Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Anatomy of a Monday run

This is an example of my internal dialogue each Monday as I slog my way through my morning run. Mileage, soundtrack and attitude may vary.

Mile 1. I emerge from the house, begrudgingly. "GOD, it's (insert weather extreme here)! I hate this. My sports bra feels weird. Ugh, these are the wrong socks. I already have a wedgie. I'm never drinking wine on a Sunday again. When did I decide running to Coldplay was a good idea?"

After warming up for a few blocks, I pass a local bus stop. "Thanks for smoking, bus guy. Nothing I enjoy more than feeling like I'm running through a bar circa 1998....Oooh, Ke$ha!"

Running in our neighborhood around dawn is like being Snow White in a Disney film, with woodland creatures threatening to alight on every limb. "Jesus Christ! You almost gave me a heart attack, stupid friggin' rabbits! Where the fuck did all these rabbits come from?? When did I move to Watership Down?....C+C Music Factory, you make me sweat indeed."

MIle 2. First traffic light. "It's called a red light, garbage truck driver. I'm sure looking at your iphone is distracting you from noticing the rather tall woman covered in reflectors. Not wanting to join Teddy Ruxspin as a hood ornament, I will let you have the right of way. I hope a bag full of old diapers opens on you today....Can I go home yet?"

Approaching other runners, running side by side coming form the opposite direction, "Guess I will dangerously hop into the street to pass you since you can't stop your conversation long enough to have one of you fall behind for three seconds. PS, if you can talk, you're not running fast enough....Y'all gon' make me lose my mind. That's right, DMX."

"Gotta return those library books. Where did I put my library card? Put milk on the grocery list. Blergh. Never eating brownies on a Sunday night again either. Would it be terrible if I threw up in the street? Remember to buy birthday present for party next week....No, Will Smith, your parents understood, they were just to broke to buy you Adidas, you insensitive prick.""

Mile 3. Approach the house of Old Running Guy. Old Running Guy is about a hundred and has the veiny, knobby legs of a long-time runner and seems to lie in wait for me each Monday when I am my slowest, to emerge and begin his run. He blinds me every morning with the headlamp he insists on wearing and shames me with his ridiculous pace. "Why are you up this early??? You have to be too old to work. Can't you do this later in the day and stop shaming me? Are you bionic?....This new Kelly Clarkson song is not all I dreamed it would be."

"Hi Snotty Bitch!" I actually do say "Hi" out loud, in a very aggressive manner. Running at this hour is like belonging to a club. We are all miserable, yet determined. I'm not looking for a long conversation, but we all give each other a little finger wave as a show of solidarity. Three months it took me to get this bitch to finally acknowledge me. I don't know why I care, I just do.

Mile 4. The Big Hill. This hill seems to go on FOREVER. If forever were a quarter mile. "OK, ipod Shuffle, what you got to get me up Big Hill? Neil Diamond? Come on! I can't stop to screw around with you, here. Enrique Iglesias? Was I drunk when I bought this song? Sade? OK, someone obviously stole you while I slept and LOADED YOU WITH CRAP!"

Mile 5. Running down Big Hill's other side. "MAKE 'EM GO, OH! OH! OH! AS YOU SHOOT ACROSS THE SKY-AY-AY!!! BABY YOU'RE A FIREWOOOORK! I love Katy Perry, I love running, why don't I do this more?"

Thursday, November 24, 2011

One Purple Balloon

Shameful, I know, how long it's been. But you will all be glad to know the dreaded student directory has been printed and is being distributed Monday (which is when I begin fielding calls about mistakes and I begin drinking heavily), and I rewarded myself with my annual weekend away in Boston with B. Best quote of the trip? "We'll take two white wines and two shots of whatever is in that skull bottle."

So it's Thanksgiving. The children are engrossed in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, H is cooking sides to bring to his brother's, and I am contemplating my entry in the Thanksgiving book. These entries used to be no-brainers. There was always a new baby or new something to take the spotlight in that year's entry, but now each year I get to really explore what has happened this specific year when deciding what to write about. This year, it is all based on a balloon.

Yesterday afternoon, I decided to brave the rain and the crowds solo, as H has another Brazil* trip coming up and needed to work late, to take the kids into the city to see the Macy's balloons being inflated. The traffic was madness and parking a nightmare - #1 heard me say "shit!", which now that she knows that is the real s-word, and not "shut up", makes her crack up with mature, 4th grade glee - but once we got there it was incredible. The Macy's staff was giving out free balloons, which makes any event more fun, no? Except when you have pushy parents trying to cut you in line. Um, sorry, my license plate might say Jersey, but my fist will say Da Bronx if you don't back it up. We walked along in the crowd, being given wide berth because of our extra wide jogger stroller, laughing, while "New York, New York" played, and we watched the Energizer Bunny and Snoopy rise up before our eyes. All was right with the world.

Until #1's balloon, which was tied to her wrist, as were all the offspring's balloons, untied from the string at the top end and floated away. There is nothing more heart-breaking than watching your child watch their balloon float away. Seeing her see the balloon stand was closed, I watched #1 want to burst into tears, but she held all but a few back and sighed sadly. #2, on the verge of tears herself, held out her string and chokingly said, "Here , have mine.", and Little Man started sobbing, saying, "(#1) is saaaad!!!!" This, dear readers, is what I am most thankful for this year. I am thankful that my children are all becoming kind, giving people. Yeah, yeah, it might sound like I'm tooting my own horn, but I'm not. I truly feel you can teach kids all you want about kindness and sharing, but it's they that have to do the hard work. You can lead a horse to emotional water, but you can't make it drink. I am thankful that the time I spend talking about doing the right thing and thinking of others is paying off. That the knocks they take now because they are so sensitive are not changing who they are. I am grateful my kids are good kids.

So #1 got over her balloon sadness and the night went on wonderfully. OK, after her brave reaction, I promised her that crazy cracked nail polish she's been wanting. I couldn't let the day end on a down note right? Yes, I am a sucker and, no I don't care. Life's hard enough. I walked around wanting to shout, "Look at my nice kids!!!"

So Happy Thanksgiving to you all. I hope your day is full of love and gratitude and that you are surrounded by your blessings. An no one's balloon floats away.

*I can finally name where it is he's been going now that his company's project is public knowledge. Every time I wrote about his being away I had to tell him, "Calm down, Jack Ryan, no one's gonna know." (points if you got the Patriot Games reference)

Friday, November 11, 2011

"Pick color"

Last week, I attempted to make another stand for myself, dear readers. About ten years ago, along with not wearing clothes intended for exercise when not exercising, I used to get my nails done every Saturday. I had been coveting a fellow mother's neatly manicured fingertips, nails coated in a rich fall brown and I thought to myself, "This wearing real clothes thing is working out quite well, why not start getting my nails done again?" So after cleaning out the attic all day Saturday, I decided to reward myself and hot-footed it to the local nail salon before they could close, ready to re-enter the world of nail art.

Those of you on the east coast will be familiar with the Korean nail salons that pepper every town and hamlet, usually managed by a middle-aged woman who speaks the most English of the crew. You walk in and search the row of faces, covered by surgical masks, trying to catch the eye of The Boss who will ask what service you want, nod, scream out something in Korean, then instruct for you to "pick color" and you sit down and wait. The timing of my decision was not great. Any woman over the age of eighteen knows when you go to the nail place within and hour of closing, it's going to be you and all the other schmucks who put it off until the last minute, waiting almost an hour, vying for the most recent Us Weekly and the last bottle of Ballet Slippers. I almost laughed out loud when a teenager walked in after me saying she had called ahead and made an "appointment". Sure, and I have a bridge you might be interested in buying. You can call these salons, and if you can decipher the heavily accented English, you will be told the wait is "not long" or you can come at a specific time, but no matter what you've been told, you're waiting with the rest of us, sister. These places are all about high volume. You want an appointment, go somewhere where they pay their workers a living wage and there's not a rice cooker in the bathroom.

I had brought two library books with me, so the wait was not an issue. Thirty minutes later, I was called and taken over to the pedicure chair, or as H call it, "the throne". Back in the day, H once had to bring my the car keys while I was getting my nails done. He crept in like a thief, so terrified was he of this foreign-run, female oasis, but got enough ammo in that two minutes to call me "your highness" for a month after seeing me in an elevated chair with a tiny Asian woman working on my feet. And speaking of men and nail places, H did it right. He ran in and ran out. I find men in nail salons so intrusive. They throw off the entire energy of the place. Whether they are in there getting their nails done, which is WEIRD even if the guy is a hand model, or even worse, paying for their female companion to get hers done, like they can't just hand her the cash and take a walk around the block, instead of sitting there propriertarily, like a pimp, men do not belong. And it is so awkward when a guy works there. You can see all the women trying to place themselves out of The Bosses line of sight when the male technician becomes available hoping to dodge that bullet. I don't want to hold hands worth any man but my husband, thanks.

I remove my shoes and climb into the massage chair, hoping the woman doesn't grimace at the state of my feet. Running develops quite a thick layer of calluses so my feet could pretty much be called hooves. Also, my lack of pedicure time, coupled with my penchant for open-toed shoes, requires a lot of at-home jobs. This lack of time also extends to doing my nails myself, which become a crisis every other Saturday night when I have, yet again, forgotten to freshly paint my toes, and not wanting to alter my shoe selection, am forced to slap yet another coat of polish over the existing chipped one, creating several strata of polish of varying colors for the technician to remove.

Eight hundred cotton balls and a gallon of acetone later, my naked tootsies are plunked into the tub. Now, maybe it's been too long since I had my feet done, but I thought the packet of green powder this gal poured into the water was to disinfect it, but instead it was some kind of aloe gel and my feet have been submerged in what I can best describe as feeling like a tub of fresh vomit. Am I supposed to be enjoying this sensation? Mercifully, she adds another packet a minute later that dissolves the puke bath and returns it to liquid state. Then another surprise. Just when I am expecting the gal to start rubbing in what I thought was lotion, and start the heavenly calf massage, she starts scraping the skin of my shins with this grainy scrub instead. Do some women have ridiculously rough skin on their legs? I'm going to leave with road rash! Eventually we do get to the rubby part, but GODDAMN, that hurt.

There is scraping and clipping, and the most humiliating - having someone dig out the nasty shit under your toe nails, which you know smells like death and you swear you will begin to clean this area daily from this point on. Not going to happen. Then the gal separates and wraps my toes in their little toilet paper muffler, that I can never seem to get duplicate at home, to keep them separated during painting, and finally, we get to the shellacking part which, thankfully, does not involve humiliation of any kind. Next, I am whisked off to the manicure station.

The pedicure station is rife with the weirdness of having someone work closely on what can arguably be described as one of the dirtier parts of your body that is not an orifice. Manicures, however, are awkwardness defined. Imagine sitting across from someone, holding hands with them, in fact, and not speaking a word or making eye contact. The last time I did that I was in eighth grade and we were watching Back to the Future. I used to feel rude maintaining this silence, and would try, in vain, to engage the nail tech in some light banter. I quickly figured out this was as much of a pain in the ass for her as it was for me. She would much rather cluck to her neighbor in Korean, probably about me ala Elaine on Seinfeld, than talk to me about the weather. Also, it felt false to me. Like, let's pretend earning three dollars an hour and possibly working off some kind of indentured servitude, is your life's calling and you want to hear all about me and my suburban problems. I always imagine the workers who have to listen to the ladies who don't have a clue, and keep babbling about their lives, have a fantasy about stabbing them in the throat with a cuticle clipper. Sure, there are regulars who have developed relationships with their usual gal, but those ladies are typically getting acrylics, which seeing how long that process is, I'd have to crack too and learn Myung's family tree too.

Regardless of conversational status, come manicure time, the ladies are always horrified by how short I keep my nails. I had some serious talons in high school, but now with three kids, long nails are only another area for feces and random grossness I touch daily to get trapped so they had to go. They always half-heartedly file my nails, as if they're not even worth the effort. My cuticles, on the other hand, are a job and a half. Bathing kids and wiping asses causes some pretty raggedy hands. As my gal begins to snip away with the clippers, I, once again, wish I had remembered to bring my own tools, so I don't wind up with one of those hideous staph infections from dirty nail tools I read about in magazines. I'm not fooled into believing two minutes in that light box cleans these tools any more than I am that swishing them around in that blue water they label as "disinfectant" does the job.

I wise up when I see my tech wielding a squirt bottle with that same gritty shit they put on my legs. Knowing I will not be bale to hide, red, raw forearms, as I will my abraded legs, I quickly stop her and ask her to use regular lotion instead. This is the best part of any manicure - the hand massage. I try not to let my head hit that piece of foam covered in wrapping paper and packing tape that my forearms are resting on, as I almost doze off, only to have to pull myself into instant alertness to stay awake for the polishing. One errant hand movement can totally screw up your gal's handiwork, causing much Korean muttering.

I make the lumbering walk to the drying station in my paper slippers, as the nail tech follows behind, clutching my car keys (which I have, for once, been smart enough to take out of my bag, preventing the mortifying experience of having a stranger rummage through Goldfish, broken crayons and unraveling tampons in the bottom of my purse), shoes and coat. More uncomfortable non-conversant time, as I sit face-to-face with a fellow client, where we briefly make eye contact, smile and both agree to pretend the other is not there and stare into space.

After a few minutes, I am bored, since I can no longer read my books, and starting to wonder if H knows to feed the kids dinner, or if our offspring are starving because of my vanity. I paint on the ingenious nail oil these salons use to create a slick barrier on your nails to prevent any nicks on the way out the door. FYI, this is an east coast thing apparently, since in California one time, they looked at me like I had three heads when I asked where it was. Seeing me preparing for departure, my tech runs over with a roll of plastic wrap. She paints my toes with the same oil and swathes my feet in cellophane, like bizarre leftovers, and shoves my shoes back on.

Thrust back into the world, I am half-effective. I turn the car key gingerly in the ignition. I walk slowly for fear of jamming my feet into the front of my shoes. Once home, I can't open juice boxes or wash a dish without thinking about wrecking my nails. This goes on for two days. By the third day, I give up and return to my nail destroying ways, and my polish looks like I've stuck my hands in a Cuisinart. Sadly, I think this new leaf is not going to stay turned over.

I see weekly manicures as somewhat akin to Chinese foot binding - a symbol of a woman's ability to not participate in household labor. I don't mean this as judgement, I'd LOVE to participate, but right now, it's just not going to happen. I can't find the stay-at-home equivalent of dialing my phone with a pencil (which I am always fascinated by) to save my nails. Sure, I will still get my nails did for special occassions, and enjoy the forty-eight hours they actually look good. I will put well-kept nails in the same box as blown-out hair, to be unpacked when everyone is in school full time and able to wipe their own asses. But I'd I'll probably break a nail using my bare hands to open it, rendering them unpaintable.

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

The definition of love

The posts have been a little sparse, dear readers, and due to an influx of local readers, as of late, I have been reticent to explain why at the risk of sounding like a bitchy whiner. But if you are friends enough with me to know about my blog, then you will quickly learn I can be a bitchy whiner and you will either break up with me or learn to deal, as my non-locals have.

So remember last year when I signed up for the PTA? Remember how easy I thought it would be with al those committees in place and all? Well, I was seriously wrong. It seems every four years, each school gets a turn putting together the almost 200 page district directory and who gets the booby prize this year? Me? Of-fucking-course. In the defense of the woman who talked to me about this position, she had no idea either, but it doesn't make gathering the personal information of every student, from kindergarten to senior in high school, and all the faculty and Board of Ed info, converting it from Excel to Word to pdf any easier. Especially since I'm almost computer illiterate.

When I took on this job I was asked if I was familiar with Word and Excel. Um, yeah, sure. I can do a numerical and alphabetical sort. Well fast forward nine months, and I'm having to do things like multiple sorts, that I didn't even have to do when putting together my senior Chemistry thesis in college, and things called "mail merges". Cue panic and call in my IT department.

As you all know, H is the computer expert around here. I lack the skills and interest and he also claims I'm a witch, being able to crash any piece of electronic equipment in a five foot radius. Many's the time I have called out to H from the computer desk, "MAKE THIS WORK!", practically banging my fists on the keyboard like a perplexed orangutan. So over the past three weeks, the poor guy has come home from work, thrown down food down his throat and spent two hours with me working on this beast. He has saved me countless hours by teaching me how to use search functions in spreadsheets, rather than combing through data. He has taught me how to auto-fill cells instead of using the computer like a glorified type-writer and doing everything manually. Basically, he made this thing work.

As we approached the end of this tortuous ordeal, I finally merge all the documents we have worked on and gotten from various people, and the document crashes. Neither of our home computers will allow us to make any more changes (which H chalks up to my evil powers). H can't figure it out, which means it is seriously NOT GOOD. So what does the guy do? He has me email it to him at work, and in between board meetings and conference calls with the CEO, he has been making sure the night custodian's name is spelled correctly and that the mother with a four-term hyphenated last name fits into the fourth grade spread sheet. And not just once - FIVE times, this thing has gone back and forth between us in the last two days.

And not a peep of complaint out of him.

I have written before about the under-appreciated male expressions of love, but this one takes the cake. I have never felt so loved, my friends. To go the extra mile when you yourself are exhausted and stressed, for no benefit, other than to help the one you love, who sits next to you rocking, in tears, asking "why isn't it working?"(which is, I'm sure, very helpful when trouble shooting software), is better than any card of gift I have ever received*. H knew how much was riding on this project, as no one likes to complain more about how a project at school was done, than the 90% of parents who do absolutely fucking nothing**, so he didn't question me when I forced him to do another exhaustive proof with me at ten thirty on a Wednesday night*** to prevent me being chased down by some irate mother whose kid's name I spelled wrong (even though it was "Jak", instead of "Jack" which I thought HAD to be a typo.). His reformatting the table of contents was like a love poem, reminding me, love is not in the grand gesture, but in the daily grind. And I have that in spades.

So H, let me put it out there. You are the most incredible husband, and I am a lucky woman to have you. Bacon for dinner and you get the remote for six months. Ok, not really about the remote, but the pork products are a go. You rock my world.

*AND he sent my flowers two weeks ago. Really!
**Hence my reticence about the locals. All y'all keep your traps shut about my bitching. I dont need any school-yard confrontations.
***Also adding to my addled mental state is the fact I am sleeping only six hours a night, not my minimum required-to-function eight, putting me seriously in sleep deprivation and giving me the mental and emotional stability of a schizophrenic. The kids really enjoy playing "which Mommy do we get today?".

Monday, November 7, 2011

What were we thinking?

I was talking to an, as of yet, child-free friend the other day, when the question came up, "When did you know you wanted to have kids?" A pretty personal question.

Most people have a rough estimate of the time period such as, "Oh, around our second year of being married", but not me. It was October 28, 2000. I was 27 and H and I had been married for three years. It was a beautiful October Sunday and we had spent the day doing various harvest-y things that child-free people can do like go for long quiet walks enjoying the fall foliage and having a leisurely outdoor lunch. It’s strange really. I always thought that the desire to have a baby would just hit me like a lightning bolt one day, that I would become a woman possessed with baby lust, walking into the Baby Gap to check out the latest in pint sized bomber jackets. It hadn’t happened yet, and I was even beginning to wonder if I would ever want children. I had been around babies my entire life, coming from an extremely fertile Irish Catholic family. Babies are cute and all, but before that Sunday I could take them or leave them. I thought that someday, probably around my thirtieth birthday, I would feel that lightning bolt come searing through me. It didn't happen that way. It was more like having a craving for Chinese food, "You know what I could go for right now? A baby."

The bigger question though, is why? What drove me, on that particular day, to decide I was ready to be a mother? Well, eleven years, and three kids later, I still don't know. When you think about it, parenthood, on paper, has very little to recommend it. When you choose to become a parent, you are selecting to give up most of your free time, sleep and disposable income. You are choosing to create for yourself a gaping whole of need that, hopefully, will be filled in eighteen years, but more likely never.

H and I went to see The Change Up, a "body-switch" movie about two male friends, one married with three kids and one single. During the film, there is a "happy montage", where we see footage of each man enjoying the perks of the life he does not lead after he has gotten the hang of things in his new situation. We see the single guy in his married pal's body killing it, changing diapers and successfully bathing and bottle feeding twins, and slinging healthy items into his cart at the grocery with swift accuracy. We then see the married guy in his unattached buddy's body cheering at a baseball game on a beautiful day, drinking a beer, rollerblading through the city and reading at a cafe. If a good diaper change and not forgetting to buy milk are the high points of Door #1, um, I'll take Door #2 please. Who would choose to do this?

On its surface, it seems incredible that any of us willingly become parents (some of us have been surprised, if the results of not using a condom can be called a "surprise"). OK, maybe the first time you can blame on those Johnson & Johnson commercials. They are pretty persuasive. But times two, three, and what-the-hell-were-you-thinking four - what can explain it? Really, try without sounding like a Celine Dion song. Can't be done. To have someone to love unconditionally, for H and I to expand our love for each other (and stretch it to its breaking point). Makes you kind of nauseous, no?

I choose to think of this indescribability as a trait all too-good things share, like God, and why good bagels can only be made in New York. They are just because they are. I wanted to have a baby because I wanted to have a baby. I can never explain why, I just know I'm so glad I did.

Thursday, November 3, 2011

Dear Utility Workers,

I just wanted to write to say thank you for all of your hard work over these last few days, since that freak snow storm that knocked out everybody's power, including ours, forcing H and I to eat enough brie and short ribs for eight people, after our dinner party had to be cancelled. It was rough, let me tell you. Plowing through all that wine wasn't easy either.

What I realized, when I was drunkenly ruminating about all the work that would have to be done over the next week to put everything right, is that we have quite a lot in common, your purveyors of energy, and we mothers. Like us, you make everything work. Without you, we are are cold, dirty and hungry. There is no dinner, no clean underwear, no baths. There are no parties or play dates when there are no lights. And also like us, if you are doing your job right no one notices. We don't all walk around marveling, "Well look at all this nice lamp light", or "I sure do love this all heat and hot water." Just like in my life, when no one notices the carefully packed school lunches or clean socks until I go on a trip or am half-dead with illness (although, unlike you, I do not get sick days and would still be cutting out dinosaur-shaped peanut butter and jelly sandwiches while coughing up a lung). Our existence goes completely unnoticed and unappreciated until something goes wrong and then, we are met with a chorus of complaints. Of course, there is no resultant tidal wave of praise and new respect for all that we do once everything is put right. It's just life as usual for the multitudes we care for.

So my hat is of to you, you hard-hatted angels. I see what you do and, since I made the realization, will now offer up a silent prayer of gratitude every time I need twenty-three minutes of peace in the form of Super Why, press the button on the remote and the TV actually turns on.

Best,
MM