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Archive for January, 2007
28
Jan
2 Tickets to Paradise
The best part of our Christmas traveling woes was the flight credit B and I received on Delta. We have $1,600 to use by next year to travel anywhere Delta flies. Deciding where we might go is more fun than I’ve had in a long while.
We’re throwing around various ideas including San Francisco, Paris, New York, Chicago….
I want somewhere restful and interesting, which may prove mutually exclusive.
How about you? Where would you go if you could go anywhere?
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25
Jan
Making a Life
Ever feel like you’re a new house, another job, or a class in Buddhism away from a pretty good life? If you’re like me, you prefer Big Change over middling shifts and titrations. Like generations of men before me, I’ve gotten sucked into the macho belief that if it doesn’t hurt and if you can’t feel the pain, it’s most likely not worth one’s time. Twins, single-parenting, second marriage, graduate school were made more difficult by my belief that the authentic experience had to be intense, raw, struggling.
I’ve always hated the “Bloom Where You’re Planted” saying, subscribing instead to “The Rolling Stone Gathers No Moss.” Why meander around a block when you can run a marathon instead? Much to my chagrin, this active Type A internal world is much like the American ideal of mindless striving and mountain climbing ‘because it’s there’ –moving ahead always preferable to staying put.
But what to do with all of this drive when one has to make a million sandwiches, wipe bottoms, stare at the clouds and see shapes?
Part of enjoying children depends on one’s ability to relax and enjoy the views of the moment. Agendas and plans and children don’t really go together, especially when the kids are young and especially if one values the sweet loveliness and chaos of the minds one is shepherding through the big world.
As I make ready for the twins to attend Kindergarten next Fall, I’m faced with one of my last opportunities to sit here and be with them, on their terms, in their world. It takes real courage to be with them and get as close as breath and air. More courage than all that other put together.
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23
Jan
Pledge The Real Love
Like many assertive, outspoken types, I am often so busy acting tough, crying out against the injustices in the world, and yelling out encouragement to my peeps that I forget to take a breath and look around my own little inner life and notice the accumulated dust and gunk –the dust of exhaustion and stress and the gunk of guilt and self-loathing. Not the “Girl, you are so fat and ugly” self-loathing (SL), but the SL for the intellectual set (the rules, the pressure, the accomplishment, the “shoulds”), which is much sneakier and deadlier.
We often stand on high with our flags in the air and lipstick on, with a smile and a smart argument. Our people are loved and fed, our boss thinks we’re doing great, and our parents are proud. We have the things and the people and the success, but we’re tired tired tired. We worry and fret and find it hard to relax.
It is at just such moments that one’s babysitter usually quits and one is forced to realize (yet again) the thin wobbly line between strong and weak or dry-eyed and sobbing.
The losses of everyday life keep us humble, but they are also proof positive that one needs more than toughness, hard work, and snark to get by. If we lack real reserves and our strength is only skin deep, it’s all just macho posturing.
So I’m taking a little pledge — to care for myself with a little more gentleness.. to treat myself like one of my girlfriends who is having a hard day. Just a bath, just a walk, just a private moment.
Just a little more love and patience…. and a few more quiet minutes each day to gather the bustling thoughts into a more manageable jumble. It would be a great honor if you’d join me….
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21
Jan
Anti-Depressant
Continue reading ‘Anti-Depressant’
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19
Jan
Shelter
The other day, the low point in my child care dilemma, I sat on the ground in the living room and cried in front of the twins. It was the first the first time they’ve ever seen me cry (which I figure isn’t bad for 5 year old twins). And it was one of those strangely translucent truthful moments where everyone, for a moment, is their true self. Olivia stood in front of me with her hands at her side, wide-eyed, perplexed. Josephine, with her fingers in her ears, eyes welling up with tears begged me to stop. Violet, oblivious, played around our little troubled group, jabbering and singing.
There was a strange relief in being myself in front of my kids… not the Parent, Perfect Mother, Patient Listener, just Rachael the human being in all my flawed and weepy imperfection. They wanted to know why I was crying and I said that I was having a hard day and just needed fresh air. To five year olds, this was obviously sufficient information.
We gathered ourselves up and went on an outing to an indoor play gym. At one point, I looked over and Josephine was crying and watching me from a distance. When I ran to her and gathered her in my arms she said, “Mommy, please don’t ever cry again.” And being Mommy, I said “I promise.”
I grew up with a Mom that let it all hang out, that shared the intimate details of her travails (marital, monetary, or otherwise). So it is that I would be the Mother who protects and shelters, who would rather burden herself than her lovelies.
But in trying so hard to be perfect, I’ve missed a kind of loveliness — this shelter that one has in the arms of puzzled crying five year olds joined with Mommy, hugging and listening to the happy babbling toddler, waiting for the light to break through, waiting for rescue.
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18
Jan
Enough Enough Enough
I’ve had it with my own drama….
Let’s turn now to some nummy great tips on parental sex from Dadcentric.
Check him out here
**
This is one of those posts I’d give anything to have written.
Argh.
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So if feelings aren’t your thing, look away. My babysitter has stopped showing up. Just stopped coming. Says her driveway is too snowy (even though it’s 50 degrees) so I’ve begun the slow, gut-wrenching task of trying to find childcare for my three daughters.
Part-time childcare.
Ever done something so sad? Not sad because the poor dolls will be cared for by someone other than me, but because one faces the grim edge of the childcare crisis in this fucking country when one attempts the audaciously hopeful but ultimately vain task of finding care for under $2,000 per month even in a crap hole backwater like Bellingham.
What I’ve found today: waiting lists, waiting lists, they can fit one of my twins but not both, they have room for Violet but not the twins, they can take them but only for two hours every third day.
I was starting the long process of researching private full-day Kindergarten for the twins for Fall 2007 because Bellingham doesn’t offer full-day public Kindergarten…. only from 9-11:30am M-F which is sort of like “Kindergarten dust” if you ask me.. what with all the driving and lugging around and schlepping. The twins are going to chew off their own heads if they have to have another under-stimulated — over-televisioned year at home.
So now I’m utterly scrambling, and missing work, and getting impatient emails from my boss who wonders why I’m not there, and trying hard to not cry in front of the girls (& failing) and losing hope in humanity. What good are stainless steel appliances when one doesn’t have proper health care and public education is a rotting hellish cesspool?
If my only option is one of those creepy places in a strip mall, I’ll have to hang up my finance garb for awhile longer and try to not go to a mental institution and stay at home.
**
In other news, I’m dissing coolness over at Babble today.
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As a recent contributor to Nerve.com’s new parenting blog Stroller Derby I’ve been charged with reporting on recent events and developments with a hip and clever twist. I’m as keen on swearing as the next gal, and I find jokes about the number of drinks required to survive a snow day quite amusing.
But oh me oh my, even I am growing weary of my own cynicism.
But oh me oh my, even I am growing weary of my own cynicism. It is not Babble’s fault that I’m running out of steam. Twice daily blogging is exhausting, even if it is good for one’s Google ranking.
My initial intent, when I started writing CrankMama less than a year ago, was to give voice to what I felt was an underrepresented segment of the mothering world: the unpretty, non-knitting, domestically challenged working babes who were not always fascinated by the travails of the family bed or the joys of teaching their children Spanish before age two.
But I’m afraid I’ve merely swapped one dogma for another. Being hip and trendy is just as limited and defining as any religion, or quilting bee, or PTA meeting ever was. And maybe moreso because those of us circling around in this group are often laboring under the isolation and cynicism of our choices.
And missing the lovely beauty of our sweet elves as they grab at our legs and beg us away from our computers.
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It’s always amusing to do something you used to do before kids (host a gal pal for a few days) and see how totally different it is post-kids. E and I spent yesterday wobbling around icy Bellingham sidewalks in between taking the poor pent up kids to an indoor play gym, and trying to help her upload a corset video right side up on her site.
The night ended with some ill-advised guffawing at a hippie hangout where all the nice people were swing dancing. We debarred for a quieter (deserted) Irish place where the barkeep was “up his own ass” and quite dull. Luckily, we commandeered the jukebox and had good laughs about Lord knows what.
All culminated with drunken radio show type interview/discussion which we may decide not to post after all…
Here we are before all the nonsense ensued enjoying our good books and discussing Aristotle
And here a few hours later.. less inhibited and more fun loving (still unfit for swing dancing).
And even though the novelty of having one’s wife laughing her ass off loudly in the kitchen has probably worn off for B (definitely time for a Man Basket), it’s been a delight and surely right on track with my New Year’s Resolution.
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