, not to mention heating the kitchen to 325 degrees, but on the other hand, only requires stirring once, if ever. From the time everything cooks down enough to fit on the stove, the ratatouille will take about another hour to finish if it remains on the stovetop; if I am using the oven, I give it about 90 minutes.

If you use the oven without starting it on the stove -- which is nice if you want to sit on the sofa with your husband and read books, occasionally having him murmur sympathetically about the blister you got from the knife, while 12 quarts of it bubbles away for the freezer -- just layer it into your dish like so: splash of oil, eggplant, onion, zucchini, garlic, herbs, tomatoes on top, splash of oil, salt & pepper along the way as you see fit, repeat until the dish is full, bake at 350 until the vegetables are mostly indistinguishable from one another, which duration depends entirely on the volume you are making.

accounted

 

Last week, all we did was cure sunburn & shop on the internet, but this week, boy-o!

• I harvested lemon balm, started process of making tincture.
• I made new chore charts with the children heavily invested in content and their graphical design, which I feel increases the likelihood they will interface with it & get the work done, for the love of God.
• Introduced The Addams Family to the children.  Creepy!  Kooky!
• Listened to this song 12,389,476,237 times at the behest of my sweet daughter, who is so very interested in Madonna, undoubtedly because I introduced her as the World's Richest Ballet Schoolgirl.  Ha.
  
  
  Madonna - New Music - More Music Videos
  
  
• Saw a long-lost neighborhood pal at the pool, which was a refreshment.
• Visited with a non-lost old friend, who was sweet enough to marshall the children's forces to get our trash out to the curb.
• We started on our bird project, finishing the sculptures.
  
  
  
• Fille passed her deep-water test at the pool, which means she can play in the diving well with her pals.
• Also, Fille made jello popsicles.

The other interesting & time-consuming thing that happened this week was that I got into confrontation with neighbors meddling in my parenting, which, jesus christ, go home, people.  Or, in their case, It is upsetting to hear you yell at him, he is a child, and I was a child, and because I have not had children myself, I have not been forced to move past a psychic childhood, meow meow meow, blahblahblah. Shut up & get an iPod, because that is your problem, not mine.

Besides counseling them to invest in something they could stuff into their ears, or maybe just their mouths, I explained to them that while it is true that parents are bound to a minimum duty of care, and I believe bystanders are ethically obligated to intervene if it is not being met, the indisputable fact is that I meet it, I surpass it, and if I want to scream at my son when he chooses to defy instruction after instruction, well, that is my business. Screaming, at the point at which he participates fully, my son, in engendering a climate of bad feelings and zero respect, well ... it is the tool I am choosing to use, and in the aggregate, it does not diminish the infrastructure of my fulfillment. 

It is the tool, actually, which Garçon chooses to be used against him, since after living with me as his mother for a decade he knows that expectations are clear and easy to meet and cheerfully parsed into smaller assignments.  For my son, this is not good enough.  What he really wants is to balk & dawdle and sulk for so long that we run out of time & it becomes a burden for the next day.  The fuck if I know where he gets such a dumb idea, since I have always & ever meant what I said, and always + ever delivered consequences as detailed.

Whenever he chooses to defy me over and over and over in the same area for most of a week, and then regarding one task for all of one afternoon, there is much in the way of top-of-lungs shrieking.  Oh, there are checkpoints in the road, I point to the mile markers along the way, and despite these promises and reminders -- also encouragements and warnings -- the final outcome is always a recitation of the inventory of his offenses + the editorial input of my grave dismay.

I feel this is a reasonable lesson for a child to have:  when you push against someone constantly, they will eventually lose their temper in whatever way they do so.  Screaming out the narrative of infractions leading up to the point where the screaming started is mine.  It is quite thorough and I am extraordinarily loud about it.

Is it perfect?  Probably not, but am I human?  Yes, and it is no one's business to tell me that my parenting falls short of their ideals.  I mean, what nerve!  That is between me & my husband & my children.  Parenting happens inside of a family, and it has its own context and weight and lexicon, which is meaningful to the people who live inside that home.  There are multiple dynamics and ways to interact -- I react to Garçon not in the same way I react to Fille, they respond to redirections & instructions differently, Mari handles things differently from the ways in which I do (although not by much, not with our infuriating son), and the children each advocate for themselves differently, with each other, with their father, or with me. 

A lot of this is cultural. In the East, as much as we can see, there is much more indulgence of children expressing themselves & running the house. Frankly, they are somewhat bratty. Mari & I are from the Midwest, and children are not leading the way of the house. Some of it. The rest is that I do not like people getting in my business, under the auspices of "helping," when really they just want to boss & judge. My middle finger is not broken. In some words spoken this week to an old pal which he then rebroadcast in his milieu, "I am not bossable."

When I was a young woman, 27, with 6-month-old Garçon, I was in the crowded elevator  of a medical office building.  He & I were on our way to see his pediatrician for a well-baby check & I had walked from our apartment with him riding in his sling on my hip.  Babies who ride in pouches strapped to their moms benefit mightily from her body heat, so he was dressed lightly, it was in the high 50s, it was fall in Washington, DC.  I was dressed cozily, but sparingly, to accommodate the burden of shlepping a 20-lb child whom I was wearing swathed in an additional layer of fabric.  He and I were both wearing hats.

While we were riding in the elevator -- I had since entering the building removed his hat -- one of the women asked me why he "wasn't dressed."  I politely answered that he was warm enough, since I was quite warm from my brisk walk, so warming him, and he seemed comfortable. 

The women conferred with each other, "But he isn't wearing anything at his throat."  I ignored them and faced forward, watching the numbers light up, aware of everyone else stealthily watching this inquiry. 

The woman then had the nerve to repeat herself, "Miss, why isn't he wearing a scarf?"

I could have outlined for her all the reasons that led me to my decision, all the resources I consulted along the way, the advice I had sought from people I respected or hired, the thermodynamics of youth, the relative perception of weather and how my husband & I wanted our son to not think 32 degrees was the end of the world, like all the softies not from New England, the Midwest, or Siberia.  I chose not to.

I turned to stare and then hissed at her, "Because I am his mother and you are not."  She shrank back and everyone pretended not to look.  "Does that answer your question," I asked.  She said nothing in response and I said, "Good." 

Honestly, people.  Mind your business.  Get your own kids and then do whatever you want.

je demeure

This day has been long, full of waiting for the refrigerator repairman, mostly, but also feeling as if the sound of my voice makes people deaf.  Or that maybe I am going crazy or something, that when I say to a child, "Can you go to the kitchen and get the orange bag on the counter?"  for that child to ask "What bag?  Does it say Whole Foods Market on it?  Is there anything in it?  What?"  etc, it makes me just out of my mind, immediately, because it seems to me that if the child could just move one goddamn muscle to the kitchen that when they got there they would see that there is only one orange bag on the counter.  Just one.  The one I mean.  Go!  Look!  Stop talking to me about it!  What is no country I ever heard of!

Then, the refrigerator repairman came.  He asked for me to tell him the problem.  I told him that the thing (that I waved at him, the part) broke off of the icemaker and it is broken, not just dismantled, so it seems like we need the entire assembly replaced.

He nodded, wrote something down in his book, then looked into my freezer and said, "Oh, that whole thing came off. I am going to need to give you a new one."  It was so strange, as if I had not just said the exact thing right before.  I do not know.  It is so bizarre, this invisibility from which I seem to be suffering.  He seemed to be listening.  Maybe he was just staring at my tits.

Anyhow, the point is that it was a long day with the children, with the world, and after a mostly-successful mealtime endeavor presented jointly by my son and me, I wanted to decompress a little with the internet and a stupid cup of tea.  Stupid, because I really would rather have a glass of bourbon.  Alex-- who is always just right, even when he and I are just texting the shit back and forth -- set me on the right path with a Beatles kick in the pants. 

I wanted to write about Hot Playground Dad, who is just that, the seditiously attractive dad I met on the playground 3 years ago -- great kids, lovely wife, nice guy -- who makes me lose my internal cool such that I a. fall down or b. drop everything in a spectacular shit everywhere fashion every single time I encounter him.  It is not for any reason anyone can figure out, including Mari, who has seen it with his own eyes and just laughs at me later. 

But, listening to the Beatles, I got a little distracted, and I wanted to read more first, before I embarked upon this journey, and clicking through my bloglines folder was not hitting the spot.  Everything was so tidy, or business-oriented, or smiley or whatever.  Or, at the other end of the spectrum, a shameless wreck, not anyone I would ever want to know, and steeped in defiance for no reason, like a child (hallo, Ayelet Waldman).  I really wanted to read about the gal who lost her temper and was unable to resist the impulse to destroy the children's toys to make a point about property rights, or who was selfish because she knows that if she gives her children everything, they will never repay her and then she will have nothing, or the frankly unhinged ramblings of a lunatic who could no longer bear the reverberations of her naughty girlhood, plus loves everyone, and plus plus needs a. a nap and b. a yoga class, just as soon as she finishes a mighty domestic task , oh, plus, look at how this shit got effed up due to faulty instructions or lack of attention, seventeen photos of time, gloriously wasted.

I was sulking and clicking and hating my cup of tea and wanting everyone's everything to be different, more variant, more messy and lifelike, not so matchy-matchy or sloven's-slutty, not without major flaws, but also not without a little ambition to be better, and then I realized, Oh, I write that weblog.  That's mine, it's me.  And it just ... it made me feel so alone, like am I weak and selfish and -- as the Israeli will tease me -- just made of pure id, so there is no one else who identifies with Jules Winnfield in their parenting frustrations or who uses the f-word or wants her children to grow up and yes, yes, yes, leave her alone, or cries for an entire week because her friends won't live forever, which is of course obvious, but it is the process of the weakening of life's bond which is painful, very much more than the outcome.  Or is it that I am the only one willing to write about it and set it down for the whole world to see in black & white, that maybe I just do not give a fuck? Maybe. Despair, with gardening, some desultory baking, and an uncertain optimism. What the world needs now.

Any old way.  We got an excellent box from Blick today.

I get my school supplies in July, for it is when I begin thinking about curriculum, and I am unable to discern one thing in the world without a Rhodia pad on which to write a list using a staedtler triplus fineliner.  10 black, five red.  I am keeping the packing slip so that when Mari tries to tell me he bought his own staedtler triplus fineliners at the Staples, I can tell him where to go. 

The rest of the box is all supplies for Alicia Paulson's papier maché birds, freezer-paper stenciling, Artistick hijinks, and watercoloring our faces off.  Also, I bought Garçon a three-dollar pencil for drawing.  THREE DOLLARS.  I know! 

do it for Johnny

Oh, my baby's shoulders used to be so beautiful.

They are resting today in our makeshift sunburn ward.  Chagrined by the pain & consequences of their carelessness, they rather glumly offered that they would like to stay home from the pool today to recover their skin.  I tend to overtreat everything anyhow (when Fille got her ears pierced, I banned all sugars and made her take a nap every day for 6 weeks, "so she could heal"), so am glad they want to lie around & listen to audio books (Mrs Piggle Wiggle's Farm) & put icy compresses on each other just so. 

I am grievously annoyed by this. How am I supposed to run an infirmary on two sticks and one foot?  Anyhow, this is like being in some kind of MASH unit, the way everything is kind of balanced in the room & all the ice for the compresses has been brought up in a cooler.  By one of the patients!  This is no way to get well!  For any of us!  What kind of infirmary makes you fix yr own lunch?  I feel like we have to draw lots to see who can rest next!

gratia plena

Our children are on a long leash.  I do not know if I would describe them using the au courant term free-range kids, but they are definitely less hamstrung than their peers.  I think a lot of this is because we have more time, because of our domestic dynamic -- more agrarian in style than post-industrial -- where we have the luxury of time with them for homekeeping and the other tasks of salary-earning support.  They are right within 10 yards of me nearly all the time, which gives me clarity in assessing their strengths and readinesses for independence.  Also, the things they are allowed to do independently mirror things they have been doing all along.  It is like independence training.  Small steps.

This summer has been a huge change, maybe not as baby-steppy-intro as I would have liked, because of my brokenness.  This will be the summer they remember, whether as good or bad, time will only tell.  For example:  today they both got a bad sunburn while at the pool.  Bad.  I mean, in my opinion, it is not the world's worst sunburn, but I am not the one lying wanly on the fold-out sofa with icy compresses on my back. 

How did they get this very first sunburn?  Well!  I told them this morning to get themselves ready for the pool & also do not forget sunscreen.  They did not, but they each failed to ask the other to do their back and so their shoulders are not well.  Burned.  They will definitely remember it and are unlikely to ever make this error again.  Is time to live & learn, babies.

Garçon is cooking!  He has long been aching to cook, and I just could not.  While I am happy to engage the Socratic method homeschool all the livelong day, cooking is too, uh, at once technical and also boring to me.  Or something.  Trying to oversee the child cooking, just, ugh.  Some of the conflict comes from him not wanting to be corrected and me not wanting him to get hurt.  Then, reasonably, comes the point in the face-off where he postures that if I know so much, I should just do it myself, and I of course say FINE, because who has been doing it all this time anyhow?  I am never happy with the way these afternoons end, and knew something would have to happen to bust up the dynamic.  Or, just bust up my ankle, har har. 

So, today, it was his job to remove a baking sheet from the oven, turn the vegetable patties, then return it to the 400-degree oven.  He somehow found himself (I was not in the kitchen) juggling a half sheet pan in one hand and a spatula in the other, in front of the hot, open oven, and burned his thumb.  Oh, well.  He assures me he will elect more carefully next time.  The funny thing is that had I been in the kitchen, I would have said, "First things first!" and he would have grumbled and I would have complained, and status quo and anyhow, the burn on his little thumb has been majorly upstaged by the sunburn.

I can not detail on the interwebs for just anyone to see without a trace the things the children have been doing out-of-doors, the privileges and accountability they have been granted -- exciting things!  Important things!  Things none of their friends get to do!  Things about which Mari & I have said, "Will you two be comfortable doing [this] alone?"  Every time it is something they have been doing all along right alongside of us, so they know how it goes, but now they will have the challenge of doing it while managing being by themselves in the world.  And their faces go quiet & nervous before they agree, hesitantly, and then they leave together, cautiously confident (and always hand-in-hand, like Hansel & Gretel) before returning all LOOK AT WE DID IT!  OH WOW!

Mari and I would be more excited if we were not in the back of our minds afraid that some meddlesome know-it-all would call the authorities because in America, children must be endlessly supervised by a parent or nanny or school administrator within arms' reach at all times until one day they are given a drivers' license.  It seems so silly. 

The point is this:  no one in the family wanted to see the third stupid Ice Age movie, except my sweet boy.  We were sad to tell him that really, we just ... ugh.  No.  He came back a little while later, "Mom, do you think that I could go see it by myself?"  Oh, um, och.  Uh ... no?  I don't know.  Um.  Ask me later.  Again, ok?

Today, I was lying around at the pool after my attempt at a suitable working out (AquaJogging round the diving well for one hour is not any kind of replacement for my usual grueling sorties, broken foot or not) and thinking about the burn from cooking & all their little errands and how much my little boy very much wants to see that blasted 3-D movie, and in a theatre we know quite well and in our neighborhood, in fact, and I want him to be able to see it, if only his sister wanted to see it, also, they could go together and stay together...

What came to me of course (of course!) was Frank O'Hara's delightfully nervy and daring and sharp, "Ave Maria," which of course starts plaintively, Mothers of America/let your kids go to the movies! and ends with don’t blame me if you won’t take this advice/ and the family breaks up/ and your children grow old and blind in front of a TV set/ seeing/ movies you wouldn’t let them see when they were young.

I have long  wanted to love the poem for its shocking verve, but was at the same time never really sure of what to think of it!  Now that I am here where it is relevant, it makes me laugh and also surprises me that it makes me say, "Yes!"  Mari scoffed, because of all the poem says in the middle, and pointed out, "You don't let Garçon use the men's room by himself." But the poem does not say I should let him go to the men's room! It says "go to the movies" and that is what he wants to do! Convenient, that, and I say yes! Now is the time! Always with parenting him, not Fille, but always him, where to go next always feels sudden to me, but also always certain & sure.  Like falling from a bike.

hamburgers

Man, having a broken whatever is hard!  It takes me hours just to get up and get showered & get my contacts in and everything.  Not least of all because I have to rest between every step.  Then I have to make certain I have everything before I head downstairs to make tea.  Because I do not want to go back upstairs once I have gone downstairs.  There is an accounting of every step that has to happen and oh.

It is not the going up and down the stairs per se, it is that I do not use the crutches but instead crabwalk up and swing myself down, so have to drag the crutches along, or have a child ferry them to me and, ok enough, this is tiresome to recount & (I would imagine) to read.

I was lying on the second-floor landing, just on the floor, a few days ago, waiting for Fifille to bring my crutches.  She leaned them on the bookshelf next to me & went into their playroom.  I kept lying there, and she came out after a while to ask if I was all right.  I told her I was just feeling sad, not sad that I had to crawl up the steps or whatever, but just sad that I was broken, that I felt interrupted & frustrated. 

She knelt by my shoulder and told me she knew exactly how I felt, that she felt the same when she broke her arm.  I told her that I remembered her feeling that way, but having never broken myself, I had no idea how she was feeling, and now I do.  It was sweet, and it would not have happened with my whole unbroken foot. 

I try to not be too sad or cranky, and mostly it works out.  Unless I get hungry.  If I get hungry, it is all over and much screaming can happen.  Mari observes that it is much like when I was pregnant, where by the time I notice I am hungry, it is too late to escape the raving & shrieking.  I guess it is the rebuilding happening?  Ravenous, is all I know. 

I do have to schedule a little time in every day to cry, like Holly Hunter in Broadcast News.  There is just too much happening and so much of it is slow and the torture of the innocents and I have to be kind & painstakingly informative to children who say "What?" in reply to every instruction which makes me so angry, it just shorts out my goddamn brain just exactly so very much like Sam Jackson in Pulp Fiction & I have to just maintain self-control & not make everyone miserable, so I just keep quiet (except about being hungry). 

But I am getting better, faster on the crutches, and by the end, perhaps I will be sliding down the banister!  (Say what again!  I dare you!  I double dare you!) 

les bleus

Last year, when the baby broke her arm, it came out that I had never broken a bone.  Know why?  As I told the fashionable Ms Minty the other day, it is because I do nothing which might injure me. 

That is not exactly true, strictly speaking.  But it is true that I eschew the terribly risky sportmaking of the world, of which I knew bicycling in this town at my age was.  Is.  Whatever.

So, anyhow, this is kind of endlessly gruesome and fascinating for me, to be so broken & damaged & dinged.  Banged-up.  Aside from an accident during sex c. 1994, nothing has ever happened to me, really.  Except that this ankle has been sprained over & over again.  It is quite a bother and somewhat of a major betrayer.  This is the limit, however. 

The new orthopaedist, the foot & ankle specialist, came into the exam room while I was photographing the ugly bruise that evidenced itself beneath the road rash.  I sheepishly tucked the camera away, but not before she said, "Oh, that's a good idea!  You can have them to show the children later." 

I did like her quite a bit.

Instead of a waterproof cast, she demurred casting altogether & gave me a Cam Walker with a compression stocking.  It is heavy and hot & kind of a drag to wear.  After I was all outfitted & knew what the next 6 weeks would entail, medical-accessory-wise, we stopped at Dick's and I got a new pull buoy to keep my legs still & these cute-as-heck swim gloves.  I have swim paddles, but I want nothing more hard nor plastic touching me. 

Today, Mari dropped us off at the pool in the afternoon.  The children played in the play pool ("Marco ... Polo ... Marco ... Polo") with a gaggle of their friends. I carefully removed all my stabilizers then paddled along in the lap pool for 1200 yards, taking a break halfway through to read my Kennedy biography.  I am totally high on endorphins since and have not been crabby for not one second this evening and have screamed at no one in this family. 

People have been counseling me to lie down for a week now & it was making me want to burn them in their faces.  Being incapable is not the least bit relaxing to me and I am actually a little bit ashamed to be on the bench.   I have things to do. Many accommodations have been made, and I do not fatigue myself with bullshit I can hand off to the children, or just skip altogether, but they are still children & I am still the adult. Mari is here, but is on a deadline, and the least I am able to do is sit on a stool and make a couple of meals a day, calling out to the children to bring me ingredients and tools I have forgotten to load up on the rolling bar cart we set up in the kitchen.

(Rolling bar cart to shuttle ingredients over to the prep area from the fridge is v clever & I wonder why I have not always lived like this. It just never occurred to me, is all. Plus, my kitchen is not so large that I can't waste the steps, ordinarily.)

At the pool I was chatting with a neighbor in between my first & second go, and explained that I needed her to excuse me so I could get back to the business of working it off, the irritability & rage & irrational screaming, also hurling things.  She asked me if the physicians had given me any meds.  Yes, of course, I have 100 tablets of Percocet (98, actually), but my foot only hurts at 800mg-of-ibuprofen levels. 

She told me that maybe if I took the meds, I would be less filled with tension.  I mean ... I guess that might be true, but it seems like a good way to be addicted to a Schedule II narcotic in pretty short order.  I would rather just swim really hard in the pool.  It seems safer. I have risked enough already.

snapped

Photography is not super-possible since I am just propped up on two sticks & one leg, but I shoot a lot of photos.  This is from some festival we were at, when summer was new & full of promise.

Now, basically, it is about one day then the next.  One foot in front of the other, propped up on crutches.  I found out last night that I do not just have a broken foot, but also have completely blown out the ligaments on the outside of the ankle.  Ok.  Sure.

The good news is that is has been double-plus splinted since Monday and does not hurt.  Oh, except for when I was in the MRI machine Tuesday and it was being incidentally vibrated.  The bad news is that I had to already fire the first doctor, who was going to put a cast on it tomorrow, for he would not accommodate my very reasonable request that I have a waterproof cast.  It is reasonable for a very many number of reasons, some of them actually medical.   

He seemed like the kind of guy who just did not want to do what I wanted him to do because it was not what he wanted to do.  What really made me angry was that Tuesday night, when he called with the results of the radiologist's report, he said a waterproof cast was fine. Then when I sought to double-check today, he turned wobbly & reversey. Not that he had actual medical rebuttals for me.  So, onto the next doctor.

I will fire a physician in a fucking heartbeat.  This time I was coy about the reasons, because really, it does not matter.  He had already made it very clear he could not hear my whispery, girlish, feminine, housewife's voice when I talked.  So whatever.  Good riddance.

Oh, whispery-girlish reminds me that I am reading yet another Kennedy biography.  It is my guilty pleasure.  My children could have drowned off the coast of South Carolina a couple of years ago while I was riveted to Don Spoto's bio of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis.  I am pretty sure I got a sunburn.  That guy is an excellent writer. 

Anyhow, first a cast, from someone, then we will see what is next.

garden state

First of all, I would be remiss if I did not volunteer that I am feeling better.  Sunshiny, even. 

 

When I was a girl, I was acquainted with an excellent sort of a guy -- the best kind really, and probably, though I have long run with a gang of self-styled intellectuals, he is the only true intellectual I have ever known -- who once remarked that any time one got up before 9am, it was going to be a long day.  It struck me then as particularly sharp, and lo these many years I think of him any time I wake before [whatever time] and am as the day wears on in for the confusion of, for example, trying to feed people lunch at 10:30 already, and put them to bed at 4 in wintertime, but never never, not for a decade, has the hour been 9am.

This morning, I rousted everyone up & out (as a threesome, we are early risers, but not very early movers) to pick cherries at the farm.  Cherries were going to be open today, and the farm expected the crop to be fully-harvested by afternoon.

I do not know why I was so excited about cherries.  They are sturdy & so good enough when you buy them in the store.

The relevance and/or accuracy of cherry picking as a colloquialism was not revealed to me during this horticultural endeavor.

I was really motivated for early-morning farmgoing by the one-two punch of rhubarb and cherries.  Rhubarb costs almost $4 per pound at the farmers' market.  Whatev, dudes.  $1.19 per pound if you snap it up yourself.

When we got there, we found out raspberries have just come into season.  Oh, my.  The picking, just at the beginning here, was so easy and a harbinger of a super season to come.  Exciting!

So, I have been thinking of my far-flung, very-fondly-remembered acquaintance today, but trying to figure out a corollary something along the lines of Any time you pick 20 pounds of fruit before you would normally be on your second cup of coffee ... But so far I've got nothing.

evident

Week 2 of our CSA share brought romaine, red leaf lettuce, turnip tops with baby roots, icicle radishes, strawberries, baby mustard greens, and some kind of a mushroom.

I like to take photos of food, but also ... I think it is helpful to document what is real to counteract the mental shorthand I tend to rely on and which is invariably subjective.  About a month ago, I was sulking, "It has been raining every day!"  And clearly, it had not been raining every day, since I had a photo of [something] that I had taken in the last several days, sky clear & blue.

I was getting wound up & mistrustful about my capacity to garden in my dumb old backyard with the recently-busted sod and all the extra squirrels.  At the same time, I happened to be looking through some .jpg files for something kid-related and wound up finding a folder of garden-harvest photos from last year, some of which I posted here.  I was really gobsmacked, because I did not actually recall pulling out such a big bowl of produce every single day from the dumb old backyard, but there was the proof.

So if I try to complain that we do not get enough food in our CSA (and actually, I was thinking last night, the CSA share starts off slow & with leafy greens, but by August, it looks like this), maybe we do or we do not, but I will be able to objectively survey.

The children are not going to camp this year, due to a confluence of factors that made the cost of camp not really a value to me.  We are sad about it, a little, but it was mostly their choice and we are going to instead use the money on a pool membership.  I think.

I mean, I think they are not going to camp.  To me, it is scary, as a homeschooler-mom to say, I will be the ruler of school & the ruler of camp now, too!  Camp was always these past three years like such a freaking m-i-r-a-c-l-e, this being able to send my children somewhere for 8 hours every day.  For six weeks!  And I was always very confident in the capability of the camp to care for them properly and effectively.  Part of me feels sad about not sending them, as if this is somehow a strike against my perceived confidence in the camp matrons' powers. 

I am silly that way, sometimes, and because of this perspective get bound up in a lot of things I would honestly rather not be doing, under the rubric of not wanting to seem as if I am saying something I am not and also keeping an open mind.  So, in this case how that would work is: I feel as if the camp matrons are v capable and so of course I will send them my children for their care because to not do so shirks my civic responsibility of putting my body where the rest of me is.

Seriously, I wind up doing a lot of things I do not want to because I am thinking of grander ideas.  It is not a bad way to live, except that really, no one else is living that way and hardly anyone else even understands the compulsions.  But the ones I know that do have been my fastest friends.

Anyhow, I felt really burned-out a few weeks ago, with my son.  Very many shenanigans and a lot of horrible, horrible behavior.  I felt like I needed a month in a hole somewhere.  Somehow, he has turned his life around & I mostly do not want to smother him anymore.  I think that it was a joint effort and me realizing there are two sides to every story.  Also, a very lot of yoga. 

I still am not really ready to totally commit to having them home with me 24/7 for FIFTY-TWO weeks in 2009, and every time someone does something dumb/"helpful" and then gets belligerent when I try to explain why "helping" means doing what is expected not a New! Idea! cooked up at dinnertime, I am not sure I can do it. 

But they are not all bad.  In a moment of Can-Do last week, I told Mari that I think it could be like when they were preschoolers & we used to have so much fun every day except now they can wipe their own butts.  So, it might be good.  I wish there were a way to photograph all the ways we feel for later objective review.

ripe

We went strawberry picking yesterday. 

The weather was clear & sunny and there was a surprise!  When the farm guy recognized us & greeted us for the new year, he said, "And this year, there is rhubarb."  Oh.  Ok.  Yes, please!

The children are mighty fine fruit harvesters this year.  I am so pleased!  Garçon picked two quarts without complaining or balking.

I spent a little time dawdling in the rows, remembering a year ago our trip to the strawberry fields, how uncertain I was about my future, and the despair I wanted to wither in the sun.  The future is now & I am ok.  Not the same as I was, but when are we ever?  So, as we say back home, good enough is good enough. 

shame on Leon Trotsky, you won't take me to Oklahoma

Bush's endless gift to the famille Follette comes from him flubbing up the old saw, "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me."  Now, anytime I think anything is suspicious or I should know better (particularly with the children) and I just abandon myself to the cruelty of openheartedness and forgiveness, I will say something, anything, as, "Well, you know, shame on Tuscaloosa."  Or, "I wouldn't get fooled if I lived in Siberia," or "Fool me twice, because I can't get Kim Jong Il on the phone."  Or whatever.

So, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, I need to stop fooling around with old Shauna Ahern's recipes.  Seriously.  She got me a couple of years ago, with her horrid bread recipe and I was fine about it, whatever.  Fool me once.  Fine.  I should have known better, but I went for it again, with an adaptation of a NYT cookie recipe.

These cookies are not good.  Actually, they are awful, really.  They are terrible!  Mealy and not flavorful!  I just ... you know.  I thought to myself when I bit into the first one, "Is she so hard-up for a fucking chocolate-chip cookie that this passed muster?  Really??"  And maybe this is the problem, that I am not hard-up for a chocolate-chip cookie.  Honestly.  Know why?  I cannot avail myself of a chocolate-chip cookie.  They make me the sick; do the math.

I just ... it is funny -- a few months ago, I was at the Israeli's and mentioned to him that I had an incredible craving, quite apropos of nothing, for a 7-Layer Bar.  I really wanted one all the time, for a few weeks.  He had never heard of such & sitting right in his kitchen, due to the miracle of handheld technology, I found him a recipe on the internet and emailed it to him.  Just last week he emailed that he had made them and they were amazing and while I replied to him, "Oh, yes, yes!"  I found that I could not actually remember what they tasted like ever.  Even though a few months ago I was RHAPSODIC about them, every single day.

I do not know.  I do know that when we found out that our son could not eat wheat or soy or corn or anything, as we trundled along the allergy timeline, and then found out that I neither was tolerating any of these things very well ... I just stopped cooking with all of those things.  No drama, no danger, no handwringing.  I turned instead and opened myself to food we could eat and I was grateful for it.  Not trying to make new food taste like old food.  And as we go on, I tend to look for recipes that never had wheat, instead of trying to create analogous recipes with substitute powers.  Because substitute powers tend not to work.  And who needs to be so hung up on food, anyhow, fretting & whining about all this replacement? 

This shocking attachment to food that people have is always troubling to me.  People constantly are saying the most ridiculous things to me about food.  "But, but, you cannot have a hot dog?  At the ball park?"  they will say.  "But, but, but, you cannot have ice cream?  At the boardwalk?"  And I wonder what in the hell is wrong with these people.  No, we can not.  And the game still plays on.  The tide still rolls in.  I meet parents all the time who confess to me that they think their child almost certainly has an allergy or a pathology that would be mitigated or eliminated by the removal of this ingredient or that element and they can not face the extermination. 

I know a woman to whom I pointed out, in the midst of her endless complaning about her daughter's behavior, a woman whose family's diet I know to be comprised of the #3 allergen on the list of allergens, that her daughter's problem was almost surely the result of that ingredient being mainlined to her 3 meals a day since birth.  She said, "I know,"  (!!!) then continued, "and I think of you & how hard it had been for you, and I can't face it."

Really?  Because it was not hard for me at all, put away the projector, lady.  It was hard for me when my son had body rashes and an upset stomach and was thrashing around like Helen Keller 16 of 24 hours.  Putting down the food was super-fucking easy after all that.  It was a motherfucking miracle and there is not a hot light at Krispy Kreme that will ever distract me from that truth and relief.

But the other thing is that, for all that Mari complains that I do not appreciate subtlety, in the kitchen may be the only place.  Let me presume that Ms Ahern is not a big liar about the reception these horrid cookies received.  And let me also presume that the people who told her they were the best chocolate-chip cookies they ever had are not themselves liars.  Ok. 

Let me leave aside the problem of her inappropriate marketing -- these are the best, most sexiest, thoroughly satisfying & delectable cookies in THE WORLD, she pretty much writes, endlessly as she presents the adapted recipe -- which sets the cookies up to an unattainable standard (and fine, for she is a fine writer, the sexiness is what she does, certo) for these are not the best chocolate-chip cookies I have ever had. They are not the best cookies I have ever had. They are not even the best gluten-free cookies I have ever had (for pignoli, really, are those). Then what we are left with about these cookies that is possibly positive to be the limit of cookie inventory the world over is this:  they are very big; they have a very lot of chocolate in them.  Gross.

I always am chagrined when I follow a recipe that gets a lot of attention from the zeitgeist and in the end I find that it is either gross & over-the-top, or (as with Ina Whatsername?  this is her raison d'être) something that requires time & attention ordinarily but has been stripped out so that one can shovel it in their face every day of the bleeding week.  (Gross.)  It is distressing to me how gluttonous this all is.

Which, really, should not surprise me about Ms Ahern, a tendency toward gourmandise.  I read her autobiographical text (which, tellingly, is a memoir about her relationship with food) where she pretty much writes endlessly, romantically, about how her earliest childhood memories growing up in California are sitting on her mother's knee, eating Oreos slathered with mayonnaise & ketchup, or Funyuns & sheepdip.  It is atrocious accounting and I can only presume that such a childhood of stunted gastronomic development left her tastebuds blown out of her mouth such that she fails all the criteria of discernment in these categories. 

I did not grow up eating a bunch of garbage.  I was not even allowed to eat sugar as a child and am hard-pressed to think of one thing we ate on a regular occurrence that was not from a whole, identifiable food or that we made ourselves in our kitchen from such.  Pie crust.  I recall the day I asked my (s)mother why we made pie crust from a mix and she said, "For I cannot."  I did not see what was so hard about it, in the cookbook, and from that moment on we never made it from a box again.  So maybe I am impossible to satisfy in this area.  Maybe I just know good food from bad.   

 But what kind of an animal makes horrible cookies and fails to recognize?  Honestly.  Yuk.

licorice. rhubarb.

So, this is our first CSA week with our spring/summer providers.

No one else wanted their rhubarb!  So, I traded 12oz of mushrooms (whatever, fungi!) and my kale each for a pound of rhubarb.  Then, a head of speckled romaine (cannot make Garcon eat lettuce, unless I braise it like endive & call it bok choy.  it is v tiring, all the subterfuge) I swapped for an additional little bunch of white icicle radishes.  Looking at it now, I should have unloaded those spring onions, also.  Anyhow.

The problem is that our oven seems to not be entirely functional all of a sudden.  Super-annoying, because we just had the ignitor replaced 6 months ago, and now the same thing and the oven is only EIGHT YEARS OLD, but I was just reading something that said the days of a major appliance lasting 30 years are over, due to cheap manufacturing practices, so I guess not so annoying, really. But I have a compelling recipe for a stovetop rhubrab endeavor, so am looking forward to some downtime with that tonight.

We went to a fantastic Greek festival last night when the weather cleared (thank you, St George!).  It was still chilly, but we wore appropriate clothing and had supper outside.  It may be only the Greeks who can corner one so fiercely with cigarette smoke in an outdoor venue that this morning we woke up smelling like we had been out all night in a bar.  A doughnut-frying bar powered by ouzo fumes.  I do not care, to me it was like oxygen for I have been a teeny bit homesick for my hometown lately, with all its casual ethnic interplay & summertime feasting for all.

Mari is not v Greek-savvy.  In fact, it came out last night that he has never been anywhere Greeky except with me.  Chicago has something of a full representation of Greeks, but I can find them wherever we go, like Spidey Sense.  One day last year, I dropped by our local taverna one afternoon -- I was SO RELIEVED when the place opened, like spontaneous generation -- without the kids to get a cup of coffee & a salad and catch up on some correspondence.  The son, who is in his late 20s, was busying himself with a lot of cell phone calls & obviously pre-vacation-departure wrap-up.

I asked him, while I was noodling around at the counter, waiting for my food, "Are you going to Greece?"  He said, "Greece?  No.  If I go to Greece, will you come with me?"  It was like, whoa, dude, go aerial!  But it is super-fun, speaking as a high-stakes flirt, to go over the line & just let it hang there.  So, we admired it, both of us, his nerviness, and then I said something bright & eyelashy, which I think was, "As long as my husband can come, too!"   

Mari never worries about anything anyone says to me, and that is saying something, because Kowalski likes to talk.  But even he was a little "What the hell?"  when I came home.  "Why would he say that?" he said.  I told him, "Because he's Greek.  It is how they say it."  "Well," he was huffy, "how did he know that you would know that it was just because he was Greek?"  I mean, I did, didn't I?  Yeesh.  But my experience is that they are a mighty frank bunch with the ladies.  And last night, with all their ouzoing and man-talking and eating with their fingers, oh. 

A long time ago, when I was living in NYC, I encountered John Stamos.  In a bizarre vignette featuring a lot of hurdygurdy around him being the only celebrity in the room, and me being the only person in the room with no real opinion about this, we made small talk and he asked me a really bizarre question that made me extremely confused.  I ended the exchange shortly thereafter -- and accidentally insulted him in the bargain -- and everyone got back to business and it was my New York Story for about week when we would all catch up.

It was eventually established by People Who Knew that he was hitting on me.  I did not believe it, but by now -- having been hit on a time or two by guys not so much from the straight-talking Midwest (So would you like to go back to my place & meet my dog?  I'll clean off the seat of the truck for you ... you like pancakes? after the first bottle of vodka, is as coy as a midwestern guy gets) -- I have to agree.  But still, I feel the same as I did when I scoffed at the Actress lo, those many years ago:  He is Greek!  He couldn't do better than that?  

Anyhow, we had fun last night, pulling in just in time for an excellent supper, featuring for Mari and I this tremendous amount of perfectly-cooked lamb.  (When Mari & I had been married for about two years, I overheard him say to someone, "I don't like lamb."  I interrupted, "Well, you've eaten it at least once a week since we've been married."  Ahahaha!) 

I thought about having an ouzo, but I did not want to become confused and wander off to dance the syrto in a haze of smoke and with all the other women dressed all in black and with the shoes such that anywhere else at a daytime event, you would look like Sandy in the big Grease finale.   

Fille liked best the plate of doughnuts, pastries, and sweets she shared with Mari.  I had an ill-advised demitasse cup of coffee, syrupy with honey, and did not sleep well at all last night.  My children have reported they do not love the bouzouki, but! I got a schedule of festivals happening this summer in the greater metropolitan area  -- one every weekend until July and then starting in September, one every weekend until November! -- and so I will give them a chance to learn to love it over and over again.  They will have so much to remember with each other when they are grown, ha-ha.   

__cycle

So, everyone living in my house has taken on this zeitgeist's green bullshit with a real zeal, never mind that some of them talk about energy conservation & the planet out of their mouths while they make a freaking mitten of toilet paper to wipe their other ends, ok, ok, I will let that go for the moment. 

Well, I cannot.  Because that is really what it boils down to for me.  I went to school in Madison, Wisconsin, and nominally ran with the hippies.  I kept very much company with men who were survivalist-y, off-the-grid sorts.  All of this conservation, environmental, planet-protection stuff is old to me.  Not to say that it is "old news," but that I know the rules and also I feel old when presented with all this shiny, sudden interest.  I do not appreciate being lectured by children, who leave all the damn lights turned on, and linger moonily before the open refrigerator, about conservation. 

Sometimes when I have had enough, I promise them in a Ralph-Kramden tone, "I swear to God!  One of these days, I am going to make you wipe with old newspaper!  And then recycle it yourselves into more paper for butt-wiping!  Do not start with me!  I know some things!!"

I mean, fine, be green.  Be vegan, or carless, or supertrained, or whatever you want.  Use those fucking light bulbs that save all the energy because they do not give off any goddamn light.  FINE.  But leave me alone about it.  I put the recycling in the recycling pile, but also, I try not to buy stuff that comes in a bunch of fucking packaging to begin with.  We are a non-composting family of four with one cat that puts out one 20-gallon trash can each week for pickup and that is frequently only half-full.  The recycling goes in a 10-gallon bin & that goes out maybe twice a month, now that I no longer get home delivery of the Times. 

So, after that, after the packaging-free shopping & all the goddamn cooking one has to do if they are buying food that does not come in a package and the years of breastfeeding and cloth-diapering and not using toxic cleaners and cloth napkins and reusable cleaning cloths, the seasonal + local food consumption ... After all of this, the fact that suddenly my children can read about not getting plastic grocery bags and so then harrassing me about it, well, it makes me cross.  Not to mention that if I never got plastic grocery bags, what in the motherfuck would I do with the dirty cat litter?  Carry it to the river in my cupped hands to dump it there?  JESUS CHRIST.  Honestly.

But then there is the matter of the car.  I love our car.  I was late to drive, Mari taught me after we were married.  He was a good & capable instructor and I love to drive.  Love.  I love cars, I love driving, I love talking about cars, cars are exciting to me.  That said, I hated living in the suburbs where the only way one can get around is in a car,  even of the distance is walkable, because the intersections & byways are pedestrian-unfriendly, if not dangerous. 

So now that we live in a city where there is transit and sidewalks and walkability, I feel a little guilty for doing as much driving as we do.  But, the reality is that this life is very busy, and we cannot take the time to just walk everywhere.  Transit is always an option, but the cost for the 3 or 4 of us to go somewhere round-trip is, honestly, more than the cost of parking the car.  More even than the parking ticket if I get caught up in the business district or on campus for more time than I thought.

Mari and I talked about this, specifically with regard to weekend outings.  We can walk to all the places we take the children, but our window between lunch & dinner is rather small, and to add in 90ish minutes of round-trip walking, well, that never works.

"If you had a bicycle ..." he averred. 

"UGH, FINE."  I told him.  I mean, really, already.  They all three have their little bikes & ride around, but it is true:  not enough as they would if I had one, too.  I have not ridden on the road in 20 years or so, and that was in Madison, Wis, with all the hippies and soldiers of fortune on the roads, committed to the preservation of carless transit and so they were not trying to KILL CYCLISTS.  Also, it was a world with NO SPORT-UTILITY VEHICLES.  Anyhow.   

So, here it is, after the shopping & building & test-riding.  Readied and souped-up and purchased & home.  Also, if you notice, green.  It is like my own little joke to myself.  Mari & the children totally have this fantasy they are sharpening up every day in anticipation of this vehicle that we are going to ride bicycles all around like the von Trapps.  As I confessed to a pal, I am v much calculating how long I will have to play along with this before I can call us broken-even on the purchase price.

On the other hand, it is very shiny.  And, it has a basket.  Also, the suspension is rather cushy and the profile is upright.  I will keep an open mind (I actually do not have much choice) and maybe I will grow to love riding around everywhere.  The bike gal at the bike store was trying to explain back carriers to me and I was just not having it.  "Let me just start with going places on it.  Like a horse,"  I told her.  "Then we'll see."  Just from the test-riding, I have to say that bicycling is quite a bit sportier than I recall.  Ow.

immaternal

I try to make a clean getaway on Mothers' Day.  A happy Mothers' Day is, to me, one that is low on the mothering.  A lot of my girlfriends will tell a tale of how they made plans to do X or Y some fine May Sunday looking at their calendar and when they mention the plan to their spouse, it gets halted -- But it is Mothers' Day!  We are going to take you to brunch -- and then there:  a fine afternoon in the garden or at the stables or the antique malls, wasted.

On the one hand, how nice their husbands & children remembered, and on the other, is the whole point of Mothers' Day not for you to do what you want?  I was a waitress when I was a girl for years -- y e a r s -- in the sort of place you took Mom for Mothers' Day, yr secretary for Secretaries' Day, yr wife for yr wedding anniversary, the graduate for graduation, on and on, and Mothers' Day just struck me as a time where only old Grandma was having a great time.  Because, typically, it is not so relaxing to take a bunch of preschoolers out to a restaurant.  I mean ... these in-the-saddle moms?  Did not seem so relaxed.  But, whatever.  They sure put back a lot of mimosas.  Welcome to Wisconsin.

Two years ago, I was really worn out by these two, and I went to Mari & told him that I wanted something from them, I wanted them to work very hard at creating something that proved their regard for me.  I wanted this because I wanted to see what they came up with so that I would not any longer feel justified in my homicidal fantasies about them.  Also, I wanted to know that they had sweated blood through their little fingers in a pressure to perform and please me.  I really felt like Franco; I was seriously dissatisfied with them. 

When I am feeling happy and even-keeled, which is ever before & since, I generally discourage any Mothers' Day shows of fussiness because FUCK A FLURRY OF SUPER-GOODNESS, Garçon and Fille, be a C+ of good-enough EVERY DAY.  Because they mostly succeed in meeting this low-investment, low-yield expectation, I do not really care about What Happens on Mothers' Day and mostly, I just want to go to the Korean sauna and get scrubbed and lay around to read magazines and then fortify myself with some light snack and a little shopping or whatever, but just freed from the burden of anyone wanting anything from me for a whole entire day.  What a luxury to just be able to walk out of the door & not worry one hair on my pretty little head about what is for lunch, or dinner or snacks or entertainment, or even if there are suitable provisions in the house.   

Mothers' Day also falls between my wedding anniversary & my birthday, so I feel already full-up on pre-fabbed homage.  I like to exchange a little goodwill among my friends who are parents, men and women, but otherwise, zzZZzz.  I am not very romantic about really much of anything, unfortunately.  (Or fortunately, if you ask Mari, who shudders at the thought of having to meet Mysterious-Yet-Critical WomanlyExpectations.)

Also, I like to do what I want, and really, the last thing I need to do is spend more goddamn time with my children.  When I am old & looking back on my life, the one thing I will not regret is not spending enough time with them.  I do not personally know another woman who spends as much time with her children as I do.  Also, on maybe the same hand, I do not know another woman who gets as much time away as I do, so I do not too much complain, plus also I do not feel like I need to be compensated with lukewarm eggs Benedict in a crowded restaurant.

I do like to use the day in kind of a performance review, in which we set goals for our mother-child relationships for the coming year.  This year is:

1. Never talk to me through a closed door again.  The door is closed for privacy & your endless yammering is the opposite of private. 
2. Do not demand things from me, really, as if I have a magic wand.  For example, "There is no milk," is no longer a valid statement, true though it may be.  I expect forthwith instead something with a solution attached.  "We are out of milk.  Will we have time to go to the store after lunch today?" 
3. Please stop calling me "Mom," because I hate the way it sounds.  If you feel too old to call me Mommy, you have long had permission to call me by my Christian name and anyhow Mrs Follette is fine, if you prefer.

I am all-business with the children.  I have to be, for this is what I do, days in and out.  I have girlfriend who just had her first baby a couple of years ago.  She reported that she used to always think that I was a little tough on my children, that I was v brusque & there were a great many boundaries.  She said once her baby got old enough to be a little push-backy, however, she realized that if I did not approach them with all the limits and rules I tend to define, they would eat me alive.  Um, yeah ... just about.

Any old way, in defiance of our convention, I was unable to get out of here today as we had tickets to a midday ballet.  It was fun, if quite a bit more Family-Togethery than I would have chosen.  Lots of women there with corsages.  I would wish for a do-over but the rest of the (year) is too busy, every single weekend.  Greek Festivals!  Bicycle Rallies!  Day Trips!  Webinars! 

When we got home I slouched around the garden and that was when I realized the comfrey was in bloom.

I am always realizing things are in bloom and it might be possible to infer that I have some kind of large, elusive garden plan, but really I am just not very attentive.  Children are very distracting, but less so every year.  Looking at this photo, I am am reminded to consider that last year, there were no bees on it.  Years prior there always were.  Come back, bees!  Come back, Getaway Mothers' Day!   

art-o-matic

When I was in school, I did a final project for a photography class that was a lot of skulking around the Art Institute of Chicago for some long time, snapping photos of people inadvertently imitating the art in the fore- or background of the frame. 

Blurry kids, Monet back.  I was about to delete the file and then remembered, then loved.

It was yesterday when the four of us headed on across the river to the old Philadelphia Museum of Art, because free or not, one can only look at the nation's preëminent collection of photography so many times. 

Ok, there were 5,374,983 people there to see the Cézanne thingy, which is about 5,074,980 too many for me to deal with.  I almost could not deal with it, honestly.  I just ... when Chickie & I were at MoMA a couple of months ago, the joint was jumping because of the van Gogh exhibit that was there.  I had never seen an art museum so packed with people and then when we sallied into the van Gogh exhibit itself, we were both astonished that so many people could be allowed into a gallery.  For insurance reasons, firstly, but also, fire codes? 

The thing that exasperated Chickie was everyone was clustered 16 wide and 6 deep around The Starry Night, which, hello?  If ever you did a bong hit, it was under that poster, christ.  Plus, it is part of MoMA's permanent collection. Meanwhile, you could swing a leopard around in the room where Starry Night over the Rhone was mounted.  That painting is a. knee-weakening and b. generally in Paris.  Chickie is an easygoing sort; I do not think I have ever seen him so fuming.  While I saw his point, I was totally all, Hey, more room for us, dude, my god, would you look at this?

Similarly, well, anyhow.  zzZzZzZzzzz.  Suffice it to say that yesterday was a little frustrating.  It happens all the time.  I was also reminded of when I went to the Spanish Painting exhibition at the Guggenheim with Fille & Algren and everyone was clusterfucking around all those Dalí, which zzzZzzZzz, and the three of us were free to frolic around with all the room in the world looking at the sweetest Picasso india-inked Passion miniatures.  Not to mention the awesomeness (the fucking badassness) of the Fontana show.

Any old way so, yesterday it seemed like a nightmare, but once we got past the entry-hall bottleneck -- shepharded by my awesome husband -- the galleries were pretty empty, surprisingly.  Then, once you make it past European art to the Modern Art Collection, forget about it.  It is the definition of desolate. 

PMA has a mighty mighty representation of Berlin-Köln-Paris-NYC Dadaist hijinks in their permanent collection and only a small part of it on view.  Hissssssss.     

While I was still fearful & trembling from the crowdedness of getting into the place, I lost the baby. I mean, "lost" and "baby," but she had been with me -- Mari & Garçon elsewhere in the wing -- then she was not.

This girl.

garden-variety

The children's birthdays usually go like so:  whatever they want for dinner (anything!  even a menu of potatoes cooked in 7 different ways!), an outing of their choosing (they typically select a museum or a movie in the theatre), cake of their own design, and some small present, generally something I have knitted.  Lest that sound too Franciscan, I hasten to point out that they get a balls-out birthday party later in the spring with all kinds of indulgences and any of their pals who can attend.

 

This year, we decided to get Fille the longed-for American Girl Doll which she is so not expecting.  But with her, everything is an excessive challenge.  She asked me a few weeks ago if I would write down her birth story for her, which I, uh, actually have been unable to accomplish.  

She knows the story -- always on each birthday I tell the respective story of the days & nights I spent getting them born. I will talk about it any old time it is relevant.  I remind her lately, when she is sassy & frustrated and stomping or giving me major teen-preview attitude, I will tell her, softly and deliberately, "Please do not talk to me like that.  I let them cut a hole in my body so you could be born safely.  Please, please, do not take that ugly tone with me."       

I am unclear about the parameters of this assignment.  Is it more of a creative nonfiction endeavor?  A rambling, magazine-style narrative?  Is it about me?  About her?  Which parts?  It is quite dramatic, the story.  Does she just want a 10-inch AP brief?  I am absolutely unable to find a way in to this project each time I sit down.  I have written about it many times, but as an adult, using adult language for myself.  Does she want the young-adult version?  Do I need to illustrate it?  

I think I should just be happy she did not ask me for a poem.  Egads.  All this tonight & cake-baking, too.  I might need to crack open my sample of Starbucks VIA. 

Today marks a year since I fell mysteriously ill.  I feel anniversary-reverberative + anxious about it.  I am trying to stay focused on how in a couple of months I will mark a year since I have started to feel more & more made of awesome every day. 

model magic

First of all, my electric kettle is working!  Yes!  It was not plugged in.  No, seriously, and then Mari came home and was all sad & observing the carcass with me and then he decided to double-check the troubleshooting and lo.  Hahaha.  So, I am happy about that.

Also, I am happy this came yesterday -- the sweetest dress for Fille's birthday-present American Girl Doll.  In an effort not to be too boring, I will tell five things only about the American Girl Doll procurement.

1. I was all set to buy Fille the adorable & local Adora Doll for her birthday this year.  At Christmas, she penciled very lightly "American Girl Doll," not in the list line, but kind of staggered in the graphic arrangement.  We had heard nothing of this desire before and not since.  Her v quiet & sincere, but articulate, longing is her most nuclear weapon.
2. I love dolls such that adult friends frequently presume I was doll-deprived as a child.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  I had quite a collection as a girl, including a number of rather precious Madame Alexander creations which, for obvious reasons, I did not take with me to university and because of my family situation, they are now lost to me forever.  I hope my (s)mother was at least smart enough to unload them on eBay, but I doubt it.
3. I am kind of against the New American Girl Doll since Mattel took over, since they not a nice doll, craftsmanship-wise, plus I have aesthetic issues.  For starters, the rabbit teeth they all have?  Good god.  Also, they all have the same face.  I know, lovers of Barbie should not throw stones, but Barbies look different from each other.   
4. It was actually my love for Barbie that forced me to ease up on the American Girl Doll.  I had been knee-jerk against AGD for the surrounding culture with the magazines and the books and also (important), the danger of the very-close NYC American Girl Doll Emporium with its doll hair salon and doll millinery shop and doll spa and doll cafeteria, etc.  But I realized Barbie has a whole culture (duh) and it is easy to disregard it and still play with the doll.  Also, it occured to me that as sweet as the Adora dolls are, they are babies, and Fille was attracted to the dress-up, projection aspect of AGD.  
5. It finally came down to two things -- a. Mari & I should feel lucky we have an 8yo who still wants to play with dolls and b. Jesus, Femme, just buy the girl a goddamned doll already.  I still had cold feet after I ordered it, but while we were playing with her AG paper dolls one day, I asked her, "Honey, how old do you think the AG is supposed to be?"  She told me she thought they were 13.  Excellent, let's get two. 

So, that is how there is a big box of dolly goodness downstairs waiting for her birthday to come.  Soon!  Oh, and I am way more excited about it now, because the dress-up is going to be so much better now that I have discovered the prevalence of cottage industries turning out simple & lovely clothes for 18-inch dolls in nice, contemporary fabrics.  Because, uh, I also love clothes.  And the AG clothes for the dolls make them look like Vegas floozies or middle-aged women.   

It seemed a little silly to Mari when I called him over to my desktop, 6 or 8 windows open, "Come help me decide which of these dresses will look best on the doll we bought."  Hahaha!  I am excited!