Another Win for Cats

My dog fawning over my mother on Christmas

Throughout my life I have had many cats. I have had only had two dogs. One of them, Otis, died when I was still in preschool, and his name still carries the weight of legend. Saying Otis did things is like saying that Harriet Tubman did things. Except that Harriet Tubman never ate whole chicken carcasses. As far as I know.

The other dog is one that we have now. His name is Xavier. I have described him before as a black lab with dwarfism and ears like a donkey. He is also somewhat like a low-rider Ferengi. His primary activity is carefully watching doors to see whether anything menacing emerges from any of them. When he is not doing that, he pines. He has raised pining to an art form. Corgi mixes, apparently, can make specific sound effects that no other life form can make. If you can imagine a Scooby Doo who is both less intelligible and more prone to ennui, you will have a strong sense of what this sounds like.

We currently have one cat, Marmalade Lion. My husband does not especially care for this cat. He is really a very sweet cat, and I don't understand why Mike doesn't like him, since he has only such has minor flaws as one expects in all house pets. One is that he has a meow that sounds somewhat like the death scream of a tortured weasel. This is the one that bothers my husband the most, especially during periods of time when the cat has stayed in all night and demanded to be let out at 2 A.M. Another small failing is that he bites suddenly when being petted. But only occasionally. Also, he likes to "make biscuits" on people. He kneads us with his claws with great affection for upwards of ten minutes while contemplating settling on a lap, and, if petted during this time, he will yowl angrily and continue kneading with his sharp claws. Otherwise, though, he is a perfectly charming cat.

A year ago, my husband decided, without my knowledge or input, to train this cat to stop meowing. Every time he yowled, Mike would spray him with water. Which caused him to yowl again louder and Mike to spray again. Et cetera. From this, Mike learned a valuable lesson. Cats cannot be trained not to meow. Our cat, apparently, continued meowing until dripping wet, and the only result is now that he is terrified of my husband.  Thus concluded Mike's science experiment on cat behavior.

There is a slight note of resentment between my husband and myself on the subject of cats. He claims to like them. I claim he likes theoretical cats but not actual cats, all of whom, in my experience, are certifiably crazy in exactly the way he explains causes him to dislike M. Lion. Cats, he says, that he picks or with whom he has lived, are not crazy, but are pleasant, and smarter than mine. And so on.

The night before last, my eighth grader had a sort of brief interruption to his normal composure after being told that we needed to look over his four year plan for high school and fill it in. During this unfortunate period of emotional distress, several items in his room were relocated from their normal locations in a sudden manner. Among them was a bar of extra dark chocolate that we had given him for Valentine's Day and which he had not eaten much of.

Our dog discovered this state of affairs only moments before I did, and when I arrived, he was eating parts of the golden wrapper. What followed was an internet search, a call to the veterinarian and a dose of hydrogen peroxide, which happily, was administered by my teenager, whose fault this all was. Then he got to stay outside in the snow with the dog to see if he threw up. It took the dog a while to throw up and, when he did, he looked at his puddle of vomit and thought to himself "Chocolate syrup!" and then Rowan had to get a bag and paper towel and clean it all up from the snow to prevent Xavier from re-ingesting it and starting the cycle all over again.

Say what you will about cats. They don't eat a bar of extra dark Valentine's chocolate with part of the wrapper AND THEN have to have vomiting forcibly induced AND THEN try to eat the vomited chocolate for a snack.

Cats do dark, horrible things. It is true. But they tend not to do mindlessly foul things. The foul things they do have the quality of calculation and staged protest. I am irked by animals that think of their own regurgitated offal as a dessert.

As fond as I am of my dog, I consider this episode to be a black mark against his character, at least inasmuch my as my cat yowling like a possessed demon in the wee hours of the morning is considered a deeply problematic trait. In the decades old war of cats vs. dogs, as captured by Rudyard Kipling in his classic tale, The Cat That Walked by Himself, I consider this another win for cats.

Although, probably, it just tells you more about teenagers as a species than anything else...

Here is What is Romantic.

So, it is Valentine's Day.

Let me just say that this is not, and has never been my favorite day. Ask me for an explanation and I will refer you to the fact that I had children before I got married. When Mike and I married, in fact, all three kids were in attendance, and when we went home, we had to give them all baths.

My romantic holiday is all taken up with Pirates of the Caribbean valentines, batches of marshmallow creme fudge that my son has volunteered to "make" for his class and three sets of homework that will need completing. Nothing is romantic about Tuesdays. At least not in the traditional sense.

That's O.K., though because I find my romance elsewhere.

Here is what is romantic:

When I suddenly separated from my former husband and Mike was not a romantic interest but my best friend of many years, he sat with me in dark rooms, long after it felt like the rest of the world had forgotten me, and told me that I was going to be O.K., because he was going to make sure I was O.K. And I believed him.

Before our child was born, Mike liked to travel and work only as much as he had to fund his freewheeling lifestyle. When our Mikalh (MEE-koll) arrived, he moved us to New Mexico and took a job that required him to commute an hour and a half each way and work outside in enough cold that icicles formed in his beard. Since then, he has never stopped working to improve his skills so that we can have more than we do.

Mike treats the two older children from my former marriage just like they are his own. Devin plays soccer, and so Mike took a position on the local soccer board, which as abysmal a volunteer commitment as you can hope to imagine, because he loves Devin, and wants to make sure he can play soccer the rest of his young life here.

When the pain of my fibromyalgia makes it too hard to raise my arms behind my head, Mike has shampooed my hair for me. He has helped me up the stairs more times than I can count and faithfully accompanied me to doctor's appointments and remembered to say whatever I was forgetting. He has done the housework so that I can sleep. "In sickness and in health" may have asked more of him already than he was expecting, but he has met the challenge, even if I have seen him have to close his eyes and take deep breaths to do it.

I do not need roses on Valentine's day, and I can't eat chocolate anyway. Let crappy store-bought notes and children's homework rule the day. Just give me an evening alone with my husband where we can talk uninterrupted, and enjoy one another's company together as Life races by us as if watched from a passing train.

Romance is nothing more than his hand placed in mine as I brave another day.

My Husband is having an Affair with Technology

During the last week my husband has been falling asleep on the couch in the arms of his laptop, leaving his side of our bed cold every night.

My husband is a brilliant man. How this brilliance realizes itself is in periods of total obsession with specific articles of knowledge that he wants to grasp. When he wants to get in better shape, he develops boot camps that turn the strongest among his friends to weak-kneed puddles of whey. When he wants to learn a skill on the computer, he is frustrated in his plans to spend the requisite forty-five minutes every day of practice, given his other commitments. He does no half-measures. Everything is done either to the point of infatuation, or it simply isn't worth doing.

Last week, he took the week off of his regular work to attend a conference on Network Security and came home every day full of the kind of zeal and enthusiasm one might expect from someone who has received wizard training, or lessons in wingless flight. As soon as the dinner dishes were done and the six year-old put to bed, he would station himself at his spot on the couch, with both his desktop computer with screen mounted on our wall, and a laptop at his feet, and attempt to unlock what apparently were the keys to the Universe.

During the periods of time when he has stopped his activities long enough to converse with the children, he has spoken in tongues:

"I'm going to be monitoring the network traffic, sniffing packets and reconstructing TCP streams. So if you're going to any web sites that you don't want me to know about, this would be a good time to stop."

"What?" Both my older children reacted with surprise and consternation.

"I'm not really sure how to make that any clearer." Mike replied.

"What he means," I said "is that he can see everything you do and if you are looking at stuff on the internet that you don't want us to see, you should stop now."

"Oh." They both said.

Yesterday, I went over to the couch, rubbed his back and let him know that we sort of missed him. He sighed, kissed me and explained in Pig Latin:

"I have been trying different Linux repositories and kernel versions, and I can't get my Wi-Fi adapter to work. I've had to re-install the OS five times because of that."

Don't you hate when that happens?

I hate when my husband disappears down the rabbit hole of some technological thrill because I miss his company. I understand though because, periodically, I disappear down a blogging rabbit hole and it is probably just as irritating. I appreciate him greatly because his genius with technology is what puts food on our table, and, if there is the hope of our ever owning a car that isn't a thirteen year-old minivan with a cracked windshield and a questionable heating and cooling system, that hope rests on his efforts, not mine.

Sometimes, though, I wish I could be as absorbing as that TCP stream he is so interested in. Maybe I should dress up as a stream of binary code on Valentine's Day.

The Tale of Why My Son is Named After a Bag of Cement

Here he is impersonating a bag of cement, 12 hours old.

Let me preface this by saying that Mike and my marriage is marked primarily by our intellectual compatibility. We have been best friends for sixteen years and we have spent most of that time in long, caffeine fueled conversations about the nature of everything. We can talk any subject to death with delight, or, if we get off on the wrong foot, we can fight like two badgers protecting the same hole.

So when Mike and I discovered that my youngest son was on the way, there was some consternation over what we should name him.

My older two children, from my former marriage, have nice Celtic names, which had been chosen on the rationale that, since they would automatically carry their father's last name, and hence his ethnic brand, mine should be stamped on the first half of their moniker. The decisions on these, retrospectively, were easy ones.

I will say that if I had known what was coming, I could easily have saved some time by skipping the part where we picked names for girls. Apparently, I can only bear male children and only male children with ADD. But that's another story.

The situation with Mike and me was different. Mike is half Native American, and his last name is Adams, which is a testament to the loving memory of his adopted father, but not in any way to his native heritage. Somehow his being Indian trumped my being Welsh in the same way that paper covers rock or rock crushes scissors, and he won the ethnicity match without much debate. Our child would have an Indian name.

Fine. I'm O.K. with that. More than O.K., in fact.

But then things started to get a little  freaky. Mike wanted our child to have not just a Native name but a Lil'Wat name. The Lil'Wat are the Salish-speaking British Columbian tribe from which my husband's family hails.Their language is known as "Ucwalmicwts." I can't say it, either.

Mike started presenting me with choices.

Mike: "I like Ken'Knep."

Me: "What? We can't have a son called Ken'Knep! He will be tormented!"

Mike: "It will be totally unremarkable. Just look at all the unusual names kids have nowadays."

Me: "Mike, there may be some unusual names, but I promise you that there are no kids named Ken'Knep. And what the Hell do you know about what it would be like? You are named Mike Adams."

Mike: "All my life I have resented having such a boring name."

Me: "Right."

Various items of discussion were completely unpronounceable to me, but totally fine with Mike. Having grown up with a name that was butchered frequently, I am sensitive on this subject, but Mike was like a child in a candy store full of delightfully unusual signatures, totally unperturbed by thoughts of elementary school victim-hood or years of teacher garbling. These concerns to him were trifling.

So it went on and on like this, with both of us becoming more entrenched, irritated and tired, until finally it was suggested that our son be named "Mixalh" after an uncle. The pronunciation was best approximated as "MEE-koll" and it meant, very sweetly, "bear".

Mike: "Fine, but it's going to remind me of a bag of cement unless we do away with the 'x'."

Apparently, prominent in my husband's work at this time, which was carpentry, were the presence of large bags of cement marked "Mix-All".

So, it was decided.

We threw in two middle names, one for Mike and one for me, because that's just how we roll, and on May 16, 2005 was born Mikalh Justin Katigwa Adams, or, to be slightly more clear

{Lil'Wat Bear Who is Not a Bag of Cement} {To Be Set Free} {Justin from the Rats of NIMH} Adams.

Because this is what happens when stubborn people are allowed to breed.

Ready for the next knock on my door.

Amy

Here is but one apparent difference between the male mind and the female mind: Focus.

Whether my husband is seated at his computer writing code, reading news articles or sending imaginary mercenaries to their virtual deaths, his focus is total.  There is nothing tentative or casual in his appearance, sitting there, completely absorbed in the contents of his LCD screen. Nothing short of the smell of burning flesh really is really likely to intrude on his concentration. This is why it never really works out when he suggests that I go lie down and relax while he keep track of the kids. (Or at least why it works only if nothing is required of the kids other than their not burning to death.)

Conversely, whether I am writing, cooking or conversing with a particular child, my brain is wired to continue to receive sensory information about everything else that is going on at the same time. Hence my dinner preparations are nightly interrupted multiple times by instructions to my three sons to get off their I Pad or stop talking to their brother in that condescending tone of voice or explain to me their plan to complete their book report on time. My writing is interrupted by homework questions. My conversations with one child are derailed by the sudden need to discipline another for tracking mud all over the carpet. 

I have situational ADD. I can't really read a full page of text anymore without distraction, even if left completely alone. I'm listening for children fighting while I should be sleeping, or planning grocery lists while I'm washing my hair. I'm blogging while I'm supposed to be reading my kid to sleep.

I know that this situational ADD is familiar to all mothers with children still at home. I do wonder, however, if certain other mothers manage to maintain attention long enough to experience more sense of accomplishment than I do. Right now, the primary tangible accomplishment I can claim at the end of any day is dinner, which is prepared nightly with strict attention to taste and nutritional guidelines, and then consumed as if by a pack of indifferent hyenas who, far from being grateful, are pretty much pissed that we are out of Bacon Bits.

Alarmingly, I've observed that my mothering seems a bit patchy lately. For instance, I forgot to have my youngest son have a social life. It is unfortunate that somehow this is up to me, given my proclivity for shyness, but I gather than I should have scheduled a play date for him sometime during this school year and this hasn't crossed my mind until five months in. Another similar problem is that my oldest son is supposed to register for high school in four weeks, and I have totally forgotten to freak out about this and gather all the information in the world ahead of time. It all seems to take so much energy.

I want to say, in my defense, that I am devoting a lot of time and attention to my blogging, and that this is what is absorbing my mothering energy, but the evidence would suggest that I am devoting more time and attention to Twitter than to actually writing. (The use of Twitter was supposed to cause my page views to explode, but it hasn't, so it is probably just another source of distraction. I think I'm doing it wrong.)

To my relief, I think that I am still doing my paying job with full attention and effectiveness. However, given that I work only 26 hours a week, it seems like I should probably be able to be productive in some other way as well. 

I would like to feel that I have total command of the responsibilities I have assumed. This is not working out.

Thirteen years ago, I was lying in my bed with my infant son, watching TV and feeling utterly depressed. It was spring in Northern California, it had been raining forever, and we had moved to a new neighborhood, far away from my old friends. I was twenty-two, a new mother, and my husband was commuting to work every day, leaving me for hours and hours alone with a child whose one goal in life was to climb everything. It was 11 A.M. and I was still in my nightgown, having never bothered to get dressed, when I heard a knock on my door. I went to go answer it, and outside there stood a woman in a long waist-less dress, with a halo of untamed, frizzy brown hair and an air of authority.  She told me her name was Amy, and she was going door to door inviting people to a potluck dinner to build community. 

At that particular moment in time–at the advent of that knock–my life started to define itself around a central meaning again, something I chose. Amy swept me up in her community-building activities and in the meanings that surrounded her, and I moved away from that horrible uncomfortable crack in the table I had fallen into it with my new motherhood (you know, the cracks in between table leaves where all the crumbs stick to the nastiness–the place where nothing is ever clean) and toward something that felt like my own.

I have to remember that moment today because I have fallen into the damn crack in the table again, although this time it's just been a couple of weeks I've spent there–just feeling like all the gunk in the world is sticking to me and nothing will ever make me clean.

I am ready for the next knock on my door to remind me what I am here for.

This too shall pass.

Some days I am inspired. Some days I have a crazy, bold, colorful vision for life, and that vision propels me with a kind of beatific, superhuman force, allowing me to scrape up patience or humor or love from places that were empty before.

On those days, I can comfort three sons, teach six classes, write my blog, make a bad-assed dinner, help with three kinds of homework, and remember I love my husband all at the same time. Some days nothing can fuck with me. Some days no one can take me down. Some days I am an avatar of what I care about. Some days I am someone I'd want to be. Someone I look up to.

Other days, Life is like a piece of sand embedded in a wound. Some days I have no patience, and I can't even remember what it felt like to have patience for my kids. Some days I don't think I even like them.

Some days I resent the Hell out of my chronic illness, and my deep resentment of its constant, never-ending presence makes me irrationally angry at all the people who pass by me, just trying to live, who happen not to offer to set the table or move the laundry over. Some days that resentment gets the better of me, and I quietly hate myself for my bitterness.

Some days the pharmacy that doesn't have my Lyrica and the workplace that demands so much of my energy and the children who have left lights on all over my house and the cat meowing at the door again and the migraine that still won't go away feel like a conspiracy to take me down, and I want to yell at some Superhuman Force of Nature that it is an asshole.

But I don't believe in God, so I get mad at my husband because his shoes are in the hallway.

I have forgotten a lot of what I learned in Alcoholics Anonymous. I have not forgotten this:

"This too shall pass."

Photo Credit: Flickr

We seem to have a failure to communicate here.

I have blogging for a year now, and still my family doesn't seem to have caught on to how this is supposed to work.

I read a number of good blogs (The Bloggess, Dooce, Mommy Wants Vodka just to name a few of many). I try to leave comments when I can, and so I read through many comments that are already there. In doing this, I have notably not noticed many comments originating from the blogger's husband. Instead, most of the comments are from admiring readers and sound very much like this:

"I am so touched by what you wrote here."
"I just love your writing."
"I wish I could be you."
"Will you marry me?"

That kind of thing.

But, of course my little blog is different. Instead, for instance, yesterday I receive an email which notifies me that I have received the following comments on a recent blog post:

I ask you...

Did Erma Bombeck's husband write letters to the editor questioning her remarks?

We seem to have a failure to communicate here.