Because Nothing Says Merry Christmas Like the Back of a Head Gazing at the Tree

 

2013

2012

2011

2010

2008

2007

Wishing you peace, love and warmth.
xoxo,
S

Don't Ask Me Why I Have Pantera On My Phone

Things are about to get pretty schmaltzy around here, what with Christmas Eve being tomorrow, so I thought I'd squeeze this in while the glam can still be labeled heavy and not tinsel.

I think we gave him the right name (mixed metals, I know). It's also perfect that a 2 year absolutely loves to rock out to an album called Vulgar Display of Power.

I am so in trouble with this one.
xo,
S

Some Weird Shit I Have In My House

With absolutely no hyperbole whatsoever, I have no idea how this reindeer toy got into my house. Which in and of itself is kind of creepy, but then it scoots its little reindeer bum all over the carpet like a dog with a tapeworm or irritated anal sacs or ho ho hey there! Please disregard my dirty floors. This is one of the reasons I will never own a dog. See also: don't hate me, but the barking. And the poop bags. And the boy dog parts.

Speaking of parts. I know how this got into my house: it's one of Bryan's old toys that his grandma made him when he was little and now my kids have found it and think it is the funniest thing ever.

Which.
I mean...

Yeah.

The most disturbing thing is that I hate lists of 2. Because two things? Does not a list make. I have searched all over my house for at least one other weird thing to include here. 3? 3 is good. But I can't find anything else. So now this is just a post about a mystery reindeer with an anal sac problem and a troll with a pokey ugly penis.

Happy holidays then.
xo,
S

Check This List

Like any good anal-retentive Virgo mom who spends the month of November filling virtual shopping carts across the www with the plan to pull the trigger on Cyber Monday, I have been asking Zoey what she wants for Christmas for months now. Except, of course, I ask all "yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus" coy. And for months now Zoey has been her own kind of coy, replying mostly with "I forget," or sometimes, "You know, that thing?" When I press for more information because someone must have forgotten to pay the domain registration on youknowthatthing.com, she tells me not to worry, that Santa will know what she's talking about. At which point I slink back to Amazon and buy more packs of Rainbow Looms feeling like a total dick.

We all know that after Thankgiving there is Black Friday, then Cyber Monday, and what follows is Smug Tuesday, when you have hit all those purchase buttons and are done with your Christmas shopping. What I did not know is that Zoey also celebrates Sucker Wednesday, otherwise known as Wait-Til-Then-To-Do-Her-Christmas-List Wednesday, although that phrase is not quite as marketable. It has not gone unnoticed that this sudden zeal fell on the same day as the arrival of one American Girl catalog in the mail. Behold the scroll of her Christmas list, spoons for scale:

If I may, let me type out the list verbatim (spelling is not her strong suit):
Braded hedband
pollr bar pagamas + charm
Sage's sliprs for girls and dolls
fancy erings for dolls
Sage's horse and helmint
The American Gril doll Makena and her stuff!
My little pony kute bobl hed that is Rainbow Dash!
Phone!
Makena's pet!

You can practically feel the momentum of gimme gimme growing with the addition of exclamation points. And then it quickly snowballs:

I want to see Santa!
Love all araownd the wold!
Peece all araownd the wold!
Happynis all araownd the wold!
10 packs of Rainbow Loom
I wish that plastic cood desolv!
I wish that I had reelly kute cklos!

I mean, come the fuck on. She wants plastic to dissolve for Christmas? SO DO I. I want happiness all around the world, peace and love and really cute clothes. I want to see Santa! So I did it. I bought the stupid American Girl doll braided headband and polar bear pajamas, fancy earrings for her doll, Saige's slippers and the My Little Pony cute bobblehead that is Rainbow Dash. Because sometimes peace is found in really cute clothes (a blue Roxy sweatshirt and boots in this case) and it is all I can do to give her love and happiness all around her world until the inevitable one day when she finds out that Santa is not real and those 10 packs of Rainbow Looms are made of plastic that is never, ever going to dissolve.

So yes, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Smug Tuesday, and every day I love her as if there were no tomorrow.

Although, p.s.--I did not buy her Saige's horse and helmet or the American Girl doll Makena or a phone, because I am not totally crazy.
p.p.s. Right? I was right not to get her Saige's horse?

xo,
S

To Spite My Face

You can never not see your nose. See? It's right there. You see it now, don't you? And once you notice that it's hard not to see it all the time. Just there like that. Being your nose.

This is where shit gets weird.

Because that's kinda' sorta' why I haven't been blogging. I've been too busy noticing my nose. Except, of course, substitute "my nose" with "thinking about my mom" and there you have it. Here's the thing: when someone you love dies, the world lets you grieve for a nebulous amount of acceptable time and then at a certain point everyone expects you to move on. Gently, sure, not callously, but quite frankly...there is oil to be changed and people to be gossiped about, somebody has to send the Netflixii back, after all (not a typo but the plural of 3 Netflix discs, i.e. Game of Thrones Seasons 1 and 2, i.e. medieval fantasy porn, i.e. King Joffrey sux dragon balls). So yes, I've been doing all this, acting like a perfectly normal person amid a perfectly normal world all the while obsessed with my nose. My nose being the fact that my mom is gone. I don't talk about it all the time during my day, at work, to the grocery store cashier, but it's there, my nose, and I see it. I am thinking the whole goddamn time my mom is gone my mom is gone my mom is gone. Because once you realize you can never not see your nose it is there. Just like that. Out of the corner of your eye, in the periphery. A part of you. And you walk around seeing your nose and even noticing other people's noses and you wonder why nobody is talking about any of it, all cap-locked and shit. CAN YOU NOT SEE MY NOSE? ALL OF US, WITH THESE UGLY LITTLE APPENDAGES ON THE FRONT OF OUR FACE LIKE THAT? PEOPLE YOU LOVE DIE! MY MOM IS DEAD. WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE!

Hardly the stuff of a blog people want to read, non?

The thing is, this blog has always been where I've gone to write about whatever the hell I want to write about but it's been hard lately to navel-gaze when my nose is in the way. So here's the deal: I'm just going to keep writing. Whatever that means. Maybe it will stink (too much? The nose analogy?). But I don't want to cut off my blog to spite my...yeah, totally too much with this nose thing. But it makes sense to me, so.

On another note, not entirely unrelated:

Lately Ozzy has been infatuated with grocery bags, preferred toy of cats and kids. I am thinking about stuffing his stocking with Trader Joe's bags. I have also stumbled upon this fabulous little life tip: if you're ever afraid of someone, nervous around someone or just really angry at someone, picture that person wearing a paper bag on their head and it magically dissolves the edge of the feeling. Try it. I double dog dare you.

Shit. There's my nose again, lit up by the glow of the computer screen.
xo,
S

Fall Is Here, Hear the Yell, Back to School, Ring the Bell...

I realize that in showing these photos I am one thin blog post away from those stupid stick figure family decals that people put on the back window of their car, but I can't help myself. My kids...THEY ARE SO SQUISHY!!!

School photos have come a long way since the 80's, though those pigtails don't fool me...she is growing up too fast, isn't she?

Giving his best Blue Steel. If this photo were scratch-n-sniff it would totally smell like clean puppies.

See also: Despite the mid-70's forecast today I wore my knit beanie and scarf to work. I am feeling very fall delicate, tomato soup and movie nights in which I cry at the part in Toy Story 3 when they go down the trash compactor...the suspense is just too much sometimes, you know? And so it is that on days like this I sing to myself in my head a cozy little ditty--And we don't notice any time pass / We don't notice anything / We sit side by side in every class / Teacher thinks that I sound funny / But she likes it when you sing...

Pumpkin spice and everything nice,
S

Like I Blister in the Sun

We should have named him Harold. Or Frank. Frank sounds like he would be a good sleeper, right? And Harold, well--Harold would never throw his toys at your face. Tim. Tim's a nice name, a nice guy. Tim doesn't dump a bag of Goldfish crackers into your cart at Target, Tim doesn't chew his cake pop and then let it fall slowly from his mouth and onto the floor the minute a stranger says how cute he is.

But Ozzy does. All of this and then some. Which is what we get for giving him the same name as the Prince of Darkness, even if we totally didn't name him after that Ozzy at all. Whatevs. Because my Ozzy doesn't sleep lately. Like from midnight until 5am, and then during the day he is a two year old nightmare on Crocs, yadda yadda, mommyblaaaahg, it's so hard and all that. As hackneyed as ripping the heads off of bats.

Tell you what else is hackneyed--because when he gives me a hug I fucking love him so much. I love him even before he hugs me, love him even as the chewed up cake pop falls down his shirt like a wet piece of poo and the stranger backs away with that small, horrified smile. I love him.

Though I will say this, not unrelated: I have been perfecting my 80's punk Pandora station. The Clash, Suicidal Tendencies, Bad Brains, Violent Femmes with a little New Wave and Ska to soften the blow--Talking Heads, The Specials. This is what I listen to on my headphones when I am at work now, partly to keep me awake and partly because I am an emotional, exhausted mess just jonesing for a mosh pit were it not for my fear of touching sweaty people I do not know + the possibility of getting hurt divided by the square root of my ballet flats. God, how I am tired.

xo,
S

She Bangs, She Bangs (Hello 2000) UPDATED WITH PICS!

There comes a time in every women's life when she asks herself: should I get bangs? I mean, my mom passed away, my cat died, I turned 41...what better time to blatantly disregard my very round face and want what general consensus says I should not have? I even went so far as to Google "should I get bangs." FYI--Google tries to anticipate what you should get by auto-populating that sentence with "a divorce," "a tattoo" and "married." Glad I'm not the only one turning to the Magic 8 Ball of the internet for life guidance. See also: glad I am not trying to decide if I should get a tattoo of bangs because that would surely be a sign I should.

The thing is, when I asked Google if I should get bangs it did not answer me with a resounding www.DoNotGetBangs.com but instead said I could totally look like this:

To which I say sign me up. I could totally look like that (if I were a completely different person). And yet? And yet I still hear the siren call of Jane Birkin winking at me beneath a boyishly sexy fringe of perfectly cut bangs that don't poke me in the eye or get greasy or ever need trimming, really. Just so you know, in this scenario I also don't have any hips and wear cords that make me look super skinny.

I mean, right? So cute. Like this. 

So should I or shouldn't I? Too late. I am at the hair salon right now.Which means that in just a few hours I could look like this:

A wonky-eyed mid-90's Brenda Walsh doing her best Paula Poundstone impression. In which case you're going to have to straight up lie to me, tell me I look très mignonne and then put some barrettes in my Christmas stocking.

Yikes.
xo,
S

UPDATE!!!!!!
And just like that! BAM! I got bangs!
Ok, here's the Before (yes, I totally Instagram filtered the hell out of myself, and double yes, I, too, have a wonky eye, #BrendaWalsh4LifeYo):

And After:

Right now my hair is a little too soft for my liking, all blow dried and styled. But tonight I will shower and tomorrow my hair will be back to it's normal texture. Already I'm loving what it does to a ponytail or a messy knot (instant style!) which is how I wear my hair usually anyway. So? I think I'm happy.
We shall see what Bryan and the kids think later...dun dun DUN.

Earthquake Weather

The weather has been unbelievable lately, bathtub warm, still, the air smelling of leaves and salt air. Beautiful out, isn't it? the guy at Walgreens might say to you at checkout. Mm, gorgeous, and then one of you mumbles something about it being earthquake weather and the other nods and you leave the store out to the freakishly perfect afternoon.

Of course there is no truth to that. Earthquakes occur miles below weather, caused by tectonic plates shifting, something that has been happening for as long as there has been an ever, during ice ages, when the earth was a hot bubbling swamp and everything in between. Nor do they happen more in the morning; your pet probably doesn't sense them, and small earthquakes do not prevent larger ones from happening. These are all just myths created to explain things we cannot possibly understand.

All this to say that if we talk about the weather I will probably say something about it being earthquake weather. That if you casually ask me how my day is I might think for a second that the earth will open and swallow me whole, I am that close to cracking. This business of understanding that my mom is gone--it has been happening for as long as there has been an ever, and yet. That's not how it works. I cannot wrap my head around it but for a few flash seconds at a time. How is my day? If a fault could open up there would be no friction. Without friction, there is no earthquake. And yet the weather is so stunningly still and happy, as if we are all just waiting for something to happen.

Quite frankly I don't know why I am putting this image here with this post except maybe I love that whoever Lana Moonblood is she gave reason, a purpose and explanation not for, but to her one tiny hand.

The End

I realize it has been a little Sturm und Drang around here lately, but when life plays you a dirge the only thing you can really do is slow dance to it. Which is what I've been doing, even though my feet are tired and I honest-to-god feel dehydrated from crying.

Saturday was my mom's memorial, and I sobbed through my eulogy and pretty much any time someone so much as looked at me. Still, I think we did her proud.

We drank Cheerwine and ate pulled pork, hush puppies and creamed corn, listened to Mississippi John Hurt and David Bowie and told stories about what a force she was.

After the memorial, Bryan and I went to the pet ER where Nacho has been since Thursday. He was not getting better, and had such significant brain damage that the vets gave him a 10% chance of any recovery, so we held his floppy body and told him what a kick ass cat he was, that we loved him, and then we kissed him goodbye as the vet put him to sleep.

Then today my dad, my brother and his wife came over and we decorated boxes for my mom's ashes. The gaudier, the glitterier the better. My mom was a maximalist who believed that more is more. Then add a little bit more.

Tomorrow is Monday, and not to get all sloppy sappy shut up, but I am going to start thinking of my mom and Nacho not in sadness but in gratitude. I am so incredibly lucky to have had such an amazing mom for as long as I did, and to have had such a sweet little fur baby like my Nacho. Not to deny my grief, but I do believe you have a choice in how you react, and I am going to make an effort to react in joy.

Which reminds me--when my mom was really sick, disoriented and could barely speak, my brother asked her if there was anything she wanted to tell him, and all she said was kindness. I don't know if that meant that she wanted us to remember her for her kindness or that we should act in kindness, but maybe it doesn't matter. The word itself is all that matters. Kindness. Such a simple word, not fancy at all (nothing like Sturm und Drang), but I think I am going to make that word my mantra. It can mean so many things.

On that note, I also want to thank all of you. For your comments and emails...even if you didn't reach out but just took a moment to think about me and my family. Thank you.

I'm turning the dirge off now. Anyone have a new song I can dance to?

xo,
S

FYI: September is Cholesterol Education Month, Alcohol and Drug Addiction Recovery Month and Apple Month. I Hate Apples.

Dear September 2013,

I get it. You hate me. I don't know what I ever did to you, but whatevs. You're a dick and in 3 days I will be done with you.

I don't know what kind of fucked up kid's game this is, but in better times I might want to play it.

I came home yesterday to find Nacho having seizures and semi-comatose. He had pooped and peed and was just lying there in it, twitching. Long story short, I rushed him to the ER Pet Hospital where he has been ever since. I guess his blood sugar dropped and he went into diabetic shock; we don't know how long he had been like that but it's now the next day, we are $3,000 into this and he is still in a coma. The vet says that all we can do now is wait to see how severe the brain damage is...

So yes, it is September, my mom died and MY CAT HAS BRAIN DAMAGE. Fuck you, September.

Tomorrow is my mom's memorial and I have no idea what to say.

But I do know I am coming at October with a nosegay of flowers and a timid little smile.

Not an x, not an o, not a love, but a dash--
-S

What Comes Next

Today was my first day back at work after 5 weeks off to be with my mom, and then to mourn for her, and it felt sad, a small word for something far bigger. Because, I mean--this is it? I thought that all day. Am thinking it still. Everything just goes back to "normal" now? The proverbial "life goes on" can't be right, it seems disrespectful, wrong. It makes me sad. I think I said that before, and then last week Nacho was diagnosed with diabetes. I give my cat two shots a day now, the exact same insulin that Bryan gives himself, only one is covered by insurance and the other is not, so there's that, plus the caterpillars I ordered for the kids have spun themselves into chrysalids that hang delicate and dry from the butterfly house, and this photo that I took of Ozzy who walked down the stairs slowly, very carefully arranged himself and then called out to me with a straight face before cracking himself up. This is how life goes on, I guess.

I just miss her so fucking much.

She Is Gone

My mom passed away yesterday, and all I can think is she is gone. Like that. Even if it wasn't like that at all--it was long, she hung on, we were "ready"--but now she is gone and her not being here is a weight, a thing that I hold in my hands, not knowing what to do. How can she be gone?

Maybe you've heard me say this before, but my mom was magic. To try and explain her would be a disservice to words.

She was beyond superlative: the funniest, the smartest, the kindest, the strongest, the most beautiful, the most eccentric, the most complicated, the mostest...even so. Those words do nothing to describe her.

Now she will no longer be limited by words or body or health. She will live on in the sound of me whistling, in Zoey's eyes, in Ozzy's sense of humor, in the way that I fold my legs when I sit, how I arrange flowers, my collarbone...sometimes I even hear myself breathe and think, god, that sounds like my mother breathing.

Still. It will never be enough. I will never stop missing her, loving her, wanting to smell that mix of perfume and smoke as she brushes her fingers across my face, wishing she were here to tell me one of her long-winded stories filled with the strangest of pauses.

Stupid stupid words, all of them, all of this, falling so stupidly short of what has been lost. Leaving me with this, saved voice mails that I play over and over pretending it's a Sunday months ago, before she was gone.

I love you, I love you, I love you, and I miss you so, so much, too.

The Hardest Part (So Far)

In case you were wondering, I am still here, waiting. Like a Tom Petty song, and I hate Tom Petty. (Sorry Tom Petty.)

I have actually been steering clear of this here blog and even Facebook lest my innards seep out, getting my emotions all over your everything. So let's not with that. Instead let me just say hello and let you know that I am here, waiting. And that I heard a genius lifehack that you can use an empty Pringles can to store opened dry spaghetti, so I bought and just polished off an entire can of Sour Cream & Onion Pringles just now only to find that spaghetti is an inch too long for the can. Now I have a stomach ache, bad breath and feel lifefacked.
But I am here.
Hi.
Love,
S

Home

You know what can make you feel like a total dick? Going on a beach vacation while your mom is in Hospice. Also? Cutting in line, getting caught looking up and down at someone's outfit, littering. But I only did one of those things (I didn't get caught so the outfit thing doesn't count)--I went on vacation while my mom is in Hospice and felt like a terrible daughter/human being.

I could go on and on about people telling me I need to take care of myself, that I deserve this vacation, etc. etc, but really. It didn't feel right, though nothing does right now. Blah blah, are you tired of me being sad? Because I am. So let's look at a few/too many photos from my vacation and pretend for a second that you can't feel my mopey dick face* on the other side of the camera**...

Joy. Someone has it.

Babe. My babe.

Looking in the right direction.

I paid her two Oreos to drape the kelp over herself, and it was worth every last trigyceride.

Happy boy.

If you're wondering why there are more photos of Zoey than Ozzy it's because Ozzy prefers to go nudey at the beach and I don't want to post pics of him in the altogether.

Love the confidence. Even if it only lasted until her first wipeout.

Cali Girl.

Eventually the feeling of being a total dick outweighed the warm water and I decided I couldn't stick my head (toes) in the sand any longer, so I flew home early while the rest of the family stayed for a few more days. I have a feeling it was just in time.

So if you were on Virgin America flight 958 this afternoon and were wondering who that woman was with her forehead pressed against the window crying, that was me. And I'm not a dick. But I was looking you up and down. To make up for it all, I left my Us Weekly in the seat pocket for you to read.

xo,
S

*Mopey dick. Heh heh. See what I did there?
**If you're my Facebook friend, let's also pretend you didn't already see all these pics on FB.

Starstuff

Everything I write here will be a lie. Mainly because nothing I write could come close to what is going on. How the breeze comes through the open window of my mom's Hospice room, or the sound of the church bells nearby...We are close to where it all began, my dad says, a few blocks from where my parents lived when they first moved to San Francisco 40+ years ago. He shows me the window of the room where I was conceived and I try to be an adult about it all. This being the Castro, later we see a naked man at the bus stop wearing a metallic gold sock on his penis and sneakers on his feet. The fog whips over the hill and it's cold. These things are all real, some of them tangible even, but still they can't be true.

They gave me a booklet. It's called Approaching the End of Life. I read it before bed and try to pretend I'm a Buddhist, that this is just a transition, that everything is changeable, appears and disappears. The cover of the booklet has a picture of sand, shells, a starfish, only now they are called seastars because they aren't fish and never were, though come to think of it, they aren't stars either, now are they? All of it lies, like this, what I'm writing. None of it can come close to what is really going on, the messages I have saved on my cell phone from my mom. Dozens of them--always Unknown Caller--knowing that there will soon be a time I won't be able to call her again, hear her voice, the way she says my name, how the thought of this makes me lose my breath. I guess that's the truth, or as close as I can get to one right now.

Quadratic Frustration

I like things to be just so. Like if I am hungry, I rate my hunger on a scale of 1 to 10, though the extremes never stay constant. How sad am I? On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 spilling over with joy and 10 soul crushing grief? I am an 8, the number somehow balancing right in my chest like that. For a creative who writes for a living and doodles on everything, I like to quantify my world. A 3 for sleepy, a 6 for thirsty, I am a 1 on a scale of understanding univariate polynomial equations of the second degree, 1 being I have no idea though I very much like saying the words.

Sexy graffiti if you ask me.

How long are we talking? I ask everyone what they think. Doctors, nurses, my dad, my brother. What do you think? On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being writhing, crying in pain, my mom is now usually a 9. 4 for clarity, sometimes more, she has lost at least 30lbs. I run these numbers through my head like worry beads, 9, 4, divided by the square root of 82...there is no constant and I can't do the math. How long are we talking?

The oncologist says it could be weeks, it could be a year, but there is just no way. My mom is not eating. The oncologist also pauses a lot when he talks; I want to take his dry hands in mine so that maybe he will flip to the back of the book for the answer. I know this--the Rule of Threes: 3 weeks without food, 3 days without water, 3 minutes without air. More numbers yet still no one will tell me.

I need to know how to pace myself. Because sometimes math becomes a word problem when significant information is presented as text rather than mathematical notation. The age-old SAT question. How many days should I leave work at 4pm to go to the hospital to then rush home in time to put the kids to bed to then jump back on work email to make sure nothing falls behind? A few weeks, a year? When will the train reach the station? Otherwise written as: how long can I subsist as an 8, the inside of my chest surely bruised, and more importantly, how long must my mom be a 9?