Terrible Mother

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.

Poem of the Week

A Blessing from My Sixteen Years' Son

I have this son who assembled inside me
during Hurricane Gloria. In a flash, he appeared,
in a tiny blaze. Outside, pines toppled.

Phone lines snapped and hissed like cobras.
Inside, he was a raw pearl: microscopic, luminous.
Look at the muscled obelisk of him now

pawing through the icebox for more grapes.
Sixteen years and not a bone broken,
nor single stitch. By his age,

I was marked more ways, and small.
He’s a slouching six-foot, three,
with implausible blue eyes, which settle

on the pages of Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”
with profound belligerence.
A girl with a navel ring

could make his cell phone go buzz,
or an Afro-ed boy leaning on a mop at Taco Bell--
creatures strange to me as dragons or eels.

Balanced on a kitchen stool, each gives counsel
arcane as any oracle’s. Rodney claims school
is harshing my mellow. Case longs to date

a tattooed girl, because he wants a woman
willing to do stuff she’ll regret.
They’ve come to lead my son

into his broadening spiral.
Someday soon, the tether
will snap. I birthed my own mom

into oblivion. The night my son smashed
the car fender then rode home
in the rain-streaked cop car, he asked, Did you

and Dad screw up so much?
He’d let me tuck him in,
my grandmother’s wedding quilt

from 1912 drawn to his goateed chin. Don’t
blame us, I said. You’re your own
idiot now. At which he grinned.

The cop said the girl in the crimped Chevy
took it hard. He’d found my son
awkwardly holding her in the canted headlights,

where he’d draped his own coat
over her shaking shoulders. My fault,
he’d confessed right off.

Nice kid, said the cop.

-Mary Karr, from Sinners Welcome

Admission

Last week, despite the soccer spreadsheet snafu, we got to Thing Three's soccer game early. There was only one other mother there, a woman I've seen a few times. She stood out before because she was so well-dressed, even at the school field where Thing Three's practices are held. She wears neatly pressed DKNY jeans and sweaters. She has a new pair of Danskos on every time I see her, and each of her ears is punctuated by a large, yet tasteful, diamond. She is thin and tan and elegant in a way I'll never be. She was one of the women who flat out ignored me that first practice.

Saturday, though, she smiled at me and said hello. Then she introduced herself and we made small talk. She asked about Thing Three, and noticed Things One and Two. "She's lovely," she said about Thing One. "She looks just like you." She was being genuine and kind, and I wondered, briefly, if it was because no one else was there. I looked at her kids, her toddler son with his mop of hair and in the tiniest soccer gear I've ever seen. I mentioned that he was cute.

"Yeah, we just came from his game." Then she crossed her arms. "The women at his games...I dunno...."

"What?" I asked.

She looked at me, eyes squinting. "It's so cliquey," she said. "I think they don't talk to me because they know I'm a stay-at-home mom. And they all have these careers." She was being honest in a way that pained me. Because you know what, it doesn't change for any of us mothers, does it? Doesn't matter how much money we have, or how many pairs of cute shoes, we still think everyone is judging us.

I think I'm officially one of the soccer moms now. And I don't much mind it anymore, so long as I can keep my tattoo and advanced degree and hip Neko Case t-shirts.

And my fledgling collection of vibrators, of course.

*tm

Prose Before Hos

Despite theological differences, all great religions share common commitments that define our ideal secular relationships. I am convinced that Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, and others can embrace each other in a common effort to alleviate human suffering and to espouse peace.

But the present era is a challenging and disturbing time for those whose lives are shaped by religious faith based on kindness toward each other. We have been reminded that cruel and inhuman acts can be derived from distorted theological beliefs, as suicide bombers take the lives of innocent human beings, draped falsely in the cloak of God's will. With horrible brutality, neighbors have massacred neighbors in Europe, Asia, and Africa.

In order for us human beings to commit ourselves personally to the inhumanity of war, we find it necessary first to dehumanize our opponents, which is in itself a violation of the beliefs of all religions. Once we characterize our adversaries as beyond the scope of God's mercy and grace, their lives lose all value. We deny personal responsibility when we plant landmines and, days or years later, a stranger to us - often a child – is crippled or killed. From a great distance, we launch bombs or missiles with almost total impunity, and never want to know the number or identity of the victims.

At the beginning of this new millennium I was asked to discuss, here in Oslo, the greatest challenge that the world faces. Among all the possible choices, I decided that the most serious and universal problem is the growing chasm between the richest and poorest people on earth. Citizens of the ten wealthiest countries are now seventy-five times richer than those who live in the ten poorest ones, and the separation is increasing every year, not only between nations but also within them. The results of this disparity are root causes of most of the world's unresolved problems, including starvation, illiteracy, environmental degradation, violent conflict, and unnecessary illnesses that range from Guinea worm to HIV/AIDS.

Most work of The Carter Center is in remote villages in the poorest nations of Africa, and there I have witnessed the capacity of destitute people to persevere under heartbreaking conditions. I have come to admire their judgment and wisdom, their courage and faith, and their awesome accomplishments when given a chance to use their innate abilities.

But tragically, in the industrialized world there is a terrible absence of understanding or concern about those who are enduring lives of despair and hopelessness. We have not yet made the commitment to share with others an appreciable part of our excessive wealth. This is a potentially rewarding burden that we should all be willing to assume.

Ladies and gentlemen:

War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children.

-excerpted from Jimmy Carter's Nobel Lecture, which he gave in Oslo, Norway after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.

Copyright© Pressens Bild AB 2002

Soccer Photos, Part II

I'm sorry, I can't help it.

Thing One, kicking some ass:

Thing One going for the ball (she's on the right):

Thing Three, running for the ball:

Thing Three, having a lively conversation on the field, during play time:

And, finally, no soccer photo spread would be complete with pictures of Thing Two. However, these are not of the boy playing soccer, but of the boy hitting on a little girl at Thing Three's soccer game. They are playing their respective Tamogotchis in these photos:

*tm

Poem of the Week

The Maple

is a system of posture for wood.
A way of not falling down
for twigs that happens
to benefit birds. I don't know.
I'm staring at a tree,
at yellow leaves
threshed by wind and want you
reading this to be staring
at the same tree. I could
cut it down and laminate it
or ask you to live with me
on the stairs with the window
keeping an eye on the maple
but I think your real life
would miss you. The story
here is that all morning
I've thought of the statement
that art is about loneliness
while watching golden leaves
become unhinged.
By ones or in bunches
they tumble and hang
for a moment like a dress
in the dryer.
At the laundromat
you've seen the arms
thrown out to catch the shirt
flying the other way.
Just as you've stood
at the bottom of a gray sky
in a pile of leaves
trying to lick them
back into place.

-Bob Hicok

Trendsetter

Friend Omega took a cue from the Soccer Scheduling Spreadsheet and started his own. But for something even more not-typically-spreadhseet friendly: dating.

I think our generation might have serious issues, people. Serious and hardly surmountable.

*tm