The Weepies

For the last day or so I’ve had a mild case of the weepies.

I mean, nothing that’s even resulted in actual tears, but some intermittent on-the-verge-of moments that come about suddenly and vaguely, unrelated to anything that’s even happening at the time. You know, putting the sliced turkey back in the fridge, handing Mark a washcloth for the kids’ bath, driving on the highway through a torrential thunderstorm when we arrived in Kentucky tonight.

And yes, I know what you’re thinking, and NO, I don’t have PMS. I’m not sure what’s to blame, but it ain’t hormones.

Though I wish that it was, because frankly this wimpish state of neither glee (my default) nor despondency is so not for me. I prefer my emotions with more dramatic flourish, thank you. At least more decisiveness, for God’s sake.

If there is crying to do, better to have an all-out bawl sesh like Holly Hunter’s daily one in Broadcast News. Sob and wail like a baby, then take a breath, wipe your face, smooth out your shirt, and get on with your day.

God, I loved that movie.

Anyway, I’m certain that my bulletproof chipperness is bound to be back by daybreak. We’re settled into a gracious old hotel in downtown Lexington—center stage for Mark’s favorite cousin’s long-awaited wedding. Which isn’t to say we’ve all been wondering when the hell she’d finally git hitched, but that ever since she and her fine fellow got engaged the family’s been champing at the bit awaiting this opulent Southern shindig. (Equine pun intended. Hey, it is Kentucky, after all.)

It also should be noted that the dress-shoe-and-accessory shopping that Mark’s relatives have done in preparation for this event has likely had a significant impact on stimulating our nation’s tragic economy. So, you’re welcome.

As for me, resolved to not spend money on something new (per the aforementioned recession, and that my dress closet overfloweth), I buckled at the last minute, but decided to be thrifty and went to Nordstrom Rack. Where, as luck had it, a fabulous frock for a fraction of the retail price fell off the rack at my feet and squawked, “Take me home!”

Okay, okay, so I actually got three dresses—and three pairs of shoes—but they were all dirt cheap. And if I don’t release the shopping pressure valve a little bit every once and a while I could fall prey to some unanticipated retail incident that’s far far more devastating.

So, I’m not sure really where this is all going, but why not come along for the ride because it could eventually get interesting.

Okay, so just to prove to you what a BAR-GAIN this dress is I’m wearing to the wedding—because I’m quite certain you’re sitting there desperate to have some way to understand more deeply just how much money I saved. Just to be able to illustrate that for you I’ll out and admit that I went out and bought my first, uh, well, girdle.

I mean, when I talked to my friends about this I’d actually thought it was a legitimately seismic confession. But everyone’s all “Spanx this” and “Spanx that,” like they’ve been wearing some form of corseture under God knows what clothes for God knows how long when I’d just been going along thinking that exercise and watching what I eat are the best ammo against a fat ass. Hell, they’re all downing 8-foot subs at lunch and just wedging their lower halves into girdles.

So the fact that my deep dark confession made everyone turn to me and say, “Duh,” made me feel like I’d told them I hadn’t read Eat, Pray, Love yet or something. Which, by the way, I have. So my ass might have naively been shakin’ around unclenched by Spandex all this time, but I have kept up with some other realms of modern female life. Sheesh.

Okay, so but what I was trying to get at was, this girdle, this gut-and-ass-confining contraption that I bought? It cost MORE than the dress I’m wearing over it. And just how many bourbons does this Northern lass have to drink under a tent at a schmancy reception at Keeneland before she’s admitting that to everyone?

Well, I’ll be sure to report back and let you know.

Again, taking my patented Pressure Valve Release Approach, I was hoping that if I admitted it here, it might mitigate my need to inform the pastor of this fact after the ceremony on Saturday.

Yes, this is what it’s like being me.

And speaking of the wedding, I can’t help but wonder now if there’s some little emotional nugget inside me that can attribute my recent state of sometimes-not-estatic, to the dismal fact that the groom—whom I truly think is the bee’s proverbial patellas—is mourning the recent death of his mother. A thing that, if it weren’t so altogether crappy on its very own, unfortunately happens to be a situation which is very damn similar to the one that I found myself in on my wedding day.

So before tomorrow morning’s hotel breakfast where we’ll descend into a slew of family and friends, before that slings me into extroverted socializing heaven, and this little case of the droop is whisked away never to be thought of again… Before all that happens, I’m here now, on the hotel bed in the shirt Mark wore today, him next to me, sleeping with a pillow over his head. And I’m sending out some thoughts the groom’s way.

Hoping that he manages, like I did, to spend his wedding day in a flurried blitz of joy and love and luck. And that without too much guilt or sorrow, he’s able to make this grown up, big boy, life-rocking move happily. Even without his Mama there.

As for me, I’m hoping the next wave of weepiness I contend with is during that inevitable hand-squeeze that Mark and I—and likely every other twosome who still takes a shine to each other—will make at some uncontrived and true, love-drenched point in the ceremony.

And I plan to follow that up promptly with a nice large glass of local bourbon.

Did I mention how cheap babysitters are here?

The Jewish Thing

Anyone whose known me for more than a day, knows what a wannabe Jew I am.

I mean, it’s so much more fun being Jewish. The food’s better. The mother’s are more obsessive, protective, fawning. (What I aspire to.) On holidays you get extra days off of work or school. And I can’t be the only woman who finds the short, nebbishy smart guys white hot.

Of course, these are all gross generalizations. All Jewish men don’t fit that description. But the ones who do—the really stubby geeky ones—are oh so swoon-worthy, no? (Sure, sure, I married a tall WASP. And I’m attracted to him, of course. But I’m not dead to the short man’s charms, people!)

Speaking of The Husband, the day Mark and I got engaged we were in NYC. We’d stuffed ourselves silly with pastrami, pickles, and matzo ball soup at the 2nd Avenue Deli (may it R.I.P.), and had the afternoon free to bum around before seeing our friend Lorin’s band, The Klezmatics, play at the 92nd St Y.

Kosher food and klezmer music. We were in Jewish heaven. Well, you know, if there were such a place.

And then, to make a perfect day even perfecter, on a walk through Central Park, while standing on a stone footbridge watching some ducks dick around in a pond, Mark suddenly got all love-goofy and kinda nervous and asked if I’d be cool with him becoming my husband. My forever boyfriend. If we could go steady for the serious long haul. Not that he used those words, per se, but that was the intention of the askin’.

I do remember exactly what I said in response, which so eloquently was, “Oh my GOD! Oh. My. God. Oh my God!” Over and over again. Enough times to likely make him question whether he really did want to spend the rest of his life with me.

But not to worry. In the made-for-TV-movie version of my life the actress playing me will throw her head back, hair flowing, and while laughing throatily, murmur, “Yes! Yes, darling! A million times—yes!” (That’s something I planned less than an hour post-proposal, over champagne at some fabulous hotel.)

Before the klezmer show, we had dinner at a Chinese restaurant with Lorin’s then-BF-now-husband, Mike. One of my all-time favorite humans. (Oddly, I still have the take-one-as-you-leave breath mint from that meal.) If it’d been Christmas and we took in a movie afterward, I think the whole day would’ve qualified us for immediate conversion to Judaism.

Eight months later, at our wedding, some friends decided to have the band play “Hava Nagila,” then raised Mark and me up in chairs on the dance floor. It was what every little non-Jewish girl who ever wished her straight hair was curly dreams of.

I get verklempt just thinking about it. Truly. (Except I do still wish I’d known what I was supposed to be doing with that napkin they handed me. I ended up whirling it around like a propeller, no doubt reinforcing in our guests’ minds the tragic imposter that I was.)

After our honeymoon I called Dawn, my friend and long-time tutor in all things Jewish, and asked her if Mark and I being up in the chairs—something she and her hubbie weren’t in on—was at all offensive. Without skipping a beat, she graciously offered that her traditions be mine, then added that she knew a great mohel in the Bay Area, if we’d need his services when our first son was born. Brilliant.

Turns out the baby we eventually had was a girl. And after a year of my staying home with her, we hired a nanny. An Israeli nanny. Her English was fluent but we had her speak mostly Hebrew to Kate.

Wait… that’s not what all good non-Jews do?

I mean, we honestly didn’t set out to provide our Jewish friends with more reasons to razz us over how clearly we covet their culture. It just turned out that we liked her the most of all the caregivers we interviewed. Plus, a nanny with good gun skills can’t be underestimated in Oakland.

So last week we were at a dinner party, rampant with children. Kate and her friend—the neighbor girl she’ll likely smoke cigarettes with and get her ears pierced by some day—the two of them ran into an upstairs bedroom to terrorize a cat and jump on the bed. Those being the four-year-old activities equivalent to cigarette smoking and home ear piercing.

A sweet mom who I met that night went into the bed-jumping room with her younger daughter, likely using Kate to illustrate to her child how one should Never Ever behave.  And in a friendly getting-to-know-everyone mode, the Mom asked Kate and her friend how old they were, and did they go to school. Kate and Future Smoking Buddy were jumping jumping. Hurling themselves no doubt at the terrified cat. And Sweet Mom was slipping in little questions. Where did they go to school? Did they like school? And more jumping jumping, talking, squealing.

Sweet Mom relayed this all to me later, since with Kate out of sight and earshot, I was hiding in the kitchen focused on guzzling wine. Oh, and neglecting Paige.

So she said at one point she tells the jumpers her daughter is starting school in the fall too. More jumping and screeching, and one of them calls out, “Where?” And Sweet Mom says, “Beth El.”

And then suddenly both girls fall silent. Stop jumping and look at Sweet Mom. Which, as she tells me, brings on a momentary neurotic panic. “Oh God,” she’s thinking, “They’re judging us because we’re Jewish.”

But then, before she can get too far down that road, Kate springs up on the bed again, looks at her and calls out, “Perfect!”

Jumping resumes. Neurotic moment passes. All is right again in the world.

Of course, whatever caused the girls to stop for a second likely had more to do with them never having heard of the school, than them passing any judgment on Judaism.

Though who knows. Maybe Kate did somehow recognize Beth El as being a Jewish name, and then paused for a moment to think to herself, “That explains why that Dada is so cute…”

In the Know

Every once and a while Kate takes it upon herself to enumerate the things the people in our family “know a lot about.”

Here’s what she came up with at dinner last night:

Herself
* Cars
* Bunnies

Mark
* Cutting (not a la Angelina—cutting as in carving meat, cutting pizza, etc.)
* Cooking things
* Fixing things
* Blimps
* Everything
* Tools

Paige
* Babies
* Talking baby language

Me
* Babies
* Mommies
* Planting flowers

Now, I don’t mean to be petty here. I’m the first to admit that my husband is a modern day Renaissance Man, but saying he knows a lot about everything? Sure there’s cycling, linguistics, technology, music, The Simpsons, installing car seats, comic books, writing, barbecuing, gadgets, soothing crying babies, science fiction, cutlery, online communities, reading super fast, urban planning, the Civil War, and molecular gastronomy. He knows a ton about those things. But, Kate’s paternal adoration aside, isn’t saying he knows a lot about everything a bit of an exaggeration?

Well, if you were to ask him, he might not think so.

In college, Mark and his BFF, Christian, used to play an aren’t-we-so-young-and-brilliant game, its premise being that they could recite off the cuff three facts on any given topic. While drinking beer at the local watering hole, one imagines.

The Eiffel Tower? It’s in Paris. It was named after its engineer, Gustave Eiffel. It’s the tallest building in Paris.

You get the idea.

Anyway, however good Mark may be at that game, by my count three data points—even if he could produce them on virtually everything—does not, in my book, constitute knowing “a lot” about those subjects.

But really, of course, I’m just jealous. Since it saddens me to think that Kate doesn’t perceive my ken as extending beyond the maternal arts. What about all I know about yard sales? Parallel parking? Taking really hot showers? Unrelenting sarcasm? Downward dog? Or toe picking, for God’s sake? Don’t those things count for anything? Or maybe it’s just that in Kate’s mind they fall under the vague rubric she calls “Mommies.”

I really shouldn’t blame Kate entirely for my petite neurotic reaction to her dinner-time game. She’s just calling it as she sees it. Really I should be thankful she didn’t add “Bellowing, ‘Can I please just have one minute here?’” or “Putting little girls in Time Outs” to her list of things I know a lot about.

Fact is, I’ve been doing a fair amount of wondering what it is I do know a lot about, all on my own. Trying to remember what I’m good at. Something that might be applied in such a way that I can make some money from it.

Because, after a glorious trip to the beach on Sunday, sandy sleepy kids piled into the car and u-turning our way out of Alameda, Mark and I stumbled into a conversation that I knew was coming eventually. The one in which we faced up to the fact that it’s time for me to get back to contributing to the family’s bottom line. Hopefully in no soul-sucking cubicle-dwelling full time capacity, but by freelancing or project work, or some utterly ideal, flexible and lucrative, creative part-time job.

So on Saturday night I went to bed, a sometimes-ashamed-to-admit-it Stay At Home Mom. And somehow by Monday I woke up feeling, well, unemployed.

What a difference a day makes.

Chickens and Other New Friends

What can I say? I’m my father’s daughter.

Which is to say that I love people. To the extent that any time I encounter someone new, I get all silly excited and need to cinch in my personality girdle so as not to freak them out and scare them away with my unleashed extroversion and super power of non-stop talk.

I get all “Can I pet the rabbits, George? Of Mice and Men Lenny-like. Fearful that my over enthusiastic adoration could result in the tragic unintended death of the very objects of my delight.

So, my Dad. My wedding presented him with a thrilling experience to revel in a sea of humans. Many new people to him—friends of Mark’s and mine who he’d heard about over the years, and who represented a fine pool of pre-approved potential cohorts.

And it was so easy. They were all conveniently making their way to his small town, a special delivery straight into his social lair.

Fresh blood!

The day before our wedding, our most excellent friend Gary—whom I like to talk about here in hopes that as my most devoted reader and fervid lurker I might incite or somehow bewitch him to post a comment—was meeting us at my Dad’s house to help Mark with the rehearsal dinner booze run. (Gary being, quite literally, an expert in the alcohol arts.)

Mark and I got hung up in the Mayberry-like town office where we had to get our marriage license, running past the time when we’d asked Gary to arrive at Dad’s. Under normal circumstances this would be no big thing. It wasn’t like Gary’d not be understanding about our lateness, or frankly had much else to do that lazy afternoon on his visit to Bristol, Rhode Island. He was, quite gallantly, at our service.

But as Mark and I made our way through the painfully slow air-conditioning-free paper pushing, there was a certain low grade agitation we felt to hurry the process along. Gary was one of the first guests in town and was arriving alone and unwittingly at my father’s door. The poor guy had no idea how he was presenting himself directly into the eye of the storm. It was like my father was standing there rubbing his hands together, desperate to ensnare the first object of his charm, intellectual banter, and letter-writing. (Dad is, perhaps single-handedly, working to keep the practice of letter writing alive. He developed no less than three new correspondents at our wedding who I believe he still communicates with via the USPS to this day. Some day I’ll tell you about his writing a letter to me nearly every day I was at college. Oh, and his envelope art.)

Anyway, who was I? I mean, where are you?

Right then. My Dad. And Gary. Once Mark and I had our marriage license in our literally sweaty hands, we hopped into our car like Bo and Luke Duke, slapping the rooftop through the open windows and hooting that we needed to get to the house and pull my dad off Gary, stat.

On the short drive through town, around about the sea wall coming up to the house, we see my father’s car approaching and then, like a slow dream sequence, passing by us, with Dad driving and Gary in the passenger seat—looking out and mutely beseeching us with wide eyes.

“My God, he’s got him!” I squealed to Mark, slapping a hand down on the dashboard. “Damn it, where the hell is he taking him? Do you think we should put out an Amber Alert?”

Blessedly, moments after passing us, we saw Dad’s car slow down and turn around, heading back to the house. And in the driveway learned that, after all the waiting around in the living room, my father offered to give Gary a tour of the jewel of our small peninsula-shaped town, its beautiful harbor, or ‘HAAA-buh’ as Gary put it, not unkindly (or inaccurately) emulating Dad’s local accent.

Anyway, the fact is, Dad’s one hell of a charming and interesting guy, and was adored by young and old alike that weekend. But it’s fun to make fun of his rabid new friend fetishism, mostly because I think if I talk about him a lot, it’ll detract people’s attention from mine.

In the past several months we’ve gotten a new batch of neighbors around here. And I’m all a’tremble with the excitement of it all.

For an excessively social stay-at-home mother, fresh blood in the neighborhood is tantamount to having your best friend move into your prison block ward. These are the few people who, aside from the ones that I gave birth to and whose noses and asses I tend to wiping, I get to see and interact with every day. To most people, a friendly nod from the mail man is a fleeting blip with no notable social merit. But to me, a raging people person who’s often confined to my domestic workplace like a wild cur tethered by a chain to a spike, even the smallest outlets for social stimulation are greedily devoured, wholeheartedly savored.

One set of new neighbs are an adorable unmarried couple who happen to be the former tenants and chums of my Mama Posse friend Mary. And get this, she’s a children’s clothing designer! How lucky is that? It’s like having a member of Schlitz family royalty move in next door to your alcoholic ass. She’s even already given the girls a bag packed with beautiful brand new duds—free!

On the other side of us, a deeeelightful sweet funny couple, two guys, relocated from Palm Springs. It was all I could do to not drool on their fabulous mid-Century furniture (that aqua couch!) the day they moved in. Never mind harboring secret fantasies of us all shoe shopping, or doing home avocado and oatmeal facials while watching old timey movies—me snugged on the couch between them, them not knowing how they ever got on before knowing me.

And then across the street, the object of my latest most ardent friendship crush, is a hilarious quirky columnist for the local alt weekly, a fried-chicken crazed foodie, musician, and, get this, nanny! I mean, hell-o-ooo. Pinch me!

Each time I see one of these people on the sidewalk, it takes every morsel of my self-restraint to not wrap my arm around their heads in that about-to-give-a-noogie stance, and just squeeze them with love and unbridled joy. (Note earlier excessive-rabbit-petting Lenny-like behavior.)

Tonight we went to the kids clothes couple’s house to meet their new chickens. Well, chicks really at this point. Turns out they’re requisitioning a part of their large front yard to, yes, chicken farming.

And I must confess that, beyond Kate’s immediate through-the-roof delight to hear her very own petting zoo was moving in two doors down, it took me a bit longer to come around to this idea. Chickens? I mean, I’m not sure where chickens are supposed to live, but isn’t it in some large unsanitary warehouse-like facilities where they’re tightly packed and pooping on each other before they make their way to Styrofoam and plastic grocery store packaging? Or, barring that, out grazing on some wide open farm in Sonoma, tended to by kind hippie folk? I wasn’t sure how to meld our urban-suburban Rockridge ‘hood with the concept of live poultry.

But I can follow a social cue like a Lab on a pheasant. When these neighbors would remark about other people’s reactions to their chicken-adopting news, they’d say things like, “She was all, chickens?! Aren’t they loud?” or “Wait, won’t chickens SMELL?” And I was all laughing alongside them and scoffing at the petty ignorance of those other neighbors, when really I was thinking, “Well, uh, aren’t they? Don’t they?”

But, you know, wanting to be one of the cool people, before you knew it I was leading the scoffing sessions with other newcomers. “Can you believe she thought that chickens would be crowing in the morning like roosters? How naive!”

Tonight as we were huddled inside Chicken Daddy’s small bathroom, where the chicks are in a crate with a heat light til they’re robust enough for coop livin’, Kate and some of the other neighbor kids got turns holding the little puff balls. And another Mom and I remarked on the cuteness of the two with racing stripes down their backs, which we learned were called Americanas, which in my mind for some reason sounded like some kinda Cuban cigar. But what do I know.

Chicken Daddy started talking about how the gender of the chicks is determined by someone called a, get this, chicken sexer. (Or should that be “Chicken Sexer” with caps?) But how weird-slash-cool is that? The way a chick’s gender is determined is, he alleged, a well-guarded secret and something that’s actually impossible to assess by just looking at the wee thing’s privates. And so, these people called—I just have to say it again—Chicken Sexers, do some sort of black magic juju laying of the hands or something on these chicks and proclaim with astonishing accuracy whether you’ve got yourself an egg-layer or a crowing cock.

But I was running late for Baxter’s yoga class, much as I wanted to stay and learn more, when Chicken Daddy started to say something about some big renowned Chinese Chicken Sexer, that I really wished I could have stuck around to hear. Like this Chinese dude is the Chicken Sexer Grand Master or guru or something, who holds the secret and is never wrong. Must hear more about this person, and print out a poster of him for my closet door.

Anyway, so it looks like at some point down the road we’ll be getting some fresh fresh eggs from down the road. And Kate will start spending time communing with the local chickens instead of begging to watch Blues Clues, or taking up drugs. And frankly what a breath of fresh—if not slightly chicken-shit fetid—air that’ll be.

Plus, it’ll give me an excuse to get out there and bask in the glow of all our divine new neighbor folk, who I just can’t wait to get my hands on.

Ich liebe dich, Gustav

Sometimes Paige turns into a small German boy named Gustav.

Never quite sure when it’ll happen. She might be shoving mac and cheese into her gob with both hands and you get an angle on her neck that’s all fatty fat chin. Gustav!

Or she lets loose a machine gun round of farts when she’s in her highchair. Off that plastic seat those toots ricochet good, making nice loud blasts. Total Gustav move.

Or, I don’t know. Maybe she’s just sitting up on the rug and nodding her head up and down vigorously in some weird rhythmic affirmation of something or other that’s not exactly clear.

I mean, anything you could imagine a rotund blond German boy wearing lederhosen and oafish, square-toed, crepe-soled shoes doing qualifies for (but isn’t always necessarily) Gustav-like behavior.

And sometimes it’s just not that clear cut. Gustav isn’t a person per se, he’s more of a, well, state of mind. A spirit if you will. Something—or someone—that can be there one second, then vanish faster than a Top Dog bockwurst.

Although I was the first to identify Gustav, Mark eventually came around to tapping into his presence. Inevitably though, whenever either of us sense we’re in his midst and cry out his name, Kate skyrockets into a “She’s NOT Gustav! SHE’S MY SISTER, PAAAAAAAAIGE!!!” freak-out.

Whatever.

Until he’s goose-stepping around the house or something I don’t really think we have anything to worry about.

Under Pressure

My birthday falls on Mother’s Day this year, giving me a small (sour) taste of what it’s like for those poor souls who are born on Christmas.

And God help dear Mark, who has his feet up in the starting blocks awaiting my decision on what I want to do. He’s desperate to make the day special for me, but to date we’ve had several discussions where he’s attempted to focus my thoughts and narrow down the options I spew out. Each of these conversations has ended with him squeezing the top of his head and whimpering softly.

I just can’t decide.

So far we have lunch reservations at 12:15 at ad hoc, Thomas Keller’s allegedly (hopefully) family-friendly restaurant, and at 1:15 at a bistro called The Girl and the Fig that I’ve been wanting to try. Not that we intend to challenge the girls’ restaurant manners—or any progress I’ve made on my postpartum bod—by eating two back-to-back lunches. I just thought it’d be nice to have options in Napa and Sonoma. (And for karma’s sake, we’ll cancel whatever ressie we don’t intend to use in advance. And by “advance” I mean within AT LEAST an hour of our reservation. If I’ve made a decision by then.)

The thing is, there’s also part of me that wonders if I just want to have Mark pack a staggeringly fabulous picnic lunch and take the kids for a hike or to the beach or something.

I mean, doesn’t that sound good too?

It’s one of those times I really wish I lived in Wichita. It’d be so freeing knowing we were going to Applebee’s since it’d be the only game in town. And I’m not sure, but I don’t think they’ve got much outdoor splendor to add in as a contender.

At night we have a sitter. But that’s as far as I’ve gotten. I haven’t determined whether darkening the door of A Cote, our cherished local haunt, makes sense after a potentially big lunch. I mean, it’s so tacky getting gout during a recession.

There’s also been some talk amongst the Mama Posse about getting together for some late afternoon cocktails that day. A proposal I never refuse from those women. (Or practically anyone else, for that matter.) But we were kinda tipsy when that idea came up, so who knows.

I’ve been telling most people that what’s likely to happen is I’ll get a migraine from the stress of trying to have a fun day to the second power, and’ll end up spending it in a dark room, dry-mouthed and fraught with pain, clutching an ice pack to my noggin.

But here’s the thing. I think I’ve even made that claim enough times now that the pressure to have a migraine is also too great. I’ll probably end up having performance anxiety over that too.

I’ve never understood when people just decide to “not do” holidays like Thanksgiving or Christmas because it’s too much of a hassle, or there’s some negative association with the holiday they want to sweep under their emotional carpet. I can’t help but think that making those days not feel like those days takes more energy than just cooking a damn turkey. Which is to say, the duck-and-cover avoidance approach just isn’t an option for me on Sunday.

Ellen emailed last week to see what I’m doing for Mother’s Day. She’d spaced on it also being my birthday, and suggested we get together and do something for Mom, since we still haven’t convened for her death-iversary. And at this point I’m thinking, what the hell. Maybe we should just celebrate Fourth of July too.

I Raise My Glass to You, Mom

I spent the better part of dinner tonight trying to hold my lips the way my mother did when she drank wine, and trying (sadly, literally) to not wet my pants laughing.

She used to do this thing when she put a wine glass to her mouth where it looked like she was playing a flute. You know, like she was sorta flattening her lips to blow, with the corners slightly upturned like the early stage of a super fake smile.

It was her Fancy Wine-Drinkin’ lips that she did without fail, every time. I mean, she could have a glass of water and one of wine that she was working at the same time and she could pick either one up at random while conducting a conversation and maybe even cooking dinner and she could still somehow remember to do the Wine Drinkin’ Lips for the wine glass, and just drink like a normal human from the water glass. It was, in a way, impressive.

Unsurprisingly, this slayed my sisters and I. And not just as kids or anything. We’d howl and slap each other laughing (that’s something us Italian Americans do) whenever we saw this, well into adulthood. And of course, we’d razz her about it MERCILESSLY.

(I still regret never having done a blindfolded test where we’d hold up several types of glasses to her to see if she could somehow intuit the presence of a wine glass. My hypothesis is that she’d know.)

So anyway, as I’m here trying to do it during our heat-wave dinner on the porch, Mark is looking at me and trying to show me what face I’m making, and saying, “Okay, so this is it?” But half the time he’s holding his lips out away from his teeth like the teeth’ve got something on them he doesn’t want the rest of his mouth to touch. And of course, that’s all wrong (and frankly, I thought, not even trying very hard), so I’m all, “No, NO, like THIS.” But then unable to keep a straight face to get the flattened flute lips really right. They need to be all pulled back like a super tight face lift with just the smallest opening to let the wine come through. The small hole there is I think what she thought made it all good manners and fancy.

And hey, compared to how I pull corks out of wine bottles with my teeth and just start chugging at the end of my harried kid-tendin’ days, it WAS fancy, man.

So anyway, Mark’s all, “Wait, are your neck veins supposed to be pulsating when you do it?” And he’s sticking his jaw out real tight like a maniac. (Not, by the way, remotely what I was doing.) But hey, it’s not like I have all this isometric lip strength that my mother had from doing it for so long. I mean, it’s not like she looked like she was bench pressing twice her weight when she sipped a pinot grigio.

Finally, after ignoring the children for most of the meal, we gave up on it. Clearly Mark was not taking my attempts at perfecting the look seriously enough, and I was starting to question whether I just didn’t have the skillz any more to nail it.

Besides, in the teeniest small way all the Mom thoughts started to get me feeling a bit sad. I mean, how am I ever going to get it right if I can’t ever watch her do it again?

Last week, on Friday, marked five years since she died. And on that day the so-great-I-don’t-deserve-them Mama Posse had a lovely just-us-and-the-kids garden party as a tribute to my Mama. But I’d likely gone so extremely overboard in stressing to them that yes, a little lunch would be lovely, but please no dead mother poetry readings, or presentations of large poster board collages with pictures of her and words like “#1 Mom!” cut out from magazines. I’d made it clear in my lacking-subtlety way that if I wanted to “go there” and talk about her, I would.

Every time one of the kids called out, “Mom!” to one of us, I think the Mamas were cringing and all pulling them aside and whispering, “Owen, I told you to call me Sacha today not Mom.”

What gals.

And, as it turns out, that day, I didn’t want to go there. It wasn’t that I couldn’t for fear of what I’d unleash, there just wasn’t anything there to really go to. So aside from Mark sweetly saying to me at one point in the evening how happy he is that he knew her, her five-year death-iversary came and went like no big thing.

Usually Ellen and I and our kids get together on that day and on Mom’s birthday in January, and I cook Polish food. We’ll sometimes pull out old pics of Mom, and Ellen–since she’s kinda a hippie–tends to have some sort of special candle lit.

But last weekend Ellen was out of town, her kids with their dad. So we’ll schedule something for another day soon. And maybe then it’ll feel more normal or natural for me to think or talk a bit, or even a lot, about Mom. And if it just turns out to be another great meal with the intention of it being a tribute to her, that’s okay too.

The one thing I’ve learned about the grief thing is you never know when it’ll strike, and it’s foolish to try to summon some disingenuous desperate emotion when you’re heart’s just not going there on its own. No one’s looking to anyone to put on a big show. And not that we have to emulate her, but Lord knows, that wasn’t how Vicki rolled.

One thing I will have to make sure of when Ellen and I get together, is that she takes a crack at the Wine Lips thing. If my memory serves me, she has a knack for imitating it. And even if she doesn’t get it quite right, I’d happily welcome another laughing sesh just watching her try.

Oh, Mama. I miss you.

Songs of Torture

My sophomore year of college I lived in a dorm near the DKE fraternity. And although much of what took place in their hazing process was, intentionally and gratefully, not common knowledge around campus, there was one component that year that the whole school was, uh, privy to.

Which was that they blasted the same bloody song OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN throughout the famously haunted (but that’s beside the point) Old Kenyon building where they lived, and blaring out onto the quad. To really fuck with the pledges, and anyone else who wasn’t hearing impaired in Knox County, sometimes they’d stop the song for a small stretch. Just long enough to get you really fired up that–sweet relief!–they were moving away from that particular form of aural abuse, and leading some goats into the building or something.

But then, they’d ruthelssly turn it back on. Whaling it extra special loud. And the entire campus would collectively seize up. Scraping at the sides of our faces wondering derangedly if they would ever show mercy on us, and hoping at the very least that whatever intangible social stature those pledges would gain as a result of it all, that it was really fucking worth it.

For years after when I’d hear the song I think I still twitched and gnawed on my lips a bit. I feared I might never shake the trauma.

But here I am, just weeks away from my can-ya-believe twentieth college reunion, and I’m thrilled to report that, as you might have noticed due to its omission–at this point I can’t even remember what that damn song even was.

Which thus far is the best mental yardstick to indicate just how freakin’ long it’s been since my college prime. Well, that or that the experimental mind-erasing procedure I had performed in Boston in ’97 really did the trick.

Heh.

At any rate, in his years as a Sports Illustrated reporter, Mark got to cover the ’96 Olympics in Atlanta. (And if you’d like a few commemorative duffel bags, t-shirts, or even a 100% rayon necktie from that event, I can happily hook you up.) Anyway, the bombing that year made the already overworked and sleep-deprived journalists there exponentially more overworked and sleep-deprived.

But outside the hotel where most of them were staying–where they’d retreat for the measly hours of sleep they’d get to have a night–there was a street vendor selling sodas, sounvenirs, and the retarded Izzy the mascot crap. The dude worked nearly round the clock and blasted that hateful hot hit which you’ve probably blacked out of your brain by now, “The Macarena.” He played it in an evil, heartless, endless loop.

And really just one hearing of that song when I’m not even mad for sleep makes me want to take a chop stick to my eardrums.

In the past couple weeks I’ve had occasion to think of these episodes. Unfortunately. All because of one greeting card. One of those open-it-and-it-plays-a-song cards, sent to Kate for Easter from her grandparents. (I won’t tell you from whose side of the family.)

Okay, OKAY! So it was from MY side of the family.

This card plays a very tinny version of a song whose nonsensical verses are, “Yummy yummy yummy, I’ve got love in my tummy, and I feel like I’m loving you.” Verses that at times seem sexually perverse to me, and at other times just an odd choice for how vaguely associated with Easter—candy eatin’, I guess—they are. I’ve had plenty of opportunities to ponder this.

Anyway, don’t get me wrong. This card is adored and beloved by Kate. It was incredibly sweet and thoughtful to have sent it to her. Every time she opens and closes and reopens that card—while eating breakfast, peeing, riding her bike, or leering up close to Paigey’s face—every single time, morning, noon, or night, it’s as though the fact that music emanates from it is a freshly exciting revelation. Something she isn’t certain will necessarily happen if she opens it again. So she needs to check.

That gal’s tenacious.

And even though I’ve had on the order of seven breakdowns where I’ve pleaded with her to take mercy on us and it’s only 6:47AM and Daddy is still trying to sleep and don’t you think that’s a little close to Paige’s face and maybe if we just sit down and eat a big pile of candy for a while that would be a fun way to take a little break from the card hmmm? Even with all that, when I cleaned up all our Easter crap a couple days ago, throwing away the already broken or rotten stuff and shoving the rest of it ceremoniously in a garbage bag for basement storage, I still left that card out for her.

Why? Because in a weirdly genuine I’m-happy-that-she’s-happy-even-if-it-makes-me-unhappy maternal way, I feel like with some intermittent intervention I can stick it out until she eventually hopefully tires of the damn card. Or, if there’s a God, it breaks.

Not that I’m setting my sights on it or anything, but if she ever wants to, that girl could DOMINATE a sorority some day.

I Could Have Told Him So

Fearful as I am to do so, I have a confession to make.

For some time now—several months, really—despite the fact that I’m a mother of a one- and three-year-old, I’ve been getting blissful, uninterupted nights of sleep. Just like normal people without kids get.

I mean, with the exception of a trip to Lake Tahoe a couple months ago, which had us all bunking in one room and therefore victims of Kate’s nocturnal verbal outbreaks (and door-banging trips to the potty), my blissful nighttime slumber could be in some kind of Serta Sleeper TV ad. Okay, so my hair gets a lot nappier from sleep than those mattress models’ apparently do, but STILL. What I’m sayin’ is we put those kids of ours to sleep in the evening, and God bless ‘em, we don’t hear from them again ’til morning.

So Saturday we visited our friends Kristen and Suneel and their delicious 5-month-old Jackson. (Total future husband material for Paige.) At one point Kristen turned her tired eyes to us, and looking almost uncertain whether she should even venture to do so, asked how sleep was for us at this point.

Now, I’ve passed through the portal into parenthood, and as part of that process I’ve been fully indoctrinated in Belief in the Mighty Power of Jinx. Particularly when it comes to discussions of successful sleep patterns. Aside from it being socially malodorous to brag about one’s child’s good sleep–especially to other potentially sleep-deranged parents whom you’d like to retain as friends–it also inevitably brings into play the potential for the good sleep spate to, well, shit the proverbial bed. For karma to spit in your eye and say, “Ten hours of straight newborn sleep, you say? Well here’s a night you won’t soon forget.” [Roll track of demonic laughter.]

This is all to say, as much as I wanted nothing more than to allay this new-Mama friend’s anxieties about how many years of crappy sleep she was staring down the barrel of, I was also—selfishly, I admit—fearful to even answer her question.

Blessedly, that night, despite having uttered aloud that our sleep was actually quite good these days, thank you, our familial sleep groove went unaffected.

But then, Mark had to duel with fate. And out of the blue in the kitchen last night, he mentions all casual and stuff, how we never even had to sleep train Paigey Wiggle in order to arrive at her current state of excellent sleep-through-the-nightery.

You think you know someone. But what ON EARTH would compel him to utter such a thing aloud?

Yeah, yeah, it’s painfully—exhaustingly, ahem—clear where this is headed. Which is to say that Paige decided to enter an unprecedented middle of the night cry-a-thon last night. In her 15 months of life the girl has not bawled as much as she did last night. There was cacaphonous wailing, and possibly even rending of garments, though it’s hard to tell with those feety pajamas. The girl had me out of bed three seperate times, alternately shoving my breast and/or a dropperful of Tylenol into her mouth to quell her insistent wake-the-whole-house-up-when-it-was-really-otherwise-quite-cozy-in-bed fury.

Finally I just decided to hold and rock her for roughly EVER until I was certain she was in a deep deep sleep and any small lurches of my body didn’t make her fear I was going to set her back into her crib and re-ignite the earsplitting wail. As sleepy as I was, it was pretty damn cute that a few times as she was about to doze off she’d wake herself up to reach her arm out to make sure I was still there.

Still, my sleeping uninterrupted would have been cuter.

The whole incident made me want to get in the car and drive like a crazy lady the hour-plus trip back to Woodside to pound on Kristen and Suneel’s door at 3:30AM—when, God knows, they may well have been awake with their baby anyway–to tell them how horribly terribly sorry I was to have forgotten the most important piece of parenting information I could ever hope to impart to dear friends such as them. Whenever it is that wee Jackson does start sleeping like a champ, for the love of God, DO NOT UTTER A WORD ABOUT IT BETWEEN YOURSELVES OR TO OTHERS.

Of Yoga, Yurts, and Republicans that Get You Thinking

Mark and his friend Christian often do this thing when they’re relaying events in the recent past. They continue rambling on about what happened beyond the point of, well, interest, until they finally wrap up by saying, “And now we’re back to the present.”

I’m not really sure what the genesis of this is—some decaying collegiate joke, no doubt—but like many things between those two I just nod and smile. I mean, aside from these little in-joke foibles, there’s little I can complain about with my husband’s husband. (This being a JOKE, Dad, since Mark and Christian are known to carry on like an old married couple.)

As for my present world, the book I’ve been obsessively reading whenever I have 30-plus seconds to myself (which averages to a 3-minute reading window) is Curtis Sittenfeld’s excellent American Wife. Of all random things, it’s the quasi-fictionalized account of Laura Bush’s childhood, running up through her utterly unanticipated stint as our very own First Lady. And believe it or not, she’s quite a sympathetic character. There’s friendship, tragic death, literary references, and even sex scenes! All in all, it’s good reading.

It’s the second selection for my new book club—a group I’m thrilled to report that with my girls at the ages they are now, I can solidly make the time commitment to be part of.

I’m not aware that I read book club books terribly differently knowing I’ll be talking about them later. But I guess there is a small part of me that underscores in my mind whatever weensy insights I’ve managed to muster along the page-turning way. And the one thing that I can’t help but come back to with American Wife, is this concept of how utterly surprising it was for Laura—or rather, Alice, the character who’s based on Laura B.—to one day call the White House home. At age 9, or 20, or even 41, she’d have never believed it to be her fate. (And really, married to HIM as she was, you can’t deny it’d come off as a fairly big shocker.)

On Friday I found myself at the dazzling nature-groovy gorgeous Green Gulch Farm Zen Center in Muir Beach. In a small yurt. In a downward dog. Or alternatively, chanting, “Ommmmmm.”

It having been a day-long yoga retreat which my friend and neighbor, Jennifer, told me about, and for which Mark graciously jumped through a fair amount of childcare hoopery in order to allow me to attend.

And despite the yogic practice of attempting to clear the mind, live in the present, and focus on one’s breathing, ommmming, or corpse-posing, I did find my mind wandering at times, thinking once during the morning session that this was a setting that not too far back I’d have never imagined myself in. Back when, at age 11 in Rhode Island, I was most concerned with how many layers I could don to perfect my turbo preppiness (a base of two turtlenecks of complimentary pastel hues being my secret weapon of success). Or at my Midwestern college at age 18, when acquiring a hand delivered invitation to a Deke party seemed to have equaled attainment of nirvana.

Even in my mid-twenties when I’d migrated to San Francisco like a big girl, my hummingbird-paced temperament was still so much the essential core of my me-ness. The thought of sitting in a room (nevermind a yurt) of strangers, eyes closed and in a cross-legged position for even three minutes would seem like some form of brutal custom-made Kristen torture.

Sure, my “and now we’re back to the present” moment is hardly on par with holding court in the White House or anything. It’s just that on Friday, as I reveled in hearing birds singing outside and strove to attain a perfect chest-opening Side Angle Pose—and wondered intermittently how Kate and Paige were faring without me all day—I also couldn’t help but think that my being in that setting seemed very, well I’m hesitant to even say it, but so very California. You know, for me to be chanting, and singing in Sanskrit, and partnering with unknown kindly long-haired men to enact prone spine-lengthening poses.

Really. Who’d a thought?

And my chaser thought that I really shouldn’t have had since by that point I definitely should’ve gotten back to focusing on the silent intention I’d set for myself that day or at least my Ojai breathing, was how very grateful I was to have somehow found my way there.

And so, as I gently pushed my chest upward into Cobra while drawing the tops of my legs down flat into the earth, I decided that years from now, when I find myself skulking around the White House kitchen for midnight snacks like it’s no big thing, I’ll have to make certain one of my agenda items is to clear out a section of, say, the Situation Room, and build a yoga studio there.

Or maybe I can just set up a little yurt in the rose garden.