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July 31, 2005
you'll awake with a tummyache
Okay, I self-diagnosed by Googling my symptoms and I think I have a campylobacter infection. (And if that isn't more than you ever wanted to know about me, I don't know what is.) I keep thinking about the lake, about how warm it was when I swam in it last, and the geese ... all those geese. Did you know that geese poop like, every seven minutes? Ugh.
So I'm hanging around at home half-dressed, watching movies and reading and not doing much else because I never know when a wave of ill feeling is going to make me have to put my head on the table and shut my eyes. On the up side, I've gotten more sleep in the past 24 hours than I've gotten for weeks, there isn't anybody around to keep asking me do I feel better yet, and I have absolutely no urge to anything other than what I am doing. And thinking:
I was wrong in life, limited, shrank everything down to my size, and yet, in the end, there was something light-craving within me, which sent me back, and saved me. (George Saunders)
and
Everyone thinks they're doing the right thing. But some people can't see anyone but themselves. They think they can, but they're always looking in a mirror. They think they're doing the right thing for someone else, but that someone else turns out to be themselves. (Jane Mendelsohn)
Posted by JudyLa at 11:00 AM | Comments (0)
July 30, 2005
sick day
I had plans yesterday evening: I had invited myself to dinner with my friends D. and D. to celebrate D.'s birthday. But the day went on and it became harder and harder to concentrate on what I was doing while the muscles in my back seemed to clench tighter and tighter, and eventually I had to get up from my desk and go outside and walk just to breathe. Friday afternoon and the streets were full of people. I felt weird and other-worldly, and the smells from the open doors of the restaurants I passed made me sick to my stomach. Back in the office I felt no better. I wanted to crawl under my desk and go to sleep. In the carpool home I fell asleep, forced myself awake and made my regrets, went home. Let Jack out to pee while I sat on the front steps with my head on my knees, then let him back in and went straight to bed.
I opened my eyes almost three hours later, my back muscles clenched, my joints aching. Went downstairs for Pepto Bismol and took my temperature. Took advil for the fever, went back to bed with a cup of Earl Grey, and went back to sleep until this morning, when Spike let me know it was time for breakfast by sinking a claw into the back of my hand.
I hardly ever get sick, so I never know exactly what to do with myself when I am. I don't want to appear whiny, even to myself, so I try to tough it out. I spent the morning alternately in the bathroom and in bed reading. I watched a movie on TNT called Switchback, with Dennis Quaid as an FBI agent chasing a genial serial killer played by Danny Glover. At least I think it was Danny Glover. I talked to Herself and to The Husband, both staying at his parents' house, and T.H. got A Tone in his voice when I told him how bad I felt. "I can't believe you're sick when you have all this free time," he said aggrievedly, and I wondered if he thinks I'm sick because of all the free time. I watched a rerun of a Mad TV episode with Tenacious D, and then I called Moo and talked to him for a while, interrupting his slaughter by my sister in a game of Blood and Guts.
I took some more advil and when it finally kicked in, I got out of bed and got dressed for something to do, and came down here to write a little bit. I wish somebody was here to change my sheets for me like my mom used to do. That was pretty much her only concession when you were sick: clean sheets. Other than that, you were on your own as far as sympathy for your condition went. But oh, it was so wonderful to get in bed and stretch out on cool, unrumpled-by-fever cotton! I don't really want sympathy, I just want to feel better and to be able to eat something other than toast. Also I would like the toast to stay in me for a little bit longer than it has tended to.
Here's my horoscope for today:
It would be most comfortable for you to become absorbed into another person and function under their protection and cover. Alas, the time has come to prove what you can do on your own.
"Alas"--I love that. I get it; Mom's not here anymore and I guess this means any clean sheets on my bed are up to me.
Posted by JudyLa at 02:00 PM | Comments (0)
July 26, 2005
it's a simple message so I'm leaving out the whistles and bells
As his father wants to Get Out Of Town, Moo is leaving for my sister's suddenly, unexpectedly early by a few days. The expanse of time that seemed so generous at the beginning of the month, stretching out empty in front of us, has telescoped into a few hours, and the knowledge that we squandered most of it is depressing. Moo's habit of staying up all night and sleeping all day long curtailed any activity before, say, dinner time; and having gotten up at 5:00 a.m., dinner time was when I'd start winding down. On the weekend I'd go out and he'd sleep. During the week he'd watch television and I'd sleep.
Nevertheless, we find ourselves at the kitchen table this evening realizing that he's leaving tomorrow morning. "I'm going to miss you, Mom," he says. "It's going to be awful." I think at first he's kidding, trying to get me to say it so he can tease me. But no, he means it. I feel a knot in my stomach. Am I going to cry? Am I going to turn into the kind of mother who cries over her children? After he leaves the house will be big and empty and quiet and all the time will be mine alone. I should be looking forward to it, but right now I'm not.
We go out, buy crickets for Argo, buy batteries for Moo's cd player, fill up the tank with gas. Come home, put our bathing suits on and go down to the lake in the still evening air. The water is warm, and lowering myself into it is hardly more refreshing than standing on the dock looking at it, but once I'm in it feels wonderful.
I float on my back and tilt my head so that I see the lake overhead and the sky below. The water is black and smells like the lake. The sky is a blue bowl fading to gray. Overhead the little bats that live in the trees start to swoop down over our heads, catching their dinner. Something nibbles at my foot. The natural light dims and on the shore the house lights come on. "Why didn't we swim every day?" says Moo. There isn't any reason; we just didn't. But we are swimming right now, all alone on the lake. We talk and toss a tennis ball back and forth until it gets too dark to see where it's landing and I keep getting hit on the head. Time to go up, time to pack. I'm going to miss you, too.
Posted by JudyLa at 11:00 PM | Comments (0)
July 25, 2005
the year of living dangerously
The evening air is as warm as bathwater. You don't walk through it so much as wade in it. It's a heat wave, a tropical heat wave, hot enough to bring the dead to life. Jack was out on the deck this afternoon while I answered e-mail for a half hour; when I came outside he was lying prostrate and I thought he'd succumbed. But now he's lying prostrate on the office floor, exhausted from heating up and cooling off all day I guess.
Today Moo got up at 4:20 in the afternoon. Yesterday it was 5:10. He stays up all night long watching television and not doing the homework I told him I wouldn't bug him about but still do, and when I get up and come downstairs I can tell that somebody in the house has been awake for my entire night's sleep. That makes me feel weird, and like I'm a bad mother somehow, to not make him go to bed. He leads a solitary existence and since it's summer, it seems he should be hanging out with friends. But he's happy to not call anybody ("I don't want to bother them."), or happy enough anyway.
I've been thinking about 9/11, about the drive home from D.C., past the Pentagon on fire, out of the city and into the suburbs not knowing what the hell was going on, was it the end of the world? Were the bombs about to start falling? It was very strange to be afraid for my life that morning, surreal. When I got home it was noon; I turned on the TV and watched the Twin Towers fall and fall and fall and fall. I was hungry, which felt weird, and I ate a sandwich. Went out and got the kids. Herself knew all about it; Moo refused to talk.
All afternoon on that glorious, perfect late summer day I watched buildings burn on TV. The Husband got home at dinner time. It had taken him seven hours to drive twenty-five miles. I was so happy to see him; he was furious. Furious with the traffic, furious with the terrorists, furious with everything. He wanted to go out and hit somebody, do some damage back.
He went downstairs and watched TV all night; I went upstairs, took a valium and tried to sleep. In the middle of the night I heard the jets overhead and it scared me. "F-16's," he told me. "Don't worry." The rest of the week we could barely talk to each other or be in the same room together. We had experienced the same things, we had seen the same images, heard the same news stories, but we might as well have been on different planets. We had no comfort to offer each other and nothing similar we could share. Fear and anger, that was it, and what if it had been the end? Fear on one floor, anger on another. Nowhere to go but inward, away from each other, nothing to say but nothing.
I don't know why I think about this now. I mean why I think so much about it lately. See? I tell myself. See? We're on our own.
Posted by JudyLa at 11:00 PM | Comments (0)
July 24, 2005
i'll say it straight and plain: i know i've made mistakes. i've always been afraid.
What doesn't kill me makes me stronger.
The thing is, it did kill me.
Posted by JudyLa at 12:30 AM | Comments (0)
July 23, 2005
what's a girl to do.
"Aren't you tired of this?" says W., exasperated. "Aren't you?" Yes. But I'm tired of so many things now, breathing being first on the long, long list of them. If I could stop doing the things I'm tired of ... although after I stopped doing just that one, the rest would take care of itself.
Posted by JudyLa at 11:30 PM | Comments (0)
July 22, 2005
a horoscope it was hardly worth getting out of bed to read
Yours is often a thankless job, but it suits you so well that you don't need the acknowledgement that some do.
I heard Moo telling his friend A. yesterday, "Every time MC Chris drank from his water bottle [at the concert], my mom ducked." No kidding, because every time MC Chris drank he spat the mouthful onto the crowd in front of the stage. I get enough abuse from the people who know me; I don't need it from the people who don't.
Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)
July 21, 2005
oh yeah?
Coz life's not all about boys and cars,
getting fucked up in fucked up bars,
See I'm not a retard or gay like DeBarge.
I'm large and in charge with a face so scarred,
a cold black heart that's been torn apart.
The Sith wish that they had a dick so hard
Coz it's long, long ago in a pussy far, far.
MC Chris, Fett's 'vette
Posted by JudyLa at 07:00 PM | Comments (0)
July 20, 2005
nothing--a goose walked over my grave
So yesterday my friend M., the unofficial Princess of Northern Virginia, called to say she'd be in town and was going to stop by my office to say hello to all the little people she'd left behind when she took a job making twice her old salary, and that she'd stop by to see me and "I want to talk, so be prepared."
When M. and I worked together she'd usually wind up in my office at some point during the day and we'd gossip about all the people we couldn't stand, figure out everybody's problems, and trade books to read. It was all very high-school and mostly a lot of fun. There's something refreshing about spending time with people who think only about themselves--I don't mean think only about themselves the way I pretty much only think about myself, I mean think only about themselves in a positive way; they know they deserve to have everything they want and don't have a lot of patience with people who can't get with the program. On the other hand, people who feel that way can be wearying, since their overwhelming self-regard means that they expect you to entertain them. All that energy spent on themselves becomes a black hole, sucking up your personality right into that empty space in their own. But in small doses, or in the right venue (say, one with liquor), they're as easy to take as helium from a birthday balloon.
After her lunch with friends at Vidalia (which she had been unhappy about going to because "who wants to pay $30 for, like, grits?"), M. knocked at my office door and came in and sat down. For the next forty-five minutes we talked about, well ... her, which was perfectly fine with me since I am studiously trying to avoid becoming the kind of person whose sadness creates another type of black hole and thereby drives all friends screaming in fear, and how I do this is to deflect all conversation about My Situation into other topics. This was going pretty well, for the most part, and during one foray back into safe territory I said "So what else is new with you? Any good gossip?"
"Oh," M. responded, leaning forward, "Well, my friends K. and J. are getting a divorce and J. is devastated. They've been married for twelve years, but they haven't had sex in, like, six. And now he's seeing somebody else and is having a great time and she doesn't know." I thought about living with somebody for six years and never having sex: how do people do that?
"So, isn't he going to tell her?"
"Oh, the last time he tried to end things by going to a lawyer she ended up in the hospital. So he's afraid to. But he's having this great time and says he could never go back."
"But what does J. think is going to happen? How long have they been separated?"
"A year and a half. She thinks they'll get back together eventually. They see each other twice a week for 'dates,' and he comes over and, like, hangs out and fixes things and stuff so it's like normal." She stopped and gave me a look. "What?"
"Nothing. I don't get it. They've been apart that long... why does she think they'll get back together?"
"Well ... the worst thing he did was to tell her that he loves her better than anybody else in the world. It was really kind of mean because it gave her hope, when there isn't any." She stopped and gave me a another look. "What?"
Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)
July 17, 2005
and all the sucka MC's can call me sire
On Sunday evening, as the neighborhood gets quiet, the air seems completely still outside and the trees against the sky look like a photograph instead of the real thing, but then I see the bats swooping back and forth and the fireflies' lights. Jack and I sit on the front porch and Spike meows to come outside and paws the window. We sit there until it gets dark and all I hear are the night insects and somebody's air conditioner.
Last night Moo and I went to a club called Jaxx to see MC Chris. The sky was clear when we left our house and by the time we got to Jaxx it was pouring, enormous dark clouds hiding the sunset and great forks of lightning spearing down every once in a while. We waited in line with a whole bunch of white adolescent boys in baseball hats until the doors opened, then I showed my ID and we paid our $10 each and we were in.
Gradually, very gradually, the room filled with both people much younger than me and cigarette smoke. The boys were either very skinny or kind of chunky (I saw one in a t-shirt that said Fuck Me, I'm Fat), and the girls all looked sexy enough to take a bite of. Moo and I stood in front of the stage and waited through two and a half hours of mostly not very good rappers, the worst of whom was OUO, who rapped about being "between the devil and the deep blue sea" and (I think) ballpoint pens, and modern women ("you look good / but can you cook good?"), before we got what we came for in the form of a short, pudgy guy with a certain amount of cynical wit and a voice like he'd inhaled helium, and it was about time.
My ears were ringing by the end of his set and the lights came up and kids called for their rides and we left the building, the rain had stopped, the air felt clean and blessedly free of cigarette smoke, and it was very, very late at night or very early in the morning, depending on your outlook. "That was great," Moo said.
Posted by JudyLa at 10:00 PM | Comments (0)
July 16, 2005
how about it.
how bout getting off these antibiotics
how bout stopping eating when I´m full up
how bout them transparent dangling carrots
how bout that ever elusive kudo
how bout me not blaming you for everything
how bout me enjoying the moment for once
how bout how good it feels to finally forgive you
how bout grieving it all one at a time
the moment I let go of it was the moment
I got more than I could handle
the moment I jumped off of it
was the moment I touched down
how bout no longer being masochistic
how bout remembering your divinity
how bout unabashedly bawling your eyes out
how bout not equating death with stopping
thank you india
thank you providence
thank you disillusionment
thank you nothingness
thank you clarity
thank you thank you silence
Alanis Morissette
Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)
July 15, 2005
say what?
Moo and I went to get soft-serve ice cream yesterday after dinner. We chased the rain all the way. There was a rainbow off the driver’s side window. “Mom,” Moo said to me while we drove, “Did you ever notice that your bellybutton smells awful? And it gets lint and other stuff in it.” This he assumed would be as fascinating to me as it was to him and he went on and on in that vein until we parked and got out of the car, and then thank God we talked about ice cream.
I’m glad my children see me as approachable and open to any topic, but jeez. This was what Herself talked to me about last night: “And C. did this really big poop and it wouldn’t go down; you know how sometimes it doesn’t get in the water and it gets stuck on the…” Et cetera.
My friend A. tells me about the ingrown hair on his lip that he had to tweeze. The Husband tells me that his antibiotics give him diarrhea. My friend D. tells me that when she was at a sex-toy party she bought a vibrator, and then explains how it works. During a long-distance call with her father and me on Wednesday, Herself takes the opportunity to announce that I take “a really long time in the bathroom, and then the seat is damp.*”
I’m sure I ought to be doing something with all this information besides wondering why people have to put voice to it; I’m just not sure what.
*No, I don’t, and no, it isn’t.
Posted by JudyLa at 01:39 PM | Comments (0)
July 14, 2005
in your darkest time, it's just enough to know it's there
who I am is not as important as what I want.
Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)
July 13, 2005
it's me, Phillipe
All around us there is thunder. Towering brilliant white clouds hang on the horizon, the rest of the sky is dull gray. Moo and I are taking Jack for his evening walk, a little bit earlier than usual, in the hope of missing the woman we usually run into, the one who went to Hollywood to be an actress but is now a mom and the owner of two dogs and is living right here in our neighborhood. She's nice but she makes us nervous: she's tiny and jittery, like her dogs.
Moo and Jack and I take our usual route. I'm walking along not thinking anything in particular. There's G., trimming the bushes in front of her house with a pair of scissors, cigarette hanging from her mouth, cell phone at her ear.
"Mom," says Moo, and holds out his hand for a plastic bag. There's something about this spot on the road that makes Jack poop. I turn and hand Moo the bag and see, one house over, a woman looking at me through raised shutters. She is shaking her head disapprovingly, staring right at me; her mouth moves. She stares at me and I stare back. Her mouth keeps moving. Does she think I can hear her? She shakes her head, squints her eyes and talks on and I watch her, until Matt is finished putting the poop in the bag and I finally mouth back at her "I can't hear you." She gives me a disgusted look and the shutters drop closed.
What was that about? The woman, in late middle-age, made me think of that movie, "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane," where a crippled up Joan Crawford is held hostage by her psycho sister, Bette Davis. At one point Joan hauls her body out of its wheelchair and hangs on the barred window in the room where she's been locked in, calling in vain for someone to help her. Maybe what I thought was "pick up all that damn poop in the road" was "help me; Bette Davis is insane and I'm a prisoner."
"Did you see that?" I say to Moo as we continue our walk. "See what?" he says. "That woman, that woman in the window looking at me." "Mom," he says back. "I didn't see anybody."
Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)
July 12, 2005
The girls in their summer dresses
It's 12:30. I take off my sweater, leave my office, take the elevator down to the lobby. I have to walk to 16th and M, about ten minutes away. As I leave the building a middle-aged man smiles at me. I smile back. It feels good to be out here in the hot. I cross the street at 19th and head up toward M. I come up behind three men who are walking slowly and talking, lots of gesticulation, their hands making large and emotional gestures in the air. “Gay,” I think. Then I catch up to them, close enough to hear them talking. Oh. Italian.
Every once in a while I walk by an open door and a blast of polar-bear air conditioning rushes out onto the sidewalk. Everyone is out, walking to someplace, talking on cell phones, everyone looks dazed and sun dazzled. By the time I am walking back from 16th Street my eyelids are sweating. I’m so hot that I shiver.
I take a left and walk down Connecticut. As I pass a man in a dark, pinstripe suit he looks at me and smiles a bit. “Hello,” he says. “Hello,” I say back. “Are you hot?” He shakes his head, “No, not at all!” I say, “I beg to differ.” I don’t turn around to catch the expression on his face. What the hell did I just say? I want to laugh.
Just past the Mayflower outside Pink sits a homeless man. I expect him to ask me for change and I am about to tell him I don’t have my wallet but instead he says to me “Ow, baby—you’ve got everything I need!” One man’s opinion. Still, I make a mental note of his location.
I walk the final blocks on the shady side of the street. I love this weather.
Posted by JudyLa at 01:01 PM | Comments (0)
July 11, 2005
I chill in deep space, a mask is over my face
"I'm going to go write a blog entry," I say to Moo. We are standing in the darkened kitchen, a chicken carcass we've been eating from on the counter, a loaf of bread and some olive oil in a dish next to it. I'm having a glass of cabernet. "Are you going to write about my man-boobies?" he says to me, poking my arm. Poke. Poke. "Mmm, nope," I say, but I guess I lied.
On my way home from work tonight I stopped the car and looked through the trees at the setting sun, red and orange and wreathed in clouds; the sky looked on fire. The air is saturated, leaden, so heavy it's an effort to breathe it. After Moo and I walked Jack, I stood in the front yard in the dark, sweating, and talked to my neighbor B. "I pray for you," she told me. When I came inside my shirt was soaked from the effort of standing upright and talking in the wet air and the dry, chilled atmosphere in the house was a shock.
Herself has been gone for almost a week. Moo and I say to each other pretty regularly
"What do you want to do?"
"I dunno; what do you want to do?"
It's hard to fill the time, all the free time that has, amazingly, opened up in front of us for the next few weeks.
Do I miss her? Probably. Or at least I want to miss her, but the sheer, utter relief I feel at not having to be somebody's everything overwhelms me and although I can say it, I don't ... quite ... feel it. I do, however, sleep badly and wake up at 4:00 a.m.; maybe that's my punishment for having a cold heart.
Posted by JudyLa at 10:00 PM | Comments (0)
July 07, 2005
aw, shaddup
Things I learned in the past 24 hours:
1. I'm just a little bit more whiny than I need to be.
2. Waiting for a month before you go to the doctor for a sinus infection isn't the best idea.
3. I'm allergic to cefuroxime axetil.
4. Turkey bologna, tomato, cucumber, vidalia onion and mayonnaise on french bread is a darned good dinner with a glass of cabernet.
5. The house is really, really quiet, and big, without Herself in it.
6. My blood pressure is 90 over 70.
7. I can read again.
8. Having somebody say "I know exactly what you mean" is sometimes all it takes to make your day.
9. I am "inspirational," according to a woman at my gym. Yes, really.
10. See 1.
Posted by JudyLa at 07:23 PM | Comments (0)
July 06, 2005
The Fresh Air Fund
So in the end it wasn't a good birthday, after all. There was her aunt and uncle and cousin, there was the sun and the lake and swimming, there was the jar of olives she loves, there was sushi, there was the Happy Birthday balloon, there were the birthday presents, there was the ice cream cake, there were the fireworks. But there wasn't the dad, and that made every bit of difference.
She cried in the morning, she cried in the middle of the afternoon, she cried before and after dinner, and she cried herself to sleep that night lying next to me. "This was the worst birthday ever, and it's my double digits," she sobbed. I told her "You'll feel better tomorrow" and hoped that it was true. The next morning when she got up she said "I'm so glad my birthday is over."
Now--right now, in fact--she is on her way east with her aunt and uncle and cousin; I've sent her away for a little while so she can live with some normal people for a few weeks and maybe realize that it can be done: a family can live together and love each other and enjoy each other and get through the day without feeling like getting through the day is the best they can hope for.
What the heck am I doing? Especially, what am I doing to Herself? It's pointless to have regrets when I keep jumping right back into the same bullshit every time, irresistably drawn to the "what if" chance that maybe this go-round things might turn out not so bad. Things always are just as bad, of course, or worse, but I always keep hoping, and hoping has gotten me right to this point: to the point where I need to send my daughter 400 miles to the north to live with somebody else so she can have a few weeks away from turmoil. What the fuck.
Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)
July 04, 2005
born on the fourth of July
This is one of the few mornings of the year when there aren't any traffic sounds from I-95. The sun wasn't up yet when I went outside, and it was cool--or cooler--and all the birds were singing, and geese were flying, honking, overhead.
Ten years ago I found myself standing on our deck at 4 a.m., restless, staring into the back yard and wondering what to do with myself. For the first time in this pregnancy I had woken up early. The rest of the house was asleep: Moo, my sister, my brother-in-law, the dog. The Husband was in Minnesota at a conference. Herself wasn't due for six weeks.
The night before we had a cookout and I let myself have a glass of good red wine with dinner and a candy bar, dark chocolate, for dessert. I was craving chocolate.
I don't remember any more how the rest of the day went until I went into labor at Pier One. My brother-in-law drove me to the hospital; all the nurses said "Oh, you aren't having that baby today"; and two hours later she was born. She spent two weeks in intensive care and when she came home she weighed five pounds.
Today she is ten years old. She's upstairs sleeping in my bed; the last thing she said to me last night was "I love you so much, Mom." And she does. I never saw a child so willing to love everybody; she loves everybody, right down to the turtle in the Tupperware bowl in my bathroom. Most of the time I'm not exactly sure where she came from; she seems to be made up completely of emotion, and I'm afraid for her, so wanting to love and be loved. Most of the time I feel that I've spent the last ten years letting her down. But I guess that's a topic for another day.
Today will be a good day. Happy birthday, little gal. I love you back.
Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)
July 03, 2005
event horizon
It was one of those days where all I did, it felt like, was drive from store to store spending money. I hate that. And I went to bed too late last night, woke up too early this morning. And the weathermen lied again; the cooler, drier weather still not anywhere in sight.
Groceries, laundry, yard work, ironing, and when Herself and I went out to swim the sun obligingly hid itself behind dark clouds until late afternoon. Floating around on my raft I closed my eyes and sighed.
"Mom. Mom. Mom."
I opened my eyes. "What?"
"Do you ever fall asleep on your raft when you're out on the lake?"
"No, I'm never allowed to."
Silence. "Oh, I get it."
Tomorrow is The Birthday, and I have gotten so many instructions from Herself over the past few days about it that I'm completely paranoid about the whole freaking thing. What she wants to eat, and when, how she wants the table to look when she gets up, what wrapping paper I'm supposed to use, when and where the fireworks will be lit ... my God. I mean, I get it and everything: it's a way of controlling something important to her. She needs this the way I needed to celebrate the 15th. Only it never works out the way you plan, and I'd like to tell her to relax and just let it happen. In fact, I have told her to relax. Being her mother's daughter, however, she can't.
She called my sister tonight to find out when she and my brother-in-law and nephew will be here tomorrow.
(I should tell you that my sister is the uber-mom. She and my brother-in-law spent weeks preparing for my nephew's fourth birthday party a month ago. I saw the pictures and just looking at them exhausted me. Naturally his slacker aunt [that would be me] hasn't even gotten around to getting the poor kid a birthday present.)
Herself put my sister on speaker phone and said to her "We just got back from getting my birthday presents."
"Oh yeah? And what did you get?" my sister asked her.
"Gum."
"That wasn't a birthday present!" I yell from across the room, but it's too late. Yes, for my daughter's tenth birthday I got her gum.
I imagine my sister's look. Maybe tomorrow I'll just pretend I have a stomach ache, and stay in bed. Only I probably won't have to pretend very hard.
Posted by JudyLa at 08:00 PM | Comments (0)
July 02, 2005
one foot in sea and one on shore
It's 6:30 in the afternoon and although everybody is still swimming, everybody is hungry. Though I am perfectly happy to keep my butt in a chair on the dock, watching and listening to them and reading this week's New Yorker, I am the only one who can drive a car and so am elected to fetch supper. While I pay for Subway sandwiches it occurs to me that last Saturday night's dinner cost roughly 20 times more than tonight's. It was an expensive evening.
There are five of us but only four chairs, so Moo reclines in the hammock and eats his dinner that way, like a Roman at a banquet, while Herself and C. and A. and I sit at the table and look out at the lake, eat and talk. Herself fetches sodas and I finish my bottle of Pinot Noir, and it's pretty nice sitting here and my heart doesn't clench every time there's silence, and I'm not worried that I'm not pretty enough or interesting enough or just wrong, too me; I'm not worried at all, in fact.
They talk about all the other kids in school whom they hate and hope to not see as freshmen. Herself talks about her birthday, which is all she has talked about for weeks. She will be ten years old, "double digits," on July fourth. Per her precise instructions, on her birthday she will have chocolate chip pancakes and bacon for breakfast and sushi for lunch and dinner and a helium balloon and a Target gift card for her "big" present and we will have ice cream cake and fireworks that night. She wants this year to be just like every year, the same as every other year, and so we will pretend that it is.
The day after her birthday, or maybe the day after that, she will leave to spend most of the rest of the summer at her aunt's house. "What are we going to do when your sister is gone?" I asked Moo last week. He gave me The Look. "We're going to have fun, Mom. Remember fun?" Sometimes.
After dinner I go down to the dock with the big kids until it gets dark, and they go back in the warm water. I bring the dinner's detritus up to the kitchen, where Spike is lounging on the floor, like a Roman at a banquet, one paw in his water dish. He blinks at me and meows. "Same to you," I tell him.
Posted by JudyLa at 11:30 PM | Comments (0)