Advanced Planning

I’m trying to get over feeling like it’s a bit absurd that I’m in Rhode Island for two weeks, and for 99% of that time my Dad’s not been here. Well, he’s here as in in-state, but he’s not in the hizouse, as it were. He’s on the DL at a rehab center after getting a hip job. 

And after spending a week here, Mark returned to Cali yesterday, and to the 9-to-5 today. With him gone, Dad on hiatus, and my womb-to-tomb amiga Amelia bound back to DC today, I’m nurturing a small abandonment complex.  

Thankfully, today was The. Perfect. Beach. Day.

And I am lucky enough to have a handful of most excellent friends who live here. So my friend Story, who I’ve known and loved since high school when she had a cigarette butt from the lead singer of Echo and the Bunnymen taped to her bedroom wall, she and her sons met the girls and I in Newport at the beach.

Oh, and did I mentioned Story’s an amazing chef? I’d been joking when I asked her to pack a gourmet box lunch for me, but didn’t object when she handed me a divine BBQ chicken sandwich.

All that, plus the bliss of seeing her boys and my girls running in and out of the waves, squealing with summertime glee. And Story and I getting our annual what-feels-like seven cumulative minutes of kid-interrupted in-person catch-up time. 

At home post-beach Paigey took an epic nap. Kate and I ate excessive pizza, read Angelina books, and I marveled over the fact that I have real estate envy for a literary mouse family’s charming Costwalds cottage.

Lots more things happened that were mostly fun and all exhausting. I was staggering towards the finish line to get the girls bathed after a dinner in which I sprang from the table no less than six times to cook peas, get more corn, grab a sippy, get a spoon. I grabbed Paige and my untouched wine thinking I’d make it my end-of-the-day treat. Then Paige plunged her grubby fist deep into it. 

Oy. 

So, well past her bedtime and getting only one book (not two), I crawled into bed with Miss Kate for a day’s end snuggle. Sometimes I do this, blurring the lines between who’s really tucking who into bed. 

Kate: [cradling her stuffed dog] “Dottie is my baby. He’s a newborn.”

Me: “Oh, really?”

Kate: “Why do newborns make mommies sleepy?”

Me: [Lunging into a 50-minute diatribe including, "And then there's the burping, and more diapers to change, and some little babies just cry and cry and cry for no reason---in the middle of the night!"] “When you were a little baby Grandma Peggy came to visit and she helped us take care of you.”

Kate: [excited] “Did she take care of me in the middle of the night?”

Me: “Well, I don’t think so, no, but sometimes in the morning she’d take you and let Daddy and I sleep if we’d been awake a lot during the night.”

Kate: “I want to have two babies.”

Me: “Well, if you want, I can come to your house and help you take care of your new baby so you’re not so sleepy. Because I’d be the grandma.”

Kate: “That’d be good.”

Me: “I think so too. I would actually love to do that.”

Kate: [perks up] “So then Daddy could be the Grandpa!”

Me: “That’s exactly right. If you want, I bet he’d like to come help out too.”

Kate: “Okay, Mama, good. Night-night.”

Handy Reminders

This weekend, reminders about why I’m happy we live here seemed to be hurled at me willy-nilly.

It was like they were coming out of some Stephen King-like possessed tennis ball tosser. But since they were all feel-good things, I was okay getting pelted by them.

And here’s the thing. It was all good clean family fun. I mean, Friday night we had a great time mostly sober at a preschool fundraiser. And birthday parties for a two- and five-year-old reminded even us grown-ups what fab friends we have here. And this involved no princess dress-up on our parts at all.

But it was three smaller things that reminded me that what we get for living in a godforsakenly expensive, far away from family, often cold in the summertime place, is really quite incredible and unique.

Saturday morning we field tripped to Berkeley Bowl West, the new gargantuan swanky (and green) outpost of the produce and gourmet-grocery nirvana, Berkeley Bowl. The issues with the original store being insufficient parking, narrow aisles, and agro baby-thwackin’ shoppers. Sure the new place addresses those problems—at least we didn’t encounter any baby-thwackers on this visit. But oddly, what wowed me was the mushrooms.

The organic mushroom selection was vast and spectacular. The colors and shapes of these things were as fascinating to stare at as tropical fish in a tank. (And, no, I wasn’t high.)

I mean, look at these? How can you not love them?

And this is just some of them that I could snap real fast with my phone without getting arrested for lurid public acts of mushroom adoration.

People in Wisconsin might be sending their kids to safe, good public schools, and aren’t spending millions on houses that don’t even have garages, but do their stores have mushroom selections like us? I think not.

Now, if I could avoid dry heaving at the even thought of eating a slimy cooked ‘shroom, this would be a benefit of living here that’d affect me more directly. But I’m a giver. I’m just happy that local mushroom lovers have this fungal fantasia at their fingertips.

Right around the corner in Berzerkeley is a hardware store Mark has the hots for. So post-groceries he ran in and the girls and I fawned over, touched, and trembled with delight over an amazing art car.

It was a Toyota station wagon with a big peace sign on the hood, and colorful gewgaws glued onto every non window-or-tire surface—marbles, paperclips, shellacked gourds, toy dinos, mirrors, ceramic mosaic chips, plastic foliage, magic markers, pennies. A hippie-dippie masterpiece, and a pure delight.

Paige cried when the nice lady (who looked very normal—nothing like the dreadlocked hemp-and-carob cookie seller you’d imagine to be the car’s owner) came out, was all friendly, then drove off.

I nearly cried a bit too.

Later, after Audrey’s birthday bash which we enjoyed so much we invited ourselves to stay for dinner, I was in the back yard watering the grass. Kate was intermittently playing and tantrumming in the sandbox Mark recently built. And just when my when-the-hell-is-this-kid’s-bedtime head nearly exploded, a high-pitched male voice call out to me from the next house.

It was Steve, waving a red plastic cup. “Kristen? Salt or no salt?”

I nearly wept with joy.

A few minutes later when his boyfriend passed the margarita to me over the fence, I saw it had a straw with a paper flamingo on it.

“I know,” Matt said, rolling his eyes. “So gay, right?”

And then, bustling out the back door onto the deck, Steve calls out, “So, hooooow is it? It’s a Skinny Girl, you know!”

Now that’s gay. And I just love it.

So, quick review. Exotic mushrooms, hippie art car, and margarita-makin’ gaybors. Where else can I get all this but right here in Bay Area, USA?

Now, don’t get me wrong. This all went down less than two weeks prior to our annual summer pilgrimage east. So you can set your watch to the upcoming posts where I pout and ponder whether a small New England town is the best setting for raising my kids.

Or, at the very least, the best place for me to joyously (and inconspicuously) return to the preppy wardrobe of my youth. I mean, I do have the Burberry flip flops now, so it’d be an easy transition and all.

Oceans Apart

I collect friends named Kristen. (With the ‘e-n’ not ‘i-n’ spelling, of course.)

I know it sounds narcissistic, and I’m sure in part it’s just a generational thing. I mean, I don’t have any friends named Agnes or Gertrude.

Actually, check that. None named Gertrude.

Anyway, it’s not like I set out to have nine or so Kristen friends. It’s just that I met these women in the course of life, as one does, and for some reason I’ve tended to develop freakily fast close bonds with most of them. And so now, at any party or ho-down I throw, I make the inevitable, goofy “Kristen, meet Kristen” introduction. Though, blessedly, at this point most of my Kristens know each other.

One of my Kristens who I utterly adore (despite her abandoning me to move to the Land of Potatoes), started going by the name Ruby at a small agency we worked at, on accounta I was there first. I swear I didn’t threaten her in the parking lot to make her do this! In fact, for a long time I’d no idea she didn’t rock the name Ruby before we worked together. I mean, how can you not love someone who’s willing to do that? (And could she have picked a cuter nickname? No!)

But, that’s how we Kristens are. We look out for each other. It’s just like that with us.

Anyway, another Kristen friend who goes by the street name Ingrid (for reasons unrelated to me), also moved—at least for now—to New York. (Sniff!) Anyway, she and I have taken a staggered approach to our baby birthing. Unintentionally, of course. So whenever one of us is freshly preg-o, the other is inevitably tending to a newborn, and so on.

When Ingrid visited here last, her son Ocean was around 18 months or so. Kate, a year older. That age spread is prime for Kate’s social tyranny. She loves nothing more than a younger person whom she can tilt her head towards while explaining, “These are cherries, Ocean. CHEH-reeeeeez. They are yummy to eat!” Kate goes into what I call her Hostess Mode and introduces everyday objects in our house to younger children. As if the kid had been living under a rock until having the good fortune to encounter Kate and her more mature, hard-won life wisdom.

Sad as it is to admit, Kate and Ocean have only met each other a handful of times. But in that terrifying way that three-year-olds remember things (“We know another Jane too, Mama! Remember that lady who was buying broccoli at Safeway that time?”), Kate has fond memories of her last long-ago afternoon with Ocean.

In the car this weekend, prompted by nothing I could discern, Kate started talking about Ocean and asking when he’s going to visit next. She became fixated on the idea of seeing him, and from most of the drive from Burlingame to Oakland—miles and worlds apart—she outlined her plans for their next encounter.

So I started to jot them down on my phone. You know, capturing her social agenda like a good Mommy Secretary.

“Ocean can sleep with Dottie.”

“He can sleep in my bed if he takes a plane to see me.”

“If we want to color in the night, I’ll get you up and ask you to get Crayons and paper.”

“If he wants me to read to him in the night, I’ll turn on the light and he’ll pick out a book.”

“I’ll make paper airplanes and helicopters for him. And boats!”

“Do we have a car seat for him?”

“He’ll sit next to me at dinnertime.”

“We can introduce him to Jonah.”

“I have a little knife. It’s wooden and he can put his hand under my hand and I can help him cut.”

“I’ll teach him how to do dance class and puzzles.”

“If he doesn’t like shell macaroni—if he doesn’t want one of my big spoons he can use one of Paige’s spoons.”

“He needs to help me make my [mud] soup. I’ll show him what roses I need and he can just break them and sprinkle them in the bowl.”

[Noticing I was typing what she was saying] “That’s my list. That’s what I want to do with him.”

[A final thought] “I wanna give him a card for him coming over here.”

When my mother-in-law visits, at the end of the day if the kids seem tired, she’ll often say, “Well, we had a big day today.” Prompting Mark to remark that every day is a big day for me.

What can I say? I like to keep busy. Plus, I don’t believe in relaxing.

Clearly, Miss Kate takes after her Mama.

Alas, Ingrid has a newborn (and no, I’m not pregnant), so I’m not sure when she’ll be in Cali next. But when we do see her and her clan, I hope for his sake that Ocean’s well rested. Kate’s got a hell of an agenda planned for them.

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…”

Annie the Moth, Long May You Live

We went to a poorly-attended reading fair at Kate’s school on Saturday, the highlight of which was chatting with another set of parents who we admire for their sense of humor about their adventures in parenting.

You never know when a gathering of parents will suddenly turn into a group therapy sesh. And we always welcome a good dose of we’re-not-alone-in-this.

At one other school event the dad had a group of men howling as he recounted a scenario where their son–who they were convinced would be the last un-potty-trained preschooler on Earth–had an epic public melter because the image on his pull-up diaper was the red vehicle from Cars, not the yellow one. On the drive home, Mark slapped the steering wheel smiling and said, “Okay, so Kate’s hellish sock freak-outs? Hooray! We’re not the only ones losing our minds!”

And by the pancakes-cooked-in-the-shape-of-letters booth this weekend, the mom talked to Mark about the kinds of arguments she finds herself getting into with her son. She and her husband recently hammered at the fact that that one million IS in fact more than one hundred until they were each busting neck veins. Yet their son continued to state that he was right. They were wrong.

They’d also had a conversation about left and right, she said, which ended with her bellowing “I AM 42-YEARS-OLD AND I KNOW MY LEFT AND RIGHT, thank you very much!”

Mark savors every morsel of these stories–as do I when he relays them–because, God knows, we’ve been there. Of course, you’re intellectually aware you’re A) speaking to a young child, and B) are in fact correct. But there’s still some mind-imploding I’m-the-adult-and-YOU’RE-supposed-to-learn-from-ME-kid fury that can suddenly devour all rationality when your glib, self-assured child persistently informs you as Kate did yesterday, “Cherries grow in the ground. I know it, Mama. NOT on trees.”

And it’s not that our friend’s son or our daughter are particularly difficult, pugnacious, or contrarian kids. It’s that they’re three. Or more specifically, as we read and learn more about these mysterious wee ones, it’s that they’re three-and-a-half.

My friend Megan has a wise mantra she whispers between clenched teeth at times. “This is age-appropriate behavior… This is age-appropriate behavior…” It’s the kind of saying that relieves you of the conviction that your child has been sent from Satan to torture your days on Earth, and helps you realize that all kids their age have been given that same satanic directive.

Plus the mantra gives you a beat to pull yourself together before calling the adoption agency.

Although she’s too big for it now, Kate still likes taking her trike out for a spin sometimes. And I happened to notice when she hauled it onto the sidewalk this weekend that there was a moth in its basket. A long-deceased moth.

One which instantly became the center of Kate’s obssessive need-to-nurture universe.

“A moth, Mama! A moth! I want to pick it up. I am sooooo gentle.”

“It is my moth! Hello moth. Jonah can’t touch it.”

“My moth’s name is Annie. Can we get a bug house for it?”

“I need to put something inside it for it to eat!”

“A flower! Here is a pretty flower for Annie. Hello, Annie! And here are some leaves for her to munch munch munch.”

“Can you write ‘This is Kate’s moth’ on the top of the jar, Dada?”

“Her name is Sally.”

“Shhh. Sally is sleeping in my room. Her name is Frank, you know.”

Intermittently when Kate brought up Annie/Sally/Frank’s state of hunger or sleepiness, Mark and I gently reminded her that the moth wasn’t alive any more–death being a concept she’s appeared to grock in the past. She could still have the moth and play with it, but it wasn’t alive; wasn’t going to fly away.

But in her Kate way, she’s just tuned us out, resolved in her certainty of life versus death. Preferring instead to putter about with her jar, yammering on, “When Grandma comes, she will like to meet you! Now you’ll have your rest time, okay?”

Sometimes when I can step outside of my wild insistence on the facts being the facts–or moreover me being right and Kate being wrong–my cold little heart temporarily comes around to seeing things Kate’s way. And I wonder what’s so wrong with one hundred being more than one million, just for a day.