Gifting.

I'll be forty-one next week.

My husband is out shopping with the kids as I write. The kids get me gifts, but my husband and I, we do not exchange presents. I put the kibosh on that looong ago.

One year, still back in college when I lived in a studio with no kitchen, he bought me a deep fat fryer, a crock pot, a vacuum and a wok. All at once.

So no more gifts.

The kids have better ideas, but they are dependant on their father to help them secure the goods.

It doesn't always work out as planned.

I own a green yoga mat that I faithfully use several times a week. Green is unofficially banned in my style of yoga (long story) but I schlep the offending mat into class every time.

Although I wear only silver jewelry, I have a "mother's" charm in the shape of a little girl made out of gold and sapphire. I try to remember to switch over to a gold chain every once in a while.

I drink gallons of coffee out of huge mugs, but I use the tiny 6 ounce cup with frogs on it when my littlest is paying attention.

I can't wait to see what comes my way this year.

Even when the kids gifts don't actually hit the mark, they come much closer than any attempt by my husband...

Love ya, hon...don't worry, I already bought myself something from you.

Time.

There are not enough hours in a day. So cliche.

Many days there are more than enough hours. I just don't always use them efficiently.
My mother is super organized. She thinks I don't plan ahead just to annoy the shit out of her. Good thing we live several states apart.
I don't want to think about what's for dinner at 7am. Even when I don't my family gets fed. And not from bottles and boxes and jars.
There is not a specified time to clean the cat box, but it's rarely overflowing.
I don't have a laundry day. It's every day.

My job is my family. Organization and efficiency are all about the end game. Getting things DONE.
But this work I do, it's never done.
It's a good fit for me I think.
My husband always claims that if he were the one to stay home that the clothes would be folded and put away, the kids wouldn't know art supplies even existed outside of a classroom, and he and the vacuum would have a close personal relationship.
Have at it honey. I'll start looking for an empty padded cell for you...

So instead of focusing on a nonexistent finish line, I set priorities. Today they include ferrying my kids to and from school at the appropriate times, making something edible out of the rotten bananas on the counter, and battling scum in the shower. YAY.
Because I'm my own boss, I also get to "waste" a little time on the blog, in the yoga room, and doing the Thursday crossword.

My lost hours are really just pieces of myself I steal back from the unending circle of mundane busywork. It would be so easy to do my job "better" but then where would that leave me?

I propose that my unorganized life is a sign of maturity, not the opposite. That's my story and I'm sticking to it...

Food Chain.

I'm sitting outside on Friday night. Maybe midnight. Not THAT late, but everyone else in my family is tucked soundly into bed. Not me. I'm sneaking in cigarette, even though I don't smoke anymore. Yeah.

So I'm guiltily enjoying my American Spirit Yellow 'cause that brand makes smoking more worthy somehow...and I reach down to pet our new long haired cat, Lily, when I remember that the cats aren't allowed outside after dark.

ACK! It's the fucking local raccoon scout. Stupid raccoon. He's not only NOT afraid of me, he's cuddling up for a little foreplay before cleaning his grubs on our pool step. Where is your wife, what will your kids think? Do you have no shame? No decency?

Turns out the wife and kids would also like a bit of gratitude for ridding our lawn of those pesky insects. What's ten or fifteen feet of rolled up grass compared to an invasion of grubs and worms and beetles? Oh wait, the bugs are supposed to be there. I just hope there are enough to turn the soil AND feed our raccoon population.

Later, the coyotes will traverse the nighttime highway that is our backyard. They will get no "aww, how cute" from me. Outside of wasps, coyotes are the only living thing for which I harbor murderous intent. The eerie chorus of yipping from a successful hunt lives hauntingly in my mind from my years in Phoenix. I've also heard that awful sound in our own neighborhood in Pasadena. Someone's chihuahua or poodle was the reason for celebration each time here in SoCal. My own OLD cat finally succumbed to their pressure last summer..

Despite the occasional close encounter, I revel in the wildlife that has endured the onslaught of population density. Occasionally we get warnings about mountain lions or bears who have "invaded" our territory. Umm...you've got it backwards ABC7. The beautiful hawk that lives in the Deodar Cedar in our front yard? Eat all the baby bunnies you can find, heck, take a few baby raccoons or coyotes...just leave my kid's cats alone.

P.S. The nearly blind baby skunk that scavenged our front yard every nightfall last summer and was named "Opus" by my daughters, PLEASE, God or whoever, don't let that be the same squashed bloody skunk that I nearly ran over yesterday outside our driveway on the way to school...I told the girls it wasn't.

Body Images.

My oldest daughter came out of the locker room last night with a new view of the world.

She's in there because she dives. A lot. She used to have long, curly, brown hair. Now the dead, blond wisps barely graze her shoulders. A side effect of over chlorinated pools brought on by the national hysteria about germs...but I digress.

So, anyway, the showers and changing area have exposed her to a lot of naked bodies in her short decade on this planet. Mostly female, but not all. Not a problem for me, I want her to understand that not all of us, none actually, look like the girls in the beer commercials.

She has first-hand knowledge that after age, oh, seventy or so, your skin and muscles aren't as friendly with each other as they used to be. No matter how many laps a week you swim.

She's shared the shower with two-year old little boys who are really happy that their penis has been freed from the swim diaper. I told her it's a default for all boys and men, they can't keep their hands off that thing. Too fun.

She battles for locker space with the young teens who have beautiful bodies in all shapes and sizes and stages, but are shy about everything so new.

She's seen women who have so much...ahem...hair down there, that they shampoo AND condition it. Who knew? Us women, we love to talk about sex, but not so much about maintenance.

Yesterday though, even my eyes-wide-open ten year old was amazed.

Water aerobics class starts during diving, and ends after we've vacated the locker room. For those of you uninitiated in the ways of the pool, water aerobics is a class usually taken by people trying to get back into a life of movement after many years of not moving. These women are often big. Really big.

So someone was late to their water aerobics class. I heard about it something like this..."Mom, mom, mom, mooommm. I saw a woman with boobs as big as my HEAD! Her legs were the size of my TORSO. And her BUTT was as big as all the butts in our whole family! While she was putting on her suit it kept getting STUCK on the extra parts of her body!"

I enjoyed her amazement. I reminded her that this woman was putting in an effort to get back to "healthy." I don't like the words fat and skinny. I teach my kids to move, not as a way to control weight, but because that's what bodies are made to do.

All my daughter could focus on though was making a mental note to NEVER get that big. I can't blame her. There are teachable moments, and then there are "ah-ha" moments. I don't think that image is going to fade from her mind any time soon. Maybe it shouldn't. When it comes to living in the skin we were born with, some things are beyond our control but not ALL.

Chalk up one more life lesson to the women's locker room.

A love letter.

Although I have six brothers and sisters in my extended family, all special to me in different ways, there is only one person who qualifies as my true sibling. My big brother by twenty-one months lived the timeline of my childhood with a perspective that no one else in this world shares.

Legend has it that he was none too pleased with the bundle of screaming fury and need that I was in those first few months (years?). A four pound preemie was definitely not what any toddler could have possibly imagined when waiting for his new sister to come home. Add insult to injury, I'd guess this point in time may be the beginning of my mother's descent into the inflexible world of control freak. I was nothing like the happy, sleepy first child she had birthed, but individuality be damned, schedule and routine were just what we all needed to remedy this new "problem."

As the years passed, he must have decided that I was the lesser of the three evils in the house. He became my protector and constant companion. My earliest memory is of my brother leaving me (in the back seat of the VW bug) to go behind a big brown gate where lots of kids were REALLY enjoying themselves. I was stuck with Mom. How could he?! It was his preschool, of course, and two-year olds weren't allowed.


From that point on, I joined in on everything that interested my (idol) brother. No way was I gonna be left behind with my parents. For the most part, he let me tag along. He played with Tonka trucks, I played with Tonkas. He climbed trees, rode big wheels, played pool, listened to disco/rock/country, read science fiction, experimented with smoking and sex at church camp...all activities faithfully mirrored by his little sister.


The last time I remember spending a lot of time together as kids was when my brother contracted mono and was forced into bed rest for about three weeks during the summer. I think we were maybe thirteen and fifteen. By that time we had survived a parent in drug treatment, a bitter divorce, a plunge into poverty, countless moves, and quality weekends with my father. I can still see that couch in the living room pulled out into a bed, my brother lifeless on it all day long and me wishing I could fix it for him. I watched his baby fat melt away as the illness dragged on. I played Deep Purple and Stairway to Heaven trying to cheer him up. I piled his bed with Dune and Farenheit 451 and probably even made cookies, hoping he'd eat.


The mono finally dissipated, but it took something with it. My brother emerged thinner and wiser somehow. He announced that living with his mother wasn't what he needed and he was moving in with Dad. By this point my father had relocated across the country, remarried someone with four kids and seemed to have his addictions under control.


Bye big bro, can I come with? I wanted nothing more. I never asked. It was time for my brother to take care of himself instead of me. I started high school without my anchor, floating free in a world of infinite terror.

I made bad choices. Not the obvious ones. I longed for popularity. I coveted the Guess jeans with the zippers at the ankle. I dutifully cooked and cleaned, trying to please my mother who's attention was focused on my errant brother, even in his absence.

Eventually he returned, but we were now on different paths. He'd picked up some new survival skills while living with Dad. They led to juvenile detention, treatment, banishment from the house, dropping out of school, and finally living hand to mouth on his own by the age of seventeen.

I still wanted to tag along. I didn't know how. I attempted to straddle our two worlds. I started smoking, I drank on the weekends at my friends parent-free houses and eventually found my way to casual drug use. At the same time, I ran track, held down a job and passed my classes without much effort. My brother only acknowledged the good girl. Try as I might, he didn't need me as a companion anymore. Hindsight revealed to me that he never did drop his protector role, but I didn't understand the big picture as well as he did.

Our lives ran somewhat parallel my last year at home. I turned my back on the high school boys who never noticed me and started going out with an "older" man. I met him at work in the suburbs, but it turns out he lived an edgy existence in a loft in downtown Minneapolis. Not only was he every mother's nightmare; experienced, grungy, and working a dead end job, it just so happened that he and my brother were friends. I spent almost a year of my limited free time with a front row seat to my brother's life. I worked hard at destroying my naive image that year but I wasn't very good at it. I wanted baaaad to belong, but the harder drugs and petty crimes of that group of immature twenty-somethings scared me.

At the predetermined time, I chose the path that led to college. I headed out of state, made new friends and struggled with academics for the first time ever. I didn't have the time for, or the access to, my brother's alternative life. We kept in touch, but only superficially. I knew he was trying out everything life had to offer and I lived in dread of the phone call telling me he was hurt or dead.

The call finally came. When I heard my Mom's voice, at the wrong time and in the wrong place, I thought I had lost him. She started with "your brother has been in an accident" but my heart stopped it's free fall when the next words out were something about "alive" and "in hospital."

I'm sure my brother could write a novel about his choices that led to him jumping a moving train that horrific night. I know he misses his foot terribly. I know that losing it did not curtail the risk taking completely. Chapters following include stopping a sixty-foot fall off a mountain with his face, repeatedly illegally bungee jumping off NYC bridges, surviving a head-on collision without a scratch, and much much more.

Things have slowed down a bit now. The next ill-timed phone call will probably be about one of our parents. We are close again, in an easy, casual way. My brother's life has mellowed to more closely parallel mine. On any given day I can assume we both do laundry, pay bills, wile away hours on the internet, cook for our family, struggle to not pick up a cigarette, work out, and any number of other mundane activities.

In my mind he will always be my first great friend and role model. He is the most interesting person I have ever known. He is also the smartest. I will always seek his approval and often be crushed by his honesty. And always, always, I know he's got my back.

I love you, bro'.

Let's try another version of my last post...

Things I like that may embarrass my kids.

Shit kicking, black leather work boots. Reminds me of a guy I used to date. I don't have a pair anymore, but there are some Harley Davidson boots en route to me as I write.

Explicit lyrics. They think it's great right now that I don't shield them. Give it a couple of years, it won't be cool that Mom knows what those things mean.

Surfing. I may be small, but my ASS in a wetsuit ain't pretty.

My five ingredients or fewer rule. If the list on the side of the bag or box is as long as a novel, I don't buy it. They can commiserate with the other kids whose moms worship to the Trader Joe's god.

Beer. I haven't checked out the side panel. I like it. I'm old enough. I drink it.

Facebook. I'll assure them I do NOT want to be their friend when they hit whatever social networking site is hot in a few years. You can bet your ass I'll know their password tho'..

Thank you notes. No, not email, handwritten. My follow through isn't perfect on this one, sometimes people get missed, but NEVER the grandparents. Yup, I'm still seeking my mother's approval.

Singing along. I know every word to every song. Nope, I can't carry a tune. Sorry kids, join in and I'll be harder to hear.

Cool Things That Everyone Else Seems To Like Except For Me.

1. The Dave Matthews Band. When is this song gonna END?
2. Movies based on comic books. NO, there is not even ONE that I am interested in.
3. People who volunteer endlessly for their kid's school. (Supposedly cool in my world). Get a fucking life. Or help create policy so we aren't compelled to make up for the shortcomings of public education.
4. Expensive cars. Fast, yes. Loud, maybe. Pricey, do the depreciation math you idiot.
5. Wine. My mother's drink. Ugh.
6. Massive televisions. Haven't gone there yet, the one I have hasn't conked.
7. Skinny Jeans. Today's teen "body by McDonalds" and this fad are not compatible.
8. The Wii. I'd rather GO bowling, PLAY softball, you get the picture.

There are more, I'll save them for another day.

Oversharing.

The petty irritations, to-do lists, music and memories are never silent in my head. My thoughts run a mile a minute. All the time. Except for in yoga. I can tamp it down to two or three threads then. The heat of the room, the intensity of the practice, my struggle to just breathe and survive to the next posture, all help silence the internal dialog.

On my mind lately? My baby girl who is seven now. A very immature seven. That's OK, there is plenty of time to be old. She is everything her anxious perfectionist big sister fears. She is a mess. When she eats, food ends up on the back of her head, stuck to her earlobe, in the crease of her knee...it's a running joke around here and always proven right. She loses homework or completes it halfway in some sort of pen, pencil, crayon combo, then forgets to turn it in. She needed one more year of speech but didn't get it so she still stutters and spits and trips over consonant combinations.

None of those things stop her from happily breezing through every minute of her disaster of a life. Her newest joy is sharing every detail of her dreams, retelling each social interaction from the playground, and acting out all the funny scenes from her favorite shows. And there are lots of details. Lots. I've been trying to be attentive, sometimes my eyes glaze over in my eagerness to hear more, sometimes I even get to listen through the bathroom door. Because the story never ends. I've attempted to teach her the merits of editing, but that skill must still be in the developmental phase.

Then I realize what's going on. She's my mini-me. I do the exact same thing to any number of people throughout my day. I do it to myself. My older daughter actually cuts me off now with an "ok, ok, ok," chant. Only the cats don't seem to mind. My newest outlet, of course, is the blog.

The little one can't blog or facebook or even hit the yoga room four times a week. I owe it to her to gratefully ingest each excruciating detail. I will be thankful that she wants me as an audience and pay attention while she shares. Maybe I'll even get a word in edgewise during one of her juicy stutters. Talk on baby girl, I'm listening.