Save Some Chicken Parm for Me

Saturday night we had a dancing-on-the-coffee-table caliber throwdown at the house for my birthday. Our friend Randy DJed all professional-like, and some of my favorite straight men got fabulous in wigs that were the wrong colors for their skin tones but oh so right in so many other ways. Mark even got Mitchell’s Ice Cream cake. It was bliss.

And as happily wrung out as I am from all the fun here, I still can’t help but feel bummed to have missed a different party last week.

My Godmother, Mimi, turned 95 on Thursday. And when I called her in the middle of the day, her house was rockin’.

She’s bellowing into the phone to me that she didn’t know she had so many friends and could she maybe call me back another time? It was kinda hard to hear with all the action. Oh, and there’s the doorbell! More guests.

Sheesh.

And is it wrong to admit that part of my sad-to-not-be-there feeling—I mean, how many 95th birthday parties does one get invited to, really?—has to do as much with the inevitably amazing food offerings, as it does with my desire to hold court as a long-standing member of the celebrant’s posse?

Ah, the food. These are the people who throw down a ham, a couple lasagnas (one meat one veg—as if a vegetarian EVER darkened their door), stuffed artichokes, fennel and orange salad, broccoli done guinea-style (cold with a little lemon juice), maybe something with shrimp or scallops, and no doubt a breaded cutlet of some sort. Really, Caligula ate worse than this, but these folks’ll still chastise themselves all through the clean-up and for a good day or two after that they forgot to put out the eggplant parm.

And by “them” I mean Mimi and her sister and ever present sidekick, Aunt Mary. The silly-she’s-so-spry nearly-90-year-old who lives next door, and who reigns supreme over the dessert realm of the food world.

I challenge you to not weep over her Better Than Sex Cake. And every time I’m lucky enough to have some I debate which is better, hearing Aunt Mary snicker with her friends about her cake’s superiority to sex, or the dark chocolate with coconut whipped cream frosting confection itself. You ask me, both are surefire crowd-pleasers.

Another reason it’s so tortuous to miss these shindigs—aside from my denial that there’s an inevitable limited time offer on them—is that parties that Mimi and Aunt Mary throw, even in their dazzling twilight years, are part of my DNA. Growing up next door to them (and their brother, who lived in the third house over and never I’d guess even knew how to boil water, but did an impressive Italian-style job of eating), growing up next to them they’d entreat my mother to host a “little something” for whatever event was taking place in our lives.

My first communion? “We’d love to just have a small party for Kristen.” My graduation from elementary school? Confirmation? My oldest sister’s engagement? “We’d be honored if we could have some people here to celebrate. ” And of course the standards: Christmas Eve, Fourth of July, Memorial Day? “You’ll be coming by, won’t you? It wouldn’t be a party without the Brunos here.”

They’d start cooking days in advance, filling our abutting back yards with a narcotic cloud of essence of garlic. When the party day arrived we’d be drawn zombie-like and Pavlovian out our back door to their homes. In hot weather we’d be on Aunt Mary’s glorious plant-filled patio or in Mimi’s large garage, which doubled as an airy screened-in porch in the summers. (Told you they were Italian.)

In that way that you don’t know what your life would be like otherwise because it’s not that way it’s the way it actually is, I never stopped to think that everyone didn’t have neighbors like them. I mean, Mimi, her utterly amazing late husband, my Godfather, Uncle Ant (as in, Anthony, pronounced ANT-nee, yo) and Aunt Mary—despite the Aunt and Uncle titles and all—aren’t even kin. They just lived next door.

For a while there many of the food fests took place around Mimi and Ant’s pool—an in-ground jobber they’d built when I was in Junior High. It was like the Pool Fairy had finally answered my prayers but delivered the goods one door down. No matter, since they didn’t have kids and I was at their house as often as my own. In fact, Mimi and Ant never swam in the thing themselves, preferring instead to sit at the edge dangling their feet in. (Ant often referred to the pool as “the world’s most expensive foot basin.”)

Between the vittles, the handy proximity, and the effusive Italian grandparent-like adoration, I was too young to know how freaking lucky I was to have so much love cooked into so many breaded chicken cutlets. (Come to think of it, they made great iced tea too.)

It really hit us when my mother eventually moved to a smaller house in town. She marveled that she’d never even seen the folks across the street, forget having been invited over for sausage and peppers and Scrabble.

My nostalgia for the old ‘hood drove me to dredge up an orange photo album Mimi made me years ago. Pictures of me through the years, posing in their clam shell driveway in the JC Penney clothes they’d bought me for back to school, showing off the stitches I’d gotten on my right eyebrow, snuggled up on a bench next to Uncle Ant drinking from one of their plastic orange-shaped cups with the built-in straws that I loved so much. (I’d kill to own one now.) And a bunch of me playing dress-up in Uncle Ant’s old Army hats and over-sized drooping uniforms. (He was a well-decorated Army man back in the day, and a devout fan of the show Hogan’s Heroes, having recorded every episode off of cable onto precisely-labeled VHS tapes.)

Anyway, I came across this Diary of a Catholic Girl photo from around when Mimi, Uncle Ant and I first started hanging out. (I’m the one in white. The one on the left in white, that is.)

I knew right away that Uncle Ant was a social force to be reckoned with. Anyone who wears sunglasses inside at church is my kind of bad ass.

Sadly, I’m bracing to miss another Mary-and-Mimi production next weekend, when Aunt Mary turns the big 9-0. They won’t be cooking for that one since Mary’s kids are hosting, but I still expect to spend some time that day feeling sorry for myself and wishing the Midwest’d finally just cave into the ocean to move the two coasts closer. (A favorite pastime of mine, despite the dear folks who I know and love in those middle parts. In my fantasy they’re all kept safe and are happily re-installed in homes along the new narrow peninsula-like strip of North America.)

We plan to be in Lil Rhody for July 4th, of course. (God sets his watch to it.) It’s my adored, most favorite, never-to-be-missed hometown holiday. And I can assure you that on that trip I’ll be setting aside some time and stomach space to party with Mimi and Aunt Mary. We’ve got some lost time to make up for.

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.

Johnny Can’t Read Music

The girls and I got to spend an afternoon with my sister Judy and her adoptive Indian parents this week. And by the end of our visit I was convinced that everyone who doesn’t already have a set of these—Indian parents, that is—should get one. Judy’s no fool.

We ate an incredibly delicious home-made Indian lunch, and, not unlike our Italian kinfolk, the more we ate had a direct correlation to how delighted our hosts were. There was a lot of fretting over and playing with the children, and we capped off the afternoon with a cup of chai tea that was so warm and mellow and sweet it nearly caused me to curl up in Amma’s lap like a drunk cat sleeping in the sun. Finally we took a tour of the fabulous Eichler house’s equally fabulous yard, snapped a few photos of everyone with the girls on their laps, and called it a day.

What I was taken by in meeting these lovely folks was their warmth and welcome, and seeing how much a daughter my sister had become to them. But later on the phone, Judy also told me about Appa’s impressive background in academia, and Amma’s—and her parents’—staggering brilliance as musicians. Something for which her family is renowned in India.

Presenting, of course, the perfect opportunity for me to remark to my sister with my highest quality sarcasm, “Oh I get it! That’s why you two are so tight! It’s the whole music thing.”

One of my family’s favorite pastimes, aside from rhythmic throat clearing, unsnarling our hair in the morning, and doing laundry, is making fun of our profound musical ineptitude. No doubt I’ve mentioned that somewhere in this here blog before.

If we are not in fact all tone deaf, we’ve spent the better part of our lives believing ourselves to be. Oddly, from as far back as I can remember, my father has boasted about this as if he’s reporting my oldest sister was elected to the Senate. At any rate, it seems to have become a self-fulfilling familial prophesy.

Which, as you might imagine, has impacted our singing. And our staggering un-Von Trapp-ness can’t help but make me think of a meeting the four of us had with a priest the day after our mother died. We were planning the funeral program. And the priest, Father McSweeney (God bless him), a delightful world class Irish nut job, was enthusiastically, gleefully, talking us through some options of song choices.

He was waddling about the room at a frenetic pace, flipping through song books and clucking in his thick brogue, “Oooh, that’s a good one! A good one, indeed!” Despite our heavy sadness—or maybe because of it—he was determined (I resisted the urge to say “hell-bent”) to whip us into a little sing-along. So he suggested some old standard hymn that was beaten into our childhood brains and started in, beckoning to us vigorously with his arms to join in. We got through just a few verses before our collectively cracking voices had us cracking up laughing, and had old McSweeney bellowing cheerfully ceilingward, “He loves us all, no matter! He loves all our different sounds of praise.”

I guess it’s the closest you can get to having a priest tell you your singing sucks.

In my father’s stint years ago as president of his local Rotary Club, he was required at the start of each meeting to lead the group in singing “On the Road to Mandalay,” a tradition I find both charming and absurd. Anyway, Dad’s voice is so bad—and actually quite booming—that he decided quite early on that he’d lip sync the words for the sake of the group. Something that must’ve been obvious, but that no one called him on. (One of the rare times I can imagine my father determining that not talking was the best course of action. Yes, I’m my father’s daughter.)

In terms of actual instrumental training, as kids my sisters had a limited stint of uninspired piano-lesson taking. But by the time I arrived ten years later, my parents couldn’t summon the energy for me to go through those likely fruitless motions.

I’ve joked to Mark that my instrumental prowess is limited to playing the three-note “Hot Cross Buns” on the recorder. But truth be told, I’ve forgotten how to play even that.

It’s all my very long way of saying that I know I don’t get the music thing. And frankly, along with the other socially-alienating fact that I’ve never seen Star Wars, I’m pretty comfortable with it.

But then a couple weeks ago I bought a toy for the girls when I was at Target. The sad fact is, I rarely seem to think to but them toys. So I was pleased to have remembered that I have kids and kids like to play. And in that happy frame of mind I removed a little red plastic xylophone—you know the typical kiddie style-one with the different colored keys—from the box. It’s got the drumstick thingy attached to it by a string, I guess so you don’t lose it, or so your kid doesn’t swallow it and disembowel themselves from the inside.

And as I’m admiring this new plaything, which was certain to bring them hours of creative fun, this white paper fell out of the box.

I was dismayed. Yet a second look at the packaging confirmed that the toy is for children ages 18 months and up.

Now, is it just me, or am I not correct in assuming that in a little more than three months time, it’s unlikely that Paige will be able to utilize this music sheet? I mean, aside from the fact that she’s got the Bad Music Bruno Gene Mutation (albeit tempered by Mark’s musical skillz). Still!

Now, I’m no expert, but I couldn’t help but wonder if some kinda color-coded sheet music, or even one that identifies the letter notes that’re printed on the keys, might be more, uh, user-friendly?

Who knows. Maybe I’m totally wrong here, and come this summer, I’ll be walking past Paige’s room and will hear her pounding out a mean “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” on the xylophone. I’ll peer in to see her crouched down to follow along on the paper, perhaps tapping her foot to keep time.

I can only hope for as much.

A Mother’s Mighty Power

I’m pretty sure it was our friend Gary who called me out on this. He was visiting from Kalamazoo, and we’d taken him to our usual neighborhood haunts, a tour which is as much about eating as it is about seeing things.

The first day I foisted our favorite cookies from a local bakery on him saying, “I don’t really like almond, but these are just so chewy and delicious.” Then at Berkeley Bowl we bought a bag of chili and lime roasted almonds. And a couple days later at the farmers’ market I urged him to try a Bay Bread almond croissant, assuring him, “I’m no almond fan, but these are truly amazing.”

At which point, smart lad that he is, Gary gently informed me that, as it turns out, I apparently do like almonds.

A concept I resisted initially, until he walked me back through our recent gastronomic adventures, and I had to admit he made a strong point.

So last night the Grippandos were here for dinner, seeking shelter from their kitchen remodeling mayhem. (They’re decamped in their living room, cooking out of one of those microwave oven cookbooks from the 70s that you see at yard sales all the time. Or if they haven’t been using one of those, they should be.) For dessert I set out some of the aforementioned amazing almond cookies.

Sacha took a bite of one and declared, “Wow, these are great. And I don’t usually like almonds.”

Later, while making her way through a second cookie, she looked at it then at me and said, “You know, I think I say that I don’t like almonds because my mother always said she didn’t like them. But… maybe I really do.”

At which point I almost fell to the ground in amazement, as though I’d suddenly cracked the code to some long-suffering hang-up in a therapy session.

“My God, that’s it!” I bellowed, no doubt shocking Sacha, and likely making a few of the children start crying. “That is EXACTLY why I have been saying all this time I don’t like almonds! That is SO INSANE.”

I mean, how could it be that by the mere power of our mothers’ dislike of almonds, that both Sacha and I, of otherwise sane mind and strong opinion, could be so swayed–even into adulthood–into thinking that something it turns out we actually do like, we really don’t?

How mighty the power of the maternal opinion!

As a mother myself, I’m now curious and fearful of my newly-realized power. I mean, I’ve now got to make a concerted effort to conceal things I don’t like so as not to rob Kate and Paige of their own opinions. In fact, just the other day I lamented having gotten a parking ticket–blathered on about how very much I hate getting tickets–right in front of both girls! To think that they might otherwise grow up to not mind getting tickets–maybe have been able to let them just roll off their backs–but instead they may now become irriated and irascible upon receiving one because, well, because I always said I didn’t like them.

Or maybe they’ll never even try a mushroom. Those nasty fungi may bring as much joy to them as they do gag reflexes to me. I mean, it could happen.

Who knows what grumpy, damaging, or ill-formed opinion of mine could be unwittingly saturating their souls right now.

Sure, I realize that I use Tide laundry detergent and Skippy peanut butter because my mother did. And like her I’m outspoken in my disdain for playing cards, something I’m confident I truly don’t enjoy. But even from childhood, I’ve always felt fairly competent in my ability to differentiate myself from some of the parentally-crafted lore that exists about my family.

The best example being my desire to take voice lessons as a girl, which was quickly shot down by my mother because, “We’re not a musically inclined family.” A curiosity-squelching remark I find hilarious, since I can’t fathom any modern-day parent worth their weight in Dr. Sears books uttering it today.

Of course, my mother’s comment left me stomping upstairs, vowing that when I became a mega-hit pop star on my natural-born talents alone I wouldn’t share my riches with my family. (Though sadly the music curse did become a self-fulfilling prophesy, since never getting any training left me unable to read music or play an instrument to this day. Well, aside from tambourine, triangle, and some limited cowbell.)

So then, Sacha and me. It’s taken decades, but it seems we’re both coming to terms with the fact that, despite our mothers’ preferences, we just might like almonds after all.

But I’ve discovered enlightenment can just lead to further confusion. Knowing as I do now the great power that I wield as a mother over the minds of Misses Kate and Paige–well, it’s somewhat terrifying. How do I manage that responsibly? In some ways I of course want to mold and shape them, but in other ways it’s my job to stand back and let them be their own people.

Maybe if I just keep them guessing, they’ll develop a strong sense of their own likes and dislikes?

Alas, note to self to buy Jif the next time I’m at the store.

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.

No Place Like Cards for the Holidays

The most socially acceptable medium for showing off one’s kids seems to be the holiday photo card. I mean, it beats the expense, travel, trauma–and let’s face it, limited exposure–of the child pageant circuit.

My sister Judy always calls in any feedback she’s gotten about our cards, which is nice. She covers off on some of the “what cute kids!” compliments that I might otherwise miss out on.

Judy’s best friend Lindelle, who lives on the East Coast, apparently called her last year at 5AM California time squealing about Kate’s posed-by-the-fir-tree innocent beauty. (Despite the two plus decades Judy’s been out here Lindelle has not yet caught on to–or simply decided to ignore–the time difference.) Good Auntie that Judy is, she was willing to take the call despite the early hour, in order to thoroughly process and discuss all elements of the card. (And that’s just one reason why they’re from-womb-to-tomb friends.) 

Judy called in her report about this year’s card a couple weeks ago. Blah blah blah Kate is pretty. And apparently word on the street is that Paigey’s a ringer for our mom. When I shared this with Mark, he claimed he’d been hearing that Paige is a wee version of him.

In either case, both these comments set off my internal awww meter.

But then with further reflection–and a dash of neuroses–it got me wondering. If Paige looks like my mother and Mark, then Mark looks like my mother, right? So does that mean that in some short-circuited Electra-like Complex I married my, uh, mother? And then, did my mother and I give birth to a female baby who looks like my shoulda-been husband?

It’s all just too frightening and confusing.

Maybe next year we’ll just send out cards with pictures of Santa. 

Mama’s Little Girl

My mother used to make up crap constantly. I mean, it was all in the service of urging one of her four daughters to do something, and as the mother of one child who’s turned the unbearable age of three, I can feel her pain. At one point the poor woman had a newborn, an 11-month old, and a 22-month-old. (Then ten years later I happily hit the scene. Surprise!)

Anyway, knowing what I know now, whatever the woman went through to get through the day is totally fine by me.

Her specialty was outlining elaborate reasons why things should be done. Often she’d add some statistics to back-up her argument. And I’m not talking about the classics like “you have to wait at least an hour to swim after eating.” She’d bust out much more detailed data. And although she’s not around to ask the origins of her plentiful stats, I have every reason to believe that based on how convenient they were to her–and the fact that with re-use the numbers sometimes changed–I’d wager she made them up on the spot.

“95% of household accidents happen from untied shoes!” she’d bellow after me as I ran through the house.

Throughout the winter months I’d hear some variant of:
“If you don’t wear a hat you lose 85% of your body heat through your head.”

And of course there was:
“70% of kids who sit that close to the TV develop vision problems, you know.”

Her: “Do you know how many kids who ride their bikes without helmets get into accidents and turn into vegetables?
Me: “Uh… sixty-five percent?”

Who knows. Maybe in Reader’s Digest or whatever women’s magazines she was reading at the time they had entire sections devoted to citing maternally-weildible stats like these. Perhaps she really did have primary sources for it all.

She also had an arsenal of other warnings. They were statistic-free but still rife with veiled health threats: “Drinking coffee will stunt your growth” was one of her evergreens, though I don’t remember ever wanting so much as a taste of her coffee when she was having a cup. Maybe the sum-total of her maternal sleep deprivation by the time I was born led her to preemptively fend people away from her coffee. And again, who could blame her?

Even later in her life when she was so sick that her body could barely process food, she’d insist we stop at Dunkin’ Donuts on the way home from chemotherapy. Something I argued fruitlessly with her about until, requesting the doctor back me up one day, he pulled me outside the exam room to gingerly advise me that if coffee was something she enjoyed “at this point in her life” I should just let her have it.

Hello gut-wrenching reality check.

But anyway, where the hell was I? Mom. Coffee. And most importantly stunted growth–believe it or not, that being the little nugget that I was making my way toward. (Still happy you’ve come along for the ride?)

The thing is with Paige–the gal I’ve been trying to get to through all this Mom memory blather–is that she’s so utterly delightful, delicious and unbearably baby-like still. It devastates me to think of her growing up. Truly! If only I thought the coffee could stunt her growth, I’d give it a shot. (Then I’d just need to figure out how to administer it, since at the ripe age of 11 months beverage-wise the gal’s still exclusively about the boob.)

When Kate was a baby I did one of the smartest things a new mother could do. I got a sitter to come over one day a week–the neighbor’s part-time nanny who wanted extra hours. She watched Kate on Friday nights too so Mark and I could go on dates, ultimately talking about how much we adored (and missed) Kate.

I’ve said it before and no truer words have I spoken: Better to pay for babysitting now than marriage counseling later. (Copyright, 2005-2008 McClusky)

Aaaanyway, it was that nanny, Blanca, who dealt me my first eye-opener about Kate’s growth. I was looking through some larger-sized baby clothes and commenting on how darling they’d be once Kate fit into them. And in her sweetest, non-confrontational, most respectful way, Blanca looked me straight in the eye and said, “Uh, Kristen? She’ll fit into those now!”

And sure, it turned out that maybe I was infantilizing ole’ Kater Tot a wee bit. I realized that maybe we were shimmying her into the 3 to 6 month clothing when really, heck, those 9-month duds weren’t exactly big on her. (Or maybe even fit.) It was just…she was my baaaby! If she was fitting into these bigger clothes it meant–absurd as it is to consider when it’s a matter of months–she was growing up.

This brought into perspective the crying jag a friend told me about years earlier when her husband assembled their first-born’s crib. The baby wasn’t even three-months-old, and was just making the move out of the bassinet. As her husband toiled over the assembly directions, Lisa threw herself on their bed for a dramatic “she’s growing up sooo fast” bawling sesh.

Today I think this is not crazy-lady behavior at all.

Well, whatever psychological force was holding me back from Kate’s move away from babydom seems to only be amplified with Paigey Wig. With Kate, I think it was that she was my first. But with Paige, she’s my last! And such a dumpling, that one! A living doll, I tell you!

Isn’t it okay for me to still dress her in snap-crotch onesies when she’s in high school? And really, what 8-year-old needs treads on their shoes when a soft hand-knitted booty is so much comfier? And say what you will about the independence kids get from walking about on their own. Isn’t there something to be said for the cozy warmth and security that a sling could provide a preteen during those often awkward and trying pubescent years?

Of course, taking the worst possible opportunity to do it, when she’s pushing herself backwards around her room (her brand of crawling) and sobbing dramatically because she needs a nap, I decided to go through Paige’s drawers today and purloin all the obviously outgrown clothes.

Alas, there’s no future sib to get another round of wear out of the burgundy Catamini romper, or the brilliant NASA shirt our friend Kenneth gave Paige. Gone for good is the peach cashmere cable knit cardigan that made both Kate and Paige’s cheeks look flushed and utterly edible. And even the threadbare but darling Carter’s standbys–the now-pilly footy PJs with the lamb and giraffe appliques. I’d think twice about putting them in a thrift store pile based on their condition alone, but can’t bear to rid myself of the outfits my sweet girls wore curled up like angels asleep in their cribs. (Sleep has so many rich positive memories for mothers.)

For weeks–maybe months–now, Mark has emerged from dressing Paige remarking that he’d had to “wedge a leg” of hers into a certain pair of pants or had to “stuff her into” her pink hooded coat. (His none-too-subtle cues to me to get the girl some new clothes.) And half-heartedly I’d mumble something to appease him for the moment.

Well Miss Paige, today you’ve officially made the transition to 18-month-old clothing. (The fact that baby clothes are often sized older than the wee ones themselves is particularly cruel to me and my type.) May your plump little ham hock thighs never strain beneath the pressure of the 0 to 6 month pea green Zutano fleece pants again. And know that even if we don’t have the good fortune that you somehow acquire coffee, devise a way to consume it, and it actually results in retarding your growth–even if that never comes to pass, just know that you’ll still always be my little girl.    

What the Cat Dragged In

While our kids were strangling each other on the sidewalk the other day, a neighbor casually mentioned to me that his cat brought a rat into their house the night before.

“A mouse?” I asked weakly, venturing hopefully to correct him.

“No, no. It was a rat alright,” he replied. “It was actually pretty big too.”

It was one of those things someone tells you nonchalantly, and it’s all you can do to repress a full body shudder and exclamation of GAAAHHHH!

Several minutes later, he’d moved onto some other topic or was chatting with the kids or something, as I stood frozen, frantically wondering, “Was it dead? How big was it? Was it half-dead? Eeeeeeeeew!!! What room did it drag it into? Oh God, was it on a carpet? Was there a trail of blood? Did their kid see it? How the hell–and where–did they dispose of the thing?!”

I could barely stand to even think those thoughts, but I also couldn’t stop myself. For the remainder of the evening, back inside having dinner and such, any quiet moment would lead my mind back to thoughts of THE RAT, which as the night progressed grew larger, bloodier, and more diseased in my imagination.

Well, hey. What do they expect having cats. One of the first things I told Kate when we brought her home from the hospital as a newborn was, “We’re dog people.” I mean, it’s important for kids to know what their family stands for right out of the gate.

My disdain for cats started out with allergies as a child, then progressed to more of a fear of them (don’t laugh) after a couple episodes where I’ve been clawed at. (Turns out they don’t like having their stomachs scratched vigorously or being thumped on the back. Who knew?)

But after this rat story I have a whole new reason to hate.

The thing is, I’m starting to see some cat-like qualities in my own offspring. In Kate. No, I’m not allergic to her, and sure she’s scratched me a few times but in minor unintentional scenarios. Thankfully we’re not at the rat stages, but Kate is doing her fair share of taking the outdoors inside.

Today I was reaching blindly for a rattle for Paige in the great toy abyss between her and Kate’s car seats. Instead I withdrew a plum-sized chunk of concrete. Not exactly the German wooden toy that’ll get Paige into Princeton that I was groping for. And clearly Kate’s work. God knows how she manages to reach down and pry off a piece of the sidewalk before we snap her into her car seat.

And that’s just the car. Inside the house, her play kitchen is a shaman’s workbench. The girl has collected acorns, leaves, sticks, fistfuls of grass, dandelions, and other small organic matter. It’s wedged into little containers, mixed in small enamel pots with tiny wooden eggplants. I even found a Tupperware in her bureau alongside her basket of barrettes, filled with a cache some sort of random sidewalk nut.

Needless to say, outside is another story altogether. The bucket in the back of her trike is full to overflowing with pebbles, leaves, dessicated kumquats, pieces of straw, prickly chestnut husks, and a thoughtfully curated collection of twigs. Seed pods are especially prized booty, as she employs the multiplicity of innards for a variety of projects, most often as the key ingredient to her specialité, homemade ‘soups.’

And I should really just write the hipster architects who live on the corner a check for all the polished gray stones Kate’s purloined from their modern front yard-scape. By year’s end she’ll have denuded the place. And from the small crazy-person piles around our yard and spilling forth from her various front porch bowls and baskets, it’s quite clear that she’s the perpetrator.

Of course, aside from being creepily cat-like behavior, this all can’t help but remind me of my mother. Which is to say, what Kate’s got is in the genes. Driving down the road with my mom you’d think she was swerving to avoid an oncoming car, but really she’d careen to the side of the road with break-neck velocity then hop out giddy like a school girl to haul in a branch laden with pine cones. Some women swoon over designer labels, but a piece of driftwood or a fallen bird nest was what’d weaken my mother’s knees.

Her pine cone habit was at times out of control. Look for a clear place to sit in her car and you’d re-enact a scene from The Sound of Music. For as much as she gathered, emptying the car of her earthly treasures was a less immediate compulsion. The back seat was typically off limits it was so overburdened with her finds, along with her stash of old bread, crackers, and cereal she fed to wild ducks. (The woman single-handedly changed the dietary needs of the North American Mallard by causing them to grow dependent on stale Ritz Crackers.)

At least the pine cones, chestnuts, shells, and other natural detritus my mother gathered were the raw materials for some backwoods-type Martha Stewart projects. (Though it should be known she found Martha to be “a puke.”) She’d gild a bale of nut husks and pair them with some holly sprigs, quahog shells, and maybe a pineapple or two. Slap on some peat moss and rig in a few candles and next thing you know we had a centerpiece worthy of a White House state dinner. As wacky as she was, the end products were always impressive.

As far as I know, none of Mom’s roadside finds made their way into her repertoire of soups, though it’s hard to really know for sure. Come winter, she did did make a hearty stew.

About Me

I realized recently that my blog lacks an About Me section.

The problem is, my personal IT support technician/spouse is away on a business trip, so I’m unable to alter the site’s, uh, complex architecture singlehandedly. (Besides, it makes Mark feel so needed when I let him do these things for me.)

While I await his return, here’s my first take on how I might describe myself:

I’m a mother of two from Oakland, CA who hates mushrooms. My ears aren’t pierced. Well, they were once, but those holes closed up decades ago. My mother died of pancreatic cancer. Women who’ve had natural childbirth are my heroes. I’ve never seen Star Wars. I’ve been a VP, toy reviewer, CNN producer, and state park employee. My favorite holiday is July 4th. I love surprises, resist change, and can’t tolerate wimpyness. I adore old women. I’ve had migraines that have put my right eye out of commission for weeks at a time. I once ate a 24-course meal. I’ve never competed in the Olympics. I went to cooking school to become a pastry chef, then decided against it. I’ve chatted with Mick Jagger. I loved high school and was unimpressed with college. My father’s name is Ferdinand. Altogether I’ve taken 13 years of French. I’ve never had a perm. I’ve lived in Rhode Island, Ohio, Massachusetts, D.C., New York, Georgia, California, France, and England. In a life riddled with happiness, motherhood has brought me supreme contentment. Some people think I have nice hands. I once spent a raucous night out with the White House Secret Service. Sometimes I want to eat my children. I don’t know how to follow a football game. My husband spent the better part of his career at Sports Illustrated. If I were President, liking coconut-flavored rum wouldn’t be uncool. I pronounce ‘aunt’ AHHHnt and ‘apricot’ with a short ‘a.’ Cats scare me. I have a terrible memory. The greatest compliment I’ve ever gotten is that my daughter Kate looks like me. I can dish it out but I can’t take it. Math Game Day in fourth grade always gave me a stomachache. My father is afraid of heights and peach fuzz. A psychic once told me I was a famous ballerina in a past life. I skipped having a first marriage and got a brilliant trophy husband at age 37. I’ve never had braces. For a made-for-TV movie I once played a woman who choked while eating in a restaurant. Parades often make me cry with joy. If I had a hammer, I’d hammer in the morning. The love I have for my husband and daughters can best be described as rabid. I’m an obsessive yard saler and recovering packrat. My super powers are the ability to sleep anywhere and parallel parking. I’m the youngest of four girls. I disagree with the way the word ‘segue’ is spelled. I didn’t make a million dollars before turning 30. I look dead in both yellow and light gray. I once stuck a pussy willow up my nose. Seeing a person carrying a box of hot pizza always delights me. I think people who put lines through their sevens are pretentious. If it’s not too much to ask, I’d like a high school marching band to play at my funeral. I know how to say the following things in Polish: ‘underwear,’ ‘Grandma,’ ‘ass,’ and ‘I’m going to throw up.’ I’m a wannabe Jew. If it weren’t for house cleaners, I’d get around to changing my sheets about as often as frat boys do. My best piece of financial advice is to pay for babysitting now instead of marriage counseling later. I’m an avid recycler. My greatest life’s work has been ridding myself of any trace of a Rhode Island accent. It wasn’t until my mother was gone and I had children of my own that I realized I’d inherited her brilliance for tackling tough laundry challenges. I can’t be inside on sunny days. I felt betrayed my senior year of college when the hippies cut their hair short to get jobs at investment banks. I’m not even a little bit country. My last meal would include a Del’s Lemonade.

How much room do they give you in those blog templates for the About Me section anyway?

Well, this will have to do for starters.

I am not my mother… I am not my mother…

For a while now Kate’s been all hopped up on hearing me tell stories about when I was a little girl. I’ve told her about vacations we took, playing in snowstorms, my sailing lessons, and the day we went to see the dog, Tramp, we ended up adopting. But by far of all the stories I’ve conjured from my past, the one Kate requests the most is the one about when my mother forgot to pick me up from school.

You see, my elementary school was across the street from my house. But my mother would still take me there–help me cross the street in the morning and fetch me at the end of the day because, of course, YOU NEVER CROSS THE STREET WITHOUT HOLDING MOMMY’S HAND. Right?

So, one day my mommy didn’t come to get me. All the other mommy’s and daddy’s came to pick up their kids. (I always include daddies when I tell Kate this story, but really, hell if a single dad performed this duty back then.) So, bereft that my mother had potentially left me and taken off on the Green Tortoise bus to California, or some such, I stood in the corner of the school yard and cried and cried and cried.

(She was likely on the order of four minutes late. But you know, kids and time and all that.)

So here I am crying.

“Then who came, Mommy? Then who came and saw you?”

Then, as I was standing there, a police man pulled up.

“In a police car, Mom?”

Yes, in a police car. And he said, “What’s wrong little girl.” And I told him about how my mother always picks me up from school but today she didn’t come get me. So, the nice police man asked me if I knew where I lived, and if I wanted him to give me a ride home.

“In the POLICE CAR, Mama?”

Yes, in the police car. Of course I felt super cool. So I get into the police car and I’m checking it all out and the police man asked me where I lived. And I pointed to the yellow house right across the street.

“Hahaha [fake laughter], that’s funny, Mama, right?” Kate says, not entirely understanding why it’s funny but knowing it’s supposed to be.

Yes, that is funny, Kate. But the police man didn’t laugh. He just asked me if I thought we should just drive around the block a couple times before he took me home. (No, he didn’t offer to put on the siren. But I took what I could get.)

Anyway, when we get to my house the police man rings the bell and through the window I saw my mother at the kitchen sink. She sees me and the police man, opens her mouth, looks at the clock over the stove, and runs to open the door while she’s drying her hands. She explains with immense embarrassment (as I stand smugly holding the policeman’s hand) that she had totally lost track of time and thank you SO MUCH officer, and of course that will never happen again.

Needless to say, my mother would have to endure several lifetimes before I’d ever let her live that one down. 

Anyway, I’ve managed to pass that old yarn down through a generation. And, like any kid, I could come up with a few other stories of minor maternal slip-ups. None of them truly damaging, neglectful, or malicious, but certainly things that collectively informed some of my “I’ll never do that” attitudes about my own mothering.

Like when my friend Steve told me he and his wife were expecting their first child. Nearly immediately after announcing the news he vowed he’d never do that spit on your thumb and clean your kid’s face move. So, you know, we all have our issues.

For me the “I won’t do thats” are more along the lines of forgotten field trip permission slips. My mother seemed to lack the gene for ever remember getting those in on time, leaving me to hold up more than a few field trips when a teacher flipping through a pile of papers at the front of the bus would mutter in dismay, “Oh wait… We don’t have one for Kristen Bruno. Again.”

Mom also thought nothing of leaving a sink full of dishes when we’d go see my grandmother for a few days. As for me, I can’t go to the bathroom with a dirty dish in the sink.

The other big thing I vowed to never fall prey to was lateness. Four girls, one mother, and one shower–and our collective estrogen level–made it understandably difficult getting out of the house en masse. Late, loud and clumsy arrivals tended to be a Bruno family hallmark. They gave grumpy Father Coffey a legitimate reason to leer over his pulpit, and me a legitimate reason to swear that my own family would assuredly be different some day.

Today, with Grandma Peggy here providing two extra hands, Googled driving directions, and a departure time mapped out that’d give Kate plenty of time to suss out the scene and fluff up her tutu before her first dance class–we set out. Well, I didn’t actually print out the directions, just skimmed them. I did write down the address. But before long it was apparent that I had no idea where I was going.

An exit off the highway dumped me into an unfamiliar neighborhood (stress spike), though I managed to quickly get back on in the other direction (manic upswing), to quickly realize it was the totally wrong highway altogether (flop sweat). I fumbled around in the backseat with one hand trying to wrench my phone out of the diaper bag. I considered calling the dance studio for directions, then Mark (for directions and sympathy), then just trying to figure it out on my own.

The clock ticked away minutes closer and closer to the class’ 9AM start time. I did a lot of muttering under my breath and a couple seemingly safe u-turns, though my mother-in-law  was gripping the side of the car door white-knuckled. She politely kept offering to “do whatever she could to help”–no doubt ending that sentence in her mind with “just get me there alive.”

All the while I lambasted myself over how Kate would miss getting a good start to her new class. Meeting the teacher, hearing the rules, getting oriented with the other kids. Was I remembering all the first classes I got to late? You bet your ass I was.

Did I think about the first bat mitzvah I was invited to? Where my mother drove me to the one synagogue she ever remembered seeing in Providence, where I threw open the doors to an empty temple, then returned to the car–which was of course devoid of the invitation–where we continued to drive around the city asking pedestrians if they knew of any synagogues nearby, until finally, after a teeth-grinding grand tour of no less than five synagogues we found Cheryl’s family and friends pouring out onto the sidewalk at the end of her ceremony? (Don’t worry, I didn’t miss the Blue Jeans Disco Dance at the Marriott after.)

Anyway, as I was driving around hell and gone Oakland with my mother-in-law, and baby, and three-year-old who was asking “Where’s my dance class, Mama?” yes, yes, yes, I was thinking about all that.

Eventually my own Guardian Angel Direction-Dispensing Pedestrian pointed us in the direction of MacArthur Boulevard. And despite a long series of palm-sweating steering wheel squeezing red lights, we slowly made progress in the right direction.

Blah blah blah. We eventually got there ten minutes late. Surprisingly, I hadn’t blown a neck artery, and Peggy hadn’t peed her pants from fear of my driving or my rabid must-get-there-on-time wild-eyed determination.

Peggy pumped money into the meter, holding Paige on one hip, and I grabbed Kate and ran down the sidewalk into the dance studio. When we regrouped after Kate joined the class Peggy kindly made a “we’re a little late but no harm done” remark.

Indeed, it didn’t appear that Kate’s lateness affected her
in any long term psyche-scarring way. Though I guess it’s too soon to
tell. It’ll take a few more times of us skidding in after the bell before she makes her own resolve to never do all the things that I do when she has her own family some day.