Terrible Mother

Prose Before Hos

[*tm: this is from one of my favorite essays "American Girl Crazy!" which is, of course, on Salon. It's about American Girl dolls, but also about the difficult job of being a parent, of wanting to keep your child young and innocent for as long as possible. It is also published in the excellent book Because I Said So: 33 Mothers Write About Children, Sex, Men, Aging, Faith, Race & Themselves.]

Sometimes at night I lie awake and think about how fast time goes with children. For years adults said this to you and you never knew what it meant. And then you had children and the baby time was molasses slow and then it seemed to go faster and faster, and you could imagine far too clearly all the things your children, who are so sweet and full of blooming affection now, wouldn't want to do in just a few years time -- like hug you in public. I see the ridiculousness of brooding about the inevitable and desirable -- we want our children to grow up, which means, in part, away from us -- not to mention the not-even-here-quite-yet. But there it is. Talia's mother probably feels something like the same sentiment, and Talia probably senses it.

It's odd what will draw a child into history, and into history's particular way of vouchsafing a sense that our world is not the only world. And it's odd how we can't know or always plan for the edifying moments. Not long ago, on a trip to Boston, my husband and I and our two children wandered into a very old graveyard. It was a place I'd always liked when I'd lived near it in my early twenties -- a quiet place on a hill, with a view of the Boston Harbor, gleaming like a nickel in the sun. We had planned to stop there for a few minutes on our way to get pizza. But our children loved it and wanted to linger. The seven-year-old lay on his stomach in front of a stone and read the inscriptions as though he were cracking a code, which in a way he was. His younger sister traced the words with a long stalk of grass and rubbed her fingers over the little death's heads with wings that you see in old New England graveyards -- not quite angels, something harsher. They asked a lot of questions. What did the skeletons look like? Where were their souls? Where was their skin? Why were African Americans buried in a separate part of the cemetery? Why did people die so young then? What sort of a name was Hephzibah?

Children are like us, but they are not us. That's the thing we forget sometimes: that their world is in some sense ineffable for us, as passionately as we love them. And in that sense, imagining their inner lives -- as immediate as a horse's in some ways and yet much more mystical than mine -- is like imagining history. I can no more remember what it felt like to be four years old or seven, not really, than I can know what it felt like to be a person of the eighteenth or nineteenth century. I have little pictures, just as I do of history -- magic lantern slides, backlit, endlessly fascinating, and somehow just beyond my grasp. We've all heard that "the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." Well, childhood is too. American Girl dolls are one way to visit both those foreign countries, I suppose. But every day my children surprise me with where they want to go, and how they want to get there.

-Margaret Talbot

*tm

Poem of the Week

Orange Sutra

I wanted to take you in, peel and all,
with the mind's all-swallowing
mouth. But the mind prefers
unoranging the orange
until a segment unhinges
and shines upright
in the night sky, unaware
of the night or of its own shining.

In such a way the mind makes a darker thing
of night's conception of itself.
Its crescent admonishes lamentation as
a temporary setback, mindful of the round,
the moon's fullness, from which it came
and from which it draws power
to increase or disappear
into us, entirely.

Gone full again, how orange are you, Orange,
now that a moon mistakes you for its
daughter? Just as I
thought: you are a wisecrack
in the abundance of the night's spiraling obituary,
willing to carry us with you
like poor relations,
until we run out of pretexts, alterations
and gambits.

If I choose to live in mind of you,
it will be known only on the blackboard
of a thought's mad all-over grammar,
those woolly bees of the heart
that want to sting a moment to death
with memory -- spelling the past wuz,
with its fur on, and letting it roll before us
like an orange, a portable altar
that prays all over itself
with itself.

You could say so, Orange.
You could kneel as you said so.
The way an orange is always kneeling
and upright at once.

-Tess Gallagher

Tess Gallagher reads April 12th at the UofO. I'll be there. And anyone not-so-local is welcome to crash on my couch. And, regardless, I'd love to see some of you at the reading and after (at the requisite Drinking After Reading). Let me know if you're planning on coming.

*tm

Miscellany: The Duh Edition

A conversation between Fort Awesome and I two weeks ago as we drove 45 minutes to hear Deborah Eisenberg read:

Fort Awesome: I liked that movie, but it reminded me of Ken Burns.

[long pause]

Terrible Mother: Who's Ken Burns?

Fort Awesome: Shut up.

Terrible Mother: What?

Fort Awesome: What the fuck is wrong with you? "Who's Ken Burns?"

Terrible Mother: What are you talking about?

Fort Awesome [voice rising]: Ken Burns! KEN BURNS! BASEBALL! JAZZ! THE DOCUMENTARIAN! THE KEN BURNS EFFECT! KEN FUCKING BURNS!

Terrible Mother: See, when you said "Ken Burns," I really thought "maybe 'Ken' is Mr. Burns first name."

[silence]

Terrible Mother: You know. From the Simpsons?

Fort Awesome: You cannot have a Master's degree. You cannot. There's been some terrible mistake*.

*****

An IM with Fort Awesome a week later:

Fort Awesome: I big heart Malcolm Gladwell- do you think he will marry me?

Terrible Mother: who is that?

Fort Awesome: holy shit

Terrible Mother: Oh God. I hate this game.

Fort Awesome: he writes** like every other month in the New Yorker!

Terrible Mother: I am now scarred, can't even begin to ask "who is that?" Because I know it's going to hurt when I don't know.

Fort Awesome: Can you at least recognize the name?

[long pause]

Terrible Mother: Yes?

Fort Awesome: Blink, Freakonomics***, The Tipping Point?

Terrible Mother: Are those essays he's written for the New Yorker?

Fort Awesome: They are books. Books.

Terrible Mother: Oh yeah. "Freakonomics." I think I read a review of that on Salon.

Fort Awesome: You're hopeless.

Terrible Mother: I'm not hopeless! I have a good memory for certain details! Conversations, for example.

Fort Awesome: Apparently no one you have ever known has talked about Ken Burns or Malcom Gladwell. Anyway, have you seen the preview for the movie based off So Much Water So Close to Home?

Terrible Mother: no

Fort Awesome: here

Terrible Mother: It looks fucking fabulous

Fort Awesome: please god tell me that's sarcasm

Terrible Mother: What? It looks good!

Fort Awesome: They've turned it into a thriller.

Terrible Mother: But I love Laura Linney****.

Fort Awesome: It's a dumb thriller.

Terrible Mother: But it's won awards. And all the awards have laurel leaves around their titles. I'm a sucker for the laurel leaf awards.

Fort Awesome: But it was this great quiet feminist story.

Terrible Mother: Really? Who wrote it?

[long pause]

Fort Awesome: Please stop talking.

Terrible Mother: Oh no. It's someone I should know isn't it?

Fort Awesome: Raymond Carver, TM. Raymond Fucking Carver.

Terrible Mother: I knew it sounded familar!

Fort Awesome: Ehud would kill you. If I ever want to be the favorite, I'll just email him this IM.

Terrible Mother: It's like the time I asked, "And who wrote The Seagull again?"

Fort Awesome: Please. Please just stop talking.

Terrible Mother: Done and done.

*****

Two years ago, at the end of a long conversation between Friends One and Two and me, I described a dramatic moment in class by saying "It was the epitome of dramatic. It was like that scene in The Karate Kid."

Friend One looked at us. "Which movie was that again?"

This caused Friend Two and I to look at each other aghast. Then we stood up at the same time. "You know, The Crane Kick," we were both saying, chattering over each other. And then in the middle of Allann Brothers Coffee, we started miming said Crane Kick. And all the while Friend One looked confused. "I'm not sure I've seen that movie before," she finally said, as Friend Two and I became more agitated, saying things out of order like "Sand the floors, Friend One!" and "Daniel-san!" and "Cobra KAI!"

I think we just confused Friend One more.

*tm

*And the entire evening of the reading, I kept asking people "Do you know who Ken Burns is?" trying to prove that someone else wasn't as lame as I was.

Did it work? No. It didn't. Not even a little.

** And he has a decent blog.

***Also, MG didn't write that book, which makes me simultaneously feel vindicated (Ha! Fort Awesome was wrong!) and lame (Oh. But that's the one I sort of knew about). It's like life. Only on a much smaller scale.

***Notice how I didn't get any credit for at least knowing who she is? See that? Shenanigans I say.

Prose Before Hos

This is the inaugural post in a new category, Prose Before Hos, which is the prose version of the Poem of the Week. Poetry on Thursday, prose on Saturday. Think of it as the literary equivalent of a mullet ("business in the front, party in the back").

-----

As my late English-professor dad would have told you at great length, "irony" does not signify something annoying or irritating, or even a strange coincidence. In its purest sense, irony is a rhetorical mode in which you say one thing and mean the opposite ("Dude, what a lovely spring day we're having!" as you walk across town in a driving sleet-storm), although it also refers to a cosmic phenomenon in which human acts produce effects contrary to those intended. (One could say that the results of the Iraq war have been ironic, for example, but only if you believe the war was actually intended to produce a peaceful, democratic Iraq.)

But I'm also not here to rail against the slippery, postmodern sense of the word "irony," the one infamously referenced by Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter when he declared that irony was dead after 9/11. Carter, I suppose, was trying to say that insincerity and dispassion and a permanent attitude of poking fun had to go on hold temporarily in the wake of that disaster, and Jeez, I hope he was looking in the mirror when he said it. (In fairness, he later acknowledged that it was a dumb-ass thing to say, although perhaps not in those words.)

Nay, I am here to honor that indefinable form of irony in all its treachery and instability, its tendency to reverse the polarities of meaning or to render them indecipherable. This is the form of irony that will make all of us, as we grow older, unable to tell whether the younger people around us are behaving sincerely or not. We will find no comfortable recourse, no safe haven. This kind of irony is both a form of self-knowledge and a form of self-mockery, it is a defense against the world of late capitalism and an embrace of it. I say it is a proud and noble thing, and I say bring it.

from Beyond the Multiplex, 3-22-07, by the esteemed Andrew O'Hehir, writer for Salon.

Go read it. Now.

*tm

Fair and Safe

Monday morning, Thing One threw up at school so the secretary called me. Despite Ike's protests that vomiting wasn't that serious, I picked up the eldest monkey, took her home and spent the day with her. What became readily apparent was that she didn't have the flu--no fever or cough--and while her stomach was upset, she kept down soda and popsicles, and eventually a bagel. I could tell something was upsetting her by the way she stayed close all day, wanted to lay with me on the couch and watch me knit. Thing One is 8 the way other people are 21: she owns being that age and rules it with a kind of elementary-school confidence. So the mother need was unusual, though I thought it was likely just something more about the Girl Wars at school.

Then Tuesday night at dinner she broke. "Papa said he was going to marry Sara," she cried. "And that if Sara wants to, they'll adopt a baby."

There are a handful of times when I've been rendered speechless. This was one of them.

Thing One put her head down on her plate--empty because she had refused to eat much for the past two days--and sobbed. "Why does he need another baby?" she asked. "He has us. He has us."

There have been times when Things Two or Three get upset and cry about their dad, the divorce, any of it. And I've told myself that those times are hard because they lack the verbal acuity to voice their feelings. I realize now that isn't true. Watching Thing One grieve--she's the kid who, at 7, cried and said, "I want you to live together again, but I know you can't. And it makes me sad."--is a special kind of pain. I can't tell her everything will be alright because she knows better.

At the dinner table, I scooted my chair next to hers, put my arms around her. I rested my forehead on the back of her neck. At the nape her hair is still baby soft, thin and light and fragile. "I'm sorry," I said. It seemed like the only thing I could say that was true.

"I don't understand," she said. "He moved away from us."

"I know."

"If they adopt a baby, then it will get to see him more than I do. And he'll like it better than us. He won't be able to help it." Thing One's chest heaved when she talked and her body shook.

Right then I wanted to hurt John. I wanted to shake him hard. Look at this, I wanted to tell him. Look. This is what responsibility fucking looks like.

John didn't admit to saying anything at first, though now he says it was all a side comment, nothing important.

Last night, I asked him to switch weekends with me, since I have something going on in late April. He agreed, but noted that I would need to take them two weekends in a row. "Well," I said, "you'll be here Easter, so I'll get a break anyway."

He was quiet.

"Because you and Sara are taking them out, right?" Last year, when we were going through mediation and creating a parenting plan, he had argued to alternate Easters. This was because last year, when I asked if he wanted to come over for Easter, he snapped at me. "I'm an atheist," he said. "Why do I care about Easter?"

It was dig against Jon, who was in seminary. When I made plans for Easter that didn't include him, though, he was angry and then sad. So he wanted to alternate the holiday, argued for it in mediation. And now it's as though he can't remember why.

"I'll be there for a few hours," he said.

"I know. I'm just trying to calculate how I'm going to do this without a break for two weeks."

"Well, I'm not taking them three weekends in a row. That wouldn't be fair."

Fair. The word stuck. Fair. I had just asked him if he could manage to pick them up early that Friday in April, at 5:00 pm. He had sighed, said he'd have to check with his boss to see if he could get off early, but he wasn't sure, and wouldn't know until maybe that week. Fair. The word doesn't carry any meaning with me anymore. Does he want to talk about fair?

Nevermind that he does not pay for their prescriptions or doctors' visits, though he promised to, and Thing One's asthma medication runs $95 a month easy.

Nevermind that he does not help cover their soccer registration fees or uniform costs.

Nevermind that he does not pay child support on time.

Nevermind that he can drop emotional bombs like "I might marry Sara and adopt a baby" and then leave without having to deal with the repercussions.

Nevermind that he never shows up on time for his weekends.

It was then that I realized that 5:00 pm is the time he's supposed to pick them up. That's the agreement. That's in the stupid parenting plan we made. And he's broken it for months now because he gets off work later than that, sometimes as late as 8pm. What's worse is that it has become so regular that I've allowed him to redefine the terms so that 5:00 pm is early. I spend every other Friday driving up to Portland to drop them off, or I hire a sitter so I can go to a reading, and then I drive them up Saturday morning. He drops them off early on Sundays too sometimes. I get 48 hours of child-free time every two weeks, and even that he tries to cut in on. "I appreciate you being so flexible," he says frequently. And I fucking let him get away with all of it.

This is what I do. I wouldn't let my friends get away with this, even my male friends. If Friend R were to ever pull something as crappy as this, I'd box his cute little ears and then I'd be done with him. I never have to worry about this, though. My friends are loyal and good and kind. They take care of me and they take care of me well. But while I wouldn't tolerate such behavior from my friends, the men I'm either romantically involved with, or were, somehow get carte fucking blanche. And part of the reason is that they're sort of emotionally crippled or something. They always seem unaware of what they're doing or what they've done.

Fair.

The Nefarious Poet and I have been trying to repair our friendship, despite what happened at AWP. He said he wanted something "safe and manageable," and I missed him, missed just talking to him, missed that connection, the way he got me, understood me. So we started emailing. But his words stick the way John's do.

Safe? Safe? No one gets safe, NP. Who would want safe? No relationship, not even a simple friendship, is safe, let alone this one. And I don't want safe. It's not worth my goddamn time. And it isn't worth yours either.

Last weekend Tim-Tim told me, over dinner at an Italian place, that pouring anything more, even friendship, into the Nefarious Poet was useless. "He's like a piggy bank with the plug pulled out. Whatever you put in there isn't going to stick."

After NP sent me a photo of an ex-girlfriend making eyes at the camera for him, I began to see Tim-Tim was probably right. Like John, he doesn't know any better. It's fair and safe. Everything fair and safe. Fair and safe. Meanwhile, the balance goes on my account, it's my job to deal with the fallout, to deal with the repercussions, to hold up the illusion of fair and safe for these men. I can't do it anymore. And I don't want to.

*tm

(listening to a playlist which includes the not-oft combined "Irreplaceable," by Beyonce, "Chan Chan," from the Buena Vista Social Club Soundtrack, "Jackson," by Lucinda Williams, "Someone to Pull the Trigger," by Matthew Sweet, and "Black Sheep" by Martin Sexton, among others).

Poem of the Week

"Only the Mistakes Belong to Us"
-Jorge Luis Borges

This tree keeps falling over. I prop it up,
it falls again. And the rain falls
day after day like a broken wet record.
Here are the birds--tiny, smaller

than birds. And like fresh butcher's
paper, the light so bright it hurts.
So the birds are the paper and so is the sky.
It will be easiest if I draw you a picture,

each of us a different shade of gray.
What goes right is an accident. It can't
be blamed on us. What goes wrong

is almost impossible to see. How quickly
it disappears, like someone's hand
into someone else's pocket.

-Matthew Thorburn

Remainder

Last night I helped Thing One finish her math homework. She's learning division, but they're still at the stage of using remainders. I had forgotten about remainders until I saw her mark one with a capital R. I miss them. They make more sense now. When did we start to think we could figure everything out, carry something down to the last digit, the 1000th place or the 1000000th place?

It never works. There are always remainders.

"What's zero, really?" she asked, halfway through.

"It's not really a number," I said. "It's an idea."

"What does that mean?"

"It shows absence. It symbolizes what isn't there."

Thing One thought about this for a minute. "Yeah," she said. "Like it's a circle around nothing. Like, 'look, here's nothing!'" She laughed.

I nodded. I thought about the Chudnovsky brothers who built their own computer to calculate pi. When I last read about them, they had calculated out 2 billion places, with still no pattern found, no final number. There has always been something strangely comforting to me about that, about them. The faith it takes to keep going. The fact no end is in sight.

"I like the remainders," I said.

But Thing One had already gone on to the next idea. "Zero is like tomorrow. Like the word tomorrow."

"What?" I said.

"Tomorrow is an idea, too," she said. "So it's like zero. There isn't a real tomorrow. You never get there."

Remember how I was all "Thing One isn't as smart as I was, wah-wah-wah"?

Now? Now I have to DESTROY her!

*tm

Poem of the Week

Making Love to Leopard Man

Tom Leppard...has approximately 99.9%
of his body covered in tattoos...
a leopard-skin design...[He} now lives
as a hermit on the Isle of Skye.
-Guinness World Records

Though I'm not a needle, let me touch you.
Let me look into the pink secret of your ear.
Let me part, one by one, your reclusive, unmarked toes.

Trust me, you are not the first man I've known
who thought he was an animal, who's sharpened
his claws without knowing what to do with them.

Like continents your bruised-green spots drift apart.
Lying beside you, I watch the ink bleed slowly
into the tiny channels of skin, edges blurring

into your yellow sea. One-hundred-six islands
I've counted so far: that one looks like a storm cloud,
that one at your hip like the head of a woman.

You're not the only one who knows how to make
the body an elaborate disguise. How I wish
the children who torment you would throw stones

at the ugly hut of my life and scatter like birds
when I glare at them. I want to bathe my scars
in the isle's dirty river. I want fangs.

Let me show you how hermit crabs do it: tap
my borrowed shell until I uncurl like a raw finger,
exposing myself to salt. Out there, I could be eaten.

I could be carried away by the current into the mouth
of prey. Hold me closer with your human claws.
For now, let's pretend we have nothing to hide.

-Stephanie Lenox

from Best New Poets 2006

The Gloves Are Off

I finally snapped regarding the First Name School, the place where Things One and Two attend. Thing Two, as you may have remembered, had a bus incident earlier in the year, and I've been trying to get some response from the school. But mostly, I've been overworked, overwhelmed, trying to deal with parenting three kids, launching a freelance career, and working a full-time straight job.

But yesterday, Thing Two brought home another bus referral, which is a form indicating his misbehavior on the bus. They want to suspend him from taking the bus for 10 days. While reading the referral, I realized that the bus driver had no idea Thing Two is autistic despite the fact we requested special transportation for him at the beginning of his Kindergarten year. At that time, the school deemed it "unnecessary," though now it seems it is. He's autistic and is bothered by ambient noise. So getting on the bus after a full day of school, a noisy bus, and spending 45 minutes on said bus? It's a recipe for disaster.

At the same time, Thing Two did misbehave. So my attitude is to find a workable solution. Still, I've gotten nothing, nothing, from the First Name School. Nothing but dismissals.

I'm fuming. And I'm ready to box now.

*tm

Miscellany: The Drama Edition

An IM with Fatally Hip Mrs. Friend Two concerning the break-up of Thing Two* and Cecelia:

Terrible Mother: Thing Two dumped Cecelia yesterday. Because she licked a marshmallow and gave it to Van**.

Fatally Hip Mrs. Friend Two: Dude, you just SLAYED me!

Terrible Mother: I know! It's perfect, right?

Fatally Hip Mrs. Friend Two: I'm laughing so hard right now I seriously considered writing "lol" even though I'm politically and morally opposed to that.

Terrible Mother: And the best thing is he's all adult about it: "I am not old enough to get married yet anyway. We are both way too young. And she should have given the marshmallow to me."

Fatally Hip Mrs. Friend Two: That last sentence just blew Thing Two's cover: "And she should have given that marshmallow to me. That faithless bitch! Toy with my heart, Cecilia! I'll show you who's the real man in this situation!"

Terrible Mother: The story slayed me. I nearly wrecked the car when he piped up with that from the backseat. And plus he was doing that adorable Thing Two-talk*** that he does. I nearly died.

Fatally Hip Mrs. Friend Two: Jesus Christ, that relationship was WAY WAY too old for both of them. They really shared a connection. I mean, it was dramatic and deep enough for 15-year-olds. Licked a marshmallow. I'm dying.

Terrible Mother: I know! It's like some strange mating ritual gone horribly awry or something.

*****

Emails from Stoic Writer which he sent upon finding out about the goings-on with the Nefarious But Adorable Poet:

Email one:

I think there might be a few things to think about. First, reassurance. Second, challenge him. Call him a chickenshit. Tell him that sheltering yourself from the world makes for a pretty miserable life. Third, Chekhov. Make him read that fucking story "Journey by Cart." And explain what it means.

Email two:

One more thing. If there's any writer who rivals the genius of Chekhov, it's Joel. Billy, that is. Play this song for him and tell him to listen closely to the lyrics. Only, replace "man" with "woman."
[Attached: I Am An Innocent Man.mp3]

That whole series of emails made my day. Christ, it made my fucking week. Is there anything better than thinking a relationship can be at all helped by sending someone a Chekhov story****? A Chekhov story along with an old Billy Joel song? Stoic Writer, you kick ass. But sometimes in a weird way. Like the time you chased all three of my children with a teddy bear. Yes. Just like that.

*****

A conversation with Friend One:

Friend One: So, I sent Fly Boy a text message today about being in a bad mood.

Terrible Mother: Oh God.

Friend One: I know, right? It was totally a test and he didn't even know it.

Terrible Mother: What did he do?

Friend One: He texted right back and asked if there was anything he could do. And then he asked if I wanted a cheese sandwich when I got home.

Terrible Mother: That's good, yeah? He passed right?

Friend One: Well, he passed the first part.

Terrible Mother: Oh no.

Friend One: Because if there isn't a surprise for me when I get home I'm going to be angry.

Terrible Mother: You know you're crazy, right?

Friend One: Yeah. But you're the one who puts men through something like the Dating LSAT, at least according to Friend Two.

[silence]

Terrible Mother: Well, you could at least have told him it was a two-part test! That there was the Section B! He doesn't know what he's up against!

Friend One: No, but he will. He will.

*tm

*I sort of hate the way some parents say their elementary-aged son is "dating" someone, which has always seemed to me a hysterical assertion of heterosexuality on par with buying boys camouflaged pants and encouraging them to shoot small animals with BB guns. But Thing Two legitimately entered into something with Cecelia, and that something including holding hands, sharing toys and craft supplies, and kisses (which would have both her parents and me yelling, "Cheeks! Only cheeks!").

**As it turned out, I think I got the story wrong because later Fatally Hip Mrs. Friend Two and I were told that Van licked the marshmallow and gave it to Cecelia who then ate it.

***Thing Two, being mildly autistic, talks in a kind of adorable monotone, brown eyes big and round, and almost completely without contractions (a side effect of spending 5 of your 7 years in speech therapy). It's so him that I can't help but think this story would lose something if another child were telling it.

****note to Omega: there's totally a set-up for a joke here, and I'm giving it to you. It's a gift. Take it, sir. Take it and run.