Terrible Mother

Things I Routinely Say "Pfft" To

- campaign ads

- my boss' prediliction for only using pens that match the outfit she is wearing on any given day. Thus she has 40+ pens.

- light string cheese

- bank fees

- bank fees making me spend $37.25 on an americano.

- boys who hit on me by saying "you've got really, really cute glasses. Where did you get those?"

Sorry, last time I checked, the optical department at Fred Meyers wasn't the hip place to go on a date.

- whole chickens being suddenly ridiculously cheap everywhere.

- my complete inability to resist purchasing said cheap protein.

- my complete inability to successfuly cut up a whole raw chicken without slicing my finger and/or hand.

- my complete inability to find good band aids for such difficult places as the intersection of palm and forefinger.

- salt in the wound.

- Music Man, this guy who many of us, Friend One and Friend Two included, took a seminar with first year, and who is thus named because he was getting a Master's in Music Composition Theory. He came up to me at a bar recently and said, "you were the best poet in that class!" He was nonplussed after I mentioned that I was not a poet, but tried to stay in the game. "Oh, I know," he said. "I still thought your work was the greatest." This was right before he gave me his email address, saying "we should get together and write a libretto sometime."

Oh. Is that what the kids are calling it these days?

- Les...I mean, Fort Awesome, whenever she says something completely full of psycho babble over chat like "you are attracted to men who make you feel inferior," and "I think this may be about your childhood" when I say something like, "I miss Ehud," or "I'm craving butternut squash."

- Friend One who calls me from NYC, drunk and in a cab, and says, "I got a pedicure today. A manicure, I mean. Yeah. The hands."

- Friend Two, who calls me while driving to see Singing Love and leaves me messages like, "I don't think you could easily call a man and a cantelope hybrid a mantelope because that would be confusing. People might think it's a cross between a man and an antelope. I think it would have to be canterman." And then calling back five minutes later, saying, "Why do you spurn me? Why don't you take my calls? Are you screening your calls? I'm just driving here, in the middle of nowhere, and it's dark," then ending with calling out my last name* as though in great pain.

- My own crankiness apparent in this list.

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*I love terms of endearment but my last name is one I love beyond all reason and only let a few people call me. Friends One and Two and I routinely call each other by our last names.

Prodigy by Proxy

Thing One did a report on Diwali, the Hindu festival of light for her third grade class. Her class does a project of the month, and this time around, the prompt was "do a report on something having to do with the fall." Thing One, being Thing One, first wanted to compare and contrast Halloween with other holidays around the world, like Dia de Los Muertos and All Saints' Day. I suggested that she pick one holiday to focus on, and she ended up liking Diwali the best because of the decorations, the lights, and the story (good versus evil, which is an archetypal narrative everyone can get down with).

She will give a short presentation today and show off a poster she made. I'm nervous because of my experience at that school with other projects of this ilk. Last year, when Thing Two was in kindergarten, the class was given an assignment to make a lost poster for the gingerbread men they made. Some of those kids showed up with perfectly typed posters complete with computer rendered pictures of gingerbread men and descriptive lines no five-year old could think of ("When last seen, Mr. Bread was singing 'run, run, run as fast as you can...'"). A few of them were laminated.

No, I am not kidding.

But I really believe, seriously, that a kid should be guided, helped, but for god's sakes, you have to let her do the project herself. So Thing One's poster has too much information on one side, and is visually lopsided. And she hasn't gotten her presentation down yet, didn't memorize or make notes, but she's great at the art of verbal discourse and can riff with the best of them. And it's smart in a lot of ways, her project that is, and includes her funny sense of humor ("Henna is really cool, but it looks like weeds growing on your arms").

And, more importantly, it's her project. It's vital for her to figure out how to go through the process, think it out, figure out what she thinks she should do next time. And she's eight. She doesn't have to make it perfect.

Part of my little rant here has to do with the fact I was a child prodigy in some ways. Read at three, then went on to read C.S. Lewis at six and seven, Dickens and Vonnegut at nine and ten. I was the youngest person (at the time) to go to Cal State Sacramento. I started there when I was ten, taking a 200-level lit class through a program designed to give gifted high schoolers the opportunity to take college courses. My fifth-grade teacher argued for me to take the test, and when I aced it, they decided to make an exception for me, even though I was technically too young. I earned an A in that class. In all of them.

And I remember, distinctly, how I loved it, loved the fact I could use my brain, how I could compete at that level. I loved, too, the rush that comes from simply being good at something and finding joy in it. But all of it was an escape from a home that wasn't stable. By the time I hit middle school, I thought that if I were just smart enough, did a perfect project or presentation on my own, wrote a brilliant paper, things at home would stabilize. It was magical thinking of the kind only a child gifted enough to be in a college course, while still young enough to believe in the ability to create reality out of fantasy, could produce.

I burned out of course, and did so magnificently, once skipping two weeks of sophomore year straight until I was sent to Saturday school. I drank to excess, snuck out at all hours, found myself in corn fields throwing up in the middle of the night. I graduated from high school, barely, with a 1.9 GPA.

I don't want Thing One, or any of the Things for that matter, to grow up with the kind of problems that an early attention to perfection, or the setting of unrealistic standards, produces. As I read this over, though, I realize how this is also about me, my unrelenting drive to perfection, and how I don't meet the standards those other parents, mothers really, set. I don't do my kids' homework as a means of self-conscious self-promotion. I'm not, as Tragically Hip Single Mother puts it, like those moms who are "rail thin as though they have sacrificed some joy on the altar of self-control." I am not beautiful in that suburban way. Next to them, I don't feel beautiful at all, and it's a struggle, that feeling. I am single. I am young in comparison, barely into my 30s. It isn't that I don't want to meet these standards; it's that I don't want to want to. I want to be free of them, want to have the kid with the normal, eight-year old created poster and not feel some needling guilt, some silent, whispering demand to be better, and to exhibit that betterness through my children. Somewhere, there is still the ten year old prodigy, smart enough to dissect The Great Gatsby, reading the story over and over, but never able to see herself in it, see that Nick's tragedy is in not wanting what he already has.

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Poem of the Week

Cultural Soliloquy

Back when I still believed in God
is not a good way to start a poem
& perhaps this is why Iowa passed
& you wound up in an MFA Program
full of vegetarians who say
your poems are all about sex or poets
or having sex with poets
or not getting into Iowa, & frankly,
they're all tired of you saying
there's no meat in any of their work.
A woman with scars like railroad tracks
tells you to be thankful
because at least you have a schtick
& when she mentions Puerto Rico
she says it like it's one word, Port-o-rico,
like the name of any Southwestern city
accustomed to being tied & butchered
by stiff tongues: San-a-barbra, San-a-fay.
She suggests you write about the violence
you surely encountered growing up
& you think about the time some cocolo
ripped the chain net off the hoop rim
& beat you up with it & stole your Pumps
& how it wasn't even a real hoop rim to begin with
but a milk crate with the bottom cut out
& how none of this ever really happened.
The woman's comments are Midwestern, at best:
everything she says is corny & overripe,
like the concept of a soul. She has been published,
she tells the class, in an Iowa anthology
& when you google her
you find what she wrote about you
in her blog: your colorless aura,
the monotony of your work. Her poems
are all about burning elevator buttons,
her Zippo has a proper name that isn't Zippo.
The tofu of her poem is always guilt
& the conceit is always healing
& the payoff is always resurrection. You think
there is no claim as cavalier as rebirth
but this may be just another of those lines
that didn't get you into Iowa. Let me tell you
something about guilt—you want to say—
guilt is an invisible tiara that weighs as much
as lightning. Broken mirrors have everything to do
with layout & nothing to do with fortune.
Quaalude is not a poetic form
& Reiki is not a revision process
& when did anyone publish an anthology
about vicious Zippos who run wild at night?
Back when you still believed in God
you would not have told a suicidal vegetarian
that her poem is as flat as old arugula,
but now, this is exactly what you say. Workshop
is a fishtank & metaphors are the pellets you all eat—
Inside, Formalists can cohabitate, & Beats too,
but only if there's enough weed to go around;
if you drop two Experimentalists, they might quarrel,
& the Confessionalists will take turns
jumping from the tank. You're the one
getting sucked into the filter,
everybody's shit flushing through your gills,
& if there's something you can say of healing
it's that distance always makes a good cliché.
O abnegated patria! O stagnant schtick!
O benighted bards of cyberspace, how the cursors
of the world rollick through your blogs,
how those bulging links flaunt your publications!
The one claim more cavalier than rebirth
may just be immortality. Even as you write it,
you can already feel the rasp
of the muzzle you must wear
while this poem is being scrutinized.
It was Iowa who put the shhh
in workshhhop. It was Iowa
where your brother went, the invisible one,
Pepito, whom your father said
was the only poet the family had room for
& whose thesis has been published by Knopf.
Now, with two weeks until the deadline,
your thesis is missing thirty pages
& if your advisor doesn't make you
cut lines as superfluous as this one
it will just be missing twenty-six.
If only Narratives & Lyrics would beget,
then the mirror at the bottom of this fishtank
might become a tunnel leading to the sea.
This is the truth: when you write & save
poems about faithlessness,
a part of you still waits for God
to break into your house
& drag their doubt into the trash bin. Guilt
is being from a place you cannot write about
because if you write about it, you know
you will just be writing about idleness.
Guilt is writing poems about language
in a language that once beat you like a stepdad.
Remember how your advisor said
your endings are always too conclusive?
Every once in a good while, she said,
the reader needs the last line to hold
an open door & not a grinning keyhole,
& not a period, this tiny knob.

-Kevin A. Gonzalez

Former Incarnations

Things I've been, have tried to be, or am:

-pastry chef (after Thing Three was born, I had this irrepressible urge to bake. And I did. I made, and perfected, a chocolate chip cookie that is to die for. I baked pies. Tarts. Cream puffs. Pastry topped with ganache. I learned how to make a flourless chocolate cake. Then I realized, two months post-baby, that it was mostly just hormones).

-brain surgeon (when I was 6, this was what I told everyone I was going to be).

-Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader (when I was 6, this is the other thing I told everyone I was going to be).

-Grateful Dead follower (as bad as it sounds. I lasted something like 6 weeks, maybe 4. It seemed much longer. Like years. Like a prison sentence).

-Auto claims secretary (gah)

-Auto claims adjuster by proxy* (which meant that I adjusted claims but was still a secretary because I did not have a degree. I saw many fatal accidents, several involving children, lots of horrible photographs. One of my jobs was to analyze the photos to attempt to figure out how accidents occurred and who was at fault. The photos...Jesus Christ, they did not pay me enough to do that job. Hence, only recently have Things One and Two gotten out of child safety seats. If the kids weren't so damn tall, they'd both still be in them).

-filmmaker (Not a terrible idea, but one that would have never worked for me, since I found no true joy in the process of filmmaking, only the end results).

-waitress/worker at pizza place (for years I worked at the best known local joint in the town I went to high school in. It was good, in a way. We had much fun, and drank wine coolers while closing every night. Once, I caught the back wall on fire. But that is another story).

-accounting clerk (for an insurance company, the same one I ended up working auto claims in. I ran payments through giant machines and configured them so they'd work correctly).

-cashier at Taco Bell (this was the year I lived in Angels Camp, a tiny town in California, perhaps best known as the home of the Calaveras Jumping Frog Contest. Or, perhaps, best known as the "tiny town between the Bay Area and ski resorts that everyone stops in to buy gas and fast food." Mark Twain's cabin was about 10 miles from the little trailer I lived in**. It was hardly kept up, which depressed me, even then).

-writer (I wrote my first story when I was 6*** about a chicken, named Potatoes, who saves her best friend, a pig named Hogwash, from being butchered. There were plot problems, as I recall. In particular, Potatoes made a paper mache pig filled with ketchup, though she lacked opposable thumbs. And hands. Or the ingredients to make paper mache).

-popular girl in high school (I tried, I must admit, for this title, and never truly won it. In part, because I don't have that look, but in part because I could not stop being snide, snarky, humorous. This is the job I have no regret ever getting).

-actress (at a young age, I took to the stage, which culminated in lots of children's and high school theater. I can't sing, though, so it was sometimes rough going. I earned my favorite part when I was 15, in a civic theater in the city I lived in. It was in "A Christmas Carol," and it wasn't a children's play. Rather, I had managed to garner a major role, and was the only sub-adult to do so. Who was I? The Ghost of Christmas Present).

-teacher (I used to think I would teach high school, but I don't think my tactics--ie, saying "What the fuck?" to students at times--would fly so well).

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*while moving recently, I came by a set of David Bradley story critiques. I had forgotten the one that truly made me cry, the one he smacked on my first story I submitted in grad school. It read: "If you're going to write like this, you might as well go back and process fucking insurance claims." It hurt a little, even now. Mostly because he was right.

**yes, a trailer. A trailer with no running water and no insulation. A handmade trailer on 40 acres at the top of this hill overlooking the valley. Whenever I start a story with "Once, when I lived in Angels Camp," Friends One and Two perk up. This is because those are all stories of rural, foothill life in California which is almost too weird to believe. It's like living in a David Lynch movie. And I've told almost no one those stories. Sometimes, I think I should write them down. I probably will.

***I know, it was a big year. Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader and brain surgeon dreams, as well as the creation of narrative.

An Invitation

Les-ahlie-not-teacher-Les-ahlie's friend made this for Thing Two's birthday party invitation:

It is unspeakably awesome, is it not?

And, if you're local, you're invited to come to the party, which is Sunday, October 29th at 2:00pm.

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Thing Two's Career Options

One of my favorite chats with Friend Omega (and a little less maudlin and overwrought than yesterday's birthday post):

Terrible Mother: today, Thing Two said "I want to be Darth Vader for Halloween. And Willy Wonka when I grow up."

Friend Omega: You're looking at my resume RIGHT NOW, aren't you?

Terrible Mother: yes

Friend Omega: Did you explain to him that being Willy Wonka is going to require postgraduate work, and that he will need to start thinking about his professional references immediately?

Terrible Mother: yes

Friend Omega: And I'm guessing - just a guess, mind you - that it doesn't even come with dental. Which is a sham.

Terrible Mother: Dental? They don't even have Vision!

Friend Omega: Of course they do. Otherwise how would they know the difference between nougat and caramel?

Terrible Mother: the consistency, duh!

Friend Omega: The consistency? What, do you think they finger each batch as it comes to their workstation? Anyway, who is "they"? THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE WILLY WONKA!

Terrible Mother: the OOMPA LOOMPAS! Christ! Do I have to explain everything to you?

Friend Omega: Who the fuck was referring to the Oompa Loompas? You said that your son wanted to be Willy Fucking Wonka.

Terrible Mother: The Oompa Loompas finger the nougat!

Friend Omega: If I had known that he'd settle for being an Oompa Loompa, I'd have been more forgiving. How are his chanting skills? Is he good at chanting after dismembering a child in the most vile ways imaginable?

Terrible Mother: But he doesn't want to be an Oompa Loompa. He wants to be Willy Wonka.

Friend Omega: I WAS TALKING ABOUT WILLY WONKA BUT THEN YOU TURNED IT INTO A DISCUSSION OF THE BENEFITS PACKAGE AFFORDED TO OOMPA LOOMPAS!

(pause)

Though I have to admit that Darth Vader does seem like a good career path towards being Willy Wonka.

Terrible Mother: OOMPA LOOMPAS DON'T NEED BENEFITS! THEY LIVE IN A FACTORY! THEY ARE PAID WITH COCOA BEANS! THEY ARE WHAT GOD INTENDED WITH NAFTA!

Friend Omega: First of all, that was not funny. Second of all, you are the one who brought up Oompa Loompas' benefits. You are having this conversation with yourself!

Terrible Mother: that's it, Omega!

Friend Omega: Oh, for God's sakes... all I said was that Willy Wonka doesn't get dental, which sucks because he does, after all, make candy.

Then you went off on your tangent about Oompa Loompas not having eyes and fingering the nougat with their little Oompa Loompa digits.

Terrible Mother: but Willy Wonka's dad is a dentist! HE DOESN'T NEED DENTAL!

Friend Omega: Perhaps the current Willy Wonka, but if Thing Two were to become Willy Wonka, are you insinuating that John would then give up his Fabulous International Law practice and enter dentistry?

(long pause)

Terrible Mother: I hate this game.

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Happy Birthday, Thing Two

Thing Two was born 7 years ago today in Bakersfield. It was muggy, cloudy, and I was ten days overdue and exhausted from pregnancy and from chasing a 16 month old Thing One around. I went into labor around 12:30 pm, though I didn't realize it at the time. I had a doctor's appointment that afternoon, so I decided, in my typical way, to wait until then. By the time 2:00 came around, I knew it was labor. Only problem? My doctor didn't seem to believe me, and made me jump through the 25 different hoops they put an overdue pregnant woman through. I had an ultrasound, gave a urine and blood sample, and was finally placed on contraction monitors. Finally, around 3:00, my doctor checked my cervix, proclaimed that I was 5-6 cm dilated, and had me walk over to the birth center with John.

Because Thing One's labor and delivery had been so rough, we hired a doula for this go around. She arrived soon after I checked in, and rubbed my back and legs, played music, reminded me to breathe slowly and deeply.

At some point, I entered into some kind of trance brought on by the pain. Childbirth is painful, but it also forces you to become single-focused in a way almost nothing else can. I don't remember experiencing it as pain so much as I remember closing my eyes, breathing, having to submit to the process.

Toward the end, it felt like it was too much. I cried. Begged someone to make it stop. It was agonizing, and I was exhausted, though it had only been a few hours since I had gotten there. This is a sign of transition, the last bit of work before the pushing stage, and it's characterized by a crushing sense of imminent failure. I remember saying, out loud, in exhaustion and pain, "just please come out."

A few minutes later, I was pushing. My nurse panicked, a little. She had tried to manually open my cervix (which is as horrible as it sounds), and I screamed, knocked over the side table accidentally. And then he was coming. I remember the doula telling me to be calm. Before I knew it, he was here, and I was holding him, warm and small, eyes winking in the dusk. It was 5:12 pm on October 19, 1999. He weighed 8lbs, 2oz, was 21 inches long, and had long fingers that looked like a piano player's.

I think sometimes that parenthood is a submission, of sorts, much like childbirth. A submission to willingly allow yourself to feel pain, hunger, anger. An acknowledgment of your own mortality, your own failures, those piled debts you owe to your parents, your siblings, the people you owe because they love you, and those you owe because you love them.

As much as I tease, name myself Terrible Mother, and as much as I craft in my children a sense of irony, the ability to laugh and joke and be sarcastic and funny and biting and a little inappropriate, I love being a parent. A mother to these three, especially Thing Two.

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Saved

I spent the better part of this evening in the pediatric clinic with a crying and sweaty Thing Three. After we got home, post-diagnosis (ear infection) and post dispensing of anti-biotics, it was late. The Things were cranky. So I put them to bed.

Then, putting my hand over the O of my mouth, I realized that in less than 3 hours, it would be Thing Two's birthday, and I hadn't bought anything for his class. To make matters worse, Thing Two must bring "healthy*" treats or non food items. No cupcakes, no candy, no cookies. Which is fine, however, it makes finding something that is "healthy" and/or a "non food item" at 9:20 pm on a Wednesday night a little difficult.

So I did what I usually do. I called Friend Two, who came over within 15 minutes and held down the fort (the natives were asleep), while I ran to Albertsons. I ended up purchasing Halloween stickers and Superman fruit snacks (not "healthy," but they deliver the image of health, which is good enough). And was saved from the hells of true terrible motherhood yet again.

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*I know, Omega. It should be healthful. But this is what the school said, so it must be right.

In Review

I've started yoga again at my old yoga studio, and I love it, even though there are no Short Shorts Yoga Boner Guys in the class.

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Things I Need an Intervention For

1: Current addiction to buying shoes. Upon moving, I discovered that I owned 22 pairs. This did not include the 8 pairs which I hadn't worn for over 18 months, and which I promptly gave to Goodwill. Now, I know that 22 pairs is not, by any means, heading into the Imelda Marcos range, but it's still excessive. A wee bit. Especially considering many of them are mary janes.

2: Current addiction to buying books. Upon moving, I discovered that I owned 19 books I had purchased in the past six months which I had yet to read. I have every intention of reading them, but have not had the chance. This is because I am busy. However, whenever I go to Powell's, I drop $50 like it's nothing.

3: Current addiction to drinking coffee. I'm up to 10-11 cups a day. That's about 80 ounces. Of coffee. This is bad, people. Bad. Last night I had a double americano at 7:45 and was fine. I'm getting to that point of caffeine addiction where one starts replacing food products with coffee.

I think Starbuck's should have a 12-step.

4: Current obsession with Beck, in particular Sea Change, which may be the saddest album ever recorded. My pusher has gotten me hooked, so tomorrow I'm downloading The Information. Before you know it, I'll be selling my babies for Beck LPs at the corner Tower. Which, incidentally, is going out of business. Which, incidentally, makes me a little nostalgic for my youth in SoCal, when we'd drive down Sunset Boulevard in LA, stop at that Tower Records, spend hours flipping through albums and shuffling cassettes between us, trying to find the best one.

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