7

Once upon a time you could not eat a whole grape by yourself. Instead I would bite it in half with my front teeth and push slivers of it into your mouth and you laughed. Now we are here where you can eat whole grapes if you want, pluck them off the stem yourself with long, dimple-less fingers and talk to me of racism and what makes airplanes rise.

This is 7. Angled teeth and tiny rubber toys that fall to the bottom of your backpack, pop music, ears pierced, you tell me now not to look when you undress. Are you looking? you ask, and I say no even though I am looking at an optical illusion, my depth perception most certainly off. How did you get so far away? I am looking but I can't see how this happened, your sense of secret and other and me suddenly just there like that. Who are you?

Because suddenly I can see the slippery slope a bit more sharply, how quickly 7 slides into a time when you will answer these questions for yourself. I'm a designer, you might say, or an accountant. My name is Zoey and I am an alcoholic, a teacher, a thief, a mother, a phlebotomist. The truth is, you will be many things to many people, the girl who wears leopard print high tops with a thousand yard stare behind starfish eyes, but I hope you always define yourself knowing that beneath it all lies this constant: you are loved.

7 years ago today they told me I might feel some tugging, some pressure. And then there was the strangest hollow suction as they pulled you from inside of me and you cried. I tell you that on that day your soft baby nails grabbed at my heart trying to hold on, that to this day you carry a piece of me with you. You can roll your eyes, but it's true. How do airplanes fly? Something about lift and force, laws of motion, I looked it up online. More often than not I know things are true without totally understanding them. A piece of my heart is inside of you, and when you are 37 years old I will still watch closely when you eat grapes to make sure you don't choke because I love you, the certainty of that like the ground beneath your feet even as you rise.

Happy birthday sweet girl.
Mommy

6, (5 is missing), 4, 3, 2, (1 is before I had a blog).

Meniscus

 

Too much. You know? I think you know. All of us too full. I see it as I walk around these last few days like an echo of last time and the time before that, how we pay for our coffee gently as we resist the push to overflow. And so we go about our day concave, the surface tension there like that, bound to each other. We tip toe, we rise and we hold on, until eventually, inevitably, we spill.

Prodigy of the Philistines

"Every line means something."

      Jean-Michel Basquiat

Untitled. Chalk and admittedly some smushed food on wall. 2013

One of the best decisions we made when we moved to this house was to paint one of the walls in the kitchen with black chalkboard paint. We all go at it: christmas lists and chore charts, vocabulary, tic tac toe, faces and cats and cartoons of cats with no faces saying ickskoosme! (It's phonetic.)

Every few months I take a photo before erasing the whole thing, and tonight as I was about to wash it away it struck me how much the wall looks like a Basquiat painting. No doubt Zoey's portraits reflect the power struggle of class and gender while Ozzy's kinetic line-work reveals the dichotomy of the inner versus outer experience, yes? Graffiti artists turned Neo-Expressionistic Primitivists, all before the second grade.

To compare: Basquiat's Philistines. Acrylic and chalk on canvas. 1982

Happy (very nearly almost) Friday,

S

An All-Over the Place Post

Once I told some coworkers they just had to watch a video--it was of a baby being born in a car--and they all recoiled in disgust and now maybe I have a bad reputation at work for you-gotta-see-this videos. (Then again, they made me watch footage of basketball player Kevin Ware breaking his leg in half, so I think we're even.)

All this to say wow, this photo. I just. Can't. It's amazing. And yes, a little gross maybe if you're adverse to a little vernix, but whatevs. Still breathing and feeding from the placenta, this baby isn't technically born yet. Holy intact amniotic sac, amiright?

Then again, I'm in a mood. A push pictures of waxy-coated babies in your face mood. I had a dentist appointment today and the dental hygienist must have said a dozen times that I have the teeth of a 20 year old. Which fine, great, anks so mash (because she had my tongue wrapped in gauze and an instrument shoved deep into my molars) except that every time she said it she followed with, if I were to just look at your teeth I would think you were 20! To which I said, ...?

Anks?

Apparently my actual face is a dead giveaway for my age.

Perhaps I should have led this post (and left it) with this. This photo of a book...shelf. 

Next time Bryan goes out of town I am totally going to do this in my hallway. If you don't know why I have to wait for my husband to go out of town it's because I am not "allowed" to hang anything on the walls since the Great Laundry Room Wall Incident of 2004. See also: that's what middle-aged women with young-looking teeth do on wild weekends alone. We get crafty with old books and all broody looking at amniotic sacs that aren't even ours.

Happy Tuesday,
S

Warning: This Is Not Even a Humble Brag But a Flat-Out Booyah of a Check Me Out

My heart is like a handful of Oobleck right now.* Tonight Zoey stuck a bunch of sticky notes together and titled it "Room 9's Go Green List"; she plans on giving it to her teacher tomorrow. The list is so pure and right that I think maybe someone should send this to Kim Jong Un c/o Whatever the Fuck is Going On in North Korea Right Now Because Out of the Mouths of Babes And All...

Let me decipher lest you are not fluent in 1st grade spelling:

1. Please pick up as many pieces of trash, it will help the earth and make the world a better place.
2. Please throw it into the trash or recycling.
3. Please donate to homeless as much as you can.
4. Please show kindness, make new friends.
5. If you are having trouble please show courage or stand up for yourself or tell the yard duty.

And with that my heart dripped through my fingers as I clutched at my chest with toomuch, tootoomuch, sweetjesuschristonacracker,thankyou.

xo,
S

*If you are not familiar with Oobleck, pinky swear you will make some this weekend. You won't be sorry.

Present

I tell myself to listen. To remember. Be present, this is it, be here now, but by accident I think about next week and what we are going to do and I remember how the air used to smell different in the spring when I was little, like rotting plums that had fallen off the tree, and the bees that gathered close to the ground.

I used to try to meditate--I think it was after I saw What's Love Got To Do With It with Angela Bassett as Tina Turner; I liked the intonation of nam-myoho-renge-kyo. And her arms. Picture a leaf floating on the surface of the water, somebody told me, only the leaf skittered and I thought of Skittles, Skipperdee, the turtle who eats raisins in Eloise at The Plaza and--leaf! Think leaf. Just leaf. Only for me ceci n'est pas ever just une leaf, so I gave up on picturing a leaf on the surface of the water.

Today on the bus ride home I was thinking about how the only time I am really truly in the moment is when I am angry. Pissed off and fuck that is when everything disappears. Needless to say this was not a welcome revelation.

I tell myself to think about what I would want if it were me in the hospital and what I would want is for my children to cuddle with me, so I climb beside my mom on the narrow bed and lay my head on her thin chest and marvel at how life really does shrink or expand in proportion to one's courage; I had not cuddled with my mom in years. I tell myself to listen.

Two Eyes Open

Ozzy was being a real butthole the other day so I bought some googly eyes to stick on him to make his butthole-ness more palatable.

That right there is one of those sentences that you type and then step back and think, wow, I never thought I would string those words together--but there it is.

And there we were. At Michael's Crafts which is kind of where buttholes are made what with all the raffia, rhinestones and felt, and I saw the googly eyes and immediately felt better about things. Googly eyes make everything better.

Except when we got home Ozzy refused to let me stick said googly eyes on him. He screamed and squirmed and did the floppy body thing so I had to settle for Zoey who was actually not being a butthole at all but just wanted to watch Annoying Orange. Hey Ozzy! Hey! Hey Ozzy! Don't be such an apple! If you get this reference then I feel sorry for you. I also feel sorry for myself.

Zoey was a real sport about the googly eyes which reminded me of the time she was maybe 2 and ate a small googly eye off of something and I later found it staring up at me from her poop. Take it from me: googly eyes really do make everything better.

Later I downloaded an app to try to put googly eyes on Ozzy but I couldn't quite figure out how to place them or size them so he kept ending up with a googly third eye to ward off evil. That's probably for the best with where we're at developmentally and all.

Later still, after everyone had gone to bed I saw this old video of a dorky tween JGL on Jeopardy! and immediately felt better. It has nothing to do with googly eyes except it also makes me feel silly strange inside.

xo,
S

R.I.P. Google Reader

This is a post about something boring. But it is something boring like paperclips are boring. Boring old paperclips...I can't think of anything more meh. On the other hand, what if someone announced that all paperclips would suddenly be gone come July 1st? How would you feel then? What would you do?

Fuck. I just remembered about staples.

Ok, so maybe paperclips are not a good example. (Because you could also always do that 7th grade thing where you turn down the corner and spit on it a little? Tear a notch and then turn it back to hand in your homework. Someone should probably just take paperclips away. They're almost useless, really.)

No, what I'm talking about is Google Reader. I have been using Google Reader pretty much since I started reading blogs 8 years ago. I have it bookmarked on all my computers; I have the app on my phone. I read it in line, on the bus...this is all sounding very Sam I Am, but it's true--I read it everywhere.

Which is why I almost started to cry when I saw the announcement last week that Google Reader is closing, that on July 1 it will be gone. Gone??! And here I thought everything www lasts forevereverever. I feel betrayed, lost. And yes, a little silly with this boring post about a blog aggregator, but here we are. Staring at a soon-to-be obsolete not-paperclip.

So I must ask: if you read blogs (honestly I have about 200 in my Google Reader), what do you use? What do you recommend? An aggregator that works on a laptop as well as on a phone, has an app, all that yummy stuff. Pretty please: help.

It just hit me. Another sad side-effect of the disappearance of Google Reader is the years of images I have saved to my favorites. I guess this means I will have to start posting them, air out the dank corners of my starred items. Here we go...

Christmas on this, the first day of Spring.
xo,
S

The End of the Rainbow

Supposedly, leprechauns are around 3 feet tall and up to no good. (The leprechaun that came to our house this morning made the toilet water green and left behind a green Whoopee cushion which has been sat on with such gusto over the day that it is already split apart.)

If you catch a leprechaun it is rumored that he will grant you three wishes in exchange for his release.

I caught these wee lil' leprechauns this morning and this is what I wished for: 1.) my mom to be well, 2.) $17 million dollars, 3.) a full night of sleep with nobody kicking me in the face.

But then I remembered that I have to let them go if I want my wishes to come true...so. *Sigh* (Tonight I leaned toward Bryan and very quietly whispered I think the kids are trying to kill me. I was only kind of kidding.)

Pretty sure Zoey is flashing some Gaelic gang sign here. Erin Go Bragh, Yo.

On another note: when did St. Patrick's Day become such a big deal? At Zoey's school they make leprechaun traps and decorate, have little parties and everyone talks about what tricks the leprechaun did in their house. When I was little we maybe pinched someone if they weren't wearing green and got a shamrock shake if we were lucky...seven miles in the snow when candy bars cost a dime, and all that.

Anyway. Off to eat the rest of the green Jell-O.
xo,
S

Whiskers on Kittens

As in actual kitten whiskers. Only they're not on a kitten anymore.

When I was a little kid we saved the whiskers of our cats. Momo, Darryl, Wanda, later there was Lily...if we found a whisker on the floor we picked it up and saved it in a small Indian pot. (Feather not Dot.) I have continued this tradition with Kitty and now Nacho. And added a kiss. That is, I pick up the whisker and kiss it before poking it into the pot, taught Zoey to do the same. It's exciting when we find one. Sometimes--not often--I pull out the bunch of them and feel the pointy ends, so sharp and tipped with black. They're touch receptors, you know. Vibrissae, embedded deep into the muscular and nervous systems of a cat like a radar. I think this is why I like them, but maybe not, I don't know.

A study done at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine found that optimism is the top characteristic found in very resilient people. (Worth noting that altruism is second, followed closely by humor.) People with a positive outlook tend to bounce back from adversity quicker and with less lasting effects than those who dwell on the negative. Not to get all Pollyanna, but this is why I have been wearing these pink neon ballet flats lately and looking forward to the new Hosseini book and this book, too. It's been uncharacteristically warm out and when I walk home from the bus stop after work I can smell the daffodils. Hell, I don't even know if daffodils have a smell, but there is that and vanilla lavender body oil and tonight I found a whisker in the cushions of the couch.

Kiss.
S

Shiny Objects

Today was a bad day, the kind of day that makes me want to build a fort out of blankets to hide in, that makes me want to eat Cadbury Cream Eggs for dinner and overpluck my eyebrows, that makes me want to push my face into the belly of a kitten, listen to Yaz, take big gulping breaths of the smell of crayons and draw a page full of very large eyes. (I did 3 out of 7 of those, but will let the specifics remain a mystery.)

It dawned on me just now that a few months ago Ozzy pulled the "c" key off my laptop, and then the shift key, so that I have to make a conscious effort if I ever want to make an uppercase c. A big c. See? Funny how life is sometimes. I don't have much to say today but I also don't want my last two posts to stand idle as they have been for the last week or so, full of portent. I don't want to make this thing a Thing, to capitalize on everything the way it is. The big C. There. That took a moment.

So instead I eat Honey Smacks and teach Ozzy to kiss me when I say give me some sugar and paint Zoey's toes in the colors of the rainbow and think shiny object, shiny object, shiny object...here are some such distractions from the last week, my capital everythings:

This is his trying-to-get-away-with-something face.

I call this one Driftwood Surfer. Check out the form. A total natural, if only she didn't mind getting water in her eyes.

The t-shirt says it all.

If I were better at math I would graph the curve of her cheek, the slope of her nose, the rise of those lashes to better understand the beauty of divine proportion and why her profile stops me every goddamn time.

xo,
S

Space Oddity

I feel like a 15-piece puzzle lately. You know? Those flat metal toys with the tiles that you slide around to mix up the picture? Only I cannot figure out how to make my picture whole again, how to get back to being right so I am sliding faster and faster, trying to figure out fuck, how am I supposed to do this?

I am hardly the first person with a parent with cancer, and I don't want this to turn into The Adult Child of a Parent with Cancer Blog, though I will cop to this: when I wanted Bryan to bring up the laundry from the basement for me I said pretty please, my mom has cancer. And then the other day I called him while he was driving home to ask if he could please get me a smoothie, I really wanted a smoothie, my mom has cancer and I love you.

Equal parts dark humor and terrible person with a side of absurd.

I get it from my mother.* Ten+ years ago she had a heart attack and had to have an angioplasty. She was all doped up for the surgery when she grabbed my arm to hurriedly tell me that she wanted me to play David Bowie at her funeral, then she sang as they wheeled her away...

This is major Tom to ground control, I'm stepping through the door
And I'm floating in a most peculiar way
And the stars look very different today
Here am I sitting in a tin can far above the world
Planet Earth is blue and there's nothing I can do...

There is something so hauntingly lonely about that song. And that is what I can't stand most of all. The fact that my mom is scared and lonely. And that there is nothing I can do.

Nothing but slide the stupid tiles to try to make things make sense again, to make the picture whole. Which brings me to this: did you hear about the photo left on the moon?

In 1972, Apollo 16 astronaut Charlie Duke took his third and final trip to the moon. While there he left behind a portrait of his family. The photo shows him, his wife Dorothy, and two sons Thomas and Charles posing on what looks like a park bench. And for over 40 years now, that photo (and corresponding boot print) has remained in the same exact spot. In a way, Duke not only took his family to the moon, they never left.

I find this oddly reassuring--beautiful, even--though I can't for the life of me figure out why.

xo,
S

*And my father. But this is a post about my mom. So.

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