Four is Enough

When I decided to get pregnant with a third child (yes, I not we, decided) I thought I was going to stand out in a crowd with my big brood.  At first people were shocked by three.  Particularly my friends and family - I think my mother said something like, "Why?"  But it wasn't long that I was the one getting all the notice and sympathy for having so much hard work upon me 24/7.  No, soon everyone seemed to be expecting a third.  Perhaps I was ahead of the crowd, I felt the trend coming maybe?  I hate being like everyone else.  It bugged me that our family was no longer out of the ordinary for middle-class northern Californians.  There was something scintillating about the idea of breaking the long standing sanity of a two child household.  Wasn't it feminism, education, rational behavior, population awareness, modern psychology, all those forms of elevated consciousness that made us consciously reduce our family sizes?  We left behind the days of religious oppression, of permitting men to just get us pregnant, of thinking that more babies would fix us, fix the marriage.  Now we had a neat package; two babies - either crammed together to bundle the costs and reduce the time away from a career or conversely spaced way apart to allow for more individual attention to each child as well as to spread the economic burden out - and a career, or perhaps a series of careers.  We had balanced work and motherhood - we hired nannies, or started a co-op.  We made huge portions of food every Sunday and froze it for the week so we could have at least 4 sit down meals together, as a family, because we all know, families who eat together do everything better.  And out husbands were on board too weren't they?  They did an equal portion of housework - right down the middle, 50-50.  One person shops, the other cooks, one does the laundry, the other the vacuuming. 

I am not that person.  I like being different than what I perceive is the norm because I never can manage to live up to it anyway.  First of all, I hated leaving my kids at day care or with a nanny.  I couldn't stand the idea of someone else spending all that time with my still nursing baby.  They were my kids and I wanted to be with them.  I tried bringing my second child to work with me for a year and it was impossible.  I was literally torn in two directions all day and I wasn't the only one who noticed the fraying of my nerves.  Even my co-workers felt ignored.  Also, my husband's job is extremely physical and he was simply unwilling to do much of anything when he came home from work.  At first this deeply upset me, and all my female friends and my mother.  I repeated verbatim their words of disgust right to my husband, in fights of course (you can imagine how effective this was) to no avail.  Sometimes he would succumb a little bit and muster the strength to wash the dishes or make dinner (twice) but these new deals were very short lived.  Eventually a marriage counselor told us to get a house cleaner.  That was fabulous - but the guilt!  Sometimes I would just get down with her and clean too - I felt terribly lazy about it (although the pleasure of a clean and effortless house was more than the remorse at having blown the work off myself so we had the house cleaned every week for many years.)  My husband insisted it was saving our marriage.

Having a third child actually made it easy to do what I had been raised to never consider but was clearly my hearts desire (at least while my kids were young) which was to be a stay-at-home mother.  It really wasn't realistic to think I could work and raise 3 children with little assistance from my husband (beyond making the bulk of the money of course).  This is not to say he wasn't emotionally there for the kids or that he didn't spend time or energy on them.  He did and he does.  He just wasn't doing the grunge work - grocery shopping, cooking, lunches, cleaning, laundry, making beds, doctors visits, dressing, shopping for clothes, shoes etc.  So I quit work and while I was at it, a few years later,  had a fourth baby.

Yet again I was shocking!  No one had four except the very wealthy (this was now becoming popular - a sign that you had so much disposable income that you could actually afford to raise four children all with utterly privileged lives.)  I still was enjoying being so cutting edge and yet I also felt the real burden of what I had done.  I realized too late, no one would ever invite us to dinner again.  No one would ever want us to rent their vacation home or to borrow anything, ever.  We really couldn't go to restaurants that weren't at least 80 decibels already and besides, even burritos ran us $60 now.  There was not a single person who wanted to babysit for us (at least not for all four kids) accept my mother-in-law, bless her heart, but I couldn't possibly ask her more than once in a blue moon.  Besides, I had this idea that each of my kids deserved the kind of attention that my first received for the first 4.7 years of her charmed and sibling free life.  So I ran myself ragged trying to be all things to all my kids all the time. 

I have had some real regret about having so many kids.  I have certainly also felt pride that we have such an unusual, albeit, loud family.  I have felt the full range of conflicting emotions - both trapped and surrounded by intense love, simultaneously over

Moments

Lately I have been seeing moments in slow motion, with a mundane poignancy.  To re-install the car seat - a physical act that I have done countless times, the nuances of which I am essentially intimate with - I must crawl inside the seat, on my knees, facing backwards and press my cheek and mouth into the backrest while I blindly (but so deftly) thread the seat belt through the correct channels.  When I complete this task the seat implodes inward, downward, sucks straight into the car's backbone.  I am very good at making sure that car seat is secure.
At night, in the middle of the night, when my husband and I are trying or are in fact, sleeping, things happen.  Not sex, (although that used to happen wordlessly in the middle of the night - I am hoping that by the time our kids are out of the bed we won't be too old or have forgotten how to rouse ourselves like that) but all sorts of unspoken or muttered communications.  My husband does this thing where he sweeps the proscribed area that he thinks of as "his" on the bed with his leg and like a bulldozer emotionlessly pushes all out of his way - the thing in his way is typically me or my blanket and sometimes (because we often end up sleeping head-to-toe) my pillow or face.  It bugs the hell out of me.  It makes me so resentful, so righteous.  I always assume he is angry at me, resenting me right back.  But he isn't - he is unconsciously trying to get comfortable.  Sometimes, when I am being swept by the leg and a child is telling me his nightmare and another child is literally climbing my head looking for a good nesting spot, I think, "Who on earth does this?".  Who?

In the morning when I meditate sitting up, my three year old sometimes wakes.  He is already in bed with me but since I am now sitting up, he is no longer pressed against my body properly and so must get closer.  He snuggles in, half sitting, half slumped and begins the process of finding my nipple.  With his hand he travels under the comforter, navigates his way through the layers, finds the edge of my shirt and travels over the wiggly rungs of loose flesh on my stomach.  As his pudgy soft hand covers every contour of my skin I am forced to think of how this intimate exercise will influence him.  This (assuming he is going to be straight) is how he will measure all female bodies - against the texture, shape and in all honestly, flabbiness, of his mother.  It is no wonder that the vast majority of men who have told me such information have admitted that a woman with some meat is the sexiest of all.  The skinny models in lingerie catalogs are not appealing.  It is no wonder.  My son's first experience with comfort, love, with the sensual experience, is with a post-partum woman.  And we all know what a post-partum woman looks like.  To me, this is a beautiful thing. 
These are the minute details of daily life that I am struck by.  Basic and perhaps not, at first glance, particularly intriguing.  I don't know where the zoom lens of the mind has come from but it certainly has given me good material for writing...

There is Nothing Better out There

I have been married for 15 years this August and have lived with my husband for 17 1/2 years. I do not know where he ends and I begin.  This is a trite little way of describing the indescribable connection that forms when you have lived with, had children (4) with, slept with (sexually and simply, well, slept) and shared money with the same person for so long.  We have lived in 4 apartments and 4 houses.  We have had horrendous arguments about preparing, packing, planning and executing our moves.  We have picked paint colors, felt belittled by the disapproval of the other over the colors we liked and didn't like, bickered and challenged each other to paint properly, prep correctly, and cover the floors thoroughly.  Countless times, he and I have stood surveying a room and negotiated how the furniture should be arranged - sometimes complimenting the other, sometimes expressing gratitude for a great idea and sometimes hating the others guts for simply refusing to put the sofa in the "right" spot.

We have taught each other how to cook, how to sing, to dance, to write in cursive, in architectural script, to draw in perspective, to use a screw gun and to sew.  There were times, months or weeks, when I was more powerful, more together, more emotionally fit and there were times when he was the strong one, the one who kept everything from falling apart.  There were long periods of general disharmony, where resentment prevailed and compassion and understanding came only after emotionally violent arguments.  There were periods in which nothing in the world felt better than being folded into his chest.  The smell of my husband's body is tantamount to home.  I have imagined him gone from my life (death, divorce, done it all fantasy wise) and I can almost make myself cry just thinking about missing his scent - or perchance catching it on an old shirt or a pillow case. 

I have been so resentful, so hateful in fact, of my husband and the way he controls, dictates, orders around and imposes his boundaries and standards on me and yet I have folded myself around his ways. I have become ever conscious of them.  There is no time I leave the bed unmade all day (always rushing to make it at 4:30 before he gets home from work) without thinking of him and how much he hates an unmade bed.  I do not prepare a meal or even a snack and not wonder what he would think of it or judge the tastiness based on his taste buds, his likes and dislikes.  I have quite a few items of clothing that I can barely bring myself to wear because he once said something only mildly disparaging about them - and conversely, everything I own that he has complimented me on, I remember too.

There is no movie, no book, no radio program, no news article, that I do not filter through his perception as well as my own.  I often feel as though he is perched on my shoulder, overseeing everything I do - he is right there with my mother who is watching as well.  Sounds bleak but it is not - I don't think so anyway... I actually think it is relatively normal to be so enmeshed with one's partner of so long.  There is a reason we finish each others thoughts or bring up the same subject at the same time - we are entangled, linked, biochemically as well as through our shared history.

Sometimes I, (and I know he does this too though he is not the kind of guy who would mention it out loud) wonder what it would be like to be single or to be married to a totally different kind of person - someone who did everything my way.  Someone who liked more of the things I do - someone who wasn't so allergic to poison oak that he is kind of a drag to camp with - stuff like that.  But I have watched divorce up close and from a distance.  I have seen women leave for new men and men leave for other women.  I have seen the total wreckage, chaos and cacophony of pain that comes of it.  I know now from these observations, that new love fades, that it is all just a projection anyway.  There is nothing better out there.  I know that.  So I muddle though, rage at, embrace and adore, giggle, bitch, complain and float inside this marriage. 

Antipathy

I have been reluctant to say this out loud for fear of being told that I made my own bed and I ought to lay in in, quietly, but... I really resent my kids.  Not all the time, but often.  Especially the youngest, which seems the worst kind of resentment. To blame an innocent three year old, really?  I wake up with resentment - dread, really.  He sleeps in our bed, which I desperately want to change, and although he manages to typically stay up later than I do, he also wakes up just when I am snuggling down into that post-pee bliss land of morning sleep.  Upon awakening his first thought seems to be, "Where, oh where, has that God damn nipple gotten to in the night?"  And then begins a resentful, irritated, aggressive search for my breasts which, mind you, must be accessible in exactly the correct way - the angle, the lack of obstruction by blanket or my arms.  Once he has managed to create the perfect nipple touching environment, there comes the actual process of reuniting with his long lost friend.  This is not a gentle thing.  No, it is incessant swirling, shifting, pinching, stroking, a sort of wiggling of fingers and palm.  I cannot begin to tell you how much I detest this self-comforting nipple-love that my youngest, and all three of his siblings before him, seem to have been born with.  I tried to prevent it.  I really did.  It seems though, that it must be genetic, because it is not as though I taught them how to do it - and the neighbor kids certainly didn't pass it on.  They just searched around, while nursing, and found something absolutely wonderful to play with.  I would move their roaming hand, push it, nudge it, but when a four month old reaches out in that ever so innocent, "I am just resting my tired little pudgy hand on your breast for a moment" way, what can a soft-hearted, exhausted breastfeeding momma do?  It is cute and it does seem innocent.  At first.
I am about to put a stop to it - I have managed to end it at bedtime.  Now we just hold hands instead, which I much prefer (although even that is tainted with demands about the angle of our fingers, the order of the interlacing) to being fondled by anyone but my husband.  Any day now, you may see me, with a chastity belt of the breasts and a perfectly happy three year old.

Nature Nurture

I realize that the nature/nurture debate has been hammered out in so many formats, so many scientific and psychological journals, to the point which I doubt I can shed any further light on the subject.  I suspect that if I were to read more thoroughly of the aforementioned pieces I could find further answers to my endless stream of queries regarding my efforts at child rearing and my influence on the outcome.


For a total layman I think I have a pretty good grasp on how things work...a child is born with a certain set of traits, assets and liabilities.  His environment, particularly if is is extreme in any way, has the potential to activate some genes (which then effect emotional and intellectual health) and to enhance or diminish genes that are actively relevant.  This supposition leaves me with the question: How much does it matter how I parent?  My inclination to keep my kids safe, clean, healthily fed and educated is a given.  Beyond that, how much affection, focused attention, exposure to nature, culture, spirituality, boundaries, rules, discipline etc is the correct amount?


Is there something that I could be doing right now with my children that will enable them to have grand dreams and then actually manifest them?  Is there something I am doing right now that is in fact squelching a part of them that would otherwise have them become a Doctors without Borders physician, the next great philanthropist, the inventor of the first entirely solar car made of 100% post-consumer waste?  Or, perhaps even a grander dream, a child who grows into an adult who finds love, is engaged with the world and is relatively happy?  Someone who is self supporting, generous, kind, perhaps?


As an aside, have you noticed that great men and women of history, those that made radical changes politically, socially, artistically and scientifically are, in their personal lives, pretty screwed up?  Why can't the JFK's and the MLK's of the world also be faithful to their wives?  And why can't the Sylvia Plath's and the Virginia Wolfe's be at all contented?  Speaking of which, what type of adult would I prefer my child to be?  The miserable genius or the happy every-man?


Because I do have four children I am in a special position to see, in actuality, how little I, or my husband may have to do with the personalities and achievements of our kids.  Much remains to be revealed, as they are still young, but I am guessing that although much in their teen and adult life will be attributed to how we raised them - sad and funny anecdotes will be told, blame and credit will be assigned - they will turn out differently than each other and they will remain the people they were always going to be - even if they had been raised in entirely different families.


So then, the question remains, why do I, like most parents, worry so much about how I am handling, addressing and responding to my kid's needs, personalities and problems?  Why do I expend so much effort adjusting my responses and reactions to their foibles and their victories?  And most curious, why do I worry so much how the world perceives me in relation to them and their behavior?  Is it just self-centered fear?  Do I (we) suffer from extreme egocentricity?  Or is it biologically driven?  A built in impulse intended to assure the best possible outcome for our offspring (living long enough to reproduce) that has, with the advent of gunpowder and antibiotics, spun into a neurotic habit?  I hate it when it all comes down to evolutionary biological imperatives so I hope there is more to it - something else that explains that parental drive to do it right, to do it better or as well as our parents did or didn't. 


Of course it is highly likely that my suppositions about the effects we have on our children are infinitely simplified - that in fact the nature/nurture dance is far more complex than I have made it out to be.  Regardless, I do so hope to get it right even as I watch myself doing so much of it wrong.  Perhaps it is in the quest for right-behavior that we are being the best kind of parent we can be - purely by seeking, we shape our children positively.  Because we care, because we question ourselves, our motivations, we shed the selfishness that allows us to be more open, more effective, in our parenting.  If that is even in part a truth, then I may have, through my infinite desire to know more, a chance at being a good mother.

Really honest life story shit in process, unedited...

I was 14, and determined to fuck-up, when my family moved me across a bridge and into an entirely new city - one that was socially radically different than mine.  I had already started my slut reputation off well at one high school and I suppose I thought I would continue on with my infamy at another.  I was under the impression that sleeping with a lot of boys was a good way to make new friends and to become popular.  I really did think that. Unfortunately sleeping with whomever, whenever, was bad for one's social standing in the Bay Area but was really just not done in San Rafael.

And sleep around is certainly what I did.  And drink.  And do drugs.  And generally be a total misfit.  When I was in the middle of ninth grade I saw a boy who was a couple years older than I standing outside after P.E.  I was instantaneously in love.  I mean full-on, heart brokenly, want to have his baby in love.  I saw his eyelashes and it was on.  The way he stood was enough to make me feel like throwing up - literally - in a good yet painful way.  His eyes were like penetrating heavy weights and I was sunk to the ocean floor when he looked at me.  This is exactly the way I felt at the time.  That intensity of feeling.  It was excruciating from the the very first moment.

So being the reckless girl I was, I walked right up to him and said something.  I am not exactly sure what I said but it was something like, "I want to be with you."  The emphasis on BE. And what do you think he did?  Yes, he promptly escorted me right off campus and into his mom-is-not-home apartment.

At that time I had decided to try to quit drinking and doing drugs.  I had a sober father, uncle and grandfather and was familiar with the signs of alcoholism and I suspected I had it.  It has been a short time, 5 days, 5 weeks, something like that, that I had maintained a tentative sobriety. 

He offered me a wine cooler - I remember this so clearly because wine coolers were new (to me or to the world, not sure) and I had this tiny baby moment of remembering that I was not going to drink anymore.  Fuck that.  It was on.  All on, all the way, no looking back.  And so began the onslaught of the worst emotional pain I had ever felt - which, at 14 was not a vast amount of pain.  But I had had my share of familial, social and even romantic trials to know that this was not going to go well.

This boy had a girlfriend when I met him and he did not break up with her to be with me (although they did break up while I was still seeing him, things did not change in terms of my status as his official girlfriend).  He dealt drugs and had a pager - (a pager that was like a mocking distant glass of water in the midst of a dry, hot desert - there was this pretense that I could get in touch with him, but he almost never called me back).  He was often distant and cold and occasionally really romantic and loving.  We were both from a liberal background and shared a certain jaded sensibility about the way the world worked.  I saw that there was a real verbal and mental connection between us and he with me  but for him, the drugs, childhood pain and teenage angst were all too powerful to allow any of that good stuff into a relationship with me.  I was way more that he wanted to deal with - he had no resources to take on my level of obsession.  There was no repository within him for my fantasy.

So that was how I spent my high school years.  Fucked up with obsession.  Trying to have real boyfriends along the way who were sweet, normal, nice guys but never really liking them all that much.  Doing tons of drinking.  Torturing my parents.  Dressing and behaving in the most provocative, aggressive and rebellious fashion.  I failed or received "D's" in all my classes.  I think I took geometry twice.  Eventually I had to take a remedial math class, which I failed when the teacher made a deal with me.  He said, if I would quit smoking he would give me an "A".  I wouldn't even have to take the final.  I agreed.  But of course, I had absolutely no intention of quitting smoking.  A girl with some sense of self-preservation might have perhaps not smoked at school, or not told anyone that I was smoking and smoked only in private.  But not me.  I just went on smoking right before class, on campus and told anyone who would listen about how flagrantly I was defying my commitment.  The teacher found out and I didn't care.  I thought it was pretty funny actually.  My complete loser-dome was amusing.

When I was 16 I sliced my wrist - I had been into cutting myself way before is was popular or even talked about.  I would never have believed that this self-mutilation was anything but a maniupative tactic for being cool and edgy if I hadn't at the age of 13 been so utterly compelled by the shimmering, sharp $80 disection

I remember very little about the aftermath of the wrist-slicing except that my parents bought a horse before it was healed.  The day we went to the stable and I test-rode Gear Jammer I was very self-conscious of the telltale wrist bandage and I did my best to keep my jacket sleeve low.  I loved the horse and I loved riding him.  Slowly my family became horse people and I ended up, over the next three years being given and purchasing with my own money, 3 more horses.  Riding was the one thing that my parents and I enjoyed doing together.  It was the only time when I felt successful and competent.  Physical exertion coupled with the intense emotional connection between horse and rider was a powerful antidepressant (if I was in fact depressed - it didn't feel like depression, it felt like extreme confusion, arrogance and obsessive-mindedness).

When I was 16 and just eeking out a little bit of sanity now and then, my mother suggested I quit high school.  She said that she was sick of getting the pre-recorded message from my school which said, "Your child has missed one or more classes.  If this is an excused absence please call or send a note..."  I was sick of rushing to the phone to intercept those calls myself.  Her suggestion was the wisest parenting decision I think she ever made.  I literally quit the next day and never came back.  I was a few months shy of the completion of my junior year and easily passed my GED.  I took a year off of school all together and moved back to my home city, Oakland, and in with my very laid back about my drinking and screwing around, grandmother.  I worked at my families retail business, bought a truck, a new horse and had the time of my life.  If I wasn't regularly drinking and driving and crashing my car and waking up in strange houses I would say that it was a healthy, growing period.  I had finally managed to at least functionally get over the boyfriend who really wasn't a boyfriend and only occasionally bounced back into his life.

When I started to take classes at a junior college I soon solidly understood what it was I hated so much about high school.  Not only did the teachers, in general, hate their jobs and their students but the shit they taught was often banal and utterly uninspiring.  More than that though, I now realized, was the social dynamic of the staid and false culture which high school produces.  Junior college, in particular, perhaps more so than a four year university, offered such a random mixture of people of all ages, races and socio-economic back grounds.  It was so much more my scene since I had always been one to mix it up socially.  One of the things I couldn't stand about the town my parents moved us to was the uptight and rigid ideas about class that were ever present, everywhere.  I also revealed to myself that I was really smart.  Getting A's was no problem for me now. And I liked shit - academic shit. My dad now became one of my most useful friends for he could write exceptionally well having taught English at UC Berkeley.  I spent hours on the phone reading and rereading my papers to him as he stopped me mid-sentence and shredded my sentences until they were precise, sharp, perfect representations of my mind.  We did this for years, even after I went to the East coast to attend a real university.

I remember being gleefully surprised by the type of guys who were now asking me out - grown men (young grown men) with histories and pasts and interests beyond foot ball and drinking.  I encountered my first young sober person and I actually thought he was fascinating with long, long red hair and such a cool way of dressing.  I hooked up with this young Spanish looking guy - from the bad part of town - who made it extremely clear from the outset that this was just sex (and I was actually fine with that - he wasn't my mentally my type, too into the gangster bullshit).  He was so beautiful to behold that I drew him in class - perfectly.  He really was an Adonis.  

There were older girl friends too - one in particular who knew about this bar - a blues bar - that didn't ask for I.D. and had a couple of pool tables.  Of course, this was my new favorite spot.  I can still conjure the feeling of titillation it gave me to walk into the smokey, stale place, with the twangy sounds of musicians warming up and the jubilantly friendly female bar tender who loved to get me wasted every Friday night.  I discovered new kinds of alcohol.  Midori for Mellonballs, Jagermeister straight, and Manhattans which seemed to have a lot of it all. 

Sick Fantasy

When I wash the dishes or trim the roses - pretty much any time I have a sharp object in my hand - I visualize myself accidentally cutting off a finger or slicing open my hand.  I think we all do this, some not even quite consciously.  For most, I suspect these images only hit the brain as a warning to not accidentally inflict hospital-worthy wounds.  But lately, my mental flashes of bloody limbs have gotten more like movies.  Instead of a quick picture that is drowned out by a renewed consciousness to watch what I am doing, I have come to take these imaginings as a possible vacation.


I imagine the entire scene unfolding and it appeals to me.  I am not indirectly talking about suicide or an attempted suicide or even a pretend attempted suicide.  I am imagining rest and being taken care of.  I imagine the attention that would be paid to me, the way in which my youngest would finally stop asking me to hold him.  I imagine that for a moment no one would need me and I would instead, be the needy one.  As I write this my 7 year old has asked me to read him a poem that he wrote in a book he bound in a class I taught at his school.  He also asked if he could sit in my lap while I wrote.  And I am grateful for that - for being his teacher, for his love of me and his desire to share good memories with me, memories I helped facilitate. While I type these words, my 3 year old has made a successful trek up my leg and into my lap, my hands are rigid on the keyboard to prevent his monkey paws from ripping them off and toward what he'd like me to do.


Back to my victim fantasy: The whole ambulance ride to the hospital appeals to me, "Well, you look like you gave yourself one hell of a cut!  What were you trying to do there?", the paramedic would joke - he would joke because of course, there would be no life threatening danger, just a quick ER visit and some stitches.  Maybe a few hours in a room alone to recover while I waited to be picked up by my, very grateful I am alright, husband.  He would probably bring me lunch, perhaps a sandwich made from food I didn't purchase, or maybe even something my kids would hate, like raw fish or a curry.


No children would be allowed in the recovery room and I wouldn't  mind.  For just a few hours in a day I would not be able to put myself second.  If I didn't tend to this horrible wound I would be in for some serious trouble, doctors orders!  And the follow-up care would involve absolutely no washing of dishes, nor bathing of children and certainly, under no circumstances, folding any clothes.


Because I actually do know what it is like when I am under orders to lay low (post-partum X 4) and the dire consequences to my marriage when I am not head of clean-up patrol, in this fantasy, my mother, the most tidy human on earth - would come over for 4 hours a day of cleaning, cooking and general childcare.  And since I am  thoroughly orchestrating how this disaster/miracle/stay-cation would go down, how about this:  My whole family, sick with concern and worry for me, would realize that it just isn't healthy for their dear, beloved wife and mother to be solely focused on their needs.  My kids would each pick a heavy-duty chore he could take on.  One would realize that laundry was his new duty.  Another, mopping and sweeping.  Even the 3 year old would see me as I really am, a mere mortal who needs a little bit of physical space every once in while.


And then after the scar began to fade and became just another great party story, I would end the tale with this life lesson, "You know what I really learned from that whole event?  The take-away? Boundaries.  You have to learn to put down boundaries." 

Multi-Failing

I used to think a lot about the differences - neurologically - of men and women and how those differences manifested in our day to day behaviors. For example, I've given a lot of thought to this idea that women can multitask and men cannot. I won't bore you with the books and PBS shows I have read and watched that furthered my knowledge on this subject but suffice it to say that we now know that the brain does not in fact multitask, i.e., we do not do two (or more) things at the same time, ever. Like right now I am parenting and negotiating with my dad and typing these thoughts but I am not doing any of them at the same time, I stop, talk, stop, advise, stop, cuddle, stop, write, stop, yell, stop, write, stop, blow the hell up...
Anyway, that's all super interesting because it turns out that women have to be willing and better (the better part is perhaps conjecture) to multitask because they have to tend to disparate activities and needs while men can typically focus on a sole task. OK. Fascinating stuff. Here is some real proof of how we cannot truly multitask: So I had this great idea that I wanted to write here and when I sat down to do it my 7 year old who has a fever came up with the liquid ibuprofen and I was simultaneously thinking about what I was going to write, I mean really thinking (at this exact moment my 9 year old wants to know where the gun to his Lone Ranger figure is from 3 Christmases ago - I am not kidding - and he would like directions to bike to the store from which I purchased it so excuse me if I am scattered here) and I started to pour the medicine into the cap (no after 4 kids, I do not use a teaspoon because I know what a god damn teaspoon is, it is a cap-full) and because I am literally thinking hard about something else my body just keeps pouring the stuff, long after the cap was full. What a trip. That must be what it is like to have the onset of dementia. I just didn't have to the ability to DO it. And I realized, it is no wonder that I fuck up so much. That I burn the beets, that I over dry the cast-iron pans, that I forget dates I have made (and rarely write them down on the calendar), that I cannot follow recipes that call for exact measurements, that I don't remember where I set things down in the house and on and on. I am always attempting to multitask, and as the scientists have proven, when we do that, we do everything poorly. Half-assed. Shittily.
That's me.

Loved This Book

Totally readable for the layman - This Stanford neurologist is the guy who discovered the therapy for phantom limb pain.  Has very interesting ideas about other disorders.

Firemen

What is it with women and their obsession with firemen? I think every woman hankers for a mustached man in blue to appear in her second story window and carry her, ass in air, down to safety. Okay, maybe not every woman, but at least half. Or perhaps just half of the women I know personally - or of the women I have asked, who I already suspected were like me in that way.

I used to talk about my "thing" for firemen around my husband. It never occurred to me that it would bother him. At first it didn't. But then, like everything I do, it eventually became too much.  I think that fireman-lust seemed a safe topic to share with him because he is a sort of honorary fireman in my book. He could be a fireman if he wanted to. He has all the bravery, the super-strength and whatever specific caveman elemental intelligence I've assumed fireman must be anointed with.

The end of my crass-disregard for my husband's peace of mind began a few years ago when my husband was working on a job near our house.  We both heard sirens - me at home, him on the job site. The fire was close by.  I, in my preternatural desire to be close to heroic men and the smell of their sweat wandered, zombie eyed, outside, sniffing my way to the scene. Luck would shine on me that day as the fire was about six houses away from mine.

Meanwhile, my could-a-been-a-fireman husband, naturally concerned for his family's safety, called our home phone. No answer. He tried my cell phone. Nothing. No one answered because no one was there to hear the ringing. Maybe the kids were were home but I wouldn't know because my mind was elsewhere. I spent the next thirty minutes bathing in the manly aura that is firemen at work and at play (because I get the feeling that when the fire is all under control and those obligatory end of the job details are being tended to, firemen are having a pretty good time being adored by the throngs of lustful housewives and envious men who hang around those big red trucks like groupies at a rock show).

Later that night, my husband told a joke that was funny at first but soon (once I took the joke as my own to tell) lost it's innocence and began to just fall flat. He said essentially that he knows better than to try to call me if he hears sirens near by because I won't be home - I will be outside checking out the firemen. When he told this story he was giving tacit approval and showing an understanding and tolerance of my fantasies about other men. When I told the story, especially in front of him, it was just emasculating. And it made me look dumb and insensitive. It took me some time after this little joke was born to stop telling it every single time we were gathered in a group and a fire truck would drive by or show up. Every block party, fourth of July fair, fundraiser or actual emergency for which firemen were present you could find me, stupidly patting my husband on the arm as I told a group of friends about what a total asshole I really was.

Because I am dense when it comes to other people's feelings, my poor husband's irritation was invisible to me. Hell, I was right there with him, checking out women and their cute butts wiggling by in skin tight leggings wasn't I? I was usually the one to tap him on the shoulder and point out someone I thought he would think was gorgeous. He and I had long since learned what was and wasn't acceptable in terms of inviting each other's green eyes monster. Or so I thought.

Recently my husband told me that only a few months into our relationship he figured out that if we were going to stay together then he had better do nothing, nothing, nothing, to make me jealous. He had seen me jealous and he didn't like it. At all. I guess there were two or three really ugly and one might call hysterical outbursts involving slamming down phones on his female friends, swearing, standing outside in the dark when he arrived home and lots of dirty looks and shrieking. It wasn't that my husband thought he was wrong and I was right. No. I really do wish that was true. I do. Because this is embarrassing. He was so turned off by my outbursts and knew that if I continued on in this fashion it would be a "deal breaker" for him. He tells me now that he determined he would be so careful, so protective of this jealousy of mine, that I would never come unglued again. And that is exactly what happened.

So much time has passed since our first, second and third apartments that until my husband recently revived my memory, I had erased from my self-concept utterly these ugly parts of me. I had come to believe that I was a very relaxed, sane, confident and secure wife. Yup. I could ogle women secretly with my husband from the safety of our tinted-windowed mini-van. I could talk about his ex's with fascination and empathy (poor her, she didn't know what she had in him). I even rented movies, on purpose, with Marisa Tomei, whom I knew he was really into, just for his enjoyment.

It seems to me now that my unconscious rule went something like this: If the woman was an abstraction then she was not a threat to me. If the woman was real then I went crazy. Women he would never meet or see again, were fine. Women who actually called our phone or gave him a ride in an old VW bug, they were not at all fine. And always, always, my husband was careful to point out that he was only attracted to women with bodies shaped exactly like mine, who were precisely my age and with the same kind of (name your feature). He was so careful and so convincing that I reshaped my own ideas about myself. I even went so far as to feel sorry for other couples who had problems with jealousy.

And then one day I went on Facebook. And I "friended" my old boyfriend from high school. You know the one. The One. Him. That was pretty cool. It was good to see that he had kids, was married, was seemingly happy and well. It was amending and made me feel like a grown up. Until I noticed that he was a...you guessed it, fireman.

I told my husband in the shower. "You are never going to believe..." He responded, only half jokingly that I might as well just leave now, he was obviously doomed. And for the next couple of weeks as I silently sorted out the emotional upheaval that occurs when we ask Facebook's assistance in the painful dredging up of the wreckage of the past, there were some pointed questions asked. I could feel his real core jealousy. He was worried and it didn't feel at all good. This situation certainly broke my "what is and isn't going to make your spouse jealous" rules. This was a real person from my real past really on Facebook. And he was a fireman.

I have had no revelation beyond the obvious here.  I have done the trite and predictable thing that we all must do.  Maturing and shedding old ideas about what and how we are is not as painful as I thought it would be - that is if I ever even thought I might one day succumb to social conventions or take the advice of someone with more experience than I.  A wise friend said to me not that long ago, "There are some things that are just better left unsaid."

 

In a House Like Mine

There is no privacy
There is always someone looking over your shoulder 
Your presence is needed and someone would like you to get off the computer now
Your chair is being leaned on
The bathroom is always full
The floor needs to be swept even if you swept it in the morning once
The new paint on the walls has smudges already and the new sheet rock has dents in it
Someone is hurt physically
Someone is hurt emotionally 
Glass just broke on the tile floor
An animal is thirsty and no one can hear her cries
Your settings on the washing machine were changed to "small load" and there has never been a small load in this house
The floor is sticky
Clothes are dirty
Someone is sneezing, snotting, dripping, farting, pooping, peeing, leaking
Blame is being laid
Anger is expressed
Someone is hungry
Someone is dissatisfied
In a house like mine.

Ayelet Waldman's new book - LOVE it!

Third Child

They say that the third child is the forgotten one. The quiet one. The pleaser, the fixer, the easy-going mellow one. Totally true in my experience. My third, Trace, is a particularly pleasant person. I have this notion that he is the most like me of all my kids. I thought about this some more before I wrote that line and realized that is some serious fantasy. He is very little like me at all but I sure do like him anyway. Perhaps in fact I like him so much because he is so different than I. God damn it! There I go again analyzing everything. I do NOT know why but I just really dig the kid.

He is subtle, perceptive, loyal and stubborn on an as needed basis. He is naturally polite, sensitive to other peoples feelings. He fits in yet is not a doormat. He is tidy, organized, funny and smart, patient and kind. He really just came out that way. His birth was easy and magnificent. He was a perfect baby in every way. Unlike all my other kids, he liked people other than me and still does.

This morning while I was meditating, he came into my bed and without a word crawled in next to me and snuggled into my arm. He is the only child who does this. I have three other children each equally unique as Trace. And thus far I believe they were all pre-programmed to be the people they are with a dash of my and their father's (over and under) reactions/input/influence once they got here.

We all get some blessings, some challenges, some grace, some trials. I get my respite in Trace - my breath before diving back into the storm. I do think he is exactly where he is meant to be in the birth order and I am utterly grateful for the spot of number three being filled by such a human as he.

Boys

We let our 14 year old daughter have boys sleep over. Yes. I know that this is not normal and that in the past my insistence on not being normal has certainly been a bad choice. I may be completely wrong in all my ideas leading up to this allowance, it may be yet another example of the pendulum swinging way too far in one direction and yet, this is where my husband and I stand.
This morning, when I told my 78 year old father (who is staying with us right now) that there were several kids in my daughters room (2 boys, 2 girls) so beware, he replied, "You mean those boys spent the night? My God. Disgusting!" Suffice it to say, my father did not let me have boyfriends or boy-friends sleep over. I would have loved to, I had a few boy-friends who were as good or better girl-friends than any girl had been. It would have been wonderful to have them sleep over so our giggling could have been extended into the wee hours of the morning (the only reason for a sleep over I think). And if we had ended up smooching he would have been a safe boy to experiment with instead of some "cute" asshole I actually was physically attracted to.

I trust my daughter. I do not trust that she will never nor has ever lied to me. No, I trust she will and know she has. I trust her to talk to me about the things that matter. I trust that she trusts me and her father, to love her first and to judge and get angry second. I trust that she is not me, that she is a very different human being than I was and am. I trust her judgement to the degree that a 14 year old has judgement at all. I see that her judgement is about on par with mine at 19 or 20. I believe that she was born with a greater, more established sense of right and wrong and her position on such things, than I was.

My daughter has been asking me and my husband the most probing questions since she was 3. My favorite example of her willingness to reach out for information was at the age of 6 when she said, "If you and dad had to have sex to have Edan [her little brother] then where was I when you did it?" my response, totally caught off guard was something like, "Uhhh, well, um" to which she gracefully replied, "I am sorry if I asked an embarrassing question... I know! I was at a sleep over!"

My inability to smoothly answer this question set my husband and me to further discussion of our feelings about honesty with our kids. We both grew up in a time when drugs and sex were done and discussed openly and without any censorship nor real understanding of the effects of both on a child's self-concept. We agreed that we would continue to be utterly truthful about the mechanics, and even the element of love, involved in sex. But we decided that we would purposely censor ourselves when it came to our own histories with both sex and drugs.

And we did so successfully for a long time. No bragging stories was she to hear about our drunk driving, our brushes with the cops, our bad trips on acid and mushrooms, our promiscuity or our exes. She heard nothing of the arrests, the time in juvy, the breaking and entering the knives confiscated, the quitting high school, the coming to school drunk and high and doing cocaine in the bathroom stalls in 10Th grade. Unlike me, she didn't have a paraphernalia box to play in, she didn't know what a "numby" was (nor given herself one from the inside of an old cedar coke box), she didn't know what razors, dollar bills and short straws were really used for. Unlike her dad, she couldn't eye an eighth, she didn't know how to sex a pot plant, she didn't know the history of free-base. None of this was discussed in front of her.

Then she turned 13. And suddenly she started asking. "How old were you when you first had sex?", "Have you ever smoked pot?", "What about cocaine?". And we didn't want to lie and we desperately didn't want to tell her the truth. It was horribly complicated. I knew the power of a child's desire to be like and emulate her parent's exploits. I sure as hell made a conscious decision to be on par with my parents and their wild and crazy yet somehow not a problem now pasts.

So we dished out the truth in dribs and drabs. We revealed as little as we felt we could honestly. We did not condone nor relish any of our past adventures. We were full of regret. We warned and admonished her against repeating our mistakes. And all the while she herself was continuing to explore her own limits with sexuality, alcohol, drugs. First just by being near kids who might be doing a little of that stuff, by drinking half a glass of someones wine at Christmas dinner, by smoking a cigarette, by playing truth or dare at her birthday party. And she was honest about it all. My momma-sixth-sense knew it and asked or she felt guilty or she just casually mentioned it. And every time we had a good talk about it, about the internal and external pressures she felt, about her desire to be mature, grown-up, a leader, the first one to do cool things.

And while these things were occurring, while she was going along in the hell that is teenage hormonal insanity (because they are insane with their level of hormones washing over those poor brains) she was having friends over, making new friends, leaving friends, figuring out the safety of certain friends and often, having big group sleep-overs that included boys. Boys she had known since infancy, boys who she had known pre-puberty and post. Boys whom we liked, could talk with, who were respectful, funny, bright and loving. My husband and I saw that things were shifting, that these boys were becoming more overtly sexual and we remember what it was like at their age, we are not at all naive. But, we decided to continue to allow it.

There are some rules. One being that boys have to sleep on the floor, the second being that the boys have to pass the Nick test. My husband, not a small man and not easily intimidated by a mountain lion let alone an eesy-beensy boy, shakes hands, looks them in the eyes and says, "No messing around with my daughter or anyone else here. You got that? Be respectful, alright?" And he just knows. He has asked a boy to leave one night, just real casual. A boy who has slept over before but he could feel a vibe that night. And our daughter confirmed he was being playfully but possibly too pushy with her new friend.

I have had many an eyebrow raised at our allowance of this co-ed sleepover activity. I am not attached to it as a permanent standard but for now, as long as we feel good about our daughter, her friends and the flow of communication, it shall remain. I'll let you know how it works out.

Anxiety

When my first child, Ellie, was born, I was 23. I had a complicated and disappointing birth experience. What was supposed to be a peaceful home birth ended up a terrifying C-section and many hours separation between my daughter and myself after her birth. Due to what I see as a perfect storm of circumstances I began to suffer - soon after her birth - from severe post-partum anxiety. I was depressed too but the real disabling pallor that now colored my every moment was a paralyzing hypochondria. My primary concern was Ellie and her health but eventually I began to fear for my own as well. I was insane with a belief that Ellie would develop an illness so severe that she would either be hospitalized (and I wouldn't be able to be with her) or die.

Every cough, fever or stomach bug would send me into a hyper-vigilant state of sleeplessness. I would watch over her, day and night, afraid to even move my body, to breathe deeply. I would count her breaths in the dark. I would examine her skin, did she look dehydrated? Was that rash perhaps indicative of something serious? Strep maybe? I was regularly convinced that she had meningitis, influenza, whooping cough, that she was dehydrated, starved of oxygen, constipated, infected, diseased. And to validate my fears, she was a seemingly sickly baby and kid (she was big and robust and actually recovered normally and was never hospitalized) but she did have asthma, some allergies, and lots of odd rashes, unexplained prolonged high fevers and every bad cold that came her way.

The older Ellie got the milder the anxiety was. When she was four and a half, her little brother Edan was born. This time, I had another failed home birth but did delivery him vaginally in the hospital. That small victory was enough to make me wonder if perhaps I wouldn't have the same crippling anxiety with this baby boy. But, soon after his birth it began. I could feel it coming on and there was nothing I could do to shield myself from it's onslaught.

And then there was a shift - out of nowhere. I couldn't have explained this at the time but now I recognize that I had a hormonal shift - I new wave washed over me - this one was a calm, trusting sense. A oxytocin-trust-faith kinda of thing. And although my fears were not entirely abated, I could quiet the disasterizer in my head. I could accept that we would be the ones to miss the rare disaster. I believed that I could tell the difference between sick and SICK. I still worried. I still went to the pediatrician more than I needed to and I read too many infant books but I was normal again.

I have never known why I suffered from this debilitating neurosis although I suspect it falls into line with a soldier's PTSD diagnosis. Something was thrown off coarse for me in the hospital with my daughter and it took a long time to realign. When my third and fourth children were born (both at home, peacefully) I was hyper aware that the worry would return and the first couple of nights after their births I did feel the fear lurking around my bed. But it didn't take hold.

Last night my three year old had a fever of 103.7 and although I was lovingly concerned I was in no way worried. I gave him some ibuprofen, snuggled him and went peacefully to sleep, knowing he was going to be alright.

Room to Spare?

We have a king sized bed. Nick, my husband, is a big guy with big physical boundaries. We were given the bed as a wedding gift from my uncle who made it by hand. It is simple and beautiful and I cherish it's squeekless solidity. When we got the bed we had one bun in the oven and she slept with us til the next one came along. Then we clamped a wee little twin that had once cradled my grandmother as a girl right up next to our bed. There was a tiny little path to Nick's side, then bed, bed, wall. We called it the room of bed. Our first slept in the twin, touching me by toe or hand and the new baby slept in the king with us. And on it goes until we had all four of our kids. Today sleeping arrangements go something like this: Youngest in bed with mom and dad, next two boys take turns every other night sleeping on the wee twin mattress on the floor (the bed itself went the way of the basement, I sacrificed the intimacy I get from sleeping on level with my kids for an actual matching bedside table). The eldest sleeps almost exclusively in her own queen bed which she graciously usually and sometimes reluctantly shares with alternating brothers. Yes, the brothers do have a room of their own. No, they don't sleep in it.

I have been asked if I like this sleeping arrangement. Some people think I am a big family-bed advocate and for some time I was. Now I don't care what other people do. I just know what we do and I cannot honestly justify or explain it. I've complained about it and I've ruminated about it. I once, for about six months did experience sleeping sans kids and not pregnant in our big bed. I think that that luxurious time was a turning point for me. I liked it and I am longingly looking forward to that day to come again. For now, I share my half (I believe against my husbands carpenterial objections that I actually only have one third of the bed but for harmonies sake I will say half) of the bed with a three year old. Sometimes a nine or seven year old will crawl in post-nightmare and nest in between my legs like a little puppy. I sleep like this unwillingly and willingly.

Sometimes, and at times in the past always, my husband "flips" and we sleep head-to-toe. I am surprised at how odd my friends find this. No one else I know has ever done this. It is kind of brilliant. We both get the shoulder room we crave and I actually like snuggling his toes. His ankles are much more inviting than his snoring back which is turned in defiant determination to sleep for consecutive hours uninterrupted. But there are nights, when I am awoken for perhaps (I really wouldn't know, have you ever tried keeping count of such a thing?) the 8Th time (and it's only 3AM) and I have to readjust the three year old so that he has covers, his action figure and skin to skin access to some part of my body, that I imagine us from an aerial perspective. I wonder, who else does this?

This is a unique intimacy, our families sleeping arrangement - as it is with all families and their personal culture. I think this is true. Perhaps it is only a justification, romanticising what is in reality a neurotic inability to set boundaries for God's sake! Perhaps it is laziness or perhaps I really do believe that this way of co-sleeping is better for my kids, for all of us. Somehow, after 14 years of it, I have stopped wondering. This is just us.

Whose Fault is It?

Having been raised on a steady diet of Freudian analysis at the dinner table I know that it is close to impossible that I will ever rid myself of it's influence. I don't think I even know the extent to which Freud's influence on modern psychology has pervaded my life. Every therapist I was sent to (your child is acting weird? therapy of course) used his approach melded with whatever latest fad in therapy was popular at that time. Quite a few members of my family considered themselves aficionados and my childhood was infused with the language of psychoanalysis.
Some of my best memories are of the car rides home after a social gathering. Me in the back, intently listening, my parents in the front, deeply scouring the psyches of our friends and family. I cherished these times as a child because of the deep sense of belonging it gave me. My parents, and hence I, really understood the motivations and unconscious longings of others. We knew them better, in fact, than they knew themselves.
The idea, no, belief, confidently held, that I could - merely through the use of my superior knowledge of the predictable patterns of the mind - break anyone down into his base elements made me feel, I am ashamed to say, superior. Superior and safe. Safe in the belief that to know others was to know myself - in a sort of detached, painless way.
My mother has been accused over the years of being critical of others. When confronted with this accusation I remember her saying that what was being called critical was in fact a yearning to deeper understand the human condition. It was, I gleaned, good to talk about others and I thought at the time, I could feel confident that my parent's analysis of their motivations, desires, neurosis, etc was in fact, true.
Fast forward some 30 years to today. I have four children spanning 11 years. I have been living with my now husband for 17 years, 15 of them married. Right away, I trained him up good in my style of post-party analysis. No one was off-limits for my labels. Tom is passive aggressive, Lucy is clearly regressing, Bobby is undoubtedly a latent homosexual, Rose is asexual, Maggie is full of unresolved wounds. Just typing all this is embarrassing. This was all difficult for my husband who wasn't raised that way. But you know how marriage requires a certain amount of abandonment of one's values (even if those values might be really good ones, like not picking apart your brother's and his girlfriend's sex life).

The problem is, these labels are a whole lot harder to make stick when you want to apply them to your own children. Why? Because my children's story involves me. I am the fuel of their angst. I am the inflicter of their wounds. I am the content of their back story. The first thing that started to happen when I began to analyze my children was a release of blame for my parents supposed crimes. The other thing I realized was that it is easy to draw a map of one child's emotional brain but add another (especially two of the same gender) who is radically different in personality and your suppositions no longer click.

How can I possibly be to blame when I have children of all sorts, sizes, shapes, temperment, attitudes, learning styles, abilities and lack there of. One child might have been asked one thousand times to use his napkin, his utensils, to close his mouth when he chews, to not interrupt, all to no avail, while another seems to have attended classes in social graces inutero. How many times have I judged other parents for not disciplining their child the way I did - if only they would, theirs would be as sweet, kind and mature as my little angel. And then I had my second child. Turns out I wasn't doing any disciplining, I was simply lucky. My daughter, my first born, was just an easy going, seemingly wise and naturally kind kid. My second, well, he spit on people, peed in public, refused to eat anything but 5 foods and hit, scratched and bit his way through first, our block, then preschool and all the way through third grade until, miraculously (I once tried to take credit for this but no, I cannot) he "grew out of it" (those are his words). All the consequences, punishments and spankings I dished out seemed to only make his behavior worse - at least they made me feel horribly out of control and generally evil.

I do not claim to be at peace now that I have finally grown into a more modest person, a humbler parent. I still scour my memory of possible causes and canvas others with more experience for an explanation of the mystery that is my youngest and his utterly challenging personality. But it does comfort me to know, that in the words of my second son Edan, he will eventually grown out of it.

Envy

I am green with envy. Emerald green. All fucked up with it. I am really into the author Ayelet Waldman - her book, "Bad Mother" is great. She lives near me, one of her kids knows one of my kids, she has 4 young children, she is funny and irreverent and an "over-sharer" - I totally relate. She is also: Harvard educated. Married to a very successful fellow author. Generally viewable as a success. It appears that she is pulling it off. Four kids, career, marriage. This all came up in a tidal wave as we are driving in Berkeley and my daughter points to a perfect house and says, "Hey, that's where my friend Zeke lives, you know, his mom is that author you like, Ayelet Waldman." Lets just say, it physically hurt. And I realized, not only am I not pulling it off all that well, but I think that I may be flailing.

This trend of having large families (one which I was ignorant of) is not something I relate to. I think having that many kids falls into one of two categories: either you are so poor you don't know about or cannot afford birth control or you are so wealthy that you want lots of offspring to further the wealth or show off or something.

Where I fit, I am not sure. I was just so damn impulsive and newborns are so little and they smell so good. I have 4 kids but I do not: have a nanny or a babysitter or daycare - or a house cleaner (anymore) - or a big house (we live in 1000 sq feet) - or a nice car - or family with much money - or all four years at one college with a degree in hand - or a career - or a fucking plan. During the economic boom my husband (a framing contractor) had a stint with making really great money. I spent it all and he helped. We were totally un-managable, out of control, directionless weirdos. I am actually grateful for the lesson now learned because...well, I had to learn it someday.

And when we had money I went right along with the wave of being a middle-class, high-falutin', liberal do-gooder with pity on the uninsured and under-served in our community o dear! I came from a very comfortable, quite well-educated, middle-class background and I expected that would be the life I too would live. But the money-management gene skipped me over. The entitlement gene landed fair and square though and here I am feeling the weight of my circumstances on my shoulders.

I wonder where I really belong - although I abut the moneyed elite in the Bay Area geographically, politically and culturally, I feel out of place. And at the same time, I recoil in horror when I go inland or north or south. I do not "get" those people either. They vote wrong, dress wrong, eat wrong, spend their money wrong. I am a stifled product of a rigid environment that no longer represents or defines me.

What it's really like

I was killing time today in the very chi-chi north oakland/berkeley area on college ave (think organic, local, sustainable, hand-made, indigenous = very expensive and exclusive). Note, I have all 4 kids in tow. First, we go in a "local" jewelery store where the diamonds are all "humanely harvested" just to check out the price for replacing my engagement and wedding ring that I let my 2 year old lose at a park a few months ago. Suffice it to say, we were hated right out of the store. Even my 14 year old daughter was turned off, "I would never spend my money at a place that treated me like that." My boys got barked at, I was frostily helped. I think that when you show up with that many kids in tow it says something about you (something jewelery store owners don't like) - it says: I don't have enough money for 1. a nanny or 2. summer camp. Then I get hit up for money by the ACLU guy. Instead of just accepting my "no" he guilt tripped me. Something along the lines of, "No time to protect the rights of (name your under-served minority)?" I lied and said that my account was overdrawn. Actually my account had a wopping $50.00. But it had been overdrawn about 2 hours previously. After over-sharing with this complete stranger I then couldn't follow through with my promise to take my kids to the EXPENSIVE but admittedly delicious ice cream store, Ici, because the ACLU guy would see me and know I was a liar. We ended up somewhere around the corner that was so much more our our class anyway - the doughnut store...where we over ate repulsive chinese-american food like the gluttonous poor white trash we are.

What my Mattress Says about Me

I was making my bed this morning - which in and of itself is a very interesting process, one which I often doubt any other family subscribes to (4 comforters, all in their own places, one quilt, atop it all - but that is another blog) and I was thinking about my mattress and how gross it is when suddenly it dawned on me. My mattress is not gross, it is a piece of us - of our family. The stains on our 7 year old mattress, upon examination, take one on an archaeological journey.
First and foremost there is pee. A lot of it and most importantly, in very odd places. Not only are there pee-stains in the expected places (2-3 feet from the head of the bed) but also around the perimeter, in random spots. What this tells the exploring mind is that our children sleep on this bed en mass and that they squirm all over, jammed into the crevices and the cracks of free space. And that they pee in bed because we want them free of diapers and that we are not all that organized about making them pee before bed and that we often forget to put down the water proof pad.
Then there are the blood stains. These stains are dear to my heart and I have done nothing to clean or remove them. They are from two home births on this mattress and their locations spark beautiful memories. I remember sitting on the very edge of the bed, about to push and the water proof padding was slipping around, and I didn't care at all and the blood was soaking through the sheets. And I remember the other big blood stain right int he middle of the bed, when I hemorrhaged and the water proof pads were spilling over with blood and leaking onto the mattress
Giving birth to my kids - those experiences - were the most transformative and profound and joyous moments of my life. I love those stains and actually I don't want a new mattress - even if I wake up every morning with a tingling left hand and a stiff-ass neck.

Link to photo of actual monster splinter

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/profile.php?ref=profile&id=827934757

It isn't live but just cut and paste it into your address bar- well worth the effort.

The 2 year old fell off the bed and I am not jumping up to Comfort Him

That's right - you heard it here first. His dad is doing just fine. Poor 4th child. Seriously though, he gets way more than enough attention. In fact I think that is my problem as a parent, I try to give all my kids as much attention as the first one got - which is, of course, physically impossible and will lead to suicidal ruminations. Where the hell did this standard come from? It's really not fair to compare myself with my own mother - she had 2 kids, 11 years apart, very much on purpose. She's a planner. So, yeah, we - my brother and I got equal amounts - perhaps different but nonetheless, equal attention.
Tonight at wrestling (my 9 and 6 year old boys just started wrestling) my 9 year old, Edan, threw a classic fit - all because I brought his shorts and not his sweats. I am sure you will remember with horror, that my kids don't wear underwear...well this is one reason why they should. Loose, baggy shorts are embarrassing to wrestle in and I really didn't think of that when I grabbed them but MAYBE that is because in the 45 minutes leading up to leaving (5 minutes late which I hate - hate - hate, being late) my son stayed in the car playing his PSP and I, slave-girl that I am, literally did the following:
Managed to make a sort of dinner for myself and baby out of literally no food. Tried to communicate with my husband. Texted back and forth negotiating with my 14 year old daughter, making sure she was safe on the bus. Took all the soapy dishes out of the suddenly broken (but brand new!?!?) dishwasher, rinsed, dried and put them away. Did all the sink full of nasty, coffee ground covered dishes. Tidied up the house a bit. Cleaned poop up off the highchair as my 2 year old hysterically pooped in his underwear/diapers (see previous blog post) while literally eating my sandwich and then right when I am heading out the door with wrestling shoes, socks and appropriate leg coverings, my 6 year old has to...you guessed it! Poop! So, that took another million years.
So when my 9 year old freaked out about the shorts, well, I lost it. Suffice it to say, finger nails (mine) were dug into arms (his) and threats were made - mean, mean, immature threats and many tears were shed. His and mine. Amends remain to be made on either side. I have simply had it tonight. I have nothing left. If I had the money in the bank, I kid you not, I would go get a (nice-ish) hotel room, all to myself.
I went to the dentist today and let me tell you, it was the calmest, nicest part of the day. He told me he hears that all the time.

What's up with pooping in diapers?

So my 2 and 3/4 year old is pretty much potty trained - this is my 4th kid so I really didn't give shit whether or not he did this heroic deed early or not. My other 3 kids all PT-ed by 2 years which I took personal credit for until this one showed up and ruined my average. Anyway, he has an accident here and there but generally is doing really well. Except for pooping. He is all hung up about needing to be standing to poop which means no potty. I actually tried to convince him to stand on the toilet and just aim but he said "hell no" in Baby Coleman speak. Which is a loud, guttural yell. I ran out of diapers and I cannot bring myself to spend $15 on shit catchers, you know? I have been buying the organic, dioxin free type because his skin is really rashy but it seems really just plain old dumb to do that for a quick poop and toss kinda of situation. Then I got a mental block about buying anymore at all. It just seemed wasteful on so many levels. Plus, I thought that eventually he would get so backed up and so uncomfortable that he wold figure it out. Which I am sure he would have if it wasn't for his kind father who couldn't stand to see him suffer.
What happens is he feels the need to poop but maybe not, maybe just to fart because he hasn't pooped in 2 days - he isn't so sure - all he knows is that his stomach hurts. So, he panics and he yells, "pooooop". I put him on the toilet, he sits there (now he actually, I kid you not, from my midwifery coaching of him, says, "breath - good, in and out, just relax, you're doing great" or he sings the "everybody poops, sometimes" songs sung to the tune of REM's "everybody hurts.....sometimes, and everybody cries.....so hold on..." - you know that song that makes you want to slit your wrists? So, he is self-soothing and then, poof, "it's all gone momma" and nothing has happened. The gas has passed I guess. And he is off and running.
So, I had the brilliant idea of putting some underpants on him the other night and telling him they were like diapers, to go ahead and poop in them. You have to know that none of my kids wear underwear (well, Ellie, my 14 year old does now of course) - don't ask me why - they all reject them 100%. This worked like magic - I tossed the poop and washed the underpants and we were golden.
I am just starting to feel like this whole ritual is sort of enabling his inability to just bare down and get to it on the actual pot itself, you know? And what would a real babysitter say about having to deal with this method. I mean, Ellie is repulsed enough as his babysitting sister. For God's sake - we have to have some standards around here, right?
My sister in law had the same problem with my nephew but they worked through it together - right there on the toilet - the spot where most important and intimate things occur in all families but no one will admit it but me right here and now.
Now that I think about it - I have had the most profound moment of my marriage, right on the toilet, in labor. I actually became my husband, and I think (I'll have to ask him) he became me.
Ok, off to bed for the night.

Broken Bones

So my husband has been breaking bones for about 10 years now. Lots. Especially in one hand/wrist/elbow area. He recently broke his 3rd metacarpal (I think) on his pinky (which is essential the hand part of your pinky). This break is, in the radiology industry, known as a boxers break and although to me the xray appears as though it really should be a compound fracture, I guess that it might just heal up fine. Our neighbor is a radiologist and he confirmed this. The PA (medical speak for physicians assistant) at Alta Bates Hospital recommended that Nick go to Highland Hospital (the county hospital for uninsured - which is what we currently are) to get a 2nd opinion from a hand surgeon. Nick did not do this.
but
By week 3 the shit wasn't looking so good - this weird bump about an inch back from his knuckle (which no longer existed - his knuckle that is) wasn't going anywhere. So, he went and picked up the xrays and our neighbor checked it out in our living room. He said to keep the cast on for 10 weeks and it'd be fine. The PA said 6 weeks but whatever. Ok, all is well, right? No. Now Nick has decided at week 6 that he should start walking around with just the ace bandage and no splint (the other day he used a comb for a splint).
Here is the clincher: Tonight he is telling me how much prettier I am than someone I said had better legs than I did while complaining about how fat I felt and he comes in for a random hug/pat/bottom squeeze/reassurance kind of dealio and what do I do? I (he says) turn my head and look away while punching him in the 3rd metacarpal. I thought I just raised my arm to receive his sweet embrace. Either way he retreated in a cloud of 'fucks' and thinks I re-broke it. Maybe. And it sounded like he blamed me. 100 % - for sure.

My Hubby's Splinter

I am the best-ever splinter-taker-outer. If I cannot remove Nick's splinter it is only because my tools are not high-tech enough. I have these kick-ass tweezers, designed specifically for splinters but their point is so fine, so thin, that when the splinter is deeply embedded the tweezers don't have enough grip. Currently, I have encountered a massive piece of wood that has, thus far, eluded me.

Well, Nick DID come home to me immediately upon encountering this massive piece of evil wood but i wasn't there - then he broke the damn thing (it went in one side and out the other - an inch apart) so as is our custom, i began the removal process upon his return from work. typically i am always able to remove even the wee ones and the invisible ... i specialize in pressure treated! anyway, i could grab and i could tug but i couldn't keep hold of this sucker! it was awful and boy oh boy did it hurt - i was deep in there! every time i pulled on the splinter you could see the wood flexing under his skin, an inch away. now it is swollen and blue-ish - poor guy. but we know, we have to now wait til it festers and the puss acts as a sort of explosive force to aid it the removal!