That Was Then

I’d just like to state for the record that if I weren’t with Mark I’d be so much thinner. I mean, he’s off at a movie screening tonight with some work cronies and I’m sitting on the couch having consumed a small bowl of tapioca pudding–it’s not just for nursing homes any more!–along with Kate for her dessert. But for me, it was my whole dinner.

It’s pathetic but I can never manage to properly feed myself without Mark. When I was single and work-obsessed I’d get home late and microwave a bag of popcorn for a nutritious and satisfying dinner. Or if I were trying hard I’d steam broccoli or nuke a baked potato. An elaborate two-course meal would consist of broccoli on the baked potato and maybe even some melted cheese!

But I don’t want to brag about what good care I took of myself.

Once Mark and I set up our House of Sin I became indoctrinated in his Midwestern protein-veg-carb holy trinity of meal-makin’. And Mark’s the kind of person who, for all his 160 pounds, does not miss a single meal. Nachos snarfed down during a night out does not a dinner make.  Not that we were out raging at bars often. But there were (and are) the nights where food on the fly works just fine for me.

But Mark’ll get in at 11:30PM and lean into the fridge calling out, “What do you want for dinner?”

When I was thinking a simple toothpaste nightcap would suffice.

Of course, now I’m used to Mark’s square meal ways. And with the kids and all I’m less likely to be substituting mozzarella sticks and a mojito for din-din. But on the rare nights when he’s out and I’m solo, I revert back to my single gal ways.

And as if we’re in some nine-year relationship cycle there have been a couple other artifacts that have emerged recently like Ghosts of Life Past as sweet reminders of our fledgling love.

One is a hellish car door thing. Ages ago when we were dating, Mark lived in what I called his “dreary little neighborhood” across town from me. He was driving to my casa for dinner one night and got side-swiped. As a result the Subaru, aging jalopy that we still drive, suffered a door injury Mark claimed was “unfixable.” Something or other about the frame of the door being irreparably affected.

Aside from looking slightly imperfect—not a small issue for OCD moi—the door for seven-and-a-half of the past eight or so years was just fine. But in the past months it must’ve gotten slightly more out of whack, causing the dashboard panel to indicate the door’s open, and the dome light to come on. This is annoying when A) it’s nighttime and the internal light’s flicking on and off, and B) when your Life’s Greatest Possession child is in the car seat by the door and you’re fearful she’ll suddenly be sucked out of it onto the highway like some movie scene of a horrific mid-flight plane crash.

So I’ve been spending lots of time pulling over, curse-whispering, and slamming the car door at the side of roads.

And just when I thought this uber annoyance was my penance for coveting my neighbor’s Porsche Cayenne, the car’s alarm started going off at random times. When it was parked on the street in front of the house, virtually untouched. (Yes, I became that neighbor.) I say it went off at random times but really it was always at THE WORST times. Like when I was mid-way through changing a massive grotesque poop-filled diaper. Or gingerly setting a sleeping baby into a crib. Or that one charming time at 4AM when I had to run out onto the rainy sidewalk, barefoot and barely clad, to aim the clicker lock thingy at the car, re-slam the *&^%*#@!! door, then lock it again.

FUN.

Fed up, I made an appointment at a body shop hoping they’d insist we buy a new BMW station wagon immediately and assure us that despite our desire to hold back on spending these days, Prez Obama would write us a personal note of thanks for doing our part to stim the economy. That really, we needed to do it for the common good. For our country.

Instead, the guy at the shop looked at the inside of the door, jimmied it with a screwdriver, and slammed it flush. Eight-plus years of annoyance remedied in seconds.

Our recent jaunt to frolic in the snow at Lake Tahoe also resulted in a spelunk down memory lane. The long-neglected snowboard I took to get waxed was marveled at by the kids at the ski shop in the way those gay brothers on Antiques Roadshow curiously inspect old yarn-spinning wheels. (Leaving me to wonder just how geriatric I must have appeared to them.)

And the lift ticket on my equally old school and not-remotely-cool-now jacket was from Whistler, dated, uh, January ‘01. Ah yes, that trip to Whistler we took. Back when we traveled under different last names and didn’t strategize about where to set up a Pack ‘n Play in the hotel room.

Of course, there was some other thing. Something else that I stumbled across recently that slung me back to the old days of Mark and me. But hell if I can remember now what it was.

Yeah, yeah. Take the ‘you’re starting having senior moments, Kristen’ pot shot. I can take it.

Anyway, maybe if we’d gotten married in the church they’d have covered this standard issue nine-year relationship cycle in those freaky Pre-Cana classes. (You know, the ones where a priest who’s barred from marrying teaches couples how to have great long-lasting marriages.) “Chapter 6: In the ninth year of your relationship be mindful of vestiges from the material world that emerge to remind you of the early days of your love thang.”

Whatever the case, thus far nothing from that past life has given me even the teen-insy-est regret about where Mark and I are today. It’s a world away from where we used to be. But a place where I can honestly say I’m thrilled to be, thankyouverymuch.

Except one thing I guess I wish had changed is my ability to feed myself.

Need to go forage for food now. Damn, I’m hungry.

Long May We Ride

Today I bumped into a woman at our favorite Mexican restaurant in Berkeley. In that inbred Bay Area way, she’s someone who I almost knew a few different ways–we had the same midwife, a mutual friend, and we took the same hospital tour to show our older kids where mommy’d be birthin’ the new baby.

Oddly though, we’d never met.

And then about a year ago our daughters were playing together at a playground, so we were kind of thrown into chatting as we monitored the older kids and bouncy-walked our newborns (who, of course, freakily happened to be born just a few days apart).

Fate seemed to be matchmaking us, so we exchanged email addresses.

And we got together once. Met up at the same playground, brought snacks, watched the kids play, and talked non-stop. She’s from the East Coast–New York, I think–and talks as fast and as sarcastically as me. We discovered a handful more things we had in common–the tug between the East Coast and West, being the same age, mixed feelings about taking a break from work, yadda yadda yadda.

By the time Mark got home that night I was envisioning the dinner party we’d have where he and her husband would hit it off like a house on fire. I’d planned our joint family summer vacations to Fire Island, and how we’d get matching friendship ankle-bracelet tattoos after some boozed-up Mommies Night Out.

Okay, well not so much about the tattoos really. But I was excited about having met a potentially cool new friend.

At the time–just fresh out of work again and lamenting the fact that the park is packed with nannies and no one who wasn’t getting paid to change diapers all day–I was, I’ll say it, desperate for a good local Mama friend. Preferably one who was around during the days, at my social beckon call.

And to my shock and awe, my casual follow-up emails to the Parallel Life Mama–in which I swear I didn’t mention anything about the blood-exchange sisterhood ceremony I was planning for us–went unanswered. In fact, when I bumped into her at a yoga class a month or so later I was fearful that she’d be embarassed to see me since she was so clearly, well, just not that into me.

Which, heck I’ll admit, stymied me.

I mean, it truly seemed like we had fun together. But maybe she just wasn’t taking resumes for new friends at the time? Maybe she seems to connect amazingly well with a lot of people but inside she’s mentally re-arranging the crap in her garage? Maybe the over-abundance of self-esteem my parents raised me with was finally–at the ripe old age of 41–rearing up to bite me in the ass?

Of course, at the yoga class I still gave her every opportunity to re-engage a best friendship with me. And I think she even did mention something about getting the girls together again. But damn my tenacious optimism. After that class, all I heard were crickets.

At any rate, seeing her today I was in such a different place. No longer longing for a daytime adult conversation that didn’t require me to use a Spanish-English dictionary. No longer starved to compare notes with someone about tactics for managing cradle cap. No longer freaked out about how the stay-at-home mom thing would ultimately play out in my psyche and my personal hygiene.

Because here I am. One year later. Frankly so comfy in this Mama role that I fear Mark will have to pry me out of my Merona sweatpants and happy homebody ways when the time eventually comes for me to add to the family’s bottom line. But more than that, now I’m feeling flush with friendship, and gratefully so.

Tuesday we returned from 11 days on the East Coast. Once we got somewhat settled I started a happy ritualistic process of checking in with my three Mama Posse friends like some OCD ball player running the bases over and over again–text one, call the next, check in somehow with the third, then circle back to the first with an email about some little Kate-ism or can I borrow something or when can we all get out to a movie or other. Maybe not quite so manic as I’m describing it, but certainly there were lots of phone calls that started with excited high-pitched hey-how-ARE-yous.

Unless my Dad is sending them checks or something (Note: Call him to ask about this) I can’t help by kinda sorta think they were as genuinely happy to reconnect with me as I was with them.

Take that, other woman who botched a chance at my friendship!

A few days before we left on our trip I was at our local bakery/gourmet grocery/coffee shop watering hole. The kind of place that guests who visit from places like Kansas short-circuit when they enter and need to lean against a wall for a few minutes to wrangle with the fact that they go to Applebees a lot. Anyway, I’m there and I see a woman from the ‘hood who I’ve done some community work with. She was in front of me in line and asked if she could buy eight small pastry boxes.

When she saw me she turned and explained that she was going to meet her mother’s group. A group of eight woman who’ve been convening since her teen-aged daughter was a baby.

“Isn’t Madeleine in college now?” I asked, curious mostly to know where she got in.

“Yes! She’s in her second semester at Wellesley,” she said brightly.

The woman behind the counter handed her the boxes and said, “No charge. No worries.” (Which only made me love the place more.)

After profusions of polite thanks to the bakery lady, she turned to me. “So yeah, we still get together regularly even though the kids are in college now. And once a month we make care packages. Everyone brings eight of something, so we send out big boxes and the kids end up getting eight different little gifts or cookies or whatever–one thing from each of us.”

At which point I think I swooned with just how sweet and fun and excellent that was, and how amazing it is that she and those women are still all hanging tight.

When I see the gals next–tomorrow at Sacha’s Oscar party, in fact–I’ll have to try to remember amidst the maurauding children, attempts at hearing Oscar speeches, and relentless glasses of wine I plan to consume, to tell them about this idea. Because I have every intention of us doing that some day. I’ll just need their help remembering it 15 years from now.

The New Otter on the Block

I realize most American kids probably don’t have sea otter stuffed animals. But in the Bay Area kids eat goat cheese not Kraft Singles, and sea otters are as a common a sight in stuffed animal menageries as stepstools are in family bathrooms.

The reason we’re all hopped up on otters has nothing to do with Otter Pops–which, don’t get me wrong, totally rock. It’s more about the beasties’ local presence here, of course. And for anyone who hasn’t had the nature-lovin’ luck of seeing the ridiculously adorable things frollicking in the chilly Pacific drink, chances are they’ve been to one of the sea otter feedings at the tremendous Monterey Aquarium.

It’s the place where Mark and I are always so blindly overcome with crazy sea otter love we’re elbowing young innocents out of the way so we can get a better look. Aside from their whiskery teddybear-like rolly polly playful cuteness, watching them eat–lying on their backs munching food that’s clamped between their front paws–is so insanely delightful it could melt even Charles Manson’s heart.

God, it’s good clean fun.

How can you not stop by the gift store afterwards to bring home the closest approximation to the real thing?

Of course, I got Kate’s stuffed sea otter at a yard sale, but that’s only because my genetic make-up virtually prevents me from shopping at full retail. Or maybe it’s more that I just love a good bargain. But I digress.

So, in the throngs of stuffed animals with whom we reside, Kate decided last night to single out her long-neglected sea otter for some intensive attention and maternal adoration.

Since then–less than 24 hours ago, mind you–I’ve started collecting some of the sea otter data points that Kate’s been imparting to Mark and me. Mark, the dear, has been tenacious about filling me in on any info she’s shared with him that I might’ve possibly missed.

“Do you know my sea otter? My sea otter’s name is Benny.”

“Benny’s last name is MacDonald.”

“Do you know what? Benny has an ear infection and it’s really bad. See? Right there is his ear.”

“Benny got lost at a yard sale. He was running around.”

“Did you know? Benny is a girl.”

“Benny is a boy but doesn’t have a penis. Not all boys have penises, you know.”

” Shhhh… Benny is sleeping now with a friend. Do you know the friend’s name? It’s Benny too. They both have the name Benny, yeah.”

“Benny’s owner said he needs to be combed–his fur.”

“Benny’s owner is named Maria. He got lost and I found him and I thought that I will be his owner.”

“Benny has a purple toothbrush. He doesn’t like it any more.”

It’s hard to know if we’ve just scratched the surface of what we’ll be learning about Benny, or if by sundown he’ll be back on the bottom of a toy bin, wedged between a princess shoe and a ceramic ladybug teapot. Later today I might use up the last tea bag in a box, and that empty vessel could suddenly be thrust to the center of Kate’s pretend universe. That’s just how things roll around here.

Whatever the case, the amount of love, attention, and pretend otter ear drops that have been administered to dear Benny should hold him over for a good long time.

Please Pardon Any Inconvenience While We Remodel

Some of my esteemed readers in Florida have gotten word to me that the former (and short-lived) new look of This Here Blog appeared to not be working on PCs. Or at least their PCs.

A technical glitch for which I am truly sorry.

If it weren’t for the fact that my volunteer IT Support Team does double duty as my adorable husband, I might imply that heads would roll as a result of the mishap. But really, it was an honest oversight. So instead I’ll just promise that we’ll (okay, he’ll) endeavor to get that old new look bug-free as soon as he wraps up his real-world paying gig for the day.

Oh, and now that I’m back home in good old Oak-Town USA, I reckon I’ll get back to posting regularly again.

Joy!

Love, Italian Style

Greetings from Bristol, Rhode Island.

Today I visited my 94-year-old Godmother, Mimi, and her 90-year-old sister, Mary. Both women are more spry than I could ever hope to be when (and if) I live to be even 20 years younger than they are.

Here’s part of our conversation. Pardon the phonetic Italian.

Mimi: [pinching Paigey's cheeks] “Coo-mah zee bell! Coom-oh cool la dee-ahl!”

Me: “Wait, what does that mean?”

Mimi: “Well, you know ‘Coo-mah zee bell…‘”

Me: “Right. [That's 'How pretty you are.'] But what was that last part?”

Mimi: [Pretends to not hear me and starts playing with Paige.]

Me: [Turning to Aunt Mary] “What was that other thing she said? After ‘Coo-mah zee bell?‘”

Aunt Mary: “Well, uh, it’s a kind of funny thing to say. Literally it means ‘like the backside of a frying pan.’”

Me: “Oh my God. I have got to write that down. Okay, Mimi, so say it to me again so I can get it.” 

Mimi: [slowly] “Coooo-mahhh zeeee bell. Coooom-oh cool–”

Aunt Mary: “Oh, and ‘cool‘ literally means, well, bottom. You know…ass!”

Me: “Okay, so what she is saying is, ‘How pretty she is, like the ass end of a frying pan?’”

Aunt Mary and Mimi: [in unison, looking at each other] “Well, yeah. That’s about right.”

Brilliant. I can’t think of two people I love more paying my sweet baby Paige a better compliment. 

It’s truly wonderful to be home.

Recent Finds

The Gods of Crap Acquisition were with me this weekend.

Not a large-scale haul by any means, but a few choice items came into my possession that are making me too happy to resist blathering on about.

1. A small rectangular mosaic table, perfect for the putting-on of gin and tonics and such on the front porch. The gray, white, and maroon palette offsets my outdoor carpet splendidly. (Take that, HGTV!) This was a freebie left in front of a neighbor’s house. Someday I’ll send them my Betty Ford Clinic bill since they’ve made it so damn convenient and charming to have a drink handy while watching Kate play outside.

So, free to me yet potentially costly to the kind folks who purged it. C’est la vie!

2. A 1973 Sears Roebuck bike. Also free from neighbor. I figure this will occupy a good amount of bicycle tinkering/porn time for Mark and is bound to result in a sweet-since-it’s-so-uncool-and-farty little cruiser bike for me.

Small amount of speckled rust. Huge amount of old-school cachet.

3. The happy bathtub-reading memoir Trail of Crumbs, by Kim Sunée. Not a find in the yard sale sense, but I did stumble across it at our so-fab-I’m-there-every-day local bookstore and have been devouring it non-stop ever since. There’s a love story, a sex story, a childhood trauma, romantic foodie/boozy settings like New Orleans and Provence, and just when you’ve though that was more than you could ever ask of a book, you get recipes! I feel like I’m deep into the best summer reading ever written, but maybe it’s because it’s been in the 70s and gloriously sunny here lately.

Anyway, Obama’s settled into the White House so take a cleansing breath just knowing everything will turn out okay in the world, buy this book, then get a babysitter and read read read for days and nights. Then drag someone you dig under an olive tree for a hot make-out sesh and a glass of Prosecco.

4. My first bocce ball set. Which isn’t to say I found a Fisher Price lawn bowling toy, but that after many years of wanting to own the old Italian guy grown-up game myself, I came across a stellar set (with sporty carrying sack) at a yard sale and welcomed it to the McClusky family fold for the low low price of $5.

An added bonus: Kate is now referring to any of the small balls in her toy empire as ‘pills.’

And so, not one to hoard my good fortune to myself, if you are in striking distance I invite you to please please drop by some afternoon for an on-the fly lawn bowling tournie (warning: Kate’s getting good, it’s that guinea blood in her). I’ll be serving up a variety of beverages in both sippy cups and Big Girl and Boy wine and rocks glasses, and might even set a little Provencale goûtée I learned about from my book onto my darling new side table.

And if you get too, uh, silly to drive home safely, I’ll gladly let you borrow the cruiser bike. Though I’m pretty sure that in its current state both tires are flat, and if I had to guess I’d say the breaks probably don’t work too well either.

Ah well. One gal’s cast-off is another’s treasure.

When It All Began

One year ago today a team of medical professionals took this out of my body. We named it Paige and instantly fell under its spell.

Paige is an incredibly sweet, tremendously happy, delicious loving dumpling of a baby. Her father, sister, and I love love love her silly.

Happy happy birthday, dear Paigey Waigey Wiggle Pop! Happy birthday to you.

And Now for Something Totally Different

I’ve actually gotten to two yoga classes recently. They were rejuvenating, indulgent, and blissful. The three-block walks to and from the studio in the chilly evening air even had a delicious soulfulness.

I know. I need to get out more.

And aside from the discovery that I was expecting (i.e. that I was expecting to discover, that is. No, I’m not pregnant!)–that I do need to find a way to get some form of regular exercise and/or Me Time–I also had an unexpected discovery. Poetry.

Now, I’ve been outspoken and unapologetic for many years about my disdain for poetry. But the handsome used-to-be-a-doctor yoga instructor read a poem at the end of each of the classes. Both were by Billy Collins, who he said used to be the U.S. Poet Laureate in 2002 or so. (Who knew?)

Both poems were wildly imaginative, unexpected, fun. Just brilliant really. Nothing like the crap I remember ruefully slogging through and painfully deconstructing in school.

Made me think I may just like some poetry after all.

So I go to the guy’s website tonight, because sometimes it’s fun to go somewhere other than Amazon for book-related info, and hell if there were some poems right there for the readin’. This was the first one (and only one thus far) I read. It’s quite different from the Cute Yoga Dude’s picks, but it still totally worked for me.

Although I never went to sleepover camp (one of my childhood’s tragic voids, along with not having seen Star Wars), the Mama-ness of it made it seem like a fitting first poem for me to stumble across.

Whaddaya think?

The Lanyard – Billy Collins

The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly–
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift–not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

Not Quite Ready to Be Set Free

Yesterday was Kate’s first visit to a dentist. And as we sat in the cheesy Hawaiian-themed waiting room, another mother came in with two older kids. Her daughter immediately flounced to the floor to engage with Paigey. And the mom pulled up a tiny surfboard shaped chair, sat, and smiled down at them.

After a few minutes she looked up at me and said, “Please pardon the loud rumblings from my uterus.” A comment which took me a beat to grock, but then totally slayed me.

Me: “Oh God, I hear you. She’s my baby and she has the same effect on me.”

Her: “Here I am, I’m 43, and I already have three kids. When’m I going to get over this?”

Which brings me to the rhetorical question, just how supremely do women rock?

I love that within three minutes of being in each others’ orbits this total stranger and I are revealing our deep down irrational-but-real want-another-baby cravings. It’s the kind of intimacy that some men who were college roommates and have been playing tennis together every Saturday since the first Bush administration still haven’t achieved.

And her remark is timed perfectly to my just-the-other-night musings. Paige refused to nurse, which had me convinced she was harboring a devastating rife-with-hearing-loss ear infection. (I’ve never understood when mother’s say their kids just stopped wanting to nurse one day, since that’s so not been how my boob-junkie kids roll.)

Paigey was back to her old milk-chugging self a few hours later, but the experience got me thinking as I was a-sway on the ugly Dutalier glider. If I were to suddenly stop breastfeeding, it seems like I’d need to put my body to another practical use. Truly. In much of the past four-and-a-half years I’ve either been gestating or breastfeeding, and odd as it is even for me to realize, it’s set me in a kind of groove I’m not sure how to get out of.

Doing neither of those things seems so, uh, kinda lazy. Or maybe it’s not that so much as just not productive enough.

Years ago when Mark (then I) started seriously obsessing over cooking, we read Michael Ruhlman’s excellent The Making of a Chef–a great first person account of a foodie journalist being thrown into the mix at the hardcore Culinary Institute of America. Aside from food chemistry and knife skills, clean-as-you-go, and never serve anything that you know ain’t right, one of the critical things you learn at cooking school is how to be crazy efficient. If the walk-in’s at the end of the kitchen, you think of all the things you’ll need from there so you can make just one trip. And on the way back to your station you grab the Chinoise or mixing bowls or grater that you’ll need from the drying racks. It’s all piled up in front of you so your arms are breaking and you can barely see, but the other thing that you learn in cooking school is cooking is hard work. That is, it’s physically taxing.

In cramped, fast-paced, and (proverbially and literally) hot restaurant kitchens, running around in circles is for rookies. It’s just not done. It confuses your mind, expends unnecessary energy and ultimately puts you in the weeds. In other words, a quick way to find yourself out on the sidewalk, considering getting an office temp job to pay the rent.

So Ruhlman. He describes how this hyper-efficient planning and intense economy of movement unsurprisingly slipped over into his out-of-the-kitchen time. (Kind of like when I played so much backgammon in college I’d look at a pub booth packed with people as a cluster of pieces–all safe since there wasn’t one sitting out alone. For my brain at least, that was the result of excessive backgammon. Imagine if I’d used that time to study!) So Ruhlman described how one day he realized he was getting ready in the morning in turbo efficient mode. Get socks and shoes and grab car keys and knife case all in one quick sweep of his apartment. Socks and shoes on mechanically fast, grab keys and knife case, and up and off you go. Or something like that.

And so here I am, just three days away from Paige’s first birthday and realizing how this mother thing has managed to wire me in a similar way. Efficient? Yes. Getting kids bathed, diapered, dressed, fed, snacks packed, car toys grabbed, hats, sweaters, shoes that have been already pulled off put back on. All that glamor that you know every mother–including your own back in the day (call her right now and thank her, please) goes through.
 
But aside from the machinations of kid tendin’, there’s of course the physical connection us mothers have. And whether we’re precious about it and read non-stop about how it all works or not, it just happens. We’re using our bodies to the fullest of their capabilities, like old-school VCRs that–though baffling and unused to their max by most folks–without even reading the manual we’re instinctively able to do the trickiest things to like updating the clocks, and setting them to advance record.

It’s actually weird how mindlessly one can grow a healthy baby.

There are the glossy hair ‘I am woman hear me roar’ pregnancy highs, and the all-my-friends-are-dumb-when-they’re-drunk-and-I’m-sober resentment. Stuff even outsiders can cotton to. But more discreet, and ultimately more powerful, is the latent accustomedness your body seems to develop for being put to these practical maternal uses. So from where I’m standing, at the precipice of not having such a physical Mama task ever again, one might be left feeling somewhat un-tethered. A bit lost.

It’s the place where some woman, no doubt, feel liberated, set free. Back to one’s skinny jeans for good.

But for me, and it seems for the dental office Mama too, it’s a much harder transition. Bittersweet in all the love and intimacy and care that was associated with all those bodily demands, despite how grueling they could sometimes be. There’s an unaddressed expectation, a void that some of us reckon with, when our bodies are suddenly not called into service any more.

Perhaps I’ll have to take up tennis. My mother always played a wicked doubles game. Maybe I can just try to make that do.

Damn Karma and All Its Relentlessness

For weeks now I’ve been screaming at the TV, bellowing desperately at Top Chef contestant Melissa to–for the love of sweet Jesus–puleeeease do something about her wretched hair.

My God, Paige could cut better bangs blindfolded with a Swiss Army knife.

I mean, doesn’t that show have any stylists who have a heart? And wouldn’t you think that that woman has a friend or relative–just one–who’d mercifully perform a hair intervention on her? And then there’s the Goddess/Hostess Padma. Can’t she help a sister out? Just someone, anyone please do something about those lifeless, scraggly, dishwater blonde, cut from ear-to-ear like Moe from The Three Stooges bangs.

If not, eventually I’m going to dislocate my vocal chords yelling at the TV. Or worse, wake the children.

Speaking of the offspring, shameful as it is to admit, we’ve been taking Kate to our exorbitant yet fabulous hair salon in SF. Jeneil, the owner/stylist, is an old friend of Mark’s and cuts his meterosexy hair. And after years of my allegience to a reliable-cheap-yet-glamorless salon, she now also does mine. Jeneil and Kate totally dig each other. (Reason #1 why Kate’ll run off and get sleeve tattoos the first chance she gets.) So Mark and I are blasting our way through the kids’ college funds on our own tresses, but for now Kate’s haircuts there are free.

The problem is, as much as it makes me sound all bridge-and-tunnel, it’s a hassle getting the girl to the city for her haircuts. Especially since the kiddie salon that the fancy Oakland set (bet you didn’t know there was such a thing) brings their shorties to is just two blocks from our house.

So, reluctantly, we tried it.

Our first trip there, despite my feeling overwrought with cheating-on-Jeneil guilt, the Rasta owner gave Kate a decent cut. And she flipped over the free balloon and cheap Made in China toy she picked out of their treasure chest. Oh, and did I mention there are TVs at every station to lull the wee ones into not-savagely-thrashing submission? Kate would sell her sister to watch an episode of Sesame Street, so watching TV during a haircut is bliss to her. Sheer bliss.

I know it’s clear where this is going.

Yesterday at the kiddle salon, the Rasta steps aside and some chick asks Kate to hop in the chair. I was about to protest but within seconds Kate was in a deep unshakeable TV trance. And I figured, how bad can a haircut be?

Well, yes. Payback for all the crap I’ve ever hurled at Melissa with the Short Bus Bangs. Kate is now her wee sorry-headed doppelganger.

At least she doesn’t also have Melissa’s fierce black eyebrows.