Fences You Can't Pass

I wonder how the family dog must feel the first time he encounters the invisible fence. There he is, just moseying over, as he always has done, to pee in a nice, shady spot on the tire of your car, when suddenly an unpleasant static charge jolts through his body. Does he immediately connect this sensation with the necessity  to remain within a defined area? If he is my dog, he will try it twice and then look around dolefully, as if the world has suddenly become a place full of cruel electric spankings visited upon very nice dogs. He will whimper and skulk off to mope under a patio chair, defeated. Invisible things are hard to navigate. Give me a nice chain link fence any day. I want to see where I cannot go. I like neither the indignity and surprise or the sudden electric shock of the buried electric alternative.

I don't want to talk about dogs, though. I want to talk about social class. I keep stepping over the boundary. Static charges prick my senses over and over, the adrenalin of my awareness that I am out of place. If I am faking it well enough, no one else notices. Or maybe they do. I am so charged up with my fear of their noticing, I don't think I can see if they really do.

I am a woman destined to feel out of place. One frequently hears the heartwarming story of the first child of an immigrant family to go to college. Imagine this in reverse. I am the child of an educated family, and I have managed to distinguish myself by being virtually the only relation to fail to earn a college degree. My maternal grandfather was a noted minister, the kind of man who had influence over politics from his pulpit, and the author of ten or more heady and beautifully written books. His wife, my grandmother, had a degree in Latin and was a gale force of intelligence in her own right. These were educated people. My father's parents, I believe, were not college-educated but his father was a relatively successful businessman and smart as a whip. My dad went on to study music on the graduate and post-graduate level. My mother worked, while I grew up, as an instructional assistant, just as I do, and then completed her degree, graduating summa cum laude in English with a creative writing emphasis. Brilliant, talented, and certified.

I grew up in a household where correct grammar was spoken, classic literature was read to me, and critical thought was encouraged. I always assumed I would go to college. Two things got in the way. As a teenager, I developed disabling depression and then drug addiction. By the time I got clean and sober, at the age of seventeen, while I did go straight to community college, I lacked any meaningful experience of hard work. I tended to take classes of interest to me, with no particular goal in mind, maintain an almost 4.0 grade point average, and drop anything that bored me or with which I had made any academic fumble. I was aimless and immature. The second death knell in my academic future was my extreme fertility. I got pregnant at twenty-one, when I could easily have finished college already had I had any sort of plan in mind, but hadn't, and ended up on bed rest for pre-term labor. I had a little boy. Then another.

The next years of my life were consumed with children. I was basically a child myself when I had my first son. Still believing that the world would rise up to cradle me should I prove my inherent worthiness to it, I fumbled forth, armed only with an array of cloth diapers and wooden toys, to be the right kind of mother. Here's what you may not understand about this if you have done this the right way yourself, marrying first, completing college before that. When you essentially give up your future to raise a child, you damn well put your heart and soul into it. This makes you less likely to return to school, not more. Having had to answer every kind of question from the well-meaning "Are you sure you are doing the right thing?" to the utterly appalling "Do you know who the father is?" (Yes, I'm engaged to him!), I was prepared to prove to the world that raising children was the best use of my time and talents. The rest is history.

The one time when, after I divorced, I prudently returned to school again and decided to major in Sociology (hence my interest in class), I was again interrupted by becoming pregnant and ending up on bed rest. I bore baby boy number three. I always meant to go back. I waited until we could afford it. I waited until the kids were older. When I was diagnosed with the multiple health conditions that now cause my life to be a daily compromise between my grandiose visions of clean houses and brilliant blog posts and my need for rest, I let the door on my academic future shut gently and finally behind me.

I will never have a college degree.

I work as an instructional assistant. My job employs my mind in a brilliant sort of way. Interweaving a gift for humor, love of children and the lightness of heart it takes to work with them, a knowledge of child development, and something critical to learn and be good at, I am privileged to be able to work with as many as thirty students a day teaching reading skills, and see a concrete difference made with the work I do. I love my writing as well. I feel like it provides something both for me and for the world–on my best days– that I want for the world to have. Parenting is perhaps the best of my jobs. There is nothing more worthwhile than the privilege of helping to shape a human being, to see who that person is growing to become and try to provide some resource for their greatness. I  am, I think, a good mother. These are engaging and worthy acts. They do not, however, come with award, certificates, recommendations or special associations.

None of this has ever bothered me a day in my life. Until I tried to fill in my profile for LinkedIn. Suddenly my life started to have the quality of poverty. No awards. No certifications. No degree. Do you think people will be impressed if I write that people say I am very, very smart and always show up on time?

Sitting amidst groups of women at the Erma Bombeck Writer's Conference, I was lost in a frenzy of rules I didn't understand. Books were mentioned I have not read, although I read avidly. (I have apparently read all the wrong books. How was this accomplished?) I cannot remember which is the correct fork to use when they give me two forks at my place setting. When is it O.K. to place my cloth napkin on the table? I do not have a business card. I have only one cardigan. Will anyone notice? What is the protocol for awaiting a cab at a nice hotel? Apparently, one does not have to stand out on the curb. The driver will come in and retrieve you. Who knew? I felt continually as if I was impersonating someone else. I might be caught out at any moment. Although I was enjoying myself, the tension felt like something I could bite.

People have said very encouraging things and this has been immensely helpful. I have been told I am a good writer and sweetly reprimanded not to be so self-effacing. It occurred to me only this morning that what I am pressed up against is larger than an issue of self-esteem, although it certainly is an issue of self-esteem as well. It is an issue of class.

Class is not so permeable in our society. Data proves this. It tends to stick to generations moving down, more so than in some other countries, more so–much more so–than we like to think. Granted, it sticks much less so than in many, many less fortunate places. Education is, in so many ways, the golden ticket. This is not a political blog, and I am not going to illustrate the inherent unfairness of education for you here, but suffice it to say, that it's not a level playing field out there, but if you can get an education, in a lot of ways, this can be a ticket to an elevation of class. I did the opposite. Through choices I made of my own free will, I moved myself downward. It is not so easy to get back up.

I have two final thoughts about all this. One has to do with my parenting. I go to church and otherwise associate with a community of perfectly lovely people (and I don't say that tongue in cheek–I mean they are. Perfectly. Lovely.). They are, as far as I can tell, all educated people. I believe it may be true that my family is perhaps the lowest class family in our congregation. Again, I don't mean this in terms of anything snide. I mean that we struggle financially, that we drive old cars, and that neither my husband nor I have degrees. Sometimes, someone will say that they very much want their child to take a year off of after high school before going to college, that they don't think grades are all that important, or that, having gotten a PhD themselves, they think college education is overrated. Whenever I hear this, I want to turn on this person and scream like a crazed banshee.

I tell my kids: It does matter. It matters more than you can imagine. It will matter over and over and over, when you are eating dinner with friends, when you want to put your kids in a sport, when you want to go see Europe. Your education will give you choices. If you have a choice and you want to move off of the grid and build a house with your own two hands and grow quinoa, do so with my blessing. I mean this from the bottom of my heart. But please, please, please allow yourself that choice before you do so. No matter how smart and how talented you are, no matter how much potential you have, life wants you to show your credentials. Have some. Know how to work. Know how to jump through hoops. Hoop jumping is a really useful skill. Know and protect your passions like fragile shoots from hard frosts, but do not be afraid to do what you have to provide for yourself. There is a great deal of inspiration to be found in the luxury of not having to work your ass off doing manual labor, day after grinding day.

Here is my last thought: If this is hard for me, (And it is. It really, really is.) what is it like for someone who has a raw talent but cannot use standard written English well? What is it like for someone who did not have the advantage of my exposure to Shakespeare, to Greek mythology, to history? Are we really saying none of these people can write?

I can get on the grammar Nazi bandwagon as quick as anyone. Or at least I could until I realized I was surrounded by my betters in the writing world. I am annoyed by misspellings, driven crazy by misused apostrophes. But what if all I am doing is setting up invisible fences all around me? Fences past which you can't pass if you are dyslexic. Fences you can't pass if you are raised in East LA, exposed to a grammar that follows rules we might find equally hard to follow. Fences you can't pass if you are still learning and growing as a writer. (Aren't we all?)

I think I will stop cracking wise about people's misused apostrophes. The world would be a richer place if it were filled with the voices of all of us–voices edged with the hard beauty of the street vernacular and the southern drawl and the fascinatingly off-kilter English of the immigrant. Imagine the written world a cacophony of voices and all of us a little more able to listen for the beauty in every one.

Images are used according to allowable terms from MorgueFile.

Home is the Place You Don't Want to Burn Down: The Story of the Las Conchas Fire

Picture courtesy of  U.S Fire and Aviation Management

On Sunday, June 26, while I was sitting outside the local bagel shop with my friend Shana, we first noticed the smoke. Smoke had not been unusual during this summer of Southwest drought. In fact, a few weeks prior, smoke had traveled approximately 300 miles from Arizona to make the skies of Los Alamos a bleary brownish haze which had me busting out the nebulizer repeatedly in the early weeks of June, to overcome the overwhelming sense of being suffocated by gaseous soot. We had seen other columns of smoke appear above nearby mountains for week. Our unseasonably dry winter had made the area a tinderbox.

I was the one seated facing the sky, and I realized later I had probably been looking at that damn smoke for close to half an hour before Shana uttered the should-have-been-obvious-to-me statement: "That's close!" Obviously what we were looking at was a fire up in the Jemez Mountains, just above us.  As we got up and walked a couple of blocks downtown, smoke suddenly began to take up half the sky. It was a very odd thing to look at the familiar sky-scape of my town and see that half of the usually turquoise sky consumed with what essentially (and ironically) looked like a nuclear mushroom cloud.

Photo Credit: Flickr by John Fowler

I arrived home, turned on my computer and discovered quickly that a wildfire had started near the Las Conchas trail-head. This particular trail-head, is in my family, almost synonymous with "Eden". In fact, it was less than a week prior that we had last driven out there in search of the lush green landscape that surrounds a clear and perfect stream teaming with tiny fish and macro-invertebrates. Las Conchas is where I go to save my soul, when the pain of missing Northern California is too great, and I am filled with resentment at the poverty of flowing water and the intractable stubby brown saginess of New Mexico. My heart sickened with the potential loss of this place.

It took me the greater part of an hour to register that the fire presented an actual danger to us.

However, as smoke continued to fill the sky, at a certain point, I began to get nervous for something other than the loss of my favorite hiking trail. Filled with the kind of nervous energy that demands one do something, I called my thirteen year-old son, who he was at the pool snack bar to warn him to be careful of inhaling too much smoke and to make sure he had his inhaler with him. I called my husband, who was at the hardware store in Espanola. I called my ex-husband, with whom my older two kids were living that week, to make sure he knew what was happening, and to offer a second nebulizer for the kids to use if needed. I started streaming the local radio station on my PC. With a certain well-controlled intensity, the DJ described the intensity of the fire, which had already been dubbed the Las Conchas fire. Repeatedly, she stated that this was not currently a threat to the town of Los Alamos...not yet, but that it was sparking, crowning and running at unbelievable speed. In fact, at the speed of an acre a minute.

And then, anti-climatically it was time to go meet the other members of my church's religious education committee to clean out a large storage closet that needed to be converted to a classroom. So off I went. If we were going to need to evacuate, we didn't now. There was nothing to actually excuse me from pawing through boxes and boxes of old crafts. At this point, the sky looked totally surreal. I called my Dad on the way to the meeting to let him know what was happening and tell him to send on any national news on the subject he might be able to get.

My father-in-law John Faucett posted this picture to Facebook on June 26, the day the fire began.

 

Two other RE committee members showed up, and there was lots of crap in the storage closet. Decades of extra buttons, boxes with samples of stone tiles, bags of antiquated flour for play dough, swaths and swaths of cloth. I was pretty distracted for a couple of hours sorting through all that. Other than a few stray comments on the smoke, we remained pretty focused on the task at hand. I wonder, retrospectively, if this happens all of the world, as terror draws nearer to groups of people. Villages go fishing. Mothers gather to darn socks. People tell children to clean their room just as toxicity rains down on a population.

On leaving church, I became re-focused on the fire. KRSN started to suggest that we think about what belongings we might want to take with us in the event of an evacuation: Six P's. Pets. Papers. Personal Computers. Prosciutto. Prostitutes. Peonies. I can't remember now. I started assembling various papers, in a nervously scattered fashion. Intermittently, eclectic mixes of music were played.

The evening was spent  listening to increasingly alarming radio reports while making lists of items with which to evacuate. We locked my mildly schizophrenic ginger tabby in the house, in case we had to get him suddenly and go, and he subsequently kept my husband up all night. I gave a great deal of thought to what the appropriate course of action regarding my five ducks might be. I had horrific visions of evacuating to a hotel with them. Additionally, our neighbor residing in the other half of our shared duplex is a firefighter, so we told him we would take care of his two dogs in the case of an evacuation. (I guess I should be grateful that I was no longer fostering the two additional cats, with whom my cat had a less than totally affable relationship.)

Photo Credit: Kristen Honig U.S. Forest Service

We wondered aloud about whether we should leave, in order to avoid health problems due to the fact that we all have asthma. The decision was complicated by the fact that my husband works for the local county government, and by the five ducks and all the furry mammals, and the fear that we hadn't gotten everything done yet that we needed to do. At some point, it came to light that this was the biggest fire in New Mexico history–bigger, in fact, than the Cerro Grande fire which eleven years ago had burned away some four hundred houses in Los Alamos. I worried about my kids, who were with their dad, just because I didn't have them near me, and that felt uncomfortable. I kept telling myself that their dad was once a volunteer fire fighter, and that he would keep them safe.

We closed all the doors and windows and hooked up one of our forty year-old, yellowed swamp coolers to operate without sucking in outside air. Perversely, my husband was at work finishing up installing a red brick patio in our back yard and setting up sprinkler systems, in case our house didn't burn and we still wanted it to look nicer. I continued to bustle about, gathering important belongings and making lists of what we needed to pack. And we just waited to hear what we needed to do.

I was afraid to go to sleep, in case the fire came into town in the middle of the night, but I did anyway. At some point the following morning, when I turned the radio back on, they started to emphasize the need for people with health conditions to voluntarily evacuate the area. Ashes began falling from the sky. And we decided to leave. Mike started calling hotels, I looked up the Santa Fe animal shelter to see if they would take our cats (mine and my mother's) and our dog and our neighbors two dogs.

Nobody really wanted the ducks.

Photo Credit: Kristen Honig U.S. Forest Service

Over a period of an hour, Mike loaded every expensive tool in the shed into his Mazda, and, then considered that he would need to be parking this vehicle with thousands of dollars worth of tools in a hotel parking lot in Albuquerque. He moved them all back into the shed, over the course of another hour.

We decided to load all our music, documents and photos onto an external hard drive and take that with us. It kept failing to load, and then Mike had to unplug the computer and load it into the car instead. I resisted taking down all the photos hanging in our hallway, wondering how much time it was going to end up taking to put them back. My six year-old emptied out his clothes drawers and attempted to pack all of his Legos in an overnight bag. At this point, I had deserted him completely to my mother's loving care, and I huffed around checking my list, putting items in a pile and disturbing my husband's train of thought constantly with "What-if" questions.

Mike re-installed a large pond in our duck's yard that we had previously removed, deeming it to hard to clean. He placed heaps of feed in various locations. I started to urge speed, so that we could get out ahead of the other 18,000 people in town, before a mandatory evacuation was ordered. And then the radio announced that the evacuation was now mandatory. We had to leave.

While Mike continued moving objects around and there was nothing more I could do, I decided I would make sure all the neighbors on my cul-de-sac knew of the mandatory evacuation. I ran around, knocking on doors. Some people seemed annoyed, which I won't even go into here, but most were grateful I had thought of them and said they knew about the order. Then I came to the house where the drunk people live.

There, I found a lone woman, brittle, suspicious and red-eyed, surrounded by copious pets, in a house reeking of urine and staleness. She was unaware of the order, but not of the fire. "I am staying here," she told me. "I don't know where my husband is. I have no car, and no place to go." My breath caught. "I'm sure we can find somewhere for you to go," I said. I said several more comforting things, repeatedly expressed my concern for her safety and ran back home to retrieve a piece of information about the shelter provided for evacuees. When I returned to her, her suspicion had evaporated, and I turned my attention to the problem of all her pets, trying to help her determine what to do with them. I found myself offering to take a cardboard box full of kittens with their eyes still closed, and their mother, to the shelter along with my own animals, to which she agreed. I moved each kitten into a carrier and this went fine. However, when moving the mother cat, she and I had a slight disagreement which resulted in a deep, bloody raking of my arm and chest and in her running off.

At this point, several things happened. A nicely dressed woman arrived, explained that she was here to help the woman, who was her sister-in-law, that she had already booked a hotel for them, and the absent husband, a man I recognized as the drunk who had attempted to grope every woman on the dance floor at my friend's retirement party, came home. It was determined that the kittens should be left on the front porch in case the mother returned for them. The drunk woman hugged me, with tears in her eyes, and I left.

Shortly after, we got into three cars with four animals and drove out of town. I had the radio tuned to the local news, and it unrelentingly played the instruction to evacuate immediately lest we face imminent danger to our lives. Tears welling in my eyes, I drove, clutching the steering wheel. A terrible, acrid smell wafted up to my nose. I reeked of the drunk woman and her stale house and her tiny kittens and despair and compassion. I reeked of fear. I cried some more. I left my damn ducks there to burn with my hard-won house. I left with two pairs of underwear and all of my important papers. I left with all of my photo albums and without all my toiletries. I sobbed and wanted to divorce my husband for failing to listen to me while he was packing. I sobbed and hated my ex-husband for having two of my children, so that I couldn't hold their hands. I drove, listened and sobbed.

I drove to Albuquerque and stayed there until they said I could come home, a week later, to a place where, instead of watching fireworks and parades, we gathered for Independence Day in a parking lot to watch our mountain continue to burn, and helicopters, like strange dragons, paced the sky, spitting fire retardant. I came home to find ducks no worse for wear, a neighbor grateful but missing all her kittens, and coyotes roaming the neighborhoods in broad daylight.

I came home.

Photo Credit Flickr: Jayson Coil

The Story of My Failed Career as a Dancer

Here is my six year-old dancing in a little cramped corner of my kitchen. He's actually pretty good. A couple of months after this was taken, we enrolled him in a very expensive hip hop dance class so that he can continue to explore this passion and talent that he has for dance. We are nothing if not encouraging of passions around here. 

Our GBE2 topic this week is dancing, and I would very much like to use this to write a long-winded, highly metaphorical exploration of something important. However, I have spent a good deal of time recently showering you all with love poems for my asparagus, and so I think it is time for me to write something funny again. In my case, dance would then make the perfect topic.

I too wanted to be a dancer, as a child. Any girl child who spends her youth with her nose inside one classic children's book after another is bound to decide to become a ballerina. I was struck continually with visions of myself, suffused with the grace of the celestials and scattering rose petals in my wake, as I spun effortless pirouettes across the playground. Besides, everyone was doing it. It was the thing to do. This is where I first remember my vision of myself running headlong into the brick wall of reality at full force.

Apparently, I have problems learning to follow "steps." My memory of this is congealed into a lump of unpleasantness in third grade wherein two friends of mine who both studied ballet were trying to instruct me in some steps for a "show" we had all created. Their frustration with me was palpable as I kept putting up the wrong arm in the wrong way followed by moving my feet incorrectly and so on. There was a decided absence of the presence of rose petals scattering pleasantly about in my wake. The part I remember most vividly was their recognition of my dismay, which was followed by their trying, with the characteristic transparency of eight year-old girls, to make me feel better. Perhaps this was the moment in life when I first developed the relationship I still maintain to being cheered up, which I rank right with being made fun of in terms of being enlivening to the human spirit. I didn't feel better. I felt like the object of pity. So, there, in the shadow of a portable, on a playground in San Anselmo, died my grandiose dreams of ballet, never to be kindled again.

I continued, however, to be dogged by dance. I liked to act, something that I in fact did quite well and with confidence. For reasons that perhaps only Satan knows, this required that I also be something of a performing poodle. Over the summer break of my sixth to seventh grade year, I participated in a week-long acting camp which performed the musical Guys and Dolls. I was cast in the chorus line, which was an abysmal use of me, in particular, since I could act quite well but danced poorly. We were required to learn a tap step known as "the Irish" and I could just not get it. I muddled through two performances, faking this movement incorrectly, only to somehow master it just after the last performance. I still remember exactly how to do the Irish, in case anyone wants to know. A very useful skill, that.

In adulthood, dance continues to plague me. My husband studied dance for years, and periodically I find myself having to dance with him in public, which is wretched because it makes such marked evidence of my inferior ability. One is supposed to enjoy dancing with one's husband, but I can't say I ever have. I almost want to partner him with a more competent consort so that he would continue to have some avenue to enjoy his hard-won skill in this arena. Instead, I grin thinly, as if I have terrible tooth pain and cause everyone around me to flock over and try to force me somehow to enjoy myself by showering me with unwanted attention. (Word to the wise: Never cheer introverts up by drawing attention to their shortcomings publicly.)

I do like to dance in private. When I have a day with some physical energy, and music is playing, I find myself dancing around my living room, happy as a clam, to things like Kid Rock. My natural style of dance is very much like that of a pole dancer. This used to be some fun to pull out in public–no steps required–when I was a cute looking nineteen or twenty, but it suffers somewhat as performed by the pain-ridden thirty-six year-old mother of three.

I guess that the gist is, for me, dancing like nobody's watching requires that nobody is actually fucking watching me.

My Friend Jenn

My friend Jenn at her job at the middle school.

Having grown up in the Bay Area of Northern California, and lived there all of my life, in 2005 I packed up two bouncy boy children, a two month-old baby, a pet mouse, two hysterical cats, and the man with whom my life had become inextricably joined, to move to Los Alamos, New Mexico. On the way, the mouse succumbed to the heat of Death Valley and was dead by the time it arrived in Arizona. My life in New Mexico would be mouse-free, which is something that I cannot ultimately regret.

I left behind Earth flags, hipsters and Puerto Rican food to alight in a place where, to my chagrin, everything closed at 8 P.M. and people talked comfortably about Jesus in mixed company. Bidding farewell to the land of peace and justice centers, community gardens and the birthplace of such earthshaking phenomena as Starhawk, Metallica and U.C. Berkeley, I moved into a cozy nest under the wing of the National Laboratory which gave the world nuclear warfare. (Ironically, my maternal grandfather's admonishment against the celebration of the mushroom cloud image graces our local Historical Museum.)

The thing, though, that I ended up missing most was my friendships. In California, I had been lucky enough to be invited to attend a group of people who gathered for periodic meetings known as Almond Roca Senior Socials. The moniker of Almond Rocas came not from the menu but from the general topic, which was the nature of being human, summed up as this: You know how when a cat takes a shit in a litter pan and then covers it up, afterwards with the litter pebbled all over the exterior of the turd, it strongly resembles an Almond Roca? This is how humans are about everything–trying to disguise shit as candy. These conversations were far more interesting than I am making them sound. My point is that I had a community which was intellectually involving, and which also was knit together by the exposure of raw feelings and pained hopes–candy revealed to all of us together as crap, which restored the crap to a kind of value.

At the center of my life there was my friend Amy. She deserves her own essay, so I won't write it here. Suffice it to say, she was my closest friend, present at the births of two of my children, and the only person with whom I have never had sex who would pull her car over to the side of the road in order to try and hold onto cell reception, so that she could talk to me a little longer, because I needed talking to, or listening to. Amy definitely does not live in Los Alamos, New Mexico. She is as much a part of Northern California as manzanita or Coast Redwood. After almost seven years here, my soul is still sick with missing her.

However, after I had lived here two years and went to work at Mountain Elementary School, I met Jenn, who was our school counselor. Jenn is the most refreshingly honest person, besides Amy, that I have ever met. She is honest even when it would be far better not to be. She cares deeply about the people in her life and can be counted on to be an unshakable friend, going further for people than the bounds of friendship dictate or demand, which is what extraordinarily kind people do normally. Because I sensed all this about her, she was the first person in Los Alamos I dared bare any real part of my soul to, and she has proved more than worthy of that trust. For all these things, I treasure her. But even more so, I treasure her Facebook profile.

This status update captures the essence of what I–and I think many others–love about Jenn:

This morning I found a fortune cookie fortune in my purse that says "Investigate the new opportunity that will soon become an option." So, I booked myself on an 8-day cruise with my friends.  

My life is full of task boxes set up up neatly at the start of my day, whereas Jenn seems to be a helium balloon lofting from rooftop to rooftop and alighting long enough to share joy with people. Somehow, despite this, her house is always lovely and mine is always messy. Recently, I had a long conversation with Jenn, who, in her extraordinary way, manages to be a great friend to both my mother and to me–which makes a kind of sense, since my mother is a great friend of mine. On this occasion, though, I had turned to her to help me bring the perspective of the mother of an adult woman to bear on my experience. My mother and I both were muddling through the difficulty of my still being ill and how this might affect both of us. Jenn decided we should all three have dinner and talk. A few days later, when I hadn't heard from her about cementing plans, I texted her to confirm and got this response:

I don't know anything about this. Did I forget? Do you mean to be texting someone else? Did we have a conversation after I took Ambien?

...which made me burst into a fit of giggles. Perhaps this sort of thing happens to everyone and they merely cover it up. Perhaps it only happens to Jenn. Either way, I find it completely charming. After the dinner, when Mom and I were sitting in the living room of my house chatting with my husband, Jenn called and told me she had been stopped by a cop. She was sober, but he had her get out the car and examined her. While she was out in the howling wind by the side of a main drag, a wholesome-looking family rode by on their bikes and clearly saw the now middle school social worker undergoing a field sobriety test. Later, she posted all the details to her Facebook profile.

I just got stopped by a cop. He made me get out and he made me follow his pen with my eyes. It was mortifying! This was after a dinner of tilapia, baked potato, AND ICED TEA!!!! He said I was on the center line going around a curve. I couldn't explain to him that I just needed to use the bathroom! But, he knew from the eye test that I hadn't been drinking so he didn't give me a ticket. But, SHIT! I know people who know me saw the whole thing! It was SO EMBARRASSING! He didn't realize that I am just am oblivious driver! No alcohol!

I didn't have a problem with doing the tests because I knew I hadn't done anything wrong but it made me SO DISCOMBOBULATED that I first pulled out my Visa card and tried to hand it to him! Then I told him that I hadn't been drinking and I was the middle school counselor and I'd just eaten tilapia. I was all over the place. It's amazing he didn't arrest me just for how I was behaving. And, since he didn't know me personally, he had no idea that THIS IS HOW I ALWAYS AM!

Perhaps, if Jenn gets to suddenly and without forethought, book an eight day cruise with friends and I do not, she also is the unfortunate soul who will suffer the indignity of a public inquisition of her virtue. These two things, I believe, are linked.  In the end, I believe that she would deem the field sobriety test a fair price to pay for the spontaneous trip, and I would not, and that—I suppose–explains our lives. I don't want to suffer the indignity that comes with a life of weightless spontaneity and yet that is what I love Jenn for, and I am sometimes extremely jealous of the lightness of spirit she brings to the same potluck where I come with a casserole made of lists and analysis.

Jenn is good people. Really good people. She has a blog where she is journalling her weight loss journey, and, whether or not you relate to or care about weight loss, she is a delight to read. She brings to it all the humanity that makes all of her communications ring out like a sounding bell from the ordinary falsetto drones of small talk. It is about scraping off the outer coating of what looked like candy to find a cat turd. It is about laughing hysterically. It is about loving oneself, everyone else, and the world and still daring to want more for all of them.

Because of Jenn and Kristine and Kimberly and a litany of others like them, I think it is O.K. to live in Los Alamos. Mountains have not supplanted oceans in my heart, but have finally won a place next to them. After all these years, I have planted gardens as if I finally know I am staying here.

Home, in the end, is wherever your friends are.

Passages from the FBI File on Tara Adams

Photo Credit: Flickr by Cliff

1. March 1, 1983. Our subject, born Tara Kathleen Gordon in 1975, recently came to the attention of the government due to her involvement with a group known only to the Bureau as "Scissilla." We believe this to be a code name for some sort of terrorist organization. Today, an agent engaged the subject in conversation in her third grade classroom, having assumed the guise of a friendly substitute teacher. Tara spoke freely and, in fact, passionately about Scissilla and her beliefs surrounding it and its related worlds (or perhaps, cells), while cantering back and forth and twisting the hem of her dress. (It was noted, by the agent, perhaps irrelevantly, that she was the only girl in her grade not wearing jeans.) Tara claimed that Scissilla exists in a parallel Universe which connects to ours through a magic waterfall. In Scissilla, she claims, everyone lives as a shepherd or farmer and is at peace with the world, practicing no violence. There is though, according to the subject, a neighboring world, Jipsivan, which is currently attacking both Scissilla and its surrounding worlds. Tara believes that "Jipsie" agents are currently at work on Earth and that she, a native of Scissilla, has been reborn here in order to stop them. After consideration, the Bureau believes this issue may be more germane to the field of psychiatry than national security. Due to the seriousness of any charge of terrorist activity, we will, however, maintain a file on Ms. Gordon.


2. August 15, 1994. Tara Gordon again came to the attention of the Bureau today while attempting to board a plane from Boston, having carried a double-edged knife to the security line. This peculiar series of events, which suggest a miscalculation in our previous decision to suspend surveillance of this subject, played out as follows. The nineteen year-old Ms. Gordon approached the TSA personnel at security proffering an elaborately decorated dagger and a polite expression. She explained that she had purchased this item in a store in Ocean Point, Maine for the purpose of giving it as a gift to her boyfriend and had then taken a car and Greyhound bus to Logan Airport, where she and her mother now planned to travel back to the San Francisco Bay Area. It had occurred to her at some point, she illustrated, that perhaps there might be a problem with transporting this knife onto an airplane and, in order to avoid having her baggage seized, decided that the best course of action would be to pack the item in carry-on and then retrieve it, to reveal to the TSA personnel, so that, with her accompanying explanation, they need not be alarmed about her bringing it on-board. However, at the point of her brandishing a dagger illegal in the state of Massachusetts in an international airport, things soured quite suddenly and the authorities were contacted. When agents arrived, in the guise of a small group of Hari-Krishnas, events found Ms. Gordon in tears over the loss of her dagger, which she claimed was a religious item, and the degradation of her character that accompanied this experience. Strange as it may seem, it is this agent's impression that Ms. Gordon was not engaged in a terrorist act, but was instead acting on a sort of ridiculous, unproved faith in the inherent eagerness of the world to understand her intentions. Naturally though, the file will remain open and very limited surveillance will commence, to protect the government's interests.


3.  October 27, 1994. A thorough background investigation into Tara Gordon received today reveals some troubling items. Apparently, there has been some question as to the patriotism and American values of her family going some ways back throughout their history. Her father's family hails, not insignificantly, from Russia, but her mother's family, although not Bolshevik by lineage, is worse. Apparently, Ms.Gordon's maternal grandfather, one A.Powell Davies, longtime Unitarian minister of All Souls Church in Washington D.C., was an antagonist to the government during the years of his peak influence. His FBI file reveals notes stating that Rev. Davies awoke every morning before dawn and worked at a printing press underneath his house, producing Communist propaganda which he would later distribute about the family's neighborhood. (It is noted that his wife, Muriel Davies, was later observed frequently to have said that not only was her husband not a Communist but that he never arose early enough to do anything before dawn.) Evidence of un-American sympathies does not end there, however. Rev. Davies was actively critically from his pulpit, of the activities of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and his church provided gifts of drawing supplies to the children of Hiroshima following the bombing which ended the war with Japan, a clear act of traitor-ship.
   
   His daughter, Bronwyn Gordon, is perhaps even more questionable if somewhat less influential. On no less than seven separate occasion, a note has been made by TSA employees of Ms. Gordon's behavior when passing through security at airports, her presence at the previously mentioned dagger incident notwithstanding. Her comments have included statements such as "Well, did you find an explosive?," "It's not as if I have a BOMB!" and "If you search my disabled client inappropriately, I will call the police!" It seems that Ms. Gordon also lived for a time with her then husband, Tara's father, in a tepee, on some land that did not belong to either of them, in the state of Washington. Both Rick Gordon and Bronwyn Gordon's presence in Berkeley in the Summer of Love is also a damning piece of evidence against them. At this time, both of them were caught up in notions of  "people's power" and it is suspected that they may have consumed illegal street drugs.
   
   Ms. Tara Gordon herself, the new report reveals, was present at the Gulf War protests in the company of a friend who strongly resembled Jesus Christ but was 6'2" and photographed wearing both a Russian ear hat and a pin bearing the hammer and sickle. This friend later joined the Trotskyist Party and remains, we find, an avid Trotskyist to this day. Ms. Gordon herself at this time referred to herself alternately as a utopian socialist, an anarchist and a faery. Clearly, we must keep a close watch on the activities of Tara Gordon. At some point, she will be caught in act of outright terrorism.


4. March 1, 2012. After close to thirty years of observing this subject, we believe it is finally time to close the file on the 36 year-old woman now dubbed Ms. Tara Adams. After what seemed a disturbing trend toward terrorist socialism at a young age, Ms. Adams has settled into bland normalcy in all of her daily dealings, year after tiresome year. It is noted that she has produced three children of unusually troublesome temperament, but this cannot necessarily be construed as a terrorist act. Periodically, Ms. Adams, or her husband–an outspoken Unitarian in the same vein as her grandfather–will make a remark worthy of notation in this file, but no action ever comes of this, and their activities reveal a pattern of soccer games, vegetable consumption and medical appointments. After Ms. Adams began writing her blog, Faith in Ambiguity, in 2010, it slowly became clear to agents studying her that the initial impressions of field envoys in 1983 were correct. Ms. Adams is clearly a case for psychiatry, but not, it seems, for the FBI. As of today, the file of Ms. Adams is officially closed and all investigation into her bizarre activities will cease.

Bloodthirsty Windshield Wipers: or How to Injure Yourself Like an Idiot

Photo Source: Flickr

You know when you are just sitting around with people, casually talking and somehow you all start showing off your scars?

No?

I spent a long time hanging out with construction workers in my twenties, O.K.? This is normal behavior among a certain group of men people. Anyway, these conversations have always been somewhat embarrassing for me. They go something like this:

A Guy: "I got this scar when my buddy almost removed my arm with a Skilsaw."

Another guy: "You think that's bad? This is a scar I got when a rusty railroad spike was accidentally embedded in my toe."

Me: "I had to get six stitches after having been impaled through the foot by a windshield wiper blade when I was six."

How, you ask, do you become injured by a seemingly innocuous thing like a windshield wiper blade? The answer is that it may be something only I can do. I doubt that this is a widespread problem encountered by emergency room doctors. In fact, a Google search for the term "windshield wiper injuries kids" yielded information on the hazards of drinking windshield wiper fluid and, strangely, information on Marfan's Syndrome, but no other examples of this type of incident.

On the day that this unlikely injury was suffered, I was playing in my front yard with two boys. This is interesting because I was anything but a tomboy. This may, in fact, have been the only occasion where I played with two boys of my own volition. (And you see how dangerous this practice can be.) We were making paper airplanes. Obviously, this was not my idea. If I was in charge, we would have been presiding over an imaginary kingdom peopled by stray cats.

Probably because I can't really throw paper airplanes (or anything), I got up onto the hood of my dad's Plymouth Duster in order to allow gravity to do the work for me. This is when I noticed that a windshield wiper blade had somehow gone through my foot. My memory from hereon may be somewhat foggy. I specifically remember that I flew–as in above the ground and over the boys' heads–up the porch steps and into my house, the concern uppermost in my mind being that I would be in trouble for climbing on the car. I remember being hustled off to the emergency room and experiencing great surprise that no one seemed to care that I had climbed on the car at all. I remember being amazed that they were actually going to sew me up, with a needle. And, afterwards, I thought I was a bad-ass because I had six stitches and a story to tell, never really stopping to consider that this story proves I am an ill-fated idiot.

It gets worse, too.

The next time I got stitches was when, at the age of fourteen, I had decided to teach myself to sew. Almost immediately at the outset of this project, I lopped off a section of the fuck-you finger of my left hand with sewing scissors. More accurately, the tip remained, hanging on by a bit of skin and doctors were able to re-attach it. I still don't have normal sensation there. The two interesting results of this injury were that I never learned to sew, and that when it was healing, and I was showing the injury to people, I kept flipping everyone off by mistake.

The worst injury I have suffered left no real lasting scar except a tinge of shininess to the skin of my arms, thighs and forehead. This happened when I lived in my first apartment, at the age of twenty. I had a gas stove, which is great. I love gas stoves. The problem with this one, though, was that it didn't light on its own. I had to remember to turn on the gas in the oven and then light it when I wanted to bake something. I was twenty and worked at a restaurant, so you can imagine how often I wanted to bake something. Not a lot. This made remembering to light the damn thing even harder, ovens in my experience always having lighted on their own when turned on.

One day, for some damn reason, I was making what I believe was a vegan eggplant parmigiana with some kind of nutritional yeast sauce (don't ask) when it occurred to me that I had forgotten to light the oven again. Twenty minutes ago. This might have clued someone else in, but I never took any real sciences in high school because I was so busy writing poetry and getting stoned on a couch in the woods, so I missed the part about it being a bad idea to throw a match into an enclosed area filled with heated natural gas that had built up over twenty minutes.

Anyway, there was kind of a fireball and it made contact with my face, thighs and arms briefly before flashing out, which left me with first and second degree burns. In places my skin was shiny and sunburned-looking and, in other places, it was blackened and bubbly and sort of sloughed off, very much like the outer casing of a grilled hot dog. It hurt very badly. Again, it made a good story, but one in which I looked like a total idiot.

I have thus far managed never to have broken a bone, unless you count the tailbone that my son relocated with his head during my third trimester. I have never suffered a concussion, torn a muscle, or undertaken any activity ambitious enough to result in my ending up in a brace, sling or cast. I just do these idiot things that single me out periodically as prone to particularly preposterous affliction. Drop a can on my foot. Cut myself with a cotton ball. Poke my own eye while shampooing my hair.

The talents I have in this world are finite and foremost among them is my talent for uniqueness. And I have the scars to prove it.

I Don't Get It

A recurring theme throughout my life has been that I don't quite "get it."  Despite all my best efforts and intentions, I somehow fuck shit up.

In second grade, I remember first noticing this when my class was playing kickball, as a large playground ball collided with my head. I had been scanning the sky for signs of bird activity that might indicate that the people from the parallel universe from which I was sure I had been ushered were coming for me soon. Several classmates expressed a great deal of irritation at the fact that I was "not playing" when my classroom teacher explained to them sharply that I "didn't understand."

This situation has not necessarily improved.

I park crooked. After carefully aiming my minivan, carefully backing up to straighten out, carefully driving back in again, and turning the engine off, inevitably I get out and see that yes–once again the car has been parked as if by a drunken teenager. I don't even bother to parallel park, except under extreme duress, my relation to spatial matters being such that somehow my car is invariably parked two feet out into traffic.

I have worked at my job for four and a half years, during which time we have used the same time sheets to record our work hours, and yet, I fuck these up. I record my work hours in the leave column. I miscalculate my  leave. I scribble. I cross out. Often, I throw out a whole time sheet and transcribe an entire two week period onto a new one out of sheer embarrassment. Sometimes, I transcribe the errors onto the new sheet, too.

I cannot adjust swim goggles, bicycle helmets or ice skates. I have to get another adult to assist me with these matters. I cannot remember how to tie slip knots. In fact, I cannot tie a child's shoes in such a way that they will  remain tied. When I open a Band-Aid package, I invariably twist the Band-Aid so that the latex adheres to part of itself and sticks on the child in a lumpy way. I cannot fix a little girls's pony tail or braid when called to do so. At least, not unless it's Crazy Hair Day at school. When called upon to perform basic mental math, as often as not, I am wrong.

And yet, I am allowed to instruct your children to read.

My students, who regard me mostly with affection–especially my second graders–often giggle to themselves as I routinely knock over water bottles, drop dry erase markers and wonder aloud where I have put something. I suppose this allows them to feel that, although I am there to instruct them with their reading, perhaps they may be of some assistance to me in coping with my basic life skills, and so the situation is more egalitarian than a normal teacher-student relationship. I am good for their self-esteem.

I am not entirely sure why it is that, although I believe my intelligence to above average in general, I am so sub-par in these basic life skills. It does seem to be an experience common to many recovering alcoholics and addicts. I think the source may be a basic defect in attitude. While most people, when discovering a major defect or deficit in their situations, I believe tend to deal directly with it, alcoholics and addicts tend to try to adapt to it, thus learning nothing.

For example, we have an older dishwasher and the silverware basket has worn a hole in one of its sections. The result of this is that utensils dropped into this section fall partway through and prevent the entire rack from rolling in and out. It is massively irritating. So, literally for months, my husband (also a recovering alcoholic) has contrived a specific strategy of placing utensils in this section just so and attempted to teach this to the five other people who load the dishwasher in this house, with the level of success you might expect, which is quite limited. My strategy, which is even less effective, is to ignore the situation until I become extremely irritated by the blockage caused by utensils in the dishwasher.

After four months, it just occurred to me that I could replace the silverware basket. And for about twenty dollars, and the investment of  ten minutes of time online, I was able to order a new part. Duh.

This, I think, is what is wrong with me. After almost twenty years of continuous sobriety, I have taken on a lot of really important flaws in my character, but I have ignored most of the little ones. I suppose I could undertake to actually learn how to adjust a swim goggle, tighten an ice skate or properly park a car.

But I am pretty busy blogging, so I might not have time.

Do-over? Not me. You might want to take notes.

Do-over.

If you know anything about my life history, you will know the thought of "do-overs" has occurred to me. One cannot live a life that includes addiction, a divorce, and the bearing of children before finishing college without some self-reproach.

I really don't live much in regret, though. I very much fear that any explanation of this will sound trite and involve lemons and lemonade, or worse, something suspiciously like truck stop quality Buddhism.  However, the honest to God truth is that after I am done briefly fuming about whatever misfortune I feel Fate has handed me, and what I have done to make the situation worse, I see the past as sort of interestingly irrelevant. It continues to be sort of amusing as the subject of stories, but it is just the Past, as immovable and solid as a stone. Perhaps this is the survival strategy of the prodigious fuck-up. It's aallll water under the bridge now, folks. I'm moving on.

Here are two examples of situations that might summon up a desire for a Mulligan in the average human being, but which I have handled using my champion positive self-talk. You may want to take notes.

Photo Credit: Flickr

While living in a tiny cottage in the redwood forest of California, I failed to have my chimney cleaned for several years. As a result, while I was at a social gathering nearby and my children, then, two and and five, were with a twelve year-old babysitter, my fireplace erupted in flames. I heard the town's fire siren howl and casually told gathered guests from out of town that this happened all the time in our little town. Only moments later, I received a call from one of the local firefighters of my very, very small town letting me know that he was at my house.

My reaction: (after checking on my kids and installing them somewhere safe) Well, there is really nothing for me to do now. Everything is all right. I can't have the fireplace cleaned until tomorrow, and no one seems upset. Hell, I am going back to my evening event. 


I was driving to some friends' house out by the coast, on roads that were completely obscured by a fog as thick and white as sheared wool. My two sons, three and six, were in the car. Although I had been to these friends' home before, never had I gone at night and never when visibility was so poor. I missed the turn to their long, winding driveway and instead turned into another. Where I drove straight into a ditch dug in the middle of a yard. With two wheels off the ground, I could not get my Volvo to reverse and, stuck in the dark and fog, in the middle of Bumfuck Nowhere, with two young children in tow, I had to knock on the door of a strange house for help. The man within, although surly looking, was not, in fact, a serial killer, and he helped me get my car out of the ditch and then pointed me on my way.

My reaction:  (upon arriving at my friends') Well, I'm awfully glad he was home. Are there any baked potatoes left?


The real reason I have so little room for regret is because of my advanced skills at worrying about the future. I am really a forward thinking person. If you enjoyed this, I will soon write you a helpful list of concerns you might consider having based on extraneous events that happen in your life.

You're welcome.

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.

Animal Lover Part I: The Saga Begins

I originally published this post back in December of 2010, when no one read my blog but my parents and my pet cat. It is actually pretty good. But it is very long. So, with a nod to Star Wars, I am breaking it into a trilogy and re-publishing it. Enjoy!

When I was a small child, I had a habit of acquiring various animals, with or without the explicit permission of my parents. Mainly, this took the form of cats. For instance, when I was about six, I adopted a grey and white Persian-mix female cat who came to the front doorstep. I called her Pretty Paws (because my best friend had a cat named Pretty Paws already and six-year-olds rarely consider originality a real virtue).

Over the years, this particular cat brought my family great joy and amusement through her various activities, which included hurling herself from the pear tree in our back yard onto the screen door, where she remained for as long as it took for someone to arrive and let her in the house. Later on, after we had moved twice and the cat's mental acuity was perhaps somewhat dimmed, she took to spending long hours sunning herself on the roof of our rented house. For reasons which may have included feline arthritis or perhaps early signs of Alzheimer's, Pretty Paws did not feel the need to leave the roof in order to relieve herself, so, unfortunately, when we vacated our Tiburon house, its roof remained peppered with fossilized cat turds, scattered proportionately across its surface. Such was her legacy.

Photo by Jamie Guimond Productions

Still later, this cat took to talking to herself in the middle of the night, specifically saying in what appeared to be a Japanese accent "Herrrrrooo! Hoar are rou?" I have found a helpful video on YouTube to allow you to picture this more easily.

However, I was unable to find a cat that really approximated the creepy phantasmagoric horror movie quality my cat brought to this project. I guess, take what I've given you and imagine the same thing done by a straggly, emaciated cat hiding behind the half-closed door of a nearby room at 2 a.m., with a voice like a throat cancer victim.

Without boring you with unnecessary detail, I will say that my animal acquisitions over the years have included unauthorized teddy bear hamsters; schizophrenic tabbies; two rabbits, which I attempted to "housetrain" unsuccessfully and keep inside the house uncaged; and an enormous homemade bottomless rat castle with five rats whom I had bred myself, and which I kept in my parents' kitchen after I moved out.

Surprisingly, adulthood has not really stopped me from continuing this practice. At the age of thirty-five, I still experience a sort of glee when reminding myself that no one can actually STOP me from acquiring whatever animal I want (unless you ask my husband, anyway). At one point, when living under the trees in the redwood forest of Sonoma County, I had six cats, many of whom had been born under my house. This, to be fair, was not my fault, since neither the mother nor father cat were mine to spay or neuter. However, rather than finding homes for these accidental kittens, I naturally adopted all of them, including those with unrepentantly feral and occasionally vicious tendencies. Three of these were matching long-haired ginger tabbies, one of whom, Marmalade Lion, I still have.

For another case, when first visiting Santa Fe on an eight-week summer pilgrimage as a newly single mother with two young children, I returned home on my 1,000-mile car trip with a baby field mouse that required careful nursing multiple times a day with a dropper full of specialized formula.

Photo by Jennifer Jordan

Really, this could happen to anyone.

One doesn't simply turn away from an infant field mouse which fell from some random stranger's ceiling in a state which is marked by the occasional but persistent presence of bubonic plague outbreaks. Not merely because you are about to drive for four days with two children under the age of seven, and plan to visit the Grand Canyon and Knott's Berry Farm. The mouse, Thimble, accompanied us to various restaurants, theme parks, and historical points of interest, and especially enjoyed the log ride. My good friend, Merisha, kept him safe inside her bra throughout most of the trip.

So, anyway, if I skip a few interesting points for the sake of attention span, that brings me to the present. Our current circumstances are not totally unreasonable. We have only one dog, which we ended up with while shopping at Lowe's in Espanola four years ago. He seems to be part Corgi and part lab. Imagine a low rider Labrador Retriever. Or a lab with dwarfism and large ears like a donkey. I still have Marmalade Lion, who is a sweet cat with an unfortunately nerve-wracking meow and a tendency to extreme paranoia. I am currently borrowing two additional cats, Gui and Gubal, for the length of a year while my friends, their owners, are living in Slovenia.

And then there are five ducks....

You'll have to read my next post to find out about them. (Do you like the way I provided a hook? My writing is like crack. Come back later and get more. Just a little more. It totally won't hurt you at all.)

Letter to a child's therapist, teacher, counselor: Remember my kids.

Dear Therapist,

Dear Teacher. Dear Mediator. Dear School Counselor. Dear anybody whose job it is to labor largely unthanked on behalf of children day in and day out, trying to find some way to help the ones who no one can help, to patch up garish wounds that gape large and ugly and bleeding with small Band-Aids, to take a child with no background knowledge and no winter jacket and teach that child to read, to teach that child to think and imagine; I have to talk to you.

I have three sons. And I don't know about your children, if you have them, but mine come with some of their stitching showing on the outside. Some of that stitching is faulty impulse control, faulty attention-paying wiring, faulty mood-control, faulty auditory processing. These three boys are the most beautifully wrought works of art I have ever cast eyes on, and part of that beauty is this faulty thread-work. Like the lazy line across a Navajo rug, it makes each of them more authentic. It can also make them first class pains in the ass.

Let me tell you a story. I have to tell it so that you will understand me. It is my story. This story is the reason I am writing.

I was a gifted child. I brought smiles of indulgence to the lips of every teacher that had me, teased by the delight of having met a child who could take what they taught further than they they imagined. Teachers; you know the tickled amusement I mean. I can appreciate it now that I have felt it myself teaching, now that a kindergartener has asked me politely how to spell "ocean" correctly. It is the unparalleled delight of knowing that, for once, you are not needed, that this child has bettered you, and you can bask in the delight of their blazing unfolding.

But when I hit middle school, I moved to a cruel and image-driven community, my family suffered a divorce and alcoholism, and a flaw that lay hidden in the weft of my own stitch-work (clinical depression) was pulled. 

The thread unraveled. My grades plummeted. The child that had once been a source of delight for teachers became, when considered at all, someone to sigh over. I skipped school, spending days hiding six or seven hours under a blanket in my own bed, concealed, rather than face the confirmation of my personal worthlessness that was middle school. My English teacher would read my creative writing with pride to the class in my absence, but he didn't call my parents to ask why I wasn't there. No one pursued me into the darkness to try to get me to come out. I fell hard from great heights.

The world that had only cast its approving light upon me up til then, in expectation on my greatness, turned away from the embarrassment of my broken body on the ground. I made a lame suicide attempt, resulting in a traumatic trip to the ER, one psychiatrist visit and nothing. I made countless visits to a school counselor to tell him that I felt I was slipping off the cliff of sanity while he quietly nodded his head. Attempts to talk to talk to friends resulted ultimately in having no friends. I was twelve and I was alone in the dark, in a world suddenly changed from what it had been.

I spent six years of my life in active clinical depression, daily losing the battle fought with a darkness that consumed the edges of Truth and cast Life in shades of bloody, lonely pain. I developed drug addiction and later, bulimia. There were angels along my way who reached out to try and  do what they could, but, for the most part, the world in general was more than willing to lose me. Most of my angels were losing their own battles with Life. The people who were winning were too busy looking away to grant the gift of seeing me.

At the age of eighteen, I fought my way crawling on my stomach with my bloody fingertips to Alcoholics Anonymous and taught myself, with help, to live. I am still learning. But I have learned a lot, if only through having made such absolutely prodigious mistakes. I have recovered from problems and events that many people cannot say out loud without a shudder, and I have stitched them into the fabric of my life, so that they have made me stronger and more flexible.

I have this to say to you out of all this experience: We cannot afford to lose children. Not without fighting. We need to stop acting like it is OK or it is inevitable that children suffer unbearable pain in this world. If, in truth, we can do nothing to stop or ease this pain, we need not let them suffer it alone. If we lose them to drug addiction, to illiteracy, to mental illness, let it be only after we have unleashed the Spanish Armada on their behalf, after we have shot every bit of ammunition in our stores, after we lie out of breath, exhausted from the effort. Let it not be for lack of imagination, lack of focus, lack of compassion.

Think about the times you have suffered the greatest pain. Maybe you were injured. Maybe you were giving birth. Maybe you lost a loved one. I hope that you did not do this alone. I hope that someone held your hand and kept holding it, and that this person looked you in the eye and did not look away. I hope that they did not get up and leave while you were most afraid. 

Please do not tell me my child is just going through a phase. Please do not tell me that all we can do is wait. Please do not imply that their failing to reach their potential as human beings is just OK, somehow inevitable. They may be one of many to you, and you may be tired. You may have seen so many, so many that you could not help and for whom the future was lost. Their faces may pass by you in a collage of hazy images. I understand. But let my child never become an item on your calendar, a name on a  list.

I don't need you to have the answers. I need you to look me in the eye and tell me you are willing to fight with me, for the life of my child. It is all I have ever wanted from you, for all these years, when I stood here talking about my child's ADHD, my child's language processing problem, my child's depression. Fight with me. You may have weapons I do not know how to use. Together, we can give my child what he needs.

Remember: These boys are the most beautiful things ever wrought. They are born to inspire. They are born to be inspired. I brought them forth out of pure possibility, knowing nothing of how to parent and without a cent to my name, with nothing but the power of my unspoken promise that they would never go without a single needed thing that I could fight for them to have. They never have. And I will crawl again on my stomach, my fingers bloodied anew, for as long as it takes, to see any of them safe and empowered while there is yet breath in my body. 

I woke this morning and heard this song (below) on my playlist. Judy Collins' son killed himself in 1992 after years of alcoholism and depression. I don't know his story. She wrote this song long before his death. You can hear her trying to hope for his future in the lyrics. I can't stop listening to it. I need to do more than hope. 

Compassion and persistence are my promise to my children. Can you help me?

Sincerely,

a mother