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Let go of superstitions, now, here, this very minute.
You sit on the living room floor, back against sofa, Music Choice on in the background. You were to spend the evening with your daughter. Her choice.
A friend is here for the night. Nice girl. Edgy and a little bit lost.
The invitation was a last-minute decision, you understand, now, that it caused some minor family drama – nagging, begging, annoying, butting in, more begging, agreeing….
The girls are upstairs in your daughter’s room, too quiet now after a few minutes of attempting cartwheels that shook the house and terrified the cat.
You are lonely and worry that this means you will be the background for everyone else for 2009.
Let go of that ridiculous notion this instant.
You are background to no one. And if you could focus (and you can figure out a way to focus), you could actually get some work done while the girls are being girls, are flirting with a boy on the phone, leaving messages to friends on Facebook, playing dress up with your daughter’s clothes (though this is hard because her friend is bigger. You will experience a replay of yesterday when the other friend who spent the night and is taller, by inches, than you, got stuck in one of your child’s old tank tops).
They are 14, these girls, and they still like to play, but like to flirt, to talk dirty, to pretend the are sophisticated and raunchy.
You feel yourself relax. This may just be one of your new roles. You will open your house up to young teens when they have no place to go to play, to flirt, to pretend to be sophisticated and raunchy.
This next year… you were about to announce to yourself that this next year will be a bad year. But it can’t be bad. It’s just a year, a date, four numbers with no power, no dark magic.
Dates are just numbers. They aren’t anything at all. They only represent something.
So get over yourself and your superstitious moaning.
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[reminder to anyone unfortunate enough to land here accidentally or randomly: this is not a blog; it's a journal. It is nothing more than writing practice and a record of an ordinary life.]
In about 8 minutes, my daughter and I are leaving to pick up one of her friends, who will spend the night with us. We are not ready for a house guest. My bathroom is mostly clean, though I suppose one more quick scrubbing of its pertinent pieces parts would be a good idea. The kitchen is never too horrible except for the stacks of mail that cover one half of my counter.
I have a phobia of roaches left over from living in less that stellar apartment complexes when I was in Houston and Temple, Texas. Texas roaches are about as big as my size 6 feet, so I tend to scrub my dishes, scour my counters, make sure all food is put in inaccessible containers or places.
Because, well, ew.
My daughter is drying her hair now instead of picking up her crap. She wants to write a note to her friend to give her with the purple duct tape rose my girl made this morning.
The cat lies hunched on the dining room floor watching my girl dry her hair. He can see into the bathroom from where he lies.
I am not sure what the girls will do today. I think I’ll find a place to hide with my laptop and headphones. If my study were neater, I would stay in there.
Maybe I will go in there and neaten it up, stack the stacks of books on whatever shelf space I can find…
whatever.
I am losing track of myself with this post, forgetting who I am, why I’m here, my purpose in sharing words.
I have no purpose, maybe. Maybe I just am.
My daughter makes a rose
with the colored duct (duck) tape
I found at Joanne’s and put in her stocking
Christmas day
she finds instructions and patterns
online
I read poetry (about what salmon know)
and think about the lovely taste of coffee
on my tongue
All of this
this
is part of what I am making
to offer up to the world
little pieces
story arcs
images
visions of a pretty teenager
still in pajamas
curly hair wadded at the back of her head
with a single elastic band
her deft fingers work the tape
spread the flower petals
and I can’t believe
that this beautiful creature
came from me
In the mall, I find a Fioriware table near Mrs. Fields. I sit with my back against the wall watching the crowd. I see two teenaged boys wearing caps with ear flaps. One wears a chain that runs from the piercing in his right ear down to the belt loop of his skinny jeans.
The boys wearing the caps with ear flaps crowd my corner as they discuss their next move with two or three blond girls and another boy. They do not see me, and I feel safe because I have the Fioriware table between me and these children.
I know the woman who designed this table. I bought her pink, stucco house and kept it pink after we moved in. I only sold the house because my husband left, and I couldn’t afford the mortgage on my own. It was a Fioriware house, with Fioriware backsplash in the kitchen, her taste everywhere from polished entrance to the cedar closet in the finished attic.
The house was charmed, so I know this table is charmed, which is why I feel safe, if invisible.
The boy who wears the cap with ear flaps, the chain running from ear to belt loop and skinny jeans is tall and lean, except for his puffy butt, which I shouldn’t even notice because he is a teen and I am old. But the skinny jeans make it impossible not to notice that he would look better in baggy pants. His voice cracks, as if he changes from little boy to man right in front of me. Something inside my right ear vibrates unpleasantly when he speaks.
My daughter calls me on my cell to tell me the movie is over. I tell her where I am, and she, her girlfriend and the friend who is a boy meet me at the Fioriware tables. The boy is shy and doesn’t speak. I think he is used to adults disliking him because of his piercings, his hair, his beautiful blue eyes. I find his face sweet, and he is so achingly thin that I want to feed him a plate of spaghetti with my homemade sauce.
It turns out that he likes my daughter’s friend rather than my daughter (who has a boyfriend), which doesn’t surprise me. She has a delightful edge to her, this girl. Speaks her mind, laughs a lot at random life events. She is not a girl I see that much, but I think my child likes her edge, likes that they sharpen each other’s wit. We’ll be seeing her more, I think.
And that’s it for now. My second post of the day in my “not-a-blog.”
Hamas & Israel clash and kill each other’s people.
Taliban burns and beheads its way through Pakistan.
Old Navy, KB Toys are closing here soon
Gas prices surge upward because of fears that the violence in the Middle East will slow supplies.
I cannot look at the news without panicking, without worrying about my child’s future, about my child’s life.
She is at the mall with friends. One is a boy who would scare most mothers with his lip and eyebrow piercings, black, black hair, obvious affection for my child. But he’s harmless, really he is. I made sure before I said yes to a movie that I met up with my daughter and her friends. I wanted to “feel out” this boy. He was polite to me, let me tease him, didn’t ooze disdain for this brown-white-silver-gray-haired matron. He laughed when I passed the José Eber people and shouted “I don’t!” when the saleswoman asked how I styled my hair (different, long-legged Eastern European beauty from the other day).
T is a scrawny ninth-grader, tallish, beautiful blue eyes, and I don’t worry, though my daughter tells me the “perverted” things he says on MSN chats. The truth is that all 15-year-old boys are perverts.
Thinking about this eases my dread of the news. Teenagers are so real, so mixed up, so hilarious.
They soothe me, make it easier for me to breathe.
In the mall, I walk from FYE toward Waldens searching today for a DVD and a book. The soles of my new tennis shoes squeak on the tile. I also search faces for secret lives under layers of normalcy. See many empty eyes, as if the mall is filled with post-Christmas zombies.
As I pass the José Eber hair products kiosk that, pray God, will disappear by next week, one of those dark-haired, high-cheek-boned, accented Eastern European beauties begins to snake out a lovely hand to snatch me up, sit me down in her hair torturing chair.
Her fingers must be twitching to twist themselves in my hair, which hangs below my bra strap, warms my ribs, is thick and brown-silver-white-gray. I haven’t had a proper hair cut (barring a trim) since 2005.
“Excuse me,” she says. “Can I ask you how style your hair?” I love the sound of her tongue rolling over those “r”s and “l”s.
I laugh and dodge her grasping fingers. “I don’t style my hair” I say. “Isn’t it obvious?”
(in-progress to do list on Boxing Day)
1. put laptop up on tray to save neck from pain
2. pour yourself another cup of coffee
3. make yourself something light to eat because you are feeling a little bit shaky despite the glass of milk you drank
4. eat
5. take a shower
6. get out a big, black garbage bag
7. put in it clothes you want to give away because you never want to wear them again
8. get out another big, black garbage bag
9. starting in the laundry room side of the basement, put in the second big, black garbage bag everything you encounter in the house that you are certain is trash
10. pick one junk basket from living room or dining nook, just one, and empty it out completely
11. take a break to read a chapter in your stupid book
12. by this point, it will be at least 2 p.m.
13. drink a decaf Diet Coke for lunch (added cheese and crackers
14. write 300 words on your novel and/or work your way into the scene at the poetry reading you haven’t even acknowledged is now part of the novel
15. strip your child’s bed and toss her sheets in the washer
16. pet your cat and bury your face in his fur
17. return to the novel and see what happens inside the poetry reading scene, feel the dark in the bar, feel the tall bodies, listen to the imaginary words, see the faces, smell the participants’ bath soap and body odor, taste the beer on your character’s tongue
Dear Someone,
I am lifeless and lovely. I lick the air and wind my fingers in my own hair. I make unsuspecting rhymes out of fingernail clippings, wait for my cat to cry at me from the middle of my tiny dining room.
My Christmas was sweet, filled with the requisite obscene amounts of food, not too many gifts, a chance to kiss my child and tease her father, a warm cat on my lap during a film, good wine, no tension.
I wonder sometimes how there can be no tension, but after five years, it should be clear that we have no tension left. We are slack and easy. We find bits of affection between the jokes and love of our kid.
It’s good, and I won’t complain, can’t complain, don’t even want to complain.
I’m so tired. My head feels huge but empty. I will sleep all day tomorrow when I am not petting my cat, writing on the novel, cleaning my house.
It’s all good.
Love,
me
read a little matthew last night
read a little luke
wrapped a lot of stuff
pulled my nutmeg from the cabinet
dreamed about my toilet clogging again
dreamed I snaked it myself with a voice in the background from a radio show instructing me on what to do next
dreamed my current journal fell into the toilet when the bowl was still full of filthy water
dreamed I didn’t care about the journal
dreamed I wasn’t wearing gloves and stuck my bare hands in the filthy water
wrote a little on the scene last night but didn’t get as far as I’d hoped.
will find a finish the novel 300 words at a time
this morning, I gave the cat his Christmas present since he went in my purse looking for it, anyway
thought about Christmas mornings at my parents’ house
thought about stocking items in brown paper lunch sacks, almost always the same: decks of cards, emery boards, pens or pencils, dental floss, something fun that we weren’t expecting.
loved those stockings
my (not-)husband sent me email.
what’s my plan?
well, do things, finish things, gather things, pack things, wrap a thing, leave the house, go there, be there, stay there, leave there
The rain tapped on windows all night, soothing and moist. But it kept me awake and thinking about all the things that make me the monumental failure I am currently embracing as my persona. A yellow light flowed through the east-facing window of my bedroom. When I rose at 4 a.m. to pee, I lifted the shade and saw that my little neighbor had a brilliant standing lamp switched on to high in her living room, all shades up, curtains open, wide avenue to pour glowing yellow into my house.
Yeah.
At least she wasn’t up and sitting with friends around her table laughing loudly, playing poker and listening to blaring classic rock, like Journey or Foreigner, so my skin didn’t crawl off my skeleton.
I feel too connected to outside and wish that I could cut myself off without feeling guilty or hurting feelings. I like being alone. Solitude is sustenance.
I started a new scene yesterday, but kept drifting away from it to think about the scene instead of writing it. Silly stuff. I might need to revise my process.
The child’s dad will send me a thousand emails about tomorrow today if I’m not careful. His sending them isn’t the trouble. It’s my feeling the need to read and answer them and then take care of whatever it is he mentions.
I caught our child awake and online at midnight last night. This is not new. When she is here with me and we are on break, we often stay up past midnight, just being awake. Night owls.
“Now you’ll sleep really late,” I tapped out to her on MSN Messenger.
“And Dad will think I’m a lazy ass,” she tapped back.
phrases I want to ponder:
corporate oligarchy
transparency
Ponzi scheme (I’m having trouble wrapping my wee mind around the definition of a Ponzi scheme, which may be part of why they are so successful. Impossible to wrap one’s mind around them)
I have just read an op-ed piece on The Huffington Post by Melissa Etheridge on Rick Warren. She makes me want to cling to my first reaction to Obama’s selection of Rick Warren as part of his inaugural ceremonies, that this choice was not meant to be a slap in the face to gays, that it is part of something new, open conversation, dialogue, peace. Comments on her essay vary from calling her and anyone who excuses Obama’s invitation to Warren a “spineless jelly fish” to those who see Obama’s invitation as a true “reaching across the aisle,” a means of furthering equal rights, attempting to get this guy who reaches 20,000 people a week on our side.
It’s all very interesting. I should stop worrying that my views are “wrong.” I have good instincts (well, I guess I wasn’t very right about John Edwards, but, meh).
More soothing sounds: tires on wet pavement, dryer tossing clean clothes, fingers on keyboard, my own slow breath.
