"You could never be better and yet every day you seem to be better," reads the note that is stuck on the tile above the tub drain as I start my post-S's-bedtime bath. It is meant for me. I get the temperature just right and then stand up, creaky back, turn to the sink to splash water on my face.
"There is no way to love you more and yet I do." S is love-bombing us. Jon gets one next to his bed, a simple one, "You are the greatest!" On my nightstand, "You are cool!" I am? All signed with a smiley face and her name.
I was away for five days doing recon in Western Massachusetts, scouting out our future home(stead) for when Jon is done with this crazy television stuff. Speaking of crazy television stuff, I just got an email that I have a pitch meeting Friday for a project I had buried long ago. I approach it with a combination of amusement and shame. I will show up, I will switch on the pitch switch, but you can't make me dance like a monkey. Ah hell, sure you can - 'what if they were vampires instead of aspiring musicians? What a great idea'!" Gag. Stomach turn. Shame feels like indigestion.
I'd say it's all research, but who wants to read about people pitching? That world was perfectly rendered decades ago in Robert Altman's The Player. And then re-treaded throughout seasons of Entourage. Run-of-the-mill LA agent/manager/network crap leaves me cold. I have been in a fucked-up relationship with this city for fourteen years. Now we're at the part where I'm totally done, I've even dumped her, but due to circumstances beyond our control, we still have to co-habitate. (This is me and LA we're talking about. My actual relationship with another human is going strong, though his continued relationship with LA is what's keeping us here. Anyway.)
I wonder if my utter done-ness with LA is part of what put S in a funk last night. Coming back from dreamy Western Mass into 405 traffic did not make for a smooth landing. Before she snuck out of bed and played love fairy, scotch-taping notes around, S and I had a talk. She's been having a hard time with a couple of boys at school who have been telling her not only that girls can't play baseball (It's 2012!) but also that's she's not good, that they're not going to pass to her in soccer, that kind of noise. (Don't worry, I've talked to the adults at school and they're integrating equality education into gym classes and making sure community circle addresses inclusion). But S told me last night that their voices have activated a voice inside her that says, "You're no good. You're mean." And, most heartstopping for a parent, "You don't belong here." I just listen, hold her tight, remind myself, just be curious. Just show up.
"Where's here?"
"Here, like, anywhere...like alive."
Come from a place of pure love but use my skills in place of my parental desire to deny that she ever feels like this. I hug her a little tighter.
"That sounds like a tough voice."
"Yeah."
"Is there another voice?"
"Like what?"
"Well, let's name that voice that says those mean things. What would you call that voice?"
"The bad voice?"
"Okay."
"I like it to be simple," S says.
Good plan. I say, "So what would a voice say that was different from the bad voice?"
"'You're the best?' Or 'You deserve to win?'"
"Yeah. What would that voice say back to the bad voice when the bad voice says 'you don't deserve to be here'?"
"I don't know. Maybe that I do deserve to be here?"
"Let's try a few out...'I deserve to be here.' Or maybe, 'The world needs me here'..."
"How about 'I help people by being here.'"
"Great. I'm liking that voice." We talk about how in gardening where you put your sun and water and good rich compost is where your plants grow. So which voice deserves the sun and water?
"The good voice," she says. And though she is only seven years old, she understands the metaphor. She quietly repeats to herself, "I deserve to play, it is good that I am here in the world..."
I give her a big hug, say goodnight and head out to the living room where I fall onto the couch. I share the interaction with Jon, who is totally present. I take the opportunity, the rare moment of tv-free, non-internet distracted face-to-face time to talk about how stuck I feel, to get really honest. He gets really defensive, then lets that go. We work through it, we hug it out, we compromise. While we talk, I hear S tiptoeing back and forth between the bedrooms, in and out of the bathroom. Then it gets quiet. She is asleep.
"You could never be better and yet every day you seem to be better." While I wait for the bath to fill, I cut up a piece of
scrap paper and return the favor, hide some love notes in her shoe,
dress-code drawers where I know she'll find them in the morning, her
lunch box. I write, "The world is a better place because you are in it." Stuff like that.
I have been known to cringe when I go to friends' houses and see affirmations taped to mirrors or lists of positive self-talk pinned next to their computer stations. I have nodded politely but internally said, "no fucking way" when therapists have suggested I repeat affirmations before bed. But after last night, I take back those silent eye rolls. It's just the last dregs of my ancestors' Puritanism that make me feel ashamed of anything that could be considered, god forbid, boastful.
Whatever water and sunlight or positive notes and reminders it takes to grow that "good voice" until that "bad voice" shrivels up and dies on the vine, I'm in. Taped to my computer is a tiny note that reads simply, "I love you so much." Smiley face. S.
Thursday, September 13, 2012
Wednesday, September 5, 2012
How I love and hate the movies.
For my daughter's eighth birthday, she's decided she wants to take one friend - "just one, Mom, it's easier that way" - to a taping of her dad's Nickelodeon show. We will have a drive-on pass at Paramount, be toted around in the show golf cart, escorted backstage, probably sing happy birthday with a flavor-of-the-month teen icon or two. Just like my mom would occasionally take us to visit my dad at the junior high school where he was grading papers, I occasionally take S to her dad's work, which just happens to be on a show he created for Nickelodeon. Until several months ago, we were both unemployed writers struggling through the apathy of the industry. My husband, at least in this moment, has a true magic Hollywood story. He gives all our friends hope.
Yesterday we had a playdate with a five year old who spoke into his play telephone about the zombie movie he's making, telling another five year old (apparently, his business partner) that they were going to have to "push the release date. We wanted it for Christmas, but we're going to have to move it back to Valentine's Day." So believable was his conversation I almost broke in and advised him to re-think the V-Day release, as Zombie Slicers didn't sound like such a great date movie. Maybe wait til Spring break? "Wait a second, you don't have a movie! You're a Five Year Old!" An L.A. five year old.
When I was on the cusp of eight years old, I eschewed the big birthday party with homemade twister board based on theme of unicorns or rainbows or Wizard of Oz - my mom's wheelhouse was themed birthday parties in the basement - for a trip to the movies with a few girl friends. We saw Annie. I had seen the Broadway show too, somehow convincing my opera-fanatic parents to tolerate the nasal belting whine of an 11-year-old who would decades later deeply amuse her same audience, now well into our 30s, as Carrie Bradshaw. Come to think of it, Sarah Jessica Parker has great symbolism in my life: she was a young Broadway star when I was dreaming of being a child actress, the geeky star of Square Pegs right when I was entering awkward brace-face adolescence, Carrie Bradshaw when I'd just moved to L.A. and was trying on fashion, fabulousness, seeing what it felt like to wear tight sparkly Betsy Johnson pants, order cosmos, and go to movie premieres. I can't really find the parallels in my 20s with Honeymoon in Vegas or the other forgettable movies she did, except perhaps for the fact that her mid-career and my 20s both have a hazy, unsuccessful fog around them. I didn't see her last movie - How Does She Do It? or whatever the name of that book-turned-movie piece of crap that served only to make women who can't do it all (read: all women) feel shitty whether they are stay-at-home moms, insecure about their worth, or full-time working moms, guilty over not being enough. I think that was the premise of the book/movie, yet because this is Hollywood, I know it ends with her finding the perfect balance, the perfect job that allows her to be a present mom who makes gourmet meals for her husband and still have a satisfying work life. Fuck that noise.
It was a big deal to take a few friends to the four-plex movie theater in our suburban New Jersey town. My family didn't really go to the movies except maybe to see a deeply inappropriate (not to mention tedious) version of the opera Don Giovanni at an art house on the Upper West Side. A huge treat was a showing of Star Wars the day it rained on our yearly vacation on the beach in Maine (which would be sacrificed by the time I turned 11 to yearly vacation trips to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival).
Opera, Shakespeare festivals, museums: yes. Television twice a week: one Yankee game and the Sunday night showing of Monty Python, yes. But movies? Not so much. We were not a movie family, save a drive-in double feature from time to time of Pink Panther and early Woody Allen (Take the Money and Run era). My parents imagined that my brother and I would be fast asleep in the pile of blankets in the back of the VW Squareback before the Woody Allen movie began, but I always stayed up, riveted, my chin perched on the row of back seats. We had to stop going to the drive-in when they switched from piping the sound through those crackelly CB radio receiver things perched on your window to a station on your car radio. We didn't have a car radio.
When VCRs emerged in my early teens, I discovered movies. Films. Cinema. I remember the first time I saw Spinal Tap in Marcia Teusink's living room. We were 13. It was the most revelatory 82 minutes of my young life. I would never live without comedy again. At 15 my friends and I snuck into the city to see Syd and Nancy, then somehow cross-wired our sleepovers so we could see a midnight showing of Rocky Horror at the 8th Street Playhouse without our parents having any idea. My first semester of college is marked by a winter break spent with my best guy friend engaging in a "DeNiro Fest," sitting in my parents' basement, forcing ourselves through everything from Mean Streets to New York, New York. Cringing through Deer Hunter, staring in disbelief at Taxi Driver. These are movies? People make these? These exist? Spike Lee rocked my world, then Singleton's Boyz in the Hood, then Thelma and Louise.
Post-college I moved to New York, and night after night as I walked home from my job in the East Village I'd stop at the sticky-seated, cleanser-scented 13th street quad to see whatever was playing. By myself. I grew up in the dark, discovering festivals of kink, tributes to gay auteurs, short films by young black filmmakers: all these people exist; all these worlds are out there. The Public Theater, where I worked, still had a little movie theater, run by an old film buff with a thick Italian accent, who'd lasted through several administrations, one of the original Joe Papp crew. He'd pop by the box office and tell me to come by after work, to make sure not to miss the Bernado Bertolucci festival or the first showing of My Beautiful Launderette. I sat in the darkened theater alone, jaw dropped, eyes wide, skin on fire. This exists?
I just read yet another New Yorker article about how impossible it is to make any movie that is not a blockbuster, that won't play in the "foreign market," that isn't part of a franchise. The articles are relentless and though one might ostensibly be about Ben Stiller and the next about a reformed gang member in the Sundance Film Lab, they all end up being about audience testing and sellability. They all leave me with the same apathetic, depressed, who-cares feeling. When my friend and I circulated a screenplay we wrote earlier this year, the notes on structure and relationships were addressable, helpful. I would have been excited to address those, if the notes on the industry hadn't made me want to go back to bed far far away from L.A. My old manager at Brillstein-Grey actually said, "this screenplay would have been pretty easy to sell, the movie would even have been made several years ago just on the strength of the writing. Smart. Funny. Now it needs to be attached to someone who is already box-office proven and even then...unless you're Judd Apatow..." "Well, um, I'm not."
Back home, under covers, or more likely, back to the stuff that isn't so depressing: build S's school, plan our move out of Hollywood, do some low-paid but real freelance writing, help someone out, troll real estate listings far from here. I wonder if the people who are not disheartened by notes like that and New Yorker articles like those ever loved movies like I did. I wonder if the ability to see art as commerce from the get-go makes it a lot easier to be successful. I wonder if I was ruined by those heart-pounding moments in the 13th street quad when I didn't know that the funding for those type of independent movies was drying up and usually came from rich parents anyway. One of my best friends back in those Public Theater days had graduated from NYU film school with a girl who made an iconic if simplistic lesbian film. When I mentioned how much I enjoyed that film, he grimaced. What? He told me how rich she was, how bankrolled, how her story about making it despite all the odds was bullshit. How the odds were always in her favor. He was barely thirty and so bitter, so done. Right when I headed out to LA, my first pilot in hand, he found a job writing copy for a bank, found his joy in yoga and a lovely boyfriend, a lovely life. I always felt sad that he hadn't pursued filmmaking. Now I feel a sense of relief. He chose a happy life. He chose a life.
I wonder how my almost eight year old will feel about the business of making movies. Having spent her early years in LA with an industry-tinted family, will she understand the commerce of it on a cellular level? Unlike her five-year-old friend, she never discusses pretend release dates with pretend collaborators. She did, however, recently say it would be fun to make movies, "but just for my friends. I don't want anyone to tell me how I need to make the movies. I just want to do what I want." Amen, sister. Too bad it's not the early 90s. I think she must've heard Jon and I bitching about network notes. I think she is already clear that she does not want to waste her life having those kinds of conversations. She must sense my disgust with the way it all works out here. She knows I'm champing at the bit to move to a small town back east. She knows there's something about this world that makes my skin crawl. She knows Hollywood has left me soul-sucked and sad even as TV pays our mortgage. And she knows I still love movies.
Yesterday we had a playdate with a five year old who spoke into his play telephone about the zombie movie he's making, telling another five year old (apparently, his business partner) that they were going to have to "push the release date. We wanted it for Christmas, but we're going to have to move it back to Valentine's Day." So believable was his conversation I almost broke in and advised him to re-think the V-Day release, as Zombie Slicers didn't sound like such a great date movie. Maybe wait til Spring break? "Wait a second, you don't have a movie! You're a Five Year Old!" An L.A. five year old.
When I was on the cusp of eight years old, I eschewed the big birthday party with homemade twister board based on theme of unicorns or rainbows or Wizard of Oz - my mom's wheelhouse was themed birthday parties in the basement - for a trip to the movies with a few girl friends. We saw Annie. I had seen the Broadway show too, somehow convincing my opera-fanatic parents to tolerate the nasal belting whine of an 11-year-old who would decades later deeply amuse her same audience, now well into our 30s, as Carrie Bradshaw. Come to think of it, Sarah Jessica Parker has great symbolism in my life: she was a young Broadway star when I was dreaming of being a child actress, the geeky star of Square Pegs right when I was entering awkward brace-face adolescence, Carrie Bradshaw when I'd just moved to L.A. and was trying on fashion, fabulousness, seeing what it felt like to wear tight sparkly Betsy Johnson pants, order cosmos, and go to movie premieres. I can't really find the parallels in my 20s with Honeymoon in Vegas or the other forgettable movies she did, except perhaps for the fact that her mid-career and my 20s both have a hazy, unsuccessful fog around them. I didn't see her last movie - How Does She Do It? or whatever the name of that book-turned-movie piece of crap that served only to make women who can't do it all (read: all women) feel shitty whether they are stay-at-home moms, insecure about their worth, or full-time working moms, guilty over not being enough. I think that was the premise of the book/movie, yet because this is Hollywood, I know it ends with her finding the perfect balance, the perfect job that allows her to be a present mom who makes gourmet meals for her husband and still have a satisfying work life. Fuck that noise.
It was a big deal to take a few friends to the four-plex movie theater in our suburban New Jersey town. My family didn't really go to the movies except maybe to see a deeply inappropriate (not to mention tedious) version of the opera Don Giovanni at an art house on the Upper West Side. A huge treat was a showing of Star Wars the day it rained on our yearly vacation on the beach in Maine (which would be sacrificed by the time I turned 11 to yearly vacation trips to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival).
Opera, Shakespeare festivals, museums: yes. Television twice a week: one Yankee game and the Sunday night showing of Monty Python, yes. But movies? Not so much. We were not a movie family, save a drive-in double feature from time to time of Pink Panther and early Woody Allen (Take the Money and Run era). My parents imagined that my brother and I would be fast asleep in the pile of blankets in the back of the VW Squareback before the Woody Allen movie began, but I always stayed up, riveted, my chin perched on the row of back seats. We had to stop going to the drive-in when they switched from piping the sound through those crackelly CB radio receiver things perched on your window to a station on your car radio. We didn't have a car radio.
When VCRs emerged in my early teens, I discovered movies. Films. Cinema. I remember the first time I saw Spinal Tap in Marcia Teusink's living room. We were 13. It was the most revelatory 82 minutes of my young life. I would never live without comedy again. At 15 my friends and I snuck into the city to see Syd and Nancy, then somehow cross-wired our sleepovers so we could see a midnight showing of Rocky Horror at the 8th Street Playhouse without our parents having any idea. My first semester of college is marked by a winter break spent with my best guy friend engaging in a "DeNiro Fest," sitting in my parents' basement, forcing ourselves through everything from Mean Streets to New York, New York. Cringing through Deer Hunter, staring in disbelief at Taxi Driver. These are movies? People make these? These exist? Spike Lee rocked my world, then Singleton's Boyz in the Hood, then Thelma and Louise.
Post-college I moved to New York, and night after night as I walked home from my job in the East Village I'd stop at the sticky-seated, cleanser-scented 13th street quad to see whatever was playing. By myself. I grew up in the dark, discovering festivals of kink, tributes to gay auteurs, short films by young black filmmakers: all these people exist; all these worlds are out there. The Public Theater, where I worked, still had a little movie theater, run by an old film buff with a thick Italian accent, who'd lasted through several administrations, one of the original Joe Papp crew. He'd pop by the box office and tell me to come by after work, to make sure not to miss the Bernado Bertolucci festival or the first showing of My Beautiful Launderette. I sat in the darkened theater alone, jaw dropped, eyes wide, skin on fire. This exists?
I just read yet another New Yorker article about how impossible it is to make any movie that is not a blockbuster, that won't play in the "foreign market," that isn't part of a franchise. The articles are relentless and though one might ostensibly be about Ben Stiller and the next about a reformed gang member in the Sundance Film Lab, they all end up being about audience testing and sellability. They all leave me with the same apathetic, depressed, who-cares feeling. When my friend and I circulated a screenplay we wrote earlier this year, the notes on structure and relationships were addressable, helpful. I would have been excited to address those, if the notes on the industry hadn't made me want to go back to bed far far away from L.A. My old manager at Brillstein-Grey actually said, "this screenplay would have been pretty easy to sell, the movie would even have been made several years ago just on the strength of the writing. Smart. Funny. Now it needs to be attached to someone who is already box-office proven and even then...unless you're Judd Apatow..." "Well, um, I'm not."
Back home, under covers, or more likely, back to the stuff that isn't so depressing: build S's school, plan our move out of Hollywood, do some low-paid but real freelance writing, help someone out, troll real estate listings far from here. I wonder if the people who are not disheartened by notes like that and New Yorker articles like those ever loved movies like I did. I wonder if the ability to see art as commerce from the get-go makes it a lot easier to be successful. I wonder if I was ruined by those heart-pounding moments in the 13th street quad when I didn't know that the funding for those type of independent movies was drying up and usually came from rich parents anyway. One of my best friends back in those Public Theater days had graduated from NYU film school with a girl who made an iconic if simplistic lesbian film. When I mentioned how much I enjoyed that film, he grimaced. What? He told me how rich she was, how bankrolled, how her story about making it despite all the odds was bullshit. How the odds were always in her favor. He was barely thirty and so bitter, so done. Right when I headed out to LA, my first pilot in hand, he found a job writing copy for a bank, found his joy in yoga and a lovely boyfriend, a lovely life. I always felt sad that he hadn't pursued filmmaking. Now I feel a sense of relief. He chose a happy life. He chose a life.
I wonder how my almost eight year old will feel about the business of making movies. Having spent her early years in LA with an industry-tinted family, will she understand the commerce of it on a cellular level? Unlike her five-year-old friend, she never discusses pretend release dates with pretend collaborators. She did, however, recently say it would be fun to make movies, "but just for my friends. I don't want anyone to tell me how I need to make the movies. I just want to do what I want." Amen, sister. Too bad it's not the early 90s. I think she must've heard Jon and I bitching about network notes. I think she is already clear that she does not want to waste her life having those kinds of conversations. She must sense my disgust with the way it all works out here. She knows I'm champing at the bit to move to a small town back east. She knows there's something about this world that makes my skin crawl. She knows Hollywood has left me soul-sucked and sad even as TV pays our mortgage. And she knows I still love movies.
Thursday, August 30, 2012
Artifacts from a young life
A couple of days ago I got Eugenides' newest novel out of the library and I had seven days to read it. I did it in three. I have stayed up well beyond a reasonable bedtime every night and am weary now. It is so hard for me to put down a book even when I know I will suffer for it in the days to come. If I could figure out how to read for a living, I'd be all right. After I picked S up from school on Tuesday, we came home, had a snack, checked in, all I wanted to do was pick up the book. I thought maybe - maybe - if I got her going on her homework followed by an educational video game on my computer, I'd buy myself a half an hour to read and still be with her. Parallel play. It worked. She did her homework, I read, occasionally helping or checking in. It was paradise. Then she disappeared into her room. This is pretty unusual. S is not one of those only children you hear about who can entertain themselves for hours out of sight of all others. She tends to want to interact after her homework - take a walk with me, play a board game, help with dinner. But she was just gone. I could hear her shuffling around in there, hear drawers opening and closing, the occasional light crash, nothing to worry about. Once or twice she emerged and grabbed some tape or scissors. What was she building in there?
I read for a good hour. I mean a good hour. God, I love reading. I glanced up at the clock, I was going to have to start dinner. Throughout this low-energy bluesy time, I've maintained certain activities. Non-negotiables. I get S to school on time every day, well-fed and with a home-made lunch. I make healthy dinner from scratch. I keep the house fairly clean. Still pursuing writing, but with less fervor than it deserves, still trying to figure out how to use my MFT license without diving into another fucked-up public mental health job, still spending too many hours a day researching homes in a small town far away yet to be publicly announced as my husband is still sucking off the television industry teat, I am primarily a glorified housewife/stay-at-home mom. At least everyone is eating healthy food and the house is in order, even as my brain is a bit wonky.
Finally, S comes out of the bedroom with a reusable shopping bag over one shoulder.
"Can I do my presentation for you?"
I sit up. I wrench the book away from my body, remind myself it will still be there at bedtime.
"I would love to hear your presentation."
"Pretend you're at table one, ok?"
"Ok."
"So after I show you something, I'll pass it to you, then you pretend to pass it to table two, but you can really just put it down on the side table."
"Got it. This is your artifact presentation?"
S nods. Then she stands in the middle of the living room rug and rocks back and forth, smiles like she's trying not to giggle, seems to have a hard time knowing where to rest her eyes. She has switched into performance mode.
"This is a book called Harold and The Purple Crayon. It is one of my favorite books because the boy draws everything with his crayon and I've had it for a long time and my mom's friend Adam gave it to me and he moved to New York and I miss him and so it's very special to me."
She hands me the book and slips me a quick smile that says she's excited about what she's put together here. I try not to get teary. When I get proud, gushy teary, she always says, "Seriously, mom?"
I place the book on table two.
Next she pulls out her baseball glove, "This is a really good kind that you can't get anymore. It is a Reggie Jackson glove and my uncle gave it to me. [How old is it, mom?]"
I think, then whisper so as not to insert myself into her presentation, "Over thirty years old."
She continues, "It's over thirty years old and it's very special to me because as you probably know, I love baseball. And I'm a lefty."
She hands it over, I consider it and place it on the table.
A super close-up picture of our dog is accompanied the narrative, "he's very lazy because he's had two knee surgeries..." then self-correction, "I mean, he's very lazy and he's had two knee surgeries so he can't walk very much. But he was lazy anyway." A giggle, then, "this picture of him lying on the floor is pretty much what he does all the time."
Next, a metal owl bookmark "that Poppi gave me so it's really special. He likes to give me bookmarks and lets me pick them out. I also love to read, so..."
Then, a carved stone owl that "Nana got it for me in Budapest because she knows I love owls. And they carve a lot of things out of stone there." Not sure how specifically true that is, but sounds good.
I'm most surprised when she pulls out a bracelet I gave her that I think I bought in the East Village on one of my earliest independent outings, just a series of metal squares linked together and a small rock glued on each - lace agate, amethyst. "This is special because my mom gave it to me and she knows I love rocks. I have like 400 rocks in my collection from everywhere we go I get rocks."
The presentation slows down as she shows how the clasp works, which requires her to lay the bracelet down on a table and slide the metal hook through a miniscule loop. I resist helping her, as I won't be there at the actual presentation. I imagine the kids will try to help her and the teacher will ask them to sit back down. She'll figure it out. I am mesmerized by that bracelet - when and where did I get it exactly? It's got a real pull for me, a strong feeling of mid-teenage hippie days when I was into rocks and crystals. It's pretty cool. She's finally got it on. "It's too big for me but I hang it on my wall as decoration and someday it will fit."
Her final item is a geode bookend. "As I already said, I love rocks and this one is big and sparkly. My dad gave it to me, I don't know where he got it but he knew I would like it. There's a bigger one, but this is the best one. I'm going to pass it around, but be careful because it's heavy..."
It's a random sampling and I wonder if she shouldn't have included items that were more specifically historical - the first tooth she lost? photos of ancestors? I stop myself immediately. This is how she defines herself. Owls and rock collections. Her lazy dog. A book that makes her feel happy. Her baseball glove. She asks if she can do it again.
"You can do it all night," I say.
"I like doing this!"
As I watch a second time, I realize the sample isn't random at all. It has a very deep unifying factor. "Adam gave me this book before he moved to New York. He's really important to me."
"This glove was my uncle's."
"From Poppi,"
"From Nana,"
"My mom's bracelet that she gave to me,"
"a geode from my dad."
I read for a good hour. I mean a good hour. God, I love reading. I glanced up at the clock, I was going to have to start dinner. Throughout this low-energy bluesy time, I've maintained certain activities. Non-negotiables. I get S to school on time every day, well-fed and with a home-made lunch. I make healthy dinner from scratch. I keep the house fairly clean. Still pursuing writing, but with less fervor than it deserves, still trying to figure out how to use my MFT license without diving into another fucked-up public mental health job, still spending too many hours a day researching homes in a small town far away yet to be publicly announced as my husband is still sucking off the television industry teat, I am primarily a glorified housewife/stay-at-home mom. At least everyone is eating healthy food and the house is in order, even as my brain is a bit wonky.
Finally, S comes out of the bedroom with a reusable shopping bag over one shoulder.
"Can I do my presentation for you?"
I sit up. I wrench the book away from my body, remind myself it will still be there at bedtime.
"I would love to hear your presentation."
"Pretend you're at table one, ok?"
"Ok."
"So after I show you something, I'll pass it to you, then you pretend to pass it to table two, but you can really just put it down on the side table."
"Got it. This is your artifact presentation?"
S nods. Then she stands in the middle of the living room rug and rocks back and forth, smiles like she's trying not to giggle, seems to have a hard time knowing where to rest her eyes. She has switched into performance mode.
"This is a book called Harold and The Purple Crayon. It is one of my favorite books because the boy draws everything with his crayon and I've had it for a long time and my mom's friend Adam gave it to me and he moved to New York and I miss him and so it's very special to me."
She hands me the book and slips me a quick smile that says she's excited about what she's put together here. I try not to get teary. When I get proud, gushy teary, she always says, "Seriously, mom?"
I place the book on table two.
Next she pulls out her baseball glove, "This is a really good kind that you can't get anymore. It is a Reggie Jackson glove and my uncle gave it to me. [How old is it, mom?]"
I think, then whisper so as not to insert myself into her presentation, "Over thirty years old."
She continues, "It's over thirty years old and it's very special to me because as you probably know, I love baseball. And I'm a lefty."
She hands it over, I consider it and place it on the table.
A super close-up picture of our dog is accompanied the narrative, "he's very lazy because he's had two knee surgeries..." then self-correction, "I mean, he's very lazy and he's had two knee surgeries so he can't walk very much. But he was lazy anyway." A giggle, then, "this picture of him lying on the floor is pretty much what he does all the time."
Next, a metal owl bookmark "that Poppi gave me so it's really special. He likes to give me bookmarks and lets me pick them out. I also love to read, so..."
Then, a carved stone owl that "Nana got it for me in Budapest because she knows I love owls. And they carve a lot of things out of stone there." Not sure how specifically true that is, but sounds good.
I'm most surprised when she pulls out a bracelet I gave her that I think I bought in the East Village on one of my earliest independent outings, just a series of metal squares linked together and a small rock glued on each - lace agate, amethyst. "This is special because my mom gave it to me and she knows I love rocks. I have like 400 rocks in my collection from everywhere we go I get rocks."
The presentation slows down as she shows how the clasp works, which requires her to lay the bracelet down on a table and slide the metal hook through a miniscule loop. I resist helping her, as I won't be there at the actual presentation. I imagine the kids will try to help her and the teacher will ask them to sit back down. She'll figure it out. I am mesmerized by that bracelet - when and where did I get it exactly? It's got a real pull for me, a strong feeling of mid-teenage hippie days when I was into rocks and crystals. It's pretty cool. She's finally got it on. "It's too big for me but I hang it on my wall as decoration and someday it will fit."
Her final item is a geode bookend. "As I already said, I love rocks and this one is big and sparkly. My dad gave it to me, I don't know where he got it but he knew I would like it. There's a bigger one, but this is the best one. I'm going to pass it around, but be careful because it's heavy..."
It's a random sampling and I wonder if she shouldn't have included items that were more specifically historical - the first tooth she lost? photos of ancestors? I stop myself immediately. This is how she defines herself. Owls and rock collections. Her lazy dog. A book that makes her feel happy. Her baseball glove. She asks if she can do it again.
"You can do it all night," I say.
"I like doing this!"
As I watch a second time, I realize the sample isn't random at all. It has a very deep unifying factor. "Adam gave me this book before he moved to New York. He's really important to me."
"This glove was my uncle's."
"From Poppi,"
"From Nana,"
"My mom's bracelet that she gave to me,"
"a geode from my dad."
She defines every item with a description of the person who
cares enough about her to give her something from their own private collections
from youth or buy her something on their travels because they miss her. My daughter is only seven and she
already knows that material things are only valuable in how they represent
love. That the most important
artifacts tell the stories of the relationships you build. That the story of one’s life is the
giving and receiving. The items,
no matter how sparkly, are just symbols of the real stuff.
Wednesday, August 29, 2012
Aggggghhhhh.
I'm reading a novel in which someone slips into deep depression, a real chemical low, can't-get-it-together depression. I know I do not have that. I have the blues, the funks, low-energy irritability. I blame LA. I know it's not entirely LA's fault. But LA does have to bear some of the responsibility, with its sprawling spread-out-ness that makes it hard to see the ones you love, to create community, to feel a part of anything. It's partly your fault, LA. But not having lived anywhere else for the past 14 - fourteen! - years, it's hard to know what it'd be like elsewhere. Sometimes I got the blues in New York in my 20s, in Massachusetts in my college years. I lived in a state of teal and aqua and turquoise in New Jersey, but I was a teenager then.
One of the strange things about watching your child grow is that they start to have moods. Like, real moods. Not just those meltdown in the middle of the grocery store because you've taken them on one too many errands and they are hungry and tired and just need to throw themselves on the ground and wail. I'm good with those. S still has those types - the big, intense, and quickly over melts. What I would call the healthy melts. If you don't try to reign them in, they pass like an intense but brief tropical storm, like the afternoons when I lived in Costa Rica, when between the time you left your host family's house and arrived at the radical political science institute you'd be drenched and the sun would already be shining. I like those kind of storms.
But now I sometimes see the blues. Not a lot. I have a happy kid, an active kid, a kid who brought home a book from the school library on Derek Jeter because "even though he's a Yankee, I really like him," and "he inspires me, mom, because he's like me. He wanted to be a professional baseball player from the time he was my age!" S has stopped worrying about the fact that there are no female professional baseball players. She has over a decade to remedy that. She starts Fall Ball Little League in two weeks. Baseball. In case you meet S, don't offer her "girls' softball" as an alternative. S thinks softball is bullshit.
Mostly it's a lot of joy and interest and curiosity with flare-ups of frustration or exhaustion, but now and then there are blue days for her too. And those are hard to weather. No matter how much I believe in letting people have their feelings, in walking through the tough times, in not suppressing the struggles, damn is it hard to not try to "make" your child happy. But I don't. Mostly. I listen. I empathize. I question, act curious, try to go deeper. Sometimes I just say, "yeah, some days are like that, huh?" And they pass. Far more quickly than my blue periods. I know (post-a-shitload-of-therapy) that part of why my blues hang around, my funks funk me out for longer than necessary, my body ends up achy and my brain fuzzy and my mood apathetic is that I fight them. Higginses are troopers! We don't have down times. We present with a smile and we don't like complainers. We see depression as weakness and lethargy as pathetic. (Imagine my learning curve to become a therapist and find empathy for the real struggles of real people). The Speers-Higgins clans are steeped in deep Puritan blood and the Puritan work ethic not only sees finding joy and fulfillment in your work as besides the point - it actually discards those concepts as devil's work.
And so I do blame LA. And I blame New England. For here I am, generations deep in the Plymouth Brethren 'you work because that's what you do' Puritanism, the 'don't expect much from life and you won't be disappointed, in fact occasionally you might be pleasantly surprised' motto of my parents (seriously, my mom just said that to me this weekend and I dry-heaved. And it's not in a Buddhist way of being in the moment, but in this old pilgrim way of self-sacrifice and discomfort in the idea of pursuing dreams or taking risks.)
And while the old New England stock rattles around deep in my chest cavity, making my heart feel selfish for its desires; my groovy LA therapist tells me to put my hand over that heart, cradle that chest cavity, close my eyes, and ask it (my heart) what it wants. "Get really quiet and listen for your heart's desire." Yes! Yes, my heart's desire. In that big, white-carpeted, ocean-viewed office in Santa Monica. Yes! And then I walk out and call my mom to arrange our child-care schedule for the week and even without telling her about my therapy (because I'm not an idiot) I feel like a giant asshole for not only thinking that I have the right to follow my heart's desire, but even to have a therapist with a big white-carpeted office. Self-indulgent. Privileged. Entitled. These are very bad words.
Is my desire to return to Massachusetts a primal desire to return to the homeland? Is it partly driven by a desire to stop living split in two? Because the groovy-LA-follow-your-bliss-crystal shit doesn't sit right inside me, even as I have acid reflux from the New England Puritan crap. But my friends who still live in Massachusetts have found a way to reject at least some of that without trying to replace it with an airy cultural philosophy that lacks context. They are following at least some of their desires - they are musicians with day jobs who gig at night; they dj on weekends and are social workers by day; they gather together frequently without having to sit in hours of traffic on the 405 to see the people they love.
Today I am writing despite the blues. For that I credit my family. Higginses do not take to their beds for weeks or even days no matter how deep the shit feels. I write on, I take a walk, I apply for jobs, I show up to run the workshop at school, train parents in Community Sharing so that the children in our school will learn how to talk about feelings and walk through them. But I can't help but wonder what it would be like if I'd been allowed to have my meltdowns, go big and hard and furious, storm off to my room saying "life sucks" (without being shamed for it) and then return ten minutes later cleansed and ready to move on. If I hadn't been made to feel that it was selfish to have a hard time. I guess we'll see in several decades when S hits mid-life. For now, I will take a walk.
One of the strange things about watching your child grow is that they start to have moods. Like, real moods. Not just those meltdown in the middle of the grocery store because you've taken them on one too many errands and they are hungry and tired and just need to throw themselves on the ground and wail. I'm good with those. S still has those types - the big, intense, and quickly over melts. What I would call the healthy melts. If you don't try to reign them in, they pass like an intense but brief tropical storm, like the afternoons when I lived in Costa Rica, when between the time you left your host family's house and arrived at the radical political science institute you'd be drenched and the sun would already be shining. I like those kind of storms.
But now I sometimes see the blues. Not a lot. I have a happy kid, an active kid, a kid who brought home a book from the school library on Derek Jeter because "even though he's a Yankee, I really like him," and "he inspires me, mom, because he's like me. He wanted to be a professional baseball player from the time he was my age!" S has stopped worrying about the fact that there are no female professional baseball players. She has over a decade to remedy that. She starts Fall Ball Little League in two weeks. Baseball. In case you meet S, don't offer her "girls' softball" as an alternative. S thinks softball is bullshit.
Mostly it's a lot of joy and interest and curiosity with flare-ups of frustration or exhaustion, but now and then there are blue days for her too. And those are hard to weather. No matter how much I believe in letting people have their feelings, in walking through the tough times, in not suppressing the struggles, damn is it hard to not try to "make" your child happy. But I don't. Mostly. I listen. I empathize. I question, act curious, try to go deeper. Sometimes I just say, "yeah, some days are like that, huh?" And they pass. Far more quickly than my blue periods. I know (post-a-shitload-of-therapy) that part of why my blues hang around, my funks funk me out for longer than necessary, my body ends up achy and my brain fuzzy and my mood apathetic is that I fight them. Higginses are troopers! We don't have down times. We present with a smile and we don't like complainers. We see depression as weakness and lethargy as pathetic. (Imagine my learning curve to become a therapist and find empathy for the real struggles of real people). The Speers-Higgins clans are steeped in deep Puritan blood and the Puritan work ethic not only sees finding joy and fulfillment in your work as besides the point - it actually discards those concepts as devil's work.
And so I do blame LA. And I blame New England. For here I am, generations deep in the Plymouth Brethren 'you work because that's what you do' Puritanism, the 'don't expect much from life and you won't be disappointed, in fact occasionally you might be pleasantly surprised' motto of my parents (seriously, my mom just said that to me this weekend and I dry-heaved. And it's not in a Buddhist way of being in the moment, but in this old pilgrim way of self-sacrifice and discomfort in the idea of pursuing dreams or taking risks.)
And while the old New England stock rattles around deep in my chest cavity, making my heart feel selfish for its desires; my groovy LA therapist tells me to put my hand over that heart, cradle that chest cavity, close my eyes, and ask it (my heart) what it wants. "Get really quiet and listen for your heart's desire." Yes! Yes, my heart's desire. In that big, white-carpeted, ocean-viewed office in Santa Monica. Yes! And then I walk out and call my mom to arrange our child-care schedule for the week and even without telling her about my therapy (because I'm not an idiot) I feel like a giant asshole for not only thinking that I have the right to follow my heart's desire, but even to have a therapist with a big white-carpeted office. Self-indulgent. Privileged. Entitled. These are very bad words.
Is my desire to return to Massachusetts a primal desire to return to the homeland? Is it partly driven by a desire to stop living split in two? Because the groovy-LA-follow-your-bliss-crystal shit doesn't sit right inside me, even as I have acid reflux from the New England Puritan crap. But my friends who still live in Massachusetts have found a way to reject at least some of that without trying to replace it with an airy cultural philosophy that lacks context. They are following at least some of their desires - they are musicians with day jobs who gig at night; they dj on weekends and are social workers by day; they gather together frequently without having to sit in hours of traffic on the 405 to see the people they love.
Today I am writing despite the blues. For that I credit my family. Higginses do not take to their beds for weeks or even days no matter how deep the shit feels. I write on, I take a walk, I apply for jobs, I show up to run the workshop at school, train parents in Community Sharing so that the children in our school will learn how to talk about feelings and walk through them. But I can't help but wonder what it would be like if I'd been allowed to have my meltdowns, go big and hard and furious, storm off to my room saying "life sucks" (without being shamed for it) and then return ten minutes later cleansed and ready to move on. If I hadn't been made to feel that it was selfish to have a hard time. I guess we'll see in several decades when S hits mid-life. For now, I will take a walk.
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Just a quickie
Don't want to lose momentum but didn't get a chance to write today. Just had taco night with S and she spent the whole time telling me all the great things she's doing at school and how she and her old pals are playing tag at recess and she's having such a good time... She disappeared into her room for the better part of an hour to gather "artifacts" for her share about her life, then asked if she could search the internet for a typing program to practice her typing, after she finished her homework. Was it just yesterday I was pondering home school?
Monday, August 27, 2012
Stuck in Lodi
Just started putting on Pandora after one too many frustrating experiences with random play on my IPod - Ramona and Beezus books or Charles Bukowski poems interrupting my Beck groove; Christmas songs sung by country singers sending me into inexplicable sudden panic. Pandora is fun because you enter an artist that represents the mood you're in and see what the anonymous Pandora people think of you. This morning I put on the Bruno Mars channel and greatly cheered up a cranky Monday-morning seven year old. Jon said, "How'd you get the pre-show music list from the Nickelodeon show we're taping?" It's true - from Bruno Mars to One Direction to Maroon Five - it was all the music the second-fifth grade crowd is rocking. When I got home from dropping S at school and a quick trip to Trader Joe's, I chose the Jakob Dylan station. Pandora always starts with a song from the actual artist and basically, I just wanted to hear that scratchy sexy voice. Oh Jakob Dylan what you do to me. I got some Ben Harper, okay, some Iron and Wine, getting a little folksy for my mood, and then a cover of Lodi, the 1969 Creedence Clearwater Revival song that I just love. I didn't really ever listen to the lyrics before - "Oh lord, stuck in Lodi again," and this time it made me do a little research. It's about Lodi, California, an agricultural town about 70 miles from Fogerty's hometown of Berkeley (or so claims Wikipedia) and the feeling of a broke musician being stuck there. I remember a Lodi, New Jersey that's pretty arm-pitty too. I mostly know it as the place with the big DMV near the town where I got my tattoo in the early 90s - Wayne, New Jersey. Wayne had the big fountain store (right across the street from Schatzi's Tattoos) that was made famous by the band Fountains of Wayne and the scene in the Sopranos in which Tony buys a fountain from the police officer he's had fired. It's a great disturbing classic scene.
I have to change the channel now. I have an aversion to Jack Johnson. I just can't believe it's music for adults. Switch over to the Dayna Kurtz station and hear my friend. I'm sure she's not making any money off it. God she's good. She's so good. Buy all her CDs: www.daynakurtz.com
S didn't want to go to school this morning. It was a classic rocking weekend with a daddy/daughter fishing trip, baseball, family hanging...I'm hoping this is just a normal Monday morning thing, but I'm having a rising anxiety about her resistance to school. I'm pondering the concept of homeschooling. I'm fantasizing that if we were in Western Mass it would all be different. I'm internalizing her discomfort. I'm visualizing her slumped shoulders as she walks into the classroom. What is going on? When I talk to her about individual subjects - music, math, PE - she says she likes them all. When I ask about her teacher, she says she loves her. It seems to be interpersonal, social, something about feeling overwhelmed being with 20 kids every day. I imagine it's overwhelming. I've never enjoyed being in a big office and having to deal with a myriad of different personalities. And at the very least I had a cubicle to retreat into.
I have to turn my focus now to a training I'm doing tonight for parents at S's school to lead class groups, help them build community, learn how to problem solve, grow empathy, all that good stuff. I led a community circle with last year's third graders and loved watching them begin to open up, listen to each other, solve problems with more respect. Tonight I'll train a crew so we have one parent per class. Paring down some of the confusing and overly groovy materials from the program we initially used, making it more user-friendly, developmentally-appropriate, and just plain fun. We shall see. I breathe deep, remind myself that it's only week two of third grade and that children struggle with going to school and no one loves it all the time and that's ok. And that this could just be transition time. I listen to a little more Wallflowers. It shoots me back into a time in my early twenties when it wasn't that I was happy, exactly, but I was responsible for no one but myself. I didn't always do a great job of taking care of me, but the worry about that was different, more existential, less heartbreaking. Ahhhh..Angel on my Bike. His voice is a salve to me. S will find her own salves. I can help her, but I can't do it for her. That may be the most excruciating part of parenthood.
I have to change the channel now. I have an aversion to Jack Johnson. I just can't believe it's music for adults. Switch over to the Dayna Kurtz station and hear my friend. I'm sure she's not making any money off it. God she's good. She's so good. Buy all her CDs: www.daynakurtz.com
S didn't want to go to school this morning. It was a classic rocking weekend with a daddy/daughter fishing trip, baseball, family hanging...I'm hoping this is just a normal Monday morning thing, but I'm having a rising anxiety about her resistance to school. I'm pondering the concept of homeschooling. I'm fantasizing that if we were in Western Mass it would all be different. I'm internalizing her discomfort. I'm visualizing her slumped shoulders as she walks into the classroom. What is going on? When I talk to her about individual subjects - music, math, PE - she says she likes them all. When I ask about her teacher, she says she loves her. It seems to be interpersonal, social, something about feeling overwhelmed being with 20 kids every day. I imagine it's overwhelming. I've never enjoyed being in a big office and having to deal with a myriad of different personalities. And at the very least I had a cubicle to retreat into.
I have to turn my focus now to a training I'm doing tonight for parents at S's school to lead class groups, help them build community, learn how to problem solve, grow empathy, all that good stuff. I led a community circle with last year's third graders and loved watching them begin to open up, listen to each other, solve problems with more respect. Tonight I'll train a crew so we have one parent per class. Paring down some of the confusing and overly groovy materials from the program we initially used, making it more user-friendly, developmentally-appropriate, and just plain fun. We shall see. I breathe deep, remind myself that it's only week two of third grade and that children struggle with going to school and no one loves it all the time and that's ok. And that this could just be transition time. I listen to a little more Wallflowers. It shoots me back into a time in my early twenties when it wasn't that I was happy, exactly, but I was responsible for no one but myself. I didn't always do a great job of taking care of me, but the worry about that was different, more existential, less heartbreaking. Ahhhh..Angel on my Bike. His voice is a salve to me. S will find her own salves. I can help her, but I can't do it for her. That may be the most excruciating part of parenthood.
Thursday, August 23, 2012
Capture the Flag: DAY FOUR
I remember Capture the Flag. I remember my brother breaking his arm during a big neighborhood game. Capture the Flag in our day was unruly, unsupervised, snaked through wooded areas (suburban, not real country) behind houses and from yard to fence-free yard. I realize as S's PE teacher teaches them a (non-flying) version of Quiddich and amps up Capture the Flag to "Super Capture the Flag" ("It's way more awesome," says S), he's following their lead. He's finding out what the kids think is cool and morphing that into a lesson plan. Smart. Funny to be observing so closely the machinations of third grade and realizing the strategy. Find the in, meet them at their interest, then infiltrate with facts and skills.
It's dreary and muggy in LA, not common weather for us. I'm in the tiny backhouse sweating. The chickens are squawking. Our dog is stinking up the place. What looked like a potential place to do legitimate therapy when I first fixed it up now looks like a hovel. The carpet is stained and pieces of leaves are scattered around the floor. Bedding from our last visitor is piled on the couch, which is covered in hair from his dog. The yard is littered with chicken poo and feathers, the summer garden neglected, wilting, flies everywhere. I know it's not as Clampitt bad as I'm making it out to be, though it's not great. It's mostly that LA looks shitty when it's not sunny. I noticed that the first summer I was here, 14 - gulp - years ago. Unlike other places I've lived, LA doesn't look moody and mysterious on overcast days, it just looks depressing.
I have been skewing depressed lately, at least when I'm alone. It's not full-time depression. I am not having that much trouble getting out of bed and I don't return there. I've been cooking good dinners, playing board games with S, showing up to help at the school, organizing events, even having a reasonable amount of sex (with my husband, people). And it's not like I'm just going through the motions. I'm actually in joy in the moments when I'm with people I love. It's just that once they all head off - on the bike to work, into the classroom, off Facebook - I'm by myself. And I sink rapidly. I can always pull myself out - I'm a pro at finding the next thing to do, embarking on a project, focusing the energy - but what's astonishing to me is how quickly I sink back in. How quickly the cobwebs hanging off the windows and the dried chicken poop on the flagstone terrace dunk me down. How the screech of a power saw nearby just makes everything seem so dreary.
In third grade news, I asked S to change her pants just as she was walking out the door because she had clearly wiped her eggy hands on them. She didn't want to. I didn't care.
"But I don't care that I'm in stained pants."
"But I do."
"But they're my pants."
"Let's not do this. Just change your pants."
She goes into her room, pissed. Yells out, "Then can you help me find some other pants that are as comfortable? Those were the only stretchy leggings."
I'm about to lose it. I walk in, saying, "You might have thought about how comfortable they were before you used them instead of your napkin."
"But I didn't wipe egg on my pants."
"Then it mysteriously found its way there."
She has terrible table manners - largely our fault, I know - and only now am I confronting some of the hand-eating, the clothes-wiping, the loud burping. I haven't really cared to be honest, but am starting to feel like I want her to be able to accompany us to more, shall we say formal (read: less-caveman) settings without having to correct her in public. She is now expected to say "May I be excused?" and to clear her plate. That part's going well. The wiping-hands-on-pants, not so strong. Sadie is standing in her underwear, looking as annoyed as I feel. I pull out a pair of lovely, clean, dress-code appropriate dark blue comfortable leggings.
"Oh, those," she says.
I walk out of the room because frankly, I'm not in the mood for attitude. She's still cranking at me on her way to the car. I tell her to have a great day and I'll see her at pick-up. I'm done with the interaction. Jon turns around when they're at the car and runs back over, gives me a kiss. He knows I hate having to play cop/mama. He calls after drop off and says that she was fine as soon as they pulled out of the driveway.
"But you sound really upset. You okay?"
"I'm just blue," I say. "Just dumb. The weather, the...I don't know."
"Buy a house in Western Massachusetts," he says. He knows that's what I fantasize about when LA (or anything that happens to be happening while I happen to be in LA) gets me down.
"I guess I'll go look at some in a few weeks?"
For once, I don't really feel like flying across the country solo, even to look at potential homes for our future. I feel like he's calling my bluff by agreeing to Western Mass after years of complaining that he could never stand the winters. Depression comes with a degree of stuck-ness. I sit here in the stink, the noise, the gray, and wonder if a big, bold move would break me out. Maybe I should make an offer on a house, start to build our future somewhere else. But depression is mobile. 3,000 miles isn't far enough to outrun it. I just need to breathe through it and keep doing the good work. And enjoy my ragamuffin child.
It's dreary and muggy in LA, not common weather for us. I'm in the tiny backhouse sweating. The chickens are squawking. Our dog is stinking up the place. What looked like a potential place to do legitimate therapy when I first fixed it up now looks like a hovel. The carpet is stained and pieces of leaves are scattered around the floor. Bedding from our last visitor is piled on the couch, which is covered in hair from his dog. The yard is littered with chicken poo and feathers, the summer garden neglected, wilting, flies everywhere. I know it's not as Clampitt bad as I'm making it out to be, though it's not great. It's mostly that LA looks shitty when it's not sunny. I noticed that the first summer I was here, 14 - gulp - years ago. Unlike other places I've lived, LA doesn't look moody and mysterious on overcast days, it just looks depressing.
I have been skewing depressed lately, at least when I'm alone. It's not full-time depression. I am not having that much trouble getting out of bed and I don't return there. I've been cooking good dinners, playing board games with S, showing up to help at the school, organizing events, even having a reasonable amount of sex (with my husband, people). And it's not like I'm just going through the motions. I'm actually in joy in the moments when I'm with people I love. It's just that once they all head off - on the bike to work, into the classroom, off Facebook - I'm by myself. And I sink rapidly. I can always pull myself out - I'm a pro at finding the next thing to do, embarking on a project, focusing the energy - but what's astonishing to me is how quickly I sink back in. How quickly the cobwebs hanging off the windows and the dried chicken poop on the flagstone terrace dunk me down. How the screech of a power saw nearby just makes everything seem so dreary.
In third grade news, I asked S to change her pants just as she was walking out the door because she had clearly wiped her eggy hands on them. She didn't want to. I didn't care.
"But I don't care that I'm in stained pants."
"But I do."
"But they're my pants."
"Let's not do this. Just change your pants."
She goes into her room, pissed. Yells out, "Then can you help me find some other pants that are as comfortable? Those were the only stretchy leggings."
I'm about to lose it. I walk in, saying, "You might have thought about how comfortable they were before you used them instead of your napkin."
"But I didn't wipe egg on my pants."
"Then it mysteriously found its way there."
She has terrible table manners - largely our fault, I know - and only now am I confronting some of the hand-eating, the clothes-wiping, the loud burping. I haven't really cared to be honest, but am starting to feel like I want her to be able to accompany us to more, shall we say formal (read: less-caveman) settings without having to correct her in public. She is now expected to say "May I be excused?" and to clear her plate. That part's going well. The wiping-hands-on-pants, not so strong. Sadie is standing in her underwear, looking as annoyed as I feel. I pull out a pair of lovely, clean, dress-code appropriate dark blue comfortable leggings.
"Oh, those," she says.
I walk out of the room because frankly, I'm not in the mood for attitude. She's still cranking at me on her way to the car. I tell her to have a great day and I'll see her at pick-up. I'm done with the interaction. Jon turns around when they're at the car and runs back over, gives me a kiss. He knows I hate having to play cop/mama. He calls after drop off and says that she was fine as soon as they pulled out of the driveway.
"But you sound really upset. You okay?"
"I'm just blue," I say. "Just dumb. The weather, the...I don't know."
"Buy a house in Western Massachusetts," he says. He knows that's what I fantasize about when LA (or anything that happens to be happening while I happen to be in LA) gets me down.
"I guess I'll go look at some in a few weeks?"
For once, I don't really feel like flying across the country solo, even to look at potential homes for our future. I feel like he's calling my bluff by agreeing to Western Mass after years of complaining that he could never stand the winters. Depression comes with a degree of stuck-ness. I sit here in the stink, the noise, the gray, and wonder if a big, bold move would break me out. Maybe I should make an offer on a house, start to build our future somewhere else. But depression is mobile. 3,000 miles isn't far enough to outrun it. I just need to breathe through it and keep doing the good work. And enjoy my ragamuffin child.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)