Terrible Mother

Miscellany: The Righteous Indignation Edition

Before I launch into my typical miscellany-type post, where I bring together disparate scenes of my life, I would like to welcome you to the newly redesigned Terrible Mother.  And I need to give credit for the design to Sweet Blog, which did a bang-up job. 

Anyway—on to the miscellany.

A conversation with Friend R:

Me:  Do you have that recipe for no-knead bread handy?

Friend R:  Yeah, I can send it to you.

Me:  Does it work?

Friend R:  It must because all the hipsters have had the chance to go from "I love it because I'm the only one doing it" to "Everyone's doing it so it's not cool anymore” to "Damn, that's some good bread. But don't let my cool friends know I'm using it."

Me:  I didn’t know hipsters ate.  I thought they rode single gear bikes and bought uncomfortable furniture.

Friend R: Do you know what the newest trend in self-righteous hipper-than-thou cooking is?  Grinding your own wheat to make bread.

Me: What. The. Fuck.

Friend R:  The name dropping is insane. "My grinder's Danish because the Danes know some shit about grinding wheat." Right. They've been grinding wheat for centuries. When they weren't out raping, pillaging, and stealing other people's flour because grinding it yourself is a pain in the ass.

(pause)

Me:  The Danes stole flour?


***

I was invited to this potluck wherein parents from Thing Two and Three’s elementary school are together and discuss the merits of changing the cafeteria offerings to healthy (and likely organic food).  We’re each supposed to bring a dish that’s something we’d like our kids to eat at school.  I am totally behind this idea, but I keep thinking of making some anonymous-looking casserole and labeling it “Trans Fat Sprayed with High Fructose Corn Syrup!”

Am I a bad person?

***

A conversation with my mom, about her upcoming wedding:

Mom: So, my colors are off-white, champagne and…mermaid blue.
Me: “Mermaid blue”?  Is that a color?

Mom: Yes.  Sort of aquamarine.

Me:  I see.

Mom: So the girls I’m gonna get dresses for in the mermaid blue color.  But you can pick whatever color you want out of those three.

Me:  Okay.

(in the background, Thing One starts pantomiming choking herself).

Me: Thing One is really looking forward to that.

Mom:  Well, good!  And tell her we’re going to attach seashells to everyone’s dresses too!

***

Excellent Swimmer (a new character!) and I have three kids between us that go to the same elementary school.  It’s a new school, having been a combination of two other schools--Eastside and Potter--with two different demographics.  One day, we started talking about those demographic differences.

ES:  Yeah, I worry sometimes about the Eastside parents because they have more money, and you know how that goes.

Me:  Yeah, I know. 

ES:  Do you know anyone from Eastside?

Me:  Sort of.  There’s this one guy. 

ES:  How do you know him?  Work?

Me: Actually, we dated for awhile, I guess. 

ES:  You dated, you “guess”?

Me:  Well, he eventually came around to telling me he wanted me to be his “second wife” or something. Maybe second girlfriend?  I don’t know.  He’s married.

ES:  What?

Me: Yeah, I’m not kidding.  We went on three dates before I even knew he was married!

ES:  Oh my God!

Me:  Right?  So you’re worried all the Eastside parents are going to all be classist. But mostly I’m worried they’re gonna be polygamists.

(pause)

ES:  Which is worse?

Me:  Good freakin’ question. 

*tm

Cautionary Tales

My mom is a drug counselor, but not just any kind of drug counselor. She doesn’t work with potheads and alcoholics, or spend her time at a lovely rehabilitation unit housed in a hospital, but made to look “homey” with quilts and prints of ocean waves. Instead Mom counsels people who are, in the common parlance of rehabs, “dual diagnosis.” These are people who have a serious mental health issue, like schizophrenia, and a serious drug addiction, like methamphetamines or heroin, at the same time. She spends her working days at a halfway house, with people whose teeth have rotted to the gums, who have lost all manner of basic jobs and families, who have been prostitutes and drug runners and have done a number of terrible, dehumanizing things in order to maintain their high.

That paragraph, to be entirely accurate, should be in the past tense, because my mom was a drug counselor for a bunch of high risk, dual diagnosis drug addicts. And then she was laid off when the economy tanked, the halfway house losing $50,000 a month in grants and funding. But this isn’t a story about the lack of adequate funding for drug programs for those who are too mentally ill to maintain a job, or about the fact that such programs help communities lower crime and domestic violence rates, or that the first casualties in a recession are those on the bottom of the economic totem pole. This is a story about my mom’s need to provide counseling and advice and guidance. And when she can’t provide it to the people who really need it—meth heads who also hear voices—she provides it to the people who needed her almost as much as those drug addicts: her kids.

Witness this scene, circa two weeks ago. The setting is Bakersfield, California, where my mom lives. The kids and I are visiting, and we’ve decided to drive to Lake Isabella for the day. My mom climbs into the passenger seat of the car, buckles her seatbelt, checks the buckle not once, but twice—twice!—and then says, “You know, the highway can be kind of hard to drive.”

“I know Mom,” I say. It’s true that Isabella sits at the end of a serpentine two-lane highway, high above Bakersfield. It can be a treacherous drive because the highway is narrow, and hemmed, on one side, with the Kern River, and on the other, with walls of rock that, on occasion, fall into the roadway. But I also know this, having lived in Bakersfield for years.

“So,” she continues, “sometimes people who live here drive that road a lot. And they like to drive fast. And so if someone comes up behind you and wants to get by, you need to look for a place to get off the road.”

“Mom…”

“And that is called a ‘turn out.’”

I put my head in my hands. Luckily, we were at a stoplight, so I didn’t have to wreck the car.

My mom has done this in some fashion for as long as I can remember. Years ago, as my mom and my aunts were planning some family gathering, my mom said to my aunt Merri, “You know what we can do? We can brain storm ideas for the party.” Then she added, “‘Brain storm’ means that we all sit down and write any idea, and no idea is bad!”

Merri said, “I know what brain storm means, Lisa.” Merri, it should be noted, graduated from Reed College, where, presumably, no one had to take a remedial class on how to brain storm. My aunt was annoyed, but my brothers and I laughed. Take that, Aunt Merri, we thought. We grew up hearing a constant narrative of explanations and reasons, and it’s high time some of the misery was spread around. But no explanation can compare to Mom’s use of the cautionary tale.

Last month, the kids and I bedded down in Gardiner, Montana, readying to spend the following day in Yellowstone National Park. We’d never been there, so we were excited to see the hot springs and Old Faithful and the bison and elk. On the phone with my mom, I relayed the route we planned to take, what we would stop at.

My mom was quiet for a moment, and then she said, voice lowered in that dead-serious tone, “Heather, you have to be sure not to let the kids go into the geysers.”

Into the geysers. Into the geysers.

“Mom,” I said. I stopped there because language was escaping me. How would you even get into a geyser? How, for the love of all that is holy?

“The geysers are very hot,” she said. “And so are the hot springs.”

“I gathered that, from the fact the word ‘hot’ is in the title,” I said.

“You have to make sure they stay on the boardwalks.”

“Mom…”

“They will have signs saying where you can walk and where you can’t*. And so they have to pay attention to those.”

In her hands, the simplest of adventures, the safest, the most mundane, can become potential, life-threatening excursions. “Have you thought about getting a dog,” she asked before we embarked on the road trip, “or pepper spray?” Or, “you know, wasp stings can sometimes be fatal;” “bats carry rabies and you should never be around them;” “tampons cause toxic shock syndrome.” In her view, the world is a place where potential death awaits around every corner, and where you have to be on your guard at all moments.

Her worry has always rubbed off on us kids, though, my brothers and I, which generally means we have overactive imaginations for disaster, and have to check ourselves regularly. I called my brother David during the swine flu outbreak just so we could channel Mom for a few minutes. Which made me think, fleetingly, that we were on the brink of some real life version of The Stand. The only way to counter-act the cautionary tales and constant advice is to remind her that you are, in fact, not a heroin addict who hears Jesus and that you do, in fact, know that geysers are hot and that bad things can befall anyone.

“Mom!” I shouted into the phone. “I know the geysers are hot! I know to follow the signs! How the hell do you think the kids managed to survive this long? I know how to keep them out of danger!”

“I just wanted to make sure you knew what was safe,” she said. And she did. She genuinely shows her affection and love through constant reminders of the world’s danger and apathy towards individual people. Her warnings were like the grown-up versions of “look both ways in the crosswalk.”I felt, for a moment, a twinge of guilt.

Then she said, “You do know that you should never feed a wild bear, right? Heather? Don’t feed any bears!"

*tm

*The following day, while the kids posed for a photo in front of Mammoth Hot Springs (on the boardwalk, following all rules. And wearing sunscreen, even.), a little boy tried to climb the fence. His mother immediately saw him and yelled, in an English accent, “Rufus! What are you doing?” while she ran over to grab him. “We talked about this,” she said. “You can get scalded! Do you want to get scalded!” My kids looked at Rufus and the mother, and then Chloe said, “that kid needs Grandma Lisa.” “And stat,” I said.

Much Ado About Tripping

I’ve been gone for some time, I know, and had pretty much given up blogging for the most part. There are many good reasons for this, not the least of which was the fact Friend 2 ran into trouble getting something published in a journal because the editors found a small, very small, part of it on his Myspace blog. While that worked out for him in the end, I worried about losing the ability to publish on other, bigger and “more legit,” venues if I continue to publish here. I also worried that I wasn’t spending enough time revising my work, because writing a blog, even a good blog, isn’t as demanding as writing a kick-ass essay. There is no built-in system for revision, for example, and nothing to push a writer to keep getting better.

I still have those worries, but I am, for the moment, bypassing them in favor of posting about a new going-on. Mainly, that after several years of discussion and pie-in-the-sky dreaming, it looks as though my desire to take a long road trip with the Things through the US, and then write a book about it, will come to fruition. Because, as of right now, New Slang Philosopher and I are planning a 6-7 week journey through much of the contiguous United States, beginning around July 6.

It’s a huge trip, and it won’t be easy. Right now, I’m teaching an overload of classes in order to save money. I took my tax refund, and a bit of savings, and paid my entire rent for the summer, too, as a means of avoiding the terrible dwindling of cash flow that always hits around August. I’m actually doing mildly okay this year, primarily because I’ve been so careful.

So, I’m reviving my blog here to chronicle the planning, the purchasing of many and sundry items, and the actual execution of said event*. So far, we’ve decided to go as far Chicago, but we’d like to make it to Pennsylvania, and then head down to Florida, cutting across through to Texas, then up through Utah and Wyoming and Colorado. I’m excited about sharing it online with you.

*tm

*I think “execution” might be the best word. Holy crap, what am I doing here?

Back--with a conversation con Thing One

Last week, Thing One asked what a bachelor party was.

I had to think for a minute before coming up with something that would both quench her curiosity while still being PG-13. "It's a party a groom has before his wedding. His friends get together and they drink and they go to different fun places. Women have them too, but they call them bachelorette parties."

"They just drink?"

"Well, sometimes there are strippers involved."

Thing One screwed up her nose an then said, "Why do they have these parties anyway?"

"Well, it's sort of a last hurrah before getting married," I said. "After that, you're expected to not really do that sort of thing anymore."

Thing One thought for a minute. Then she said, "So, you mean a bachelor party is like Marriage Mardi Gras?"

"Holy Christ," I said. Because she was right. And that, that my friends, was a damn brilliant comparison.

I'm back, at the ol' homestead. Missed it, missed you guys, too.

*tm

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