Seasons Greetings from Our Frat to Yours

Our happy little home has been converted to a frat house, just in time for the holidays.

It all started a couple weeks ago when I rearranged Kate’s bureau. Now she can reach everything herself when she gets dressed. But the unexpected outcome of the change is that Paige can get at it all now too. And she does so with vigor.

Paige rifles through Kate’s once perfectly-folded clothing daily. She reaches into drawers she’s too short to look in like Helen Keller ravaging the refrigerator for a midnight snack. She wanders out of Kate’s room dragging a pair of PJ bottoms behind her, or maybe a flowered skirt. But generally it’s intimate apparel Paige parades around with most. She puts Kate’s undies on teddy bears, stretches them over the back of kiddie chairs, and attempts (usually unsuccessfully) to pull them on over her shoes and pants.

Apparently Paige’s desire to stage pantie raids is insatiable.

Add to that, as if we’ve been scattering months-old pizza boxes and empty beer cans around the place, we’ve become besieged by ants. Hoards of them convening under the kitchen sink, swarming over a morsel of child-strewn scrambled egg, or confusingly, making their presence boldly known in the pristine, seemingly un-delicious knife drawer.

I’m a true blue ‘more is merrier’ kinda gal. But these guests are utterly unwelcome. I’ve been told they’re Argentinian ants, but frankly knowing their fabulous nation of origin does nothing to escalate their social merit in my mind.

Dare I proclaim victory prematurely, I hesitate to say that it appears we’ve successfully driven the ants away. I mean, thanks in part to the professional stylings of an exterminator. On his visit to the house, I peered beyond him out the front door to get a look at his ride. In a deep what-will-the-neighbors-say fret, I inquired as I swiftly wrenched him by the arm into the house, “What are you driving out there?” [Insert nervous laughter.] I mean, in the same way that porn is mailed in plain brown wrapping (or so I understand), it seems like exterminators should drive discreet unmarked vehicles.

“No luck there,” the guy said, motioning to the van parked behind my car. It had huge cartoon-like images of  brightly-colored roaches and rats splayed across its sides. Enough to make me want to proclaim to passers-by that all we were dealing with was a simple rainy-season ant infestation.

Alas, I swallowed my public shame so the legions small vile beasts would blessedly, finally be gone. (Which isn’t to say that any guest who pops by and stirs a spoonful of sugar into their tea isn’t being hawkishly watched by Mark and me, lest a stray grain of ant-attracting sugar fall to the floor.)

With the ants in exile, the things moving around the house most these days are our Christmas tree ornaments. Whenever Kate and Paige are out of sight for a moment they’re inevitably found pawing at the tree like cats at a scratching post. They regularly denude the thing of the ornaments in their reach. Kate sometimes even drags a chair over to get at the fragile or beloved ones I intentionally hung up high. Then, somehow without us ever witnessing it in action, they ferry the ornaments into the kitchen.

At any given moment an assortment of red balls, hand-sewn Santas, or Germanic wooden nutcrackers line our kitchen counter tops. They teeter just on the edges, the spots where small arms can just barely reach to stow them.

I’m not sure why the girls seem to find that there’s something wrong with these items being on the tree versus wedged alongside our toaster. Someday perhaps I’ll understand. Years from now counter-top Christmas decorating may be all the rage, and I’ll chuckle to myself as I tuck stray wisps of gray hair back into my bun and adjust the tennis balls on my walker that, “There was a time when you girls seemed to just know that this was the direction that holiday home decor was moving in. And to think that your father and I thought you were just plain crazy!”

But where was I? I’ve ventured into the future like some Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come and here I was trying to tell you that with the ants and the pantie raids we’ve gone all collegiate Greek hereabouts.

And part of the whole toga party feel involves Miss Paige, whose vocabulary has been sprouting new words lately like tiny mushrooms popping up after the rain. Just Monday she learned to say “No.” Yes, on Sunday she was a sweet innocent thing, unable to utter that most negative of terms. Then, SNAP! On Monday her little mouth started forming a word that sounded very much like—Wait, was it?—Yes, Mark and I agreed that what she’d just said in a truly darling testing-it-out kinda way was, “No.”

So now our frat house also features Paigey Wigs, still growing used to her walking legs and staggering around while muttering “No no no” under her breath. It’s like she’s some boozed-up co-ed whose been freshly indoctrinated in the “No Means No”mantra of collegiate dating.

It’s only a matter of time until Paige’s Nos grow up to be definitive modes of warding off the unwanted. In the meantime when I hear them I can’t help but cup my hand under her pudgy chin and whisper an adoring Minnesotan-sounding “Nooo nooo nooo!” back at her. I will love them until they turn on me.

Really, lots of things happen in frat houses, some shameful, some raucous, some even innocent and fun. But beyond all the abandoned pizza boxes, discarded brassieres, and creatures scuttling along the floor, to those who live there the place still is home.

So from our house—such as it is these days—to yours, I send you joyous season’s greetings. May you be enjoying the mayhem as much as we all are here.

Isn’t She Lovely?

“Dorothy, will you look at that dress,” a woman at the coffee shop clucked to her friend, nodding towards Paige who was staggering around their table, mashing a cranberry scone into her mouth and leaving a trail of crumbs behind her. “It’s just too precious.”

“She had a school interview today,” I said, corralling her toward me. “And she’s not even two years old!”

“Whaaaaaat?” they balked simultaneously.

It was just the response I’d been hoping for, though I surprised even myself with the apparent bitterness the recent experience had brought out in me. Funny how it’s not until you encounter some kindly old women who are sipping cocoas after their weekly walking club jaunt that you come to terms with how you really feel about something.

It hadn’t only been Paige who had gotten decked out for an interview that morning. Kate had paid a visit to the school too. It was part of the application process. And to be fair, the girls weren’t really interviewed at all. The applicants are asked to come in to spend some time in the classroom. It’s a chance, they say, for those of us jockeying for entry to kick the tires on the school—as much as it’s the school’s chance to size us up. You know, make sure “everyone feels comfortable.” But that always seems like code to me.

So I was dressed up and geared up to charm, but I was also mildly leery. Call me an egomaniac, but any club that won’t warmly welcome me without ever having met me I’m somewhat suspicious of. I’m just that way.

I started in the two-year-old room with Paige. (For the young’uns they ask the parent to tag along.) For most of our time there Paigey wandered around, taking an inventory of their toys and occasionally, briefly, interacting with another kid. She acted pleasantly enough. No dramatic behavior, no fearful clutching at me, no shouting racial epithets.

She squealed with delight a few times while playing with a dollhouse—something I looked around to see if anyone’d noticed, as it seemed, given the situation, a sweet, appropriate thing for her to be doing. You know, the kind of thing someone “who would fit in well with our community” would do. But as far as I could tell, neither she nor I were being observed or really noticed much by any of the school staff.

Of course it wasn’t until we were up in a small aerie-like nook off the main room—a hide-away decorated with bright floor pillows, wooden cradles, and a disarray of dress-up clothes—that one of the teachers came to peek in on Paigey. It was when she was at the toy cash register. She was swiping what appeared to be a little credit card through a slit in the machine over and over again. I mean, at that point any self-respecting cashier would’ve just typed in the card’s data. But Paige apparently inherited my optimistic streak.

Between credit card swipes she’d hold a black calculator she’d found on the floor up to her ear like a cell phone and say, “Dada? Dada?”

The teacher, one of those preschool gems who’s been with the school for something like 20 years, turns to me and asks, “So are you home with her?” And it was all I could do to not blurt out, “Well, yes, but really I do more than shop and use my cell phone! I mean, I’m really not sure WHERE she learned these behaviors.” [Insert nervous laughter.]

Later, while Kate was whisked off to the Big Kid Room to hopefully perform acts of staggering cuteness and genius, Mark and I met with the head of the school. Our conversation started out with the lethal, “Well, I’m sure you both have plenty of questions.” [Long pause.] And really, with the amount of time we’d spent at the school’s open house, reading about the place, and interrogating our friends whose kids went there, we kinda didn’t have any questions. Which therefore left us with an expanse of time in which we were required to say insightful or endearing things to win our kids two coveted spots at their finger painting table.

Instead I seemed to just say lovely. “We thought it would be lovely to have the girls at the same school.” “Our neighbor’s kids go here and they’re such lovely children.” “During the Open House I just found something so lovely about the two-year-old room.”

This is no doubt, collectively, more times than I have ever used that word. But something about being there, knowing whatever we did or said or wore, or how Paige reacted to not being able to open her Tupperware of raspberries herself, or all of those things in combination, knowing it was being observed, somehow the pressure of all that just made me want to say lovely a lot.

Mark, the dear, of course called me on it. “What up with all the lovely?” he asked as we we flopped on the couch post-kiddie-bedtime that night.

“I know, I know,” I said cringing.

Senior year of college we were required to take comprehensive exams, or ‘comps.’ As an English major you could choose to write a huge paper or take a test covering everything a good Kenyon grad should know literarily before emerging into the world. Well, everything that someone who’d read all the books they should have should know.

Nearly everyone opted for the paper.

In the giddy post-due-date afterglow of handing our papers in, I was hanging out with a group of friends. We were debriefing on what we thought the quality of our work was. My friend Leah, an outrageously funny Chicago-born gal, was holding court amongst us, sharing her secret to success.

“My title was The Distinction Between the Poetry of the Late 18th and Late 19th Centuries,” she said. (Of course, I’m making this topic up because at this point I can barely remember what I even wrote about.) “I made sure to point out the distinctions between the styles of poetry. The distinctions between the various poets. And, no doubt the distinction between the brilliance of my paper, and, say, your-all’s.”

‘Distinction’ was the term the school applied to comps that merited honors.

“After those gin-soaked profs read my comps,” she said with a flourish, “They’ll have no recourse other than to award it distinction.”

The group of us, hanging out at a cafeteria table long after the lunch crowd had left, howled at this, pounding the table and wiping our eyes. Of COURSE, Leah did that. And if she really hadn’t, it was sheer brilliance for her to even suggest that she did.

In that spirit I can only hope that, when that school’s Executive Director sits down a few weeks from now to make her pronouncements about who’s in and who’s out, she’ll pick up the folder for Kate and Paige and turn to her assistant. “The McCluskys…” she’ll say slowly, flipping through her notes. “Oh yes, them. A lovely family, weren’t they? I think we most certainly have a spot for them.”

I Love You, I Love You Not…

There’s been a cold snap here. Gray skies, biting winds. The children of the Bay Area have insufficiently-warm outerwear, and their parents are all thin-blooded wimps. During the day when we might normally be at the park, or on the front porch, or cruising around the neighborhood on bikes, or strollers, or the red wagon, we’ve been stuck inside, hiding from the cold.

I’ve loved it.

The girls and I have spent such sweet happy afternoons snugged up indoors. We’ve cooked elaborate feasts with wooden toy food, conducted tea parties with real cinnamon-laden victuals, and read countless books about Christmas. It’s been so freeing knowing that getting out of the house just isn’t an option. Usually once Paige wakes from her nap I’m on a madwoman’s mission to get everyone’s shoes on and diapers changed and bike helmets secured. Channeling my mother I bellow the rallying cry, “It’s a beautiful sunny day! Let’s get out of this house!” I’m a self-professed fresh air fetishist.

But lately we’ve been padding around in slippers. Assembling puzzles. Doing projects with Popsicle sticks. Digging to the back of the closet and finding long-neglected toys that the girls delight in reacquainting themselves with. And a couple times this sugar-stingy Mama has even thrown caution to the wind and whipped up a pot of hot chocolate.

All that plus streaming Pandora Christmas carols. Now this is living!

During one of these happy floor-dwelling moments, when Dr. Kate and I were injecting Paige with some pretend inoculation or other, I thought about our warm weather life. I dug up the following post, which I’d written last year (for pay!) for a wine company blog. The blog—which several woman across the country were hired to contribute to—sadly never emerged beyond the marketing firm’s conference rooms.

Aside from the contrast it shows to our current indoor existences at Camp McClusky, the post brought to life how mercurial my love for this city is. One minute I can’t imagine living anywhere else, and the next I’m calling Mark at his office to announce we are packing up and moving to a small town. Somewhere. Anywhere. Just not HERE.

I’m like a dramatic child lying in the grass plucking daisy petals. “I love you. I love you not….” The only difference being I’m not talking about a youthful crush, something it’s okay to be fickle about. In this case it’s where my husband, daughters and I live. My “I love you not” episodes have the ability to rock other people’s worlds much more intensely.

But today? This morning I’m still reveling in a lovely neighborhood party from last night. This afternoon the Mama Posse is taking our older kids to San Fran to see The Velveteen Rabbit, and there are cookies to bake before then.  I’m filled to the gills with the holiday spirit.

I’ve got love for all people, all places. Even Oakland.

So, despite the fact that our front porch has just been functioning as a pass-through these days, this old never-posted post still captures my current emotional reading on our little corner of the world.

The View from the Front Porch

This is the story about a woman in a strange city, with a new baby, and how a bottle of wine saved her. Or as it were, saved me.

But before we get to the wine, let me back up a bit.

At the time I was managing a complex jumble of major life changes. Like some guy in a lumberjack contest running to keep his balance on a log so he won’t fall in the water.

I was so busy wrangling with it all that I didn’t fully realize how much of it there was, until a few different friends commented on my excess of Major Life Stressors. Most people, they all said, could only handle two of those doozies at once. But there I was exceeding that quota. As if I had any choice.

And while I’m at it, what up with that whole “two big life stressors” urban-legend-like theory? It seems like one of those Ann Landers quizzes that circulated in high school. (You know, the one where your final score revealed if you were a slut or not?) In this case I picture it as being an actual list of Life’s Hugest Stress Triggers with checkboxes next to them. And the smart mortals only check two at a time.

Aaaaanyway, where was I? Exceeding my stress quota. Okay, so what I had going on was having just moved to a new city—just over the bridge from where I’d lived for 12 years, but still. Devoid of local friends and the ever-presence of my lived-just-five-blocks-away sister. It felt like worlds away. I feared I’d be offering monetary incentives to get our city friends to ever visit.

Other stressors: I’d taken an indefinite hiatus from my maniacal love-hate time-sucking career. I was mourning my mother’s recent death. And I just had my first baby.

Oh, and did I mention I’m not really one for change?

I handled it all swimmingly. Which is to say I nearly refused to conduct commerce in Oakland, driving to San Francisco with my dry cleaning and sometimes even to grocery shop. I seethed every time my sister asked about traffic before deciding to come by. And I rejected the social value of neighbors as friends since, well, they lived in Oakland. They were Oakland people and I, well, I was from San Francisco. And likely just passing through.

But thank God for sidewalks. Where our new neighbors imposed their friendliness upon us despite my cynicism and Urban Girl guard being up. A friendly wave from the lady across the street when I grabbed the morning paper drove me back in the house ranting, “What’s up with her? Does she stand there all day waiting to pounce on people with her chirpy hellos?”

I was resistant. But even I can be worn down.

Because when you are tired, and smattered in spit-up, and have already called your husband’s office seven times by noon desperate for adult conversation, even the freaky old neighbor ladies and their little yapping rat dogs start seeming kinda nice.

Oddly, the women my age—especially the mothers—I held further at bay. With their older children, I considered them to be professionals at the mom thing, where I felt like a newbie, a maternal imposter.

It wasn’t until one evening when a random sidewalk chat stretched out, and seemed silly to continue just standing there, that I invited one of those moms to take a seat on my front porch. And like some bad movie montage, where the calendar pages flip to show time passage, eventually we’d see each other, sit longer, chat more, pass off outgrown kid clothes, and watch as the hip-held babies interacted. It wasn’t until one evening—both bushed from grueling kid-tending and diving deeper into some conversation or other, that I offered up a glass of wine.

“Well,” she said, performing an etiquette dance that’d do her mother proud, “I don’t want to put you to any trouble… Do you have anything that’s open?”

“Yes!” I yelped, over-eagerly, thrilled by the prospect of an impromptu happy hour, a new friend to talk to while the babies lolled contentedly on a blanket by our feet. “I have something we opened last night,” I said, trying to tone down the mania in my voice. “No problem at all.”

At which point I went into the house, grabbed a bottle of chard from the fridge, opened it, dumped a bit in the sink, grabbed two glasses, and waltzed back out to the porch.

Sometimes you don’t know which cork it is that you should hold onto—which bottle of wine will mark something worthy of a saved-cork tribute. In retrospect I wish I had that one now.

It’s three years and another baby later. I can’t count the number of front porch hangouts I’ve hosted on the fly—or with much-anticipated planning—since that first one.

Nor can I count the number of times that after calling Mark to lament that maybe this wasn’t working (this me staying home with the kids thing), maybe I needed to go back to work, get the girls a nanny—that he’d come home a few hours later, to find me commandeering the front lawn sprinkler for a gaggle of sopping screaming kids. And Jennifer, and maybe Bob from down the block who works from home, or really any number of other stopped-by-on-their-way-past neighbors would be on the lawn or perched by the porch table, which was loaded with a hodge-podge of kid and adult-friendly snacks, sippy cups, and a bottle of unapologetically opened-just-for-the-occasion wine.

And here Mark walks into the scene, expecting to find me pouting inside, resentfully changing a diaper or playing my fourth game of Chutes and Ladders, but instead I’m half-soaked and laughing, on a totally different plane from the frustration and self-pity of just hours before. But, sweetheart that he is, he never calls me on it. He just greets the gang, goes in the house, drops his lap top bag and grabs a wine glass for himself.

Thank you thank you Universe for getting me past that hard lonely sad first chunk of time here. Thank you neighbors for not giving up on me. Thank you dear daughters for coming along on the ride where I figured out that being a mother doesn’t mean leaving all of person I used to be behind—that I can be responsible and grown-up and still have some fun.

To my beautiful family, my great city, and my groovy little street of friends—I raise my glass to you.

I think I finally feel like I’m from Oakland.

Stayin’ Alive

I’m dripping with get-rich-quick schemes. Not that I’ve ever set any in motion. I just keep them mentally tucked away. They’re like alternate 401K policies. You know, something I can tap into if the financial going ever gets rough.

One of my first entrepreneurial ideas was the seemingly brilliant gym-laundromat combo. I hatched this concept back in the days of laundry-facility-free post-collegiate living.

I could imagine no better double-dose of self satisfaction than doing laundry while working out. Dump your clothes into washing machines and do a half-hour of cardio. Flip it to the dryers, then lift some weights. Towel off, maybe even shower (if you’re lucky enough to live near one of the deluxe full-service locations), then fold your laundry and go.

After such a highly-functioning hour, one could easily spend the remainder of the day watching a People’s Court marathon and eating Pringles, guilt-free.

Yes, that was how my mind used to work.

But these days, with two wee ones, I can see myself spending a day parked in front of the TV as easily as I can imagine my two- and four-year-old cooking me dinner from Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Besides, life with a washer/dryer on-site has become a given, not a fantasy. Alas, my gym-laundromat idea has lost a bit of steam.

My next dazzling idea—one that’s sure to delight backyard barbequers the world over—is much more aligned with my current Mama-mode lifestyle. The idea is—drum roll please—the Hot Dog Patty™. Yes, the it’s-so-brilliant-why-didn’t-YOU-think-of-it hamburger-shaped hot dog. It alleviates the pesky grocery-store hassle of having to estimate how many hamburger and hot dog rolls to buy.

Now I admit, the Hot Dog Patty has a few aesthetic hurdles to overcome before it starts flying off grocery store shelves. But I’m confident that with the right team behind me we can iron out those kinks, and before long be rolling in round hot dogs and riches.

Oh I’ve had other ideas. Outposts where singles can rent puppies to more easily pick up people in parks. Career counseling for mothers going back to work after baby-tending breaks. An online store selling black-out room-darkening curtains in cute patterns for baby rooms.

For a short while I was hopped up on making a compilation CD entitled High School Funeral Songs of the 80s. Now, I realize this is much more of a niche item, but I’ve spoken to a few people (who, granted, were inebriated at the time) and they seemed really keen on the idea. In no way do I want to disrespect anyone who’s had the misfortune of attending such a sad event, but hearing those standards like The Rose and Wind Beneath My Wings again can’t help but bring you back to another time and place.

And I can’t be the only self-absorbed socially-obsessed teen who fantasized about my own fabulous, flower-festooned funeral. I mean, I’m not proud to admit it, but I daydreamed about the over-crowded church. The sobbing preppie popular boys, bereft that I was gone when they’d never asked me out (or ever even really noticed me). I’m certain other people imagined their popularity soaring like a Bee Gees song on the pop charts once they were suddenly gone.  I mean, gone in some way that still allowed them to look fabulous in an open casket, feathered hair perfectly in place.

But once more, the passage of time, and a blessed mellowing of my dark tastes, changed all that too. Long before adulthood any off-color funeral fantasies I had petered out. And with the birth of my children, they were utterly and wholeheartedly extinguished. (Gone too, thank God, is my bad hair, which really never took well to feathering anyway.)

A few weeks ago, I tagged along with Mark on a blissfully child-free four-day work trip to New Yawk City. We ate indulgent, gout-inducing meals at erratic, family-unfriendly hours. We strolled down crowded streets holding hands, tried on overpriced shoes, and whenever the spirit struck us headed back to our hipster hotel to nap, smooch, or watch bad TV in bed. I carried a Big Girl purse, without a single diaper or Kleenex.  And one night we spent $70 on just three cocktails.

Ah, New York!

It was, as the French say, incroyable. Mark made me laugh until I cried. He dazzled me with his killer charm and dashing good looks–even busting out a swank pin-striped suit for one party. Throughout the trip he reminded me how damn lucky I was to have landed him. I mean, not by pointing it out to me or anything. Just by being him.

We even missed the girls at the same times, somehow synching up our indulgent carefree episodes and our sudden desperate needs to call home. It’s nice to know that when we’re not busy with all that kid-tendin’ Mark’s still my favorite playmate.

Another thing that kept coming up on the trip, for me at least, was the weird nagging sense of needing to, well, to stay alive. As much fun as I was having away from the kids, I kept remembering my parental responsibility to return home in one healthy and functional piece. To have fun, but to do it safely. Even though I wasn’t pushing a stroller, I still waited for the ‘walk’ signal to cross the street. Well, at least most of the time. At any rate, it turns out that being a mother has engendered in me the ultimate opposite experience of the teen-aged funeral fantasy.

Blessedly, our plane back to SF touched down uneventfully. We drove home without incident. And when we joyously burst into the house, we found Kate watching TV, oblivious to our arrival. Like some dog you leave at the kennel who has to punish you for your absence, she foiled the rapturous leaping-into-my-arms reunion scenario I’d played out in my mind. Instead we got, “This is a show about pets. Shhhh… I’m watching it.”

Paige was napping, so we got even less happy homecoming hoopla from her. Oh well.

A couple nights ago Mark strode from the kitchen to the living room saying, “I can’t believe I keep forgetting to tell you this!” He went on to describe a conversation he and Kate had the day before. Out of the blue she asked him what happens to children when their parents die. And Mark, dumbfounded, managed to muster the response, “They live with someone else who loves them very much, and they take care of them.” And he tacked on, “But you don’t have to worry about that. Mama and I are going to be around for a very long time.”

She asked this, Mark said, in a total matter-of-fact way—no tears or fretting. And she accepted his response similarly, with a satisfied nod and a look out the window.

I nearly vomited with sadness and love hearing this. It was all I could do to not bang open the door to her room, and throw myself on her sweet sleeping self, never to let go.

“My God,” I asked Mark dry-mouthed, “How the hell did you cope with that?!”

“We were driving across the Bay Bridge,” he said, “But I practically abandoned the steering wheel to crawl in the back seat to wrap myself around her.”

Word to that, man.

Dear Kate—and Paigey Woo, too—you girls are extra-specially lucky because you have a Mama and Dad who are working really hard at sticking around for a very long time for you. We have no intention of missing your hellish teen years, or Princeton graduations, or the time in your twenties when you move back home unemployed and start dating creepy older men who we disapprove of. In fact, when you guys are living with us then I thought maybe we could have a standing Tuesday night Scrabble-and-tomato-soup-and-grilled-cheese date. What do you think?

I want you both to know that I love you both like a total crazy lady. In a way you’ll only understand when (if) you have kids of your own. And with full awareness of how utterly cheesy it is, I will say here and now that you two girls are without a doubt the wind beneath my wings.

The Walking and the Dead

It was killing me that I forgot my camera. At first at least.

I was in San Francisco at night, kid- and husband-less, roaming around the Day of the Dead celebration with my sister and her friends. And man, was there amazing eye candy. Incredible fodder for photos.

Tons of folks had their faces painted white, with black-hallowed-out looking eyes and other skeleton-like features. That might not sound so terribly spooky, especially on the heels of Halloween two nights before, but trust me, milling around the Mission at night with hundreds, maybe thousands of people who look like that and are carrying orange marigolds and lit candles and photos of their loves ones who have died—it creates a certain ambiance.

There were lots of full-bore costumes too. Men in elaborate Victorian high-necked dresses, long full skirts, wigs with curls piled high. I mean, men in San Francisco use a bi-annual teeth-cleaning as an excuse to wear a dress. Troupes of roving drummers and dancers festooned in jingly gold wrist and ankle bracelets swept past. One woman in white face was carried on a platform Cleopatra-like by four attendants. Even dogs, toddlers, and babes in arms had face paint or photos pinned to them.

Ostensibly there was a parade, but the streets and sidewalks were so flooded with people, everyone walking or dancing and moving forward en masse, it was impossible to tell parade participants from on-lookers.

In the midst of it all I thought, “Why would I ever want to live anywhere but the Bay Area?” And, “I’m definitely coming back here next year—every year.” Also, “I wonder when Kate and Paige will be old enough to see this without freaking out?” And, “Why oh why did I forget my effing camera?”

At one point my sister’s housemate, who I’d bemoaned my cameralessness to, handed me hers. “Snap away!” she trilled. But the thing felt heavy and awkward in my hands. I tried to focus on someone, but they swept by before I could ever orient myself.

I handed it back to her. “Ah thanks,” I said. “But I’m actually fine.” After all my lamenting I realized I didn’t want to be taking pictures at all. I just wanted to be drinking it all in directly.

It’s been over a week now—ten days to be precise—since we experienced a momentous, long-awaited event here Chez McClusky. Paigey has finally, blessedly, started walking.

It happened on a Friday at a divey Mexican restaurant. The girls and I met some of my Mama’s Posse friends for a last-minute lunch. Our kids were crawling everywhere, spreading rice and beans on the carpet like confetti, and watching Yo Gabba Gabba on Sacha’s iPhone as a last-ditch effort to maintain decorum before we all fled home for nap-time. Mary had dashed out suddenly a few minutes before, when she’d realized her parking meter had expired.

And from that utter mayhem—or maybe in an attempt to free herself from it—Paige quietly stood up, set a course forward, and jerkily placed one foot in front of the other toward the restaurant’s front door. Sacha and I watched stunned, and I commented to the booth of lunching lesbians next to us just how long I’d been waiting for this day.

“Oh I know about late walkers,” one gal at the the booth’s edge said. “I have twins. One walked at 12 months, and the other waited ’til 16.”

“Really?” I said. “Well Paige here, she’s twenty-one months old.”

At a slight incline in the floor, Paige wavered, fell backwards, then pushed herself up and resumed her herky-jerky strut. I was standing frozen in joy and disbelief when the dykes next to me all started clapping and hooting. Paige looked back at them grinning, fell on her butt again, then got up and headed for threshold and the open door.

I was so touched by the enthusiasm of those strangers, I realized later I should’ve done something impulsive and celebratory like picked up their bill. But in the moment I only managed to snap out of my rooted watching mode with enough time to grab Paige before she hit the sidewalk solo.

It’s weird waiting for something for so long and then having it suddenly there. I thought I’d want to shout from the rooftops that my girl was walking. In fact, I came home that day and attempted to write a splashy celebratory blog post. But my heart wasn’t in it. Not that I wasn’t happy, mind you. But it turned out to be a quieter sort of contentment, not a giddy yelling-out-the-sunroof kinda glee.

I feel that weird but distinct brand of Mama guilt that it’s taken so long for me to share the news. But I’ve been spending the time well at least—slowly following Paige as she waddles down the sidewalk, or taking half-steps alongside her as she proudly walks though Kate’s schoolyard to pick her up.

I’m always on the go, always happily hurrying from one place to the next, but I can’t imagine a better reason for slowing down these past several days than to walk through the world at Paige’s wonderful new pace.

Renting is the New Rich

My friend’s husband swept his hand along our speckled-gray linoleum kitchen counter. “You guys are lucky,” he said wistfully. “Really.”

Why? Well, he wasn’t referring to our not-even-Corian counter top. His point was that we have the good fortune—as he sees it—to live in a 1,600-square-foot cottage. A rental. Whereas he owns a grand home in a manicured stately neighborhood. A house with a master bathroom, as well as a family room and a living room. A grown-up big boy house.

But in the past couple years he’s often grown wistful when he, his wife, and kids visit us. When he looks around at our compact living room, our Home Depot-appointed kitchen, and our children’s modestly-sized but lovingly-decorated bedrooms.

We have something that he doesn’t. Less.

It feels like the Curly Hair Straight Hair Syndrome—the thing that’ll have Paige desperate to blow-dry her curls flat some day, while Kate burns with envy over Paige’s ringlets. But this is about houses, not hair. It’s the same thing, but in bigger, more grown-up terms. We go to their neighborhood and I delight in not having to lock the car doors. I luxuriate in the adult conversation that takes place while the kids play in another room.

I admit it. I’m jealous.

We don’t see these friends nearly as much as we’d like, so when we do get together we have a lot of ground to cover. And we’ve gotten efficient about it. “The job? How’s the job? And Jeremy’s school? You still liking it?” We trade good news and worries like baseball cards. Sometimes new things are in the mix, sometimes it’s the old standbys. I’ve heard my friend’s hubbie lament their large mortgage before, but this time when she brought it up too, my concern lingered.

I mean, I know a housing crisis is raging through the country like a forest fire. But I think I’ve been naive enough to think it wouldn’t reach my friends.

And then another old friend dropped by the next day. She was on my side of the bay for a work thing, so she came over first for tea. She’d never been to our house.

“Oh your place is so cute!” she said the moment she stepped in. By her second or third remark on the charms of our Craftsman I felt obliged to point out that the place isn’t really “ours.” “We rent, you know,” I said, feeling the slightest twinge of Lowly Renter Complex.

“It’s just we were looking to buy when I was pregnant with Kate,” I went on. “And we weren’t finding anything we loved, and I was getting pregnanter and pregnanter until we finally just decided to rent. Especially since we’d never lived in the East Bay. Best to kick the tires before committing, right?”

I should carry a tape recorder around. I’d save a lot of breath on my frequently-compelled-to-utter Why We Rent Rationalization if I could just hit Play.

The part I often fail to mention is when we were looking to buy and we ran the numbers on our monthly payments, we realized I’d have to return to work right after having the baby. We couldn’t make it work on one salary. And I know myself well enough to picture myself crying in an office bathroom stall, leaking milk and lamenting that I had to leave my weeks-old baby with a sitter.

I know millions of women do this. Right now thousands of stalls nationwide are packed with weeping Mamas. And my heart—and a rumpled Kleenex—goes out to them. But if there was any way I could avoid joining their ranks I wanted to. Instead of being a slave to a mortgage, I wanted the option of staying home with my baby. If only in the short-term.

My visiting tea-drinking friend lives in a spectacular home. It’s perched high over a harbor cove with views that tourists take honeymoons to see. One whole side of their house is glass. And since I last saw the place—then a real estate wet dream—they’ve redone their kitchen, pushed out the walls. Made it even fabulouser.

I made some comment crowing over her divine place. “Well, if we can even hold onto it,” she said flatly.

The remark may well have been exaggeration, but she went on to point out the long sliver luxury car she’d pulled up in. “Oh God, that thing. It seemed like such a good idea a year ago and now it’d be impossible for us to pawn off.”

Before even covering all our catching-up bases, my friend looked at her watch and announced she needed to dash. Paige and I waved from the porch as she drove off, and when we turned around to go back inside I looked around our compact quarters with a new sense of appreciation.

“Maybe Paigey,” I said setting her down by the coffee table. “This place isn’t so bad after all.”

The Mystifying Laws of Attraction

The best imaginary friend I ever met was a can of salmon.

I was in Providence, and my womb-to-tomb friend Amelia was graduating from Brown. We were hanging out in her flat when one of her housemates herded her family through. They were on their way to or from some ceremony or dinner or requisite visit to the bookstore.

During our introductions, the housemate’s kid sister got in a big huff about someone having been overlooked. So the housemate rolled her eyes and said with a pained expression, “And this is Barnaby.”

Uh, Barnaby? There was clearly no one else there. But the little sis was thrusting something in her hand towards us. And on further inspection we saw it was a can of salmon. A dinged-up, tattered—dare I say well-loved—can of salmon. It was, as was later explained to us, the kid sister’s longtime companion. Her “special friend.”

Of course, I LOVED it. I wished I’d been so eccentric as a child to join forces with an inanimate household object and love it dearly. I wanted to go out drinking with the kid. But back then I wanted to go out drinking with pretty much anyone. And for reasons far less compelling than the chance to converse with some chunk salmon.

Anyway, Kate hasn’t befriended any food items yet. But around here it’s hard to know what her imagination will serve up next. We seem nearly constantly embroiled in elaborate pretend play. And she can get stuck in odd patterns with it.

Lately, for instance, she asks me to pretend I’m her neighbor, and explains I’m visiting her because she has a hurt foot. She’s either in the hospital or has just come back from it. I half-expect that at any moment Bobbie Spencer will walk in and take her vital signs. And sometimes when I’m not in on the game, I’ll walk past her room and hear her soothing a stuffed animal whose foot is hurt.

My mind wanders to strange conclusions about why this is of interest to her. But when I ask she’ll just say, “Well, Neighbor, I was crossing the street and a truck runned over my foot.”

Ah. Well sure.

The girl also has a book she likes having on her. It’s not Good Night Moon, or Angelina Ballerina, or even something ageless like The Giving Tree. It’s called Toilet Training In Less Than A Day, an outdated 70′s-era paperback I got at a yard sale for a nickel, and haven’t read one word of.

But Kate? She pours over it. It’s mostly text, with a few line drawings of a kid on a potty, pants around his ankles. You can’t even see any of his boy parts. Kate’s well past her potty training prime; far beyond finding bathroom issues novel or interesting. I don’t think she values the book based on its subject anyway.

She drapes her legs sideways over her green stuffed chair and flips through, page by page. At times she “reads” from it to her dolls or animals or to Paige. It’s always a different story, never about potty training. She takes the book on long car rides. Tucks it into her play purse when she sets off on a pretend jaunt to the store.

Lately, monkey-like Paige is drawn to the book too. Only, of course, because it’s something Big Sis likes. Poor Paigey must flip through those endless pages of text wondering what the hell Kate sees in the book.

And now that Wiggle is in on the action, I find random pages torn in half on the kitchen floor. I open the bathroom door and see the cover, ripped off and discarded. I carefully scoop up the shreds as I find them and bring them to my desk, where I wield Scotch tape and play book doctor.

That’s where it sits now, freshly restored from its adoring dismemberment. There’s a pink starburst on the cover proclaiming “2 Million Copies Sold!” I wonder how many of those are loved as much as ours.

Too Young to Feel this Old

“So how much of an old lady am I?” I asked a friend the other day, as she came back from putting the kettle on. “I brought my own teabags.”

“Well, that depends,” she said. “Do you also have packets of sugar in your purse?”

Heh.

For the record, I am not in the habit of making off with fistfuls of free sugar packs from restaurants. Well, not yet at least.

But lately it’s not just my teabags that are making me feel old. My lower back has been seizing up in the middle of the night. Waking me up and requiring me to spend several minutes just trying to roll over or move my legs to stretch out a bit. It’s excruciating.

Even my chiropractor wants to throw in the towel. And I’ve formed a twice-a-week habit with him.  But he suggested I see my primary doc for an MRI, and thinks I should get some physical therapy.

Add to that this cold—this loogie-laden, dull-headed seasonal cold that’s persisted now for well over a week. It saps my energy, leaving me lifeless by early afternoon, to the extent that I push aside soul-sucking guilt and plop Kate in front of TV while Paige is napping, so I can get some rest myself. By the time Mark gets home I’m a dishrag, stumbling through the day’s final acts of Mama-hood grumpy, impatient, and having slim hope I’ll feel any better the next day.

And Mark, my sprightly hubbie nearly five years my junior, even he’s coming undone lately. Ever the weekend warrior, he can hop on his bike after several computer-bound days and conquer a mountain with impressive ease. But suddenly, without even falling or wrenching it, he’s got a jenky knee. His body is letting him down for the first time ever, and it’s utterly infuriating. Digging an ice pack out of the freezer last week he grumbled to himself, “Is this is just what happens when you get old?”

But my bad back and his bum knee aside, it’s nearly Halloween. And no holiday makes me feel more young at heart.

For a week or so I was bereft, lacking a brilliant costume idea. For myself, that is. I feared I was losing my edge. I was coming up with possible get-ups that were both obscure and impossible to implement.

“Paige will be a piano… And I’ll be Liberace!” I declared to Mark one night.

“Liberace?” he said, making a face like he’d sucked a lemon.

It wasn’t very supportive of him. But really I had no idea how I’d make Paige into a tiny grand piano anyway.

Then an idea came to me. Something kinda funny and doable that’s not lowering the bar over my past twisted, sordid, or absurd costumes. Something that won’t make me feel like the mother of two who had to hang it up.

What is it? Well, like the names of children I’m pregnant with, I don’t reveal anything until the Big Day.

Anyway, I set out for one of those pop-up Halloween superstores to forage for supplies. Inside the shop I tracked down a salesgirl, likely a student from the nearby Cal-Berkeley campus. Even though I’m making Kate’s requested dog costume (I know, BO-rrrring!), I’m curious to see what they have by way of props.

“You know,” the co-ed says, twisting a long lock of hair around her finger, “We don’t have animal costumes here. But we have another store in Emeryville. You might want to check there.”

“So wait,” I say. “What you’re saying is, you all don’t carry animal stuff, but another branch of the same store two miles away might?”

“Yeah. Weird, right?” she says. “I mean, when I got here I was like, where are all the animal things? Those are pretty standard costumes, right?”

“So do you think, it’s some sort of Berkeley thing?” I say, getting a little amped up with the absurdity of it. “Some kind of vegetarian-minded animal-cruelty type thinking?”

“Huh,” she says, looking out of the corner of her eyes, thinking. “Yeaaaaaaaah… Probably.”

Okay. So I feel old.

My Good Egg

I’ve not always been the best bed mate.

Mark may not often admit that, the dear, unless you catch him on a morning when I’ve had what he refers to with restraint as “a particularly active night’s sleep.”

You see, he’s a light-as-a-feather sleeper. And I could slumber heavily alongside a train track. I’m a deep deep sleeper who’s also on the move, stretching, flopping over then back like a fish, pedaling an imaginary bike, or curling fetally into what Mark calls my “comma position.”

I do sleep as a high-impact sport.

Mornings, the volume of my hair snarl and the intensity of Mark’s bloodshot eyes are the indicators of  just how fervidly I’ve thrashed through the night. Usually without ever pulling out of my corpse-like slumber.

I am not a night-time tinkler. (In fact, I hold mortals who speak of “getting up at night to pee” in mild to moderate disdain.) Before kids became part of our traveling show, I’d fall asleep on planes prior to take-off, and be nudged awake before landing by flight attendants insisting I “return my seat to the full upright position.” At the dramatic height of a movie or TV show, I could suddenly nod my head, let my jaw hang lax, and conk out cold.

Sleep is my super power.

Of course, I’ve been pregnant twice too. So Mark’s also suffered through months of me engaged in nighttime aerobics, but wielding a large inner baby and scads of assorted pillows I’d pack around myself like I was some fragile teapot being sent through the mail.

I suddenly discovered what it was like to wake up in the night, uncomfortable with a hip that seemed it was being crushed in a vice. Add to that, I was having to pee. (Me!) My pillows were my desperate effort to defend my long-cherished run of failure-proof sleep. They were my mental and physical support. Like a full-body nighttime bra.

Yet even they failed me. Because whenever I rolled over I’d need to reconfigure the innumerable group of them on the new side.

As if that weren’t bad enough, once I’d finally get settled the skin on the soles of my feet would feel dry. (My own personal crazy-lady pregnancy thing.) So I’d reach to my bedside table for lotion, sweeping my glasses to the floor, clanging my glass of water, and ultimately, upsetting my strategic pillow array. Waah!

Poor Mark. A frat boy after a night celebrating his 21st birthday couldn’t sleep through that.

Often, understandably, Mark would give up and schlep to the couch. And as long as his pillow and blanket were gone by daybreak, so friends or house cleaners wouldn’t question the health of our marriage, I was admittedly happy to be alone. Doing snow angels in the sheets with my immense baby-filled body. Not worrying about moving too much and keeping Mark up, I’d fall asleep nearly instantly.

Alas, it’s likely Mark’s days of pregnancy-induced couch sleeping are over. (Sniff!). But this week I’ve had a cold. I NEVER get sick. My take on colds is akin to the mortal weakness of night peeing.

And Mark’s been so horribly busy at work. At night he gets to crawl into bed with me sniffling, snorfling, coughing, and worst—doing the Bruno triple throat clear. From my lump on the left sife of the bed I radiate germs and self-pity like rays from the sun. And my already unsexy cadre of nighttime attire has bottomed out with the cold-weather return of my flannel Lanz of Salzburg granny gown.

Let’s just say I’m no Betty Draper.

But through it all Mark’s been the attentive tough-love nurse. “Have you even taken zinc? Or Vitamin C?” he’ll ask, then sigh, trundle off, and return with a handful of pills and a tall glass of water.

This morning he delivered a cold pill and some decongestant or other before I even got out of bed. I mean, at least that’s what he SAID he was giving me.

But seriously, if you haven’t met my husband, let me tell you. He’s a good egg.

When the girls were wee babes and I was getting up a lot at night to nurse, since Mark holds the title of World Featherweight Sleeper, he’d be up too. In fact, he’d be the one shaking me to consciousness when the monitor was blaring baby cries and crackling static at Volume 11, right at my ear.

“Uh, honey? Kristen? The baby is up.” And I’d've been on such another stratosphere of deep sleep I’d walk heavy-legged and dull-faced down the hall towards the crying.

But when I got back into bed, without fail, he’d have fluffed my pillows.

I know it seems like a small thing. But it was such a sweet act of I-wish-I-had-boobies-and-could-help-out-more kindness. If I weren’t so damn tired, I’d have taken his face in my hands, planted a big smooch on his forehead, and blubbered happy words of appreciation.

Turns out having one’s head drift down into two perfectly fluffed pillows is an exceptional simple pleasure. Especially when you’re months into no more than three or four hours of sleep at a stretch.

And another thing about that man, because I’m on a roll now. When he’s cooking? And cutting up carrots for something? He chops off a little nubbin of one and brings it over to me wherever I am. You know, like where I’m setting the table, or digging in the bottom of the closet for my other clog.

I don’t even remember how it is that I told him about this, but the reason he does it is it’s something my mother would do. She spent 70% of my childhood cutting up raw vegetables to set in front of me. Or handing me a piece of celery off the cutting board, before dumping the rest into a pot.

Speaking of her, I had that phone thing happen today. The thing people talk about when someone close to them dies—still getting the impulse to pick up the phone and call the person, then having the realization that you can’t.

Google really should work on that.

Anyway, what’s weird is that it’s been ages, like, over five years, since mom and I have had one of our meandering, sometimes only mildly-interesting daily phone calls. So I’ve been over that phone call habit for a while now. Or so I thought, at least.

But earlier tonight, after Kate’s dance performance and before dinnertime, I was tired. I’d been on Mama duty all day, with a ragged voice, goopy cough, mounting headache, and two young unsympathetic charges. I was summoning my last bits of patience and energy to get a bare-bones frozen ravioli and salad dinner on the table.

I was cutting up carrots to steam—’cause it turns out my mother’s veggie-pushing got passed down in the genes—and as I turned on the oven to warm some bread, it started. Not that I thought I wanted to call her per se. It’s more that this string of thoughts about feeling worn out, and the girls arguing over books in the other room, and it starting to get really cold at night here now that it’s fall—this series of thoughts I was running through in my head were things that were somehow sort of customized for her. The kinds of things I’d be telling my mother if I could.

And then that one part of your brain that can be sitting back when another part is doing something else, it prompted me with the thought, “Hey, seems like you want to be calling your mother right now.”

Which had the potential to take me to the brink of feeling far worse about the state of things than I already felt. I mean, feeling sick and tired is one thing. But the dead mother trump emotional card always beats out everything else.

But blessedly, before I could even go there, the lock on the door clicked in that barely audible way it does when Mark comes home. And Kate sprang off the couch with an amped-up need to tell a story, and Paige, from her spot on the floor stretched out her arms for her tragic pick-me-up-you-don’t-KNOW-how-much i-missed-you act.

In a snap, that little door click redistributed all the energy in the house. And when the door swung open, it was like all the thoughts swirling around in my head got sucked outside in the back draft.

Sometimes that man has just got perfect timing.

Ahead of Schedule

Last week our Israeli babysitter came up to me holding Kate’s new anatomically-correct doll. She had its diaper pulled down.

“Okay, so what is this?” she asked, waving the uncircumcised plastic penis at me. “Really, Kristen,” she said, in mock dismay. “I don’t know about this!”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “That doll? Definitely not Jewish.”

For the past couple months, whenever we’d go to our local toy store, Kate would immediately run over to where this doll was shelved. It was all boxed up with a pacifier, a bottle you could fill with water, a diaper, and a little training potty. Oh, and a penis! An actual working—well peeing at least—penis.

Or as Kate says, a “pee-NOOS.”

Now, I realize this pronunciation is absurd, but you try telling an, ahem, self-assured young child that she’s saying something wrong.

Anyway, for weeks she’d visit her pee-NOOS doll and totally obsess over how much she loved it, how great it was that it really tinkled, how desperately she needed it, and how I’d better get it for her before someone else came in and snatched it up.

Oh, and did she mention it has a pee-NOOS?

Now, I didn’t expect that Kate would become quite so interested in pee-NOOSes at this age. I mean, she’s FOUR for God’s sake. And this particular pee-NOOS doll obsession actually began when she was three. (We staved off getting the damn doll until her fourth birthday.) But three, four, whatever the age—I couldn’t even utter that word until I was MUCH older. As in high school, maybe. And then, (and even now a little) not without giggling.

At any rate, it seems that a lot of things around here are progressing faster than we expected.

Last night before dinner, Kate was sitting at the table doing some little art project, and I called to her from the kitchen to please wash her hands before dinner. She ran past me and mentioned something about also “having to clean up the hair on the table.”

“Huh?” I said. “Hair?” And I walked into the dining room to see scissors, purple construction paper, and Crayons, covered with a layer of wispy locks of hair.

Now, for some reason I had no idea where this hair, this FINE BLOND LITTLE GIRL HAIR, had come from. “Is this from a doll, Kate?” I asked, confused and annoyed.” It really took me a couple minutes, hearing her innocent “I dunnos” then eventually noticing her new asymmetrical ‘do, to finally grasp that it was her hair.

Ah well, there goes the cute bob. Now her hair looks like one of those choppy surfer dude wigs. Well, on the right side at least.

“I thought we’d have to wait until the teen years to worry about this,” Mark muttered as he set our turkey burgers on the table.

And then, mid-way through our meal, Paige shoves her fingers down her throat. All the fingers on one hand. She gags, then looks around at us, and makes a huge proud grin. From across the table I’m yelping, “Paige! What are you doing, Paige?! Don’t do that!” as Mark turns his head away so she won’t see him laughing, and want to do it more.

So then, we’ve got rampant pee-NOOs interest, self-hacked punk haircuts, and pre-bulimic baby behavior.

God help us when these girls turn five and two.