~1976~

Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like if my mom had kept a blog when I was a kid. Would it be all that different than mine? Posts about loving her kids to distraction, struggling to be the perfect mom, wife, worrying about money, politics, clothes, friends, trying to figure out who she is through the veil of so much other. So I asked my mom to write a blog post from the vantage point of a day when I was Zoey's age, and this is what she sent me. I mean, kind of. She actually sent me 7 pages of handwritten notes and I printed them out, edited and added, because this is my blog, after all, 2010, a year that one day will oxidize...

Dear Blog That I Never Kept Seeing As How The World Was One Al Gore Away From The Internet But This Is In My Daughter's 37 Year Old Imagination So Just Go With It, Thanks,

It's 1976, the summer of the Bicentennial. Today I took Andy & Susannah down to the Taco Bell where they each got a commemorative liberty bell glass that they will both keep well into their adulthood, god knows why. Gerald Ford is president. I like him about as much as I like Eddie Fisher, which is to say not so much. This is what I do like: Norma Kamali, Pepsi, the Stones, Fleetwood Mac, though secretly my Gene Autry LP still does it for me. Thank god my Klute haircut has finally grown out!

Here's the thing: I'm 31 years old but that's it. I have a 3 year old girl and a 6 year old boy. I am married. Every day I check my calendar by the phone to see who needs to be picked up where, what's for dinner. One weekend I went to est; I screamed when told. So here I am moving away from my Southern, six-times-a-week church-going, good girl self in the hopes that I will find me.

Next week I'm getting a perm.

I know who I used to be, I know who I don't want to be, and I know that I never ever want a pixie haircut. Which is why I did mushrooms last Saturday with my husband. (Of course I made plans for Andy and Susannah to stay with my friend, Nancy for the day, parking them in her living room so that I could go on a trip without having to pack. I am, after all, a very good mother, and that is both me saying that and me, no me, Susannah. She is a fantastic mother, and this is all very meta, no?)

Anyhoo, I went home and we ate the mushrooms. Ed warned me that I might feel sick, and not twenty minutes later I started to throw up in the toilet, suddenly entranced with the way it swirled into the bowl. The colors! It was awful and hilarious and I did not know how to move when suddenly I looked up and there stood Andy and Susannah with Nancy and her two kids peering in at me from the open bathroom door. Sorry, she said, they just really want to hang out here. Which, I'm sorry, but fuck her, she knew what we were doing!

Pleasepleaseplease, Sunday school God! I will wear Capezios, wrap around skirts! Please just let me get through this day, please give me back my mind and whatever you do, don't let me melt...

To make a long story short, and believe me when I say that my 37 year old daughter has very much abbreviated this story, the kids played in their rooms for maybe an hour or a decade when suddenly I heard a yowling and a hiss and then crying. Kids crying. A cat. The smell of something solvent, plastic, hair, I don't know, it was hard to tell what was real and what was a hallucination. But there was our cat, Dumb Darryl Chicken Liver Whip Whap Sick Sack, covered in styrofoam packing bits that the kids had glued to his fur to make him look as if he'd been in a snowstorm.

Have you ever held your cat down so that the vet can shave him while you're tripping on mushrooms? It's funny and not funny but really funny when on psilocybin and then only kinda' funny when your daughter posts about it on her blog 34 years later.

So I probably won't be doing shrooms again. Or leaving my kids with Nancy. Although she did apologize and invited us over to her house this weekend for a hot tub. Her husband's a shrink and he's got this new medication called Quaaludes which is supposed to be super relaxing, especially in a hot tub. I just hope my perm doesn't get too frizzy!

xo,
Judy