Terrible Mother

The Move is Complete

Okay all, the move is done and I'm (mostly) in my new digs at Offsprung. I'm still working out a few bugs, and the site here will be up for awhile, but all new content will be posted at the new home of Terrible Mother.

In case you people didn't know, the readership and comments are the thing that makes this blog what it is. So I hope I'll see you over there.

*tm

Marching Toward Insolvency

Last week, I opened a letter from the Oregon Department of Revenue. I had been looking forward to said letter because I knew it meant my state tax refund--which was to be $3845--was on its way to my bank account or my hot little hands. And who doesn't like tax refunds, I ask, especially when they come close to 4 grand?

The letter, however, let me know exactly where my money was going: directly into the rather deep pockets of the university where I finished grad school last year. I owe them money: two months' rent, three months afterschool care for Things One and Two, charges from the Health Center, and a short term loan added up to just over $5,000. I've been paying on it every month. Some months, that's $150, some months it's $10. It didn't occur to me that my refund would get applied to my account, and in some ways, it's entirely fair. I owe that money; those charges are legitimate. But I desperately needed that money and I'm not sure I can make it through the summer without it, and this is why: summer care for the Things Three runs just over $1500 a month.

For comparison's sake, my car cost $1200 and is still running strong (knock on the drywall that surrounds my desk).

$1500 sounds excessive, doesn't it?, until you do all the math: divide 1500 by three, then divide by the number of hours each child spends at the center, then calculate the pay for each teacher and assistant, the cost of the fieldtrips and snacks and meals, and suddenly it becomes all too clear why it costs so much. This is a fairly good price for high-quality childcare, and if the center hadn't decided to continue charging me the student rate, I'd be paying over $1800 for the same service.

But this is the truth: after rent, childcare, electricity and car insurance, I'll have $112.60 left over. That's including John's child support (which he has started paying on time this month), and including the SSI Thing Two collects because he is autistic. Though because I recently received a fifty-cent an hour raise, the latter may be cut.

And that is $112.60 left over each month, not each week. I don't yet know how I'll cover gas and phone, or anything else we'll need like laundry soap and shampoo. I can't even begin to think how I'll pay for food. I've emailed the account manager at the childcare center (aka "Guido The Collector") and asked if an alternative arrangement can be made where I pay $1100 a month and roll over the rest until the fall so I can at least have money for food and gas.

That was yesterday. She hasn't responded yet, but I'm hoping for something because otherwise I don't know what I can do.

*****

Friday night, I drove the kids to Portland for their weekend with John. He has moved into Sara's house recently, and this was the first time I would see the place. It was lovely, a two-story row house with hardwood floors and plush carpet. In the kitchen there were granite counter tops and dark wood cabinets--something like cherry wood or mahogany--and it felt warm and inviting. The house only has two bedrooms, and the guest room is where the kids stay. When I took their things in, I noticed the furniture was the kind fashioned from pine logs and made to look homey. In the dresser, Sara had put the clothing she had bought the kids--four summer outfits and a swimsuit each. There was a credenza with new books on it, and there were flip flops and slippers. Opening into the bedroom was an immense bathroom with glassware decorating the counters and those little lights framing the mirror.

Sara's mom was visiting from Pennsylvania and though the two of them had already headed to the coast, she had bought new pajamas for the kids before they left. The kids were happy, ran around the new house excited and gleeful. John showed me around and was proud of the place, I could tell, and I worked at not begrudging him it. Outside, in my little car that cost less than one month of summer childcare, the gas tank measured just under half a tank. The drive was two hours back. I had $1.88 in the bank, no cash on me besides pennies, and I didn't know if I'd make it back. There was no way I would have told John this, walking through that house, him showing me the master bedroom covered in red and orange and black. He had just handed me the child support check, though I had asked for cash, because I knew depositing it in an out-of-town branch might result in a hold on the funds and I needed the money, I needed it Friday night and Saturday morning for gas and food.

There's something particularly unnerving about the minutiae you have to devote yourself to knowing, the institutional rules you learn, when you're poor. I hadn't known about my bank's specific rules regarding deposits until one weekend evening when I was in Portland, depositing a check, and needed that money. The protocols around these things are banal, and the banality can drive you, or the person you have to explain it to (aka, "the fanbase") insane. Is it very interesting? No. But this is where most of us who deal with some level of being poor* learn pretty quick: the only way of managing it is to learn the tedious ins and outs. It is sometimes the only leverage you have.

Thing One, the girl who is smart beyond her years, somehow knew about the gas, and I think guessed I wasn't going to say anything, and so she looked at John and said, "Mom doesn't have enough gas to get home." She said it flat, matter-of-factly, and I loved her and hated myself at the same time. If I had known she would have said anything, I would have swallowed my considerable pride and said something myself. Who the hell am I to put an 8-year old in that position?.

John, though, did what he needed to, drove to the bank and took out $20. "This is for my share of Thing One's medication this month," he said. He acted like it was an act of generosity. I did, too. Because I've learned a long time ago to be grateful even for what you should expect.

I cried on the way home (big surprise, I know, me, the girl that says Crying Is Okay). But it was hard to see John living so well, hard to know the kids had all those things I couldn't give them. Sara is great, and the fact she bought them clothes and books, found ways to make their living space there comforting and welcoming--that's not a small thing and I'm sure it wasn't easy, either. And Lord knows that John could have ended up picking a crackhead who didn't like children and chain-smoked and watched reruns of Bonanza (though, frankly, I am highly suspect of his Dating Prowess. How can anyone explain landing Sara AND me in the same lifetime, hmmm?**).

I used to believe that my intelligence, my ability to think and analyze, to teach, to write, to work hard, to raise bright children, my education, somehow these things at long last would earn me a living wage. But none of them do.

*tm

*It's hard to talk about poverty and being poor in part because the language itself is so absolute. I don't think I'm poor the way some people are. I don't, for example, qualify for welfare, and I live in a good neighborhood. I have a car. But worrying about food and electricity? That automatically gets you into the poor category, or at least the lower-middle class category. Period. End of argument.

**I know, totally self-promotional and egotistical there. But if you had just admitted to the Internet that you were poor, I would let you slide. I'm just sayin'*.

*"I'm just sayin'" is, seriously, the best reason ever. You can use it all the time! It supports any argument! It's genius!

New Blog

So, I've been working with the new blog at Offsprung, and it's quite pretty. I'm posting here and there for the next week or so, and then will start posting there only. I'd love it if some of you would go check it out and comment, help me experiment with it a little.

*tm

Prose Before Hos

I heard more about the diamond dreams the next day from a younger miner walking the road with a shovel over his shoulder near the village of Katopka. His name was Narcise Blede, twenty-three years old, and he said the divinations that came to him the night weren't always from the ancestors. He had dreamed of having passionate sex with a rich white woman the night a big-carat discovery the year before.

"She came driving up to my house with a new car," he said. His friends next to him laughed, but he didn't appear to be joking as he told me the story through Alexie.

"It was a very good dream," he said. "I was screwing the spirit."

I asked what he had found recently and he gestured to a friend. The friend pulled out a small cardboard matchbox bearing the words Le Boxeur. Inside was a sickly yellow chip, a sad discovered half-carat.

"Diamonds are full of spirits," he said. "Very powerful. If the diamond is too big, people can go crazy and die."

Dreams and spirits. What was happening in the Central African Republic was the emergence of an entirely new folk religion. French corporations have dug the diamonds out of the sand here since the 1880s, but the large-scale recruitment of the countryside into mining didn't gear up until the Bokassa era, when a lust for imperial glitter became a presidential obsession. The president had died, but the mania hadn't. In just thirty years, diamonds had transformed the economy of the backcountry. But they had changed even more than the dreams of young men--they were changing the culture itself. The yellow rocks from the mantle had been almost unknown before, with no place in the ceremonial or religious heritage of the M'Baka, the Niam-Niam, the Baminga, the Mondjombo, or any of the tribes, and now a whole set of mythologies was laid onto their slippery surfaces.

Most of them revolved around the spirits of the dead.

-from The Heartless Stone by Tom Zoellner.

Semantics

A few months ago, in the car, where all pertinent conversation in our family takes place, Thing One and Thing Two had this exchange:

"I would like to see Eight-Finger Jon again so I can play with his dog," said Thing Two.

"You can't call him Eight-Finger Jon anymore," said Thing One.

"Why not?"

"Because now he doesn't have eight fingers. He only has FIVE."

"So I can call him Five-Finger Jon?"

"Well, he has metal fingers now."

"I thought he had a hook."

"Mom," Thing One called up to the front seat, "does Jon have fingers or a hook?"

"I'm not sure. Maybe he has both."

"Well," said Thing Two, "we could call him 10-finger Jon if he has metal fingers."

"That's stupid," said Thing One. "Having 10 fingers is normal so why would you make a whole name out of it?"

"It is not normal to have 5 metal fingers and 5 normal fingers!"

"But no one can tell from the name it isn't normal."

This conversation lasted for approximately 7 more minutes, and resulted in much arguing, and no new nickname for Jon until I said "What about Bionic Jon?"

They loved this (a name Fort Awesome thought up a long time ago), with only Thing One adding "Well, I don't know how bionic he really is, but okay."

Somehow, I think Jon would have loved listening to this conversation.

*tm

Poem of the Week

Thanks

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
taking our feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
thank you we are saying and waving
dark though it is

-W.S. Merwin

Hire a U-Haul, Boys!

Several months ago, four to be exact, I mentioned that some changes were going to happen with this blog. And then they never happened, which is what occurs in real life, especially when it involves writing.

But now the change is set to go down in the next few weeks, so I'd like to let everyone know the excellent news. I'll be blogging from Neal Pollack's new website Offsprung as one of the contributing writers. *TM is moving to that penthouse in the sky, people!

Or, at least, a sweet little bungalow in an even-tempered neighborhood.

More later on this big news, including a plethora of links (and probably a good deal of hand-wringing on my part), but I am, well and truly, headed for new and snazzier digs.

*tm

Single Mothers' Mother's Day

Reasons It Is Better to Be Single on Mother’s Day as Opposed to Married, Partnered, or Otherwise Juxtaposed with A Man*:

Reason 1: No sentiments printed on over-flowered card stock celebrating your gentle spirit, ability to wash laundry and cook dinner, or the fact you’ve procreated.

Reason 2: No overpriced brunch where the strongest drink you can get is a mimosa.

Reason 3: You can buy your own Mother’s Day gift.

Reason 3a: Vibrators make a great gift.

Reason 3b: As do contributions to Planned Parenthood and NARAL.

Reason 4: You don’t feel the need to spend all day thanking someone for doing the most menial of chores in your stead, like bathing children.

Reason 5: You’re proof that single mothers don’t have to just survive; they can thrive.

Reasons Mother’s Day Should Be Co-opted by Feminist Moms:

Reason 1: Mother’s Day shouldn’t be just a day where society pays lip service to motherhood.

Reason 2: Especially when it’s lip service to society’s jacked up ideal of motherhood and what it should look like.

Reason 3: If one of my partnered friends calls me, morose, and for a good reason, with the news that her husband gave her an implement used for cleaning**, I am going to take up arms.

Reason 4: The single biggest indicator that a person or couple will go through bankruptcy is if they have children. There is something vastly wrong with a society when we devote a day to what we think motherhood should look like and be celebrated for (and for that matter, consider Father’s Day in the same vein), and yet families are living this startling fact.

Reason 5: Mother’s Day should be about the realities of motherhood (parenthood). So why do we spin our wheels with quiche and roses? Our own second world nation lacks high-quality, subsidized childcare. And that, to quote the inimitable Katha Pollitt, is why “in Europe childcare was developed as something would be beneficial to children, like nursery school; in this country, it’s seen as something for women—women, who if middle-class shouldn’t have jobs and if low-income shouldn’t have kids. Daycare in America is about feminism.”

Why someone hasn’t co-opted Mother’s Day and turned it on it’s head before now surprises me. The Republicans co-opted “family values,” so I think it’s only fair we get Mother’s Day.

*tm

*I purposely didn’t include lesbian partnerships in my critique since the few lesbian-partnered friends I have don’t fall into the same traps us hetero girls seem to face.

**One of my good friends, years ago, got a new washing machine for Mother’s Day and called me upset to tell me about it. Granted, it was expensive. Granted it was new and nice and was even the water and energy efficient model. But it’s not a gift, really. I mean, something for the house? Something that supports housework that benefits the entire family? Please.

Prose Before Hos

The obsession with burial and what to do with bodies when life has fled is a defining human trait, as much a subject of poetry and epic as love or jealousy or war. It is the central point of the Iliad: not Achilles’ wrath but Priam’s decision to go and beg for the mutilated body of his son, Hector. It is the motive of Sophocles’ “Antigone,” in which everything turns on a sister’s desire to have her dead brother buried, not “left unwept, unsepulchred.” And it has haunted our own time in the search for M.I.A.s in Vietnam, the silent rituals at Ground Zero, and the anguish over the refusal to show the return of the war dead from Iraq. It is irrational—we ought to fuss more about babies than about bodies, more about keeping people alive than about what to do with their envelopes after life has left them—but it is always there, the disposition of the dead being the obsession of the living. “It is the dead / Not the living, who make the longest demands / We die forever,” Antigone bluntly explains.

Though man has lost his claim to uniqueness as a toolmaker, war planner, and even serial murderer, there is a case, made at length by paleontologists, that humans are still unique in having burial rituals for their fellows, or friends, or fashion models. Even Neanderthal man may have buried his dead, dusted with ochre and possibly sprinkled with flowers, a thing no other animal on earth had done before. Man is no longer the toolmaker but the gravedigger, arguing for all time in a Florida courtroom or a Roman imperial city about what to do with what’s left of us.

-from "Remains of the Days," by Adam Gopnik.

Miscellany: The And I Work Here? Grammar Edition

Capitalization:

Ike: Don't capitalize this title.

Me: But it's a proper noun and a title. And we've always capitalized it.

Ike: I know, but I want to call attention to the other title in the sentence, since it's more important. So capitalize that one but not this one.

Me: Capitalization doesn't work that way. And you can just reword the sentence if you want to stress one over the other, or join two phrases with a subordinating conjuntion to do it.

Ike: No one will understand that. This makes more sense, anyway.

Use of Adverbs:

Ike: You cannot end a sentence that way.

Me: Which way?

Ike: With "unanimously."

Me: What? Why?

Ike: You can't end a sentence with an adverb.

Me: Yes you can. You can end any sentence with an adverb. You're thinking of a preposition. And that's an old rule anyway.

Ike: I wasn't even talking about prepositions, but you can't end a sentence with those either. I'm talking about adverbs. You need to pay attention.

Me: Look, people end sentences with adverbs constantly.

Ike: Not correctly. And I don't want you doing it anymore*.

Use of the Past Perfect:

Ike: Why do you have all these "hads" in here?

Me: Where?

Ike: Here and here and here.

Me: It's the past perfect.

Ike: That's ridiculous. No one even knows what that is.

Me: Sure they do. It signals to the reader that the text is referring to something that happened before.

Ike: But it's already in past tense.

Me: I know, but sometimes things happen before that and you need to refer to them.

Ike: Everyone understands it happens before because of the context. You don't need to use them.

Me: Actually, you do need to use them. That's why we have them. To make it less confusing.

Ike: It's just some way for writers to make themselves feel smarter.

Me: No, I'm pretty sure it's just grammar.

*tm

*the rest of the day, I walked around saying things like "I am going to print these files....quickly," and "I have to go to the bathroom...slowly." Yes, I am that petty.