No Title

Me: Guess what?

You: What?

Me: My mom has cancer.

You: ...

Me: ...

My brother, my mom and me, circa 1995.

I could go the factual route, which is somehow easier in its clinical-ness, though some may not be comfortable with the TMI-ness of said clinicality. On Tuesday, February 12 my mom called 911 in excruciating pain and went to the ER in acute renal failure. CAT scans showed a large mass on her cervix...turns out it's malignant...diagnosis is stage 3 squamous cell invasive cervical cancer.

Or I could go the hand-flapping, snot-bubble-blowing sobbing route, which is what I have been choking down since this happened. (Don't hug me! I tell people at work, knowing that I am a back pat away from losing it.) When they wheeled my mom away for the first surgery I bent down to tell her that she is magic and my voice caught on the word. My relationship with my mom has not always been easy but she has always been magic in that I live in awe of her, don't always understand her and love her beyond logic. She held my head as I cried about how magical she is, like a stupid fucking kid crying over unicorns, her body suddenly so light and tiny beneath me.

My mom has always said she is a realist; I call her a fatalist. I don't know what will happen. Fuck that. Yes, I do. I know that I will be there for my mom through this, hold her hand as she deals with whatever treatment she decides on, because I am an optimist, and I believe in magic.

For now I just turn to Bryan out of the blue and say guess what? Because I am trying to get used to it, to wade out from beneath the underwater raw numb place that I have been in for the past week. What? he humors me. My mom has cancer.

The Very Last First Kiss

I am never again going to have a first kiss. At least I hope not, because I love Bryan and our life together and I don't want anyone else. Though I'd be lying if I didn't say that the thought of never having a first kiss again didn't make me pause. The uncertainty, the butterflies...(but let's be real. I've been with Bryan since we were teenagers. Do adults get nervous kissing someone for the first time? Clammy? Clumsy? I hope so, for everyone's sake.)

My very first kiss was with a boy who had blubbery lips. I wrote it about it eons ago, but it was one of the Petunia-faced posts long-lost in The Great Google Account Deletion Doh! of 2008, so I will recap it quickly for you: 7th grade, 7 Minutes in the Closet. I went to my first boy-girl party and what I remember most is that some girl got her period on the white couch and the boys all laughed while the girls laughed harder. Karma, karma, karma, karma, karma Chameleon, we come and go, we come and go-ooo...someone suggested a rollicking game of 7 Minutes in the Closet even though I was pretty sure it was supposed to be 3 minutes, so I feigned boredom and ate pizza. At the time I was "going" with a boy named NotBob (in that his name was totally NOT Bob but in this age of wwwEveryone'sBusiness I don't want him to find this). Honestly, I had no idea what "going" meant, but I was 12 and just wanted somewhere to go. I was a cool, modern (read: terrified, stupid) 7th grade girlfriend, so I "let" NotBob disappear into the closet with lots of girls that night as I tried to pull off a sophisticated apathy. Of course I was 12, so after an hour or so I relented and let someone push me into the closet with NotBob. In the dark, he reeked of Cheetos and the closet smelled like wool. And then his mouth: wet, too big, tongue, and all I could think was this is it???

My first kiss sucked, as I imagine most do, but my second kiss was with Bryan, yes, Bryan of the til death do we part Bryan. This time I was in the 8th grade. He kissed me up against a chain link fence, me leaning low against it because I was taller than he was. I was wearing his trench coat with the Madness iron-ons and Sharpie drawing of The Specials, and I remember thinking, yes this. is. it.

(Sometimes in my revisionist history I erase NotBob and pretend that Bryan was my first kiss, my first everything, all fireworks and Marcia Brady with Davey Jones if Davey Jones had married Marcia and they had two kids and drove Toyotas. Let's play that game, shall we?)

It wasn't until 22 years later that I had my second first kiss, the exact nomenclature a little awkward. This time it was with Zoey, sweet 17 month old Zoey who clasped my face and kissed me, mama, the best kisser of them all. (Apologies to my husband and NotBob who we agree to agree never happened, yes?)

And now this: Ozzy. My last first kiss, since I am not having more kids and don't want anyone other. Ozzy. He has taken to coming at me with his mouth open, a strategy I hope he works on later in life, but for now--wow. Hot-breathed Ozzy. He kisses me with wild abandon and laughter, pushes his fingers into my mouth to inspect my teeth, puts his face up to mine so that I can taste the joke. With him it is all funny, the way he kisses me as though it is a punchline, an abstraction, guess you had to be there even though I am there, something just between us. My last first kiss, and I am sad.

This is it. Yes. Oh, I know they will still kiss me. I have years left of smooches, comfort, quick kisses hello and goodbye, but this is the last of my firsts. And the beginning of theirs.

Graham cracker breath and milk. Mwah.
xo,
S

February 4

Sometimes I don't think it was anything that the judge said or our signatures or even the vows, but that cab ride we took down to City Hall that made us married.

15 minutes of us smiling at each other across a torn naugahyde bench seat while being driven too fast down Fulton, giddy and stupid with the promise of it all.

8 years, 2 kids, 4 houses, 6 jobs and 400 Taco Tuesdays later, I look back at these pictures that really weren't taken that long ago and think about how smooth my forehead looked that day. Last night I slept in Ozzy's crib because he was crying, pulled myself tight into a ball and slept that way until morning with no pillow, no blanket. Just me in my robe and our son in his sleepsack, the promise of that cab ride made not good but really fucking great.

Happy anniversary, love.
xo,
S

One Photo

My Grandma Do. She is 18, standing on the deck of the ocean liner Rex. She and her mother are going to see the Olympic games in Berlin. It is 1936, and I have no idea what she is thinking.

If you read about the 1936 Olympics there is much about Hitler, how he used the games to show the world a resurgent Nazi Germany, promoting his propaganda about "Aryan racial superiority." These are also the games where Jesse Owens achieved international fame by winning 4 gold medals, the most successful athlete at the Olympics that year.

5 years later my grandmother would be married with one son, and the night before my grandfather shipped out to fight the Nazis, my father was conceived. (My dad has always thought of Pearl Harbor Day as another kind of birthday.) Years later my grandfather returned from the war and my dad finally met him, though there is a quiet family belief that he returned irretrievably broken, mean.

My grandmother died when I was 12, though my memories of her are larger than life. She is my Auntie Mame, my own Ruth Gordon; it's easy to deify someone when you can still be bought with rainbow colored sprinkles. So I stare at this photo never knowing her as an adult. What was she thinking?

I put the pieces together like this. Also competing in those Olympic games was another African American athlete named Archie Williams. He won the gold for the 400 meter race, and 52 years later taught at my high school. How thin that is, I think, the wire...a photo of my 18 year old grandmother on her way to Berlin where she sees Hitler and watches a man win a gold medal, a man who later teaches her granddaughter math (or tried to) even though she is not yet married, does not yet have her sons or thinks of grandchildren, does not yet know that war is years away from tearing everything apart, or from putting everything together, depending on how you think of Pearl Harbor Day. Would I exist if not for a day that would live in infamy?

Sometimes my dad comments on my outfit, says I look trig, which is something his grandmother used to say. It means stylish, jauntily trim, and so I look at this photo and think my, how they look trig, greedily searching the photo for the story I know lies beneath.

Tuesday (Monday in Masquerade)

Some days, like today, I walk past homeless people sleeping on sidewalks and think how did we let this happen? As a society, I mean. The plaza I cut across on my way to work is home to bike messengers hocking loogies and homeless people huddled beneath blankets soiled stiff. Which makes it sound as if the bike messengers are huddled beneath the blankets with the homeless people, but no. They are just there smoking pot and the homeless people, they are just lying there. Sometimes I see them and feel sad; sometimes I don't notice them at all, and that is sadder still.

Bryan and I got into a big fight, the kind that we could not resolve so here we are, slowly creeping back toward one another with small offerings of kindness, a bowl of popcorn and a quiet i love you said at the end of a phone call. Because what is the alternative? Either we have this same fight for the rest of our lives together or we don't have the rest of our lives together. The thing of it is, he makes really good popcorn, adds extra salt and butter, and the kids have his eyes, so. There's that, which is all there needs to be.

I went online to my health insurance carrier to get my eyeglass prescription to order new glasses and couldn't find it. There I was poking around in the tab marked "Health Summary" and found that I have been formally diagnosed with an ongoing medical condition: Hypochondriasis. This is not a complete surprise, but still. Seeing it there on my permanent record like that. I ended up having to email my doctor because I never did find my eyeglass prescription and now I'm afraid she's going to email me back that I don't actually need glasses, what am I talking about? Freak.

That's all I've got today.

xo,
S

Une Femme d’un Certain Âge

Bryan thinks I like this photo because he looks afraid of me. He's only a little bit right.

Photo from my office post-holiday party this weekend.

I also like it because this is how I think I look as I go about my day. It is only when I catch a glimpse of my reflection in rogue windows that I realize the right light does not follow me around. I am 40. Neither old nor young, really, which brings me to middle-aged, a horrible phrase that conjures up things that are dry: toast, skin, flyaway hair but not humor. It reminds me of that A.A. Milne poem "Halfway Down":

Halfway down the stairs / Is a stair / Where I sit. / There isn’t any / Other stair / Quite like / It. / I’m not at the bottom, / I’m not at the top; / So this is the stair / Where / I always / Stop. / Halfway up the stairs / Isn’t up, / And isn’t down. / It isn’t in the nursery, / It isn’t in the town. / And all sorts of funny thoughts / Run round my head: / “It isn’t really / Anywhere! / It’s somewhere else / Instead!”

Which is where I am, I think, most days as I walk around thinking I look like this. Not up, not down, not afraid even, but somewhere else instead.

The Way We Were/Are/Will Be

If you ask Zoey what her earliest memory is she will tell you it was when we lived in the city and there was an earthquake and I ran into her room and scooped her up, but this can't be true. Oh, I remember the earthquake, how Bryan and I looked at each other in the kitchen before one of us said "Big truck?" Then no, how we ran into Zoey's room and grabbed her from her crib beneath the large plate glass window. But she couldn't have remembered it. She was maybe 6 months old.

She used to say earthquick, not quake. And something for cereal, I can't remember. You got a feeling for a cavity, not a filling. Only the other day I finally corrected her--earthquake, too late realizing how quickly it's all falling away. Sometimes I look at her and see her making a decision because something must be done and things don't just magically happen anymore. I want to gobble her up, make it stop, everything moving too fast.

Far as I can tell there is one more word left: rememberies, the last of her toddler pronunciation. Apparently we talk about making memories a lot around here because she has always said this, rememberies or making a remembery. When she says it I think of tiny berries, for some reason, cramming them in with the joyful desperation of watching her grow up something tangible, how it all seems to be sliding from my mouth, the juice running down my chin, how most times I am a mess.

I decided that I am never going to correct her on this one: remembery.

Not For Human Consumption

I think Ozzy is on bath salts. Symptoms include: taking off your clothes (check), superhuman strength (check), and irrational, paranoid behavior (check). Here is just a partial list of things that have set him off lately:

Me cleaning his face

Nacho wouldn't let him poke his eyes

He couldn't have the remote/my phone/the calculator/the box cutter

I made him get off the ladder

I don't know what "mees" means

I pulled him out of the dishwasher

I ate the cookie he placed in my mouth

I poured the milk too slowly

I still don't know what "mees" means

I wouldn't eat the cookie he put in my mouth

Nacho wouldn't let him poke his butthole

I didn't let him run into the ocean

I lifted him up off the floor of the restaurant/grocery store/sidewalk

Mees, woman! MEEEES!

When I asked his pediatrician about this behavior he said that the terrible two's are a misnomer, that acting out starts at 18 months, but I know better because I Googled "I think my son is on bath salts" and learned to "be on the look-out for small packets similar to those that contain moist towelettes." Wouldn't you know it, I found a stash of those in Ozzy's sock drawer. Shit just got real, yo.'

Lately I have been asking all the men that I encounter, what is up with you people? I mean, really. Bryan, my dad, the guys at my work...what is it with you and your need to throw rocks into puddles? Boy energy is no joke, the constant drive to move, run, jump, smack, dodge, laugh, chew, throw and to touch your penis. Pretty sure it's still there, mkay?

And then there is the way Ozzy kisses me, my little testosterone-addled climbing boo-yah of a boy. Let's not go into the image of him eating my face off, per se, though he is all open-mouthed and hot-breathed, the taste of puppy dog tails something wild and reckless and full of a love I have never, ever known.

Mees out,
S

Aftermath

And then Jesus said "Let there be pestilence and barfing! Lo! But there will be barfing! Verily, avast, the barfing shall be put forth all over the hallway, not two feet from ye olde commode."

But not before He commanded Great volumes of plastic and paper, croissants, orange juice and miniature chocolates inexplicably in the form of a fat man of mysterious Dutch origin known forth as SinterKlaas.

Happy birthday, Jesus. Hope you got everything you ever wanted because I sure did.
xo,
S

2006: No Hair; 2009: No Idea

2007

2008

2010

2011

2012

Xoxo (and a ho ho ho),
S

Sometimes the Clothes Do Not Make the Man (A Diversion)

1991
I'm a freshman at San Diego State and every weekend I drive up to Encinitas where Bryan is living in an apartment with a roommate who has a pillow airbrushed with tits. Bryan surfs while I sit on the beach. We drink. Fight. We are so young and tight but feel grown up. I drive my maroon Volkswagen Cabriolet way too fast on the freeway singing along to this song feeling like my mouth curves just like Christy's or Linda's, angling my jaw like they do in the video. On the weekends I do go-sees and watch House of Style and sketch clothes. I don't know it yet, but I am really unhappy.

Not sure what made me think of this song tonight but I did, and listening to it I am right back there as I mouth the words and feel hot and simple, my only worry that Bryan didn't call me back.

God, I love this song. Almost makes me want to put on shorts with tights and a belt, a unitard, a choker, ankle boots. Instead I think I will listen to it in my car this weekend, mouthing along like Christy and Linda, two carseats in the back.

Special

Surely I am not the only one feeling fragile lately, the need for kindness so great I smile at pigeons. So when Zoey sat down tonight and made this card for her first grade teacher I nearly wept--not cried, but wept--a feeling so raw it belongs among statues.

They had a holiday party at school today and were allowed to bring in their favorite stuffed animal. Her teacher brought in her childhood bear, old enough that it had stitches which seemed to fascinate Zoey.

Translation: Dear Ms. Cozza, I love you. Have a Merry Christmas. Love, Zoey. Then the bear is saying (starting backward): I will love you for the rest of my life. On the other side: Special.

Which. Just. Yes. Thank you to all of the teachers that take care of our children and make them feel safe and loved and special.

Rolling in seasonal sap as if it were armor of some kind,
S

This Is A Drill

This will not be a well-written post. Nor will it be pretty. There will be no pictures.

We got a message from Zoey's principal that there will be a drill on Tuesday. And the principal doesn't call to tell parents about fire drills or earthquake drills. He said that the staff will not mention the Connecticut school shooting, but that there will be a drill.

A fucking drill.

I am so fucking angry. Not at the principal or her school, but at the very fact that there has to be a drill. And that I have to tell Zoey something about what happened so she doesn't hear about it from someone else. So tonight I told her. Tried to say it lightly, as if such things can be said without wanting to fucking tear at my throat. And when I told her, she asked if the kids died, and I said yes, some of them did, and she said that if something like that happens at her school she will kick the bad guy in the weenie, so there is no need to have a drill. I hugged her and said not to worry about it, that there is nothing to worry about because I am doing everything I can to make sure the bad guys don't have guns and that she is safe.

Don't worry.

As if it were that simple.

Fuck. That's what I keep coming back to. Fuck.

Like so many people, I have been completely shattered by this, as if everything around me is totally fucking broken. It wasn't until I told Zoey about it that I realized I don't have the luxury of feeling broken. Because I have to make this right by my kids, make it whole and right and, in my own way from 3,000 miles away, I have to honor those kids that died.

Which is why I promised Zoey I would do everything I could to make sure the bad guys don't have guns. Oh, I know this is simplified, but what's the alternative? Sitting around feeling sad? Clearly that's not working and hopeless inaction is no longer acceptable.

Instead I am taking action. Like I said, this is not a well-written post. Instead it is a fucking drill. Here is what we need to do:

Sign petitions lobbying President Obama for gun control 

Support these gun control groups with time and donations

Donate to the Sandy Hook Elementary School Victims Relief Fund

And though I will never give that evil fuck shooter the (albeit infinitesimally small) glory of printing his name (I hate how the news gives him so much space), I do recognize that something needs to be done regarding how we treat the mentally ill. Can anyone point me to a good article, website or something...I don't even know where to start. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.
UPDATE: Aha! My sister-in-law told me about Laura's Law. Read about it here and here.

For that matter, any ideas on how else to support gun control and/or how to help the victims' families...please leave them in the comments.

Hope you are all hanging in there.
xo,
S

Just Fuck It All To Hell

My soul is crushed from what happened in Connecticut yesterday, and I don't quite know how anything goes on from here. Pure evil. Of all the news reports--and I'm afraid to say I've become a bit obsessive in reading and watching all the coverage--by far the best journalism comes from The Onion, so I straight up pasted it below for you to read...

Fuck Everything, Nation Reports

December 14, 2012

WASHINGTON—Following the fatal shooting this morning at a Connecticut elementary school that left at least 27 dead, including 20 small children, sources across the nation shook their heads, stifled a sob in their voices, and reported fuck everything. Just fuck it all to hell.

All of it, sources added.

“I’m sorry, but fuck it, I can’t handle this—I just can’t handle it anymore,” said Deborah McEllis, who added that “no, no, no, no, no, this isn’t happening, this can’t be real.” “Seriously, what the hell is this? What’s even going on anymore? Why do things like this keep happening?”

Continued McEllis, before covering her face with her hands, “Why?”

Despairing sources confirmed that the gunman, armed with a semiautomatic assault rifle—a fucking combat rifle, Jesus—walked into a classroom full of goddamned children where his mother was a teacher and, good God, if this is what the world is becoming, then how about we just pack it in and fucking give up, because this is no way to live.

I mean, honestly, all 315 million Americans confirmed.

“Well, I suppose we have to try to pick up the pieces and make some sort of sense of this tragedy and—you know what? Fuck it, I can’t do this,” said Connecticut resident Michael Zaleski, his remarks understandable given the circumstances, because, holy shit, what else can one say? “I’m sorry, but I can’t fucking do this. Can you? Can anyone?”

Witnesses said the gunman fired at least 100 rounds during his deadly rampage, which, according to children in the school—goddamnit, how? How? Twenty children. Dead. In a fucking school.

No. No, no, no.

“I just feel so [why does it even matter what this person said when no words can bring 20 dead kids back to life?]” said some person who, just like everyone else, is completely unable to process or handle any of this. “It’s awful. Just too awful to bear.”

Americans reported feelings of overwhelming disgust with whatever abhorrent bastard did this and with the world at large for ever allowing it to happen, as well as with politicians, with the NRA, and above all with their own pathetic goddamn selves, sitting in front of a fucking computer instead of doing fucking anything to help anyone—Christ, as if that were even fucking possible, as if anyone could change what happened, as if the same fucking bullshit isn’t going to keep happening again and again and fucking again before people finally decide it’s time to change the way we live, so what’s the point? What the hell is the goddamned point?

“I…” said Tom Miller, 27, after reading an article about the tragedy online. “I just…”
“…” he added.
At press time…screw it, there’s nothing else to say.

See also: Right to Own Handheld Device That Shoots Deadly Metal Pellets At High Speed Worth All Of This

My Vote to Replace Santa This Year

Perhaps I've been a wee bit heavy here lately. Shorter days, dark, I've had a mean flare of sciatica, which is why I think we could all use a sweet seasonal dose of Chris "Christmas" Rodriguez.

Oh yeah. Happy Friday to you.
xo,
S
See all of Chris "Christmas" Rodriguez here.

Here. Hold This. (Again)

These are the things they push into my hands: colorful straws and Barbie shoes, cereal bar wrappers, bites of apple and stones, most of them irregular, some shaped vaguely like hearts. Hold this, they say, my palms the place for things they think worth saving. And so it is that later while waiting for the bus I pull sticks from my purse, pieces of somewhere else, poke at the tips of broken toys hidden in my pockets while at work, the other side of me pushed down like that.

The things they place into my palms are at times based on necessity, hair ties, a booger; other times by something needier, the placing of it at once blurry and wet, frantic. They place things into my hands that I cannot hold on to, trust, milk and the weight of their everything. How I want to swallow it all, push every last rock that they ask me to hold deep into my mouth so that I won't someday lose it.

(Have you ever had a book follow you around? Years after, you still find yourself seeing the words? That's how I've been with The Things They Carried now for over a decade. Here is where I wrote about it four years ago. This post is yet another inspired by Tim O'Brien.)

7 Snapshots of the Memorial Service

1. 

It is not really real until I get there, although I love the smell of real cold. In the morning it begins to snow and I sit at the foot of my cousin Tess's bed and advise her to draw penises in the margins of her eulogy so she doesn't break down. I can't stop looking out the window at the snow falling and think that this is the first time in a long time that I see Tess and there are no photo booths with props, the last decade filled with weddings.

2.

At the church I want to take pictures, it is so beautiful, but I don't want to be disrespectful. Instead I crack jokes with my brilliant cousin Oliver because the family is told to gather in The Pusey Room before and after the service, named after a former president and benefactor of Harvard. Everyone cries in The Pusey Room, we whisper to each other, it all begins and ends in The Pusey Room, twirling myself around to read the gold inlaid quote about education, my head spinning with the infinite possibilities of the name.

3. 

The organist plays fugues, Wagner, people read Mary Oliver and speak. At the end there are military honors, a 3 gun salute; I am stunned by how powerful it is. The exact way the impossibly young marines turn on their heels, fold the flag...how the marine on the far left fumbles with the corner for a few minutes and I feel bad for him...turning the corners in and in again. And then a marine from outside marches in to slip the shell casings inside the tight triangle of flag, a slow, measured, heavy salute, and we are all sobbing.

4.

The reception is held at The Harvard Museum of Natural History. I wonder if it is too late for me to do something extraordinary enough that people will gather there to remember me. Probably, though I wonder if maybe just having a few stuffed tigers at my memorial would suffice. I guesstimate that the average IQ of the crowd is 135.

5. 

There are boards with photos, and I fall in love with this one of a paleontological dig at a Crow Indian reservation in the 70's. There is my dad in the back with the rifle, my uncle seated in the front, on the far left my step-dad is holding a machete. I know I will never be as cool as these men.

6. 

Later, my dad tells us stories. The time he was jailed for murder in Africa (didn't do it), took acid on ice floes in Greenland, how when he was 15 and my uncle 18 they drove cross country in my uncle's Jaguar and camped on the very edge of the Grand Canyon because you could do that in 1957 at 15 years old, I guess. How they met some leathery traveler and spent the night smoking Lucky Strikes and listening to the man's stories, how in the morning they woke up to find a carved stick stabbed into the dirt with a note attached that just said Adios Amigos, John. They took the stick and named it the Amigo John Stick, gave it to their younger brother Andy who later died at 40.

My dad finds the Amigo John Stick in my uncle's study and takes it home with him.

7.

On the flight home the woman next to me chews gum with her mouth open for 6 hours straight. 6 hours straight of it sounding as if someone is eating a banana in my ear, and I think about how strange it is that I am not able to tell her to please close her mouth but totally able to punch her in the face. Instead I swipe my card to buy Direct TV, put on headphones and watch Real Housewives of Atlanta all the way home.