October 2008 Archives

docked, originally uploaded by Not Calm (dot com).

Sunday afternoon walking in Monterey I saw this rope and it made my hands remember untying the rope on my Poppa's boat. My brother and I could hardly stand the slow ride to the buoys. When we got to them our grandfather would look back over his shoulder at us, his hands on the steering wheel, and smile and yell for us to hang on before he floored it. We loved going fast, the bumps that lifted us up off our seats when we hit the wake from another boat. The times we'd cross a bunch of choppy water and bounce and bounce. Sometimes we'd stop and fish, but usually we'd cast off the back of the boat, willing the fish to bite, staring at the line as it floated above the sparkly water.

I grew up on lakes, not the ocean. It still surprises the hell out of me to get seawater in my mouth and have it be so salty.

an old door on an old and closed up government building in Monterey

I was in my car after work today, on my way to pick up the kids, on my way home.  Right near where I live there is a cemetery and as I got closer I looked to my left, over the hedge like I always do when I drive past.  But, today as I looked over, the tiniest flicker overhead pulled my eyes up to the bright spots of a bunch of balloons in the autumn blue sky.  Another second and I wouldn't have seen them floating away.  I wouldn't have known what the small group of people gathered together in a kind of half circle by a grave near the road were looking up at.  I could just make out their faces over the hedge.  Just enough to think I caught that man's eye for a second, just enough to see from how they stood close together that they were family.

I see things like that and I resolve to be more grateful, more patient, more aware.  But just minutes later I am standing and waiting for my kids to get their shoes on and gather their things so we can go home and I can start their supper and race through all the things I have to do in an evening in hopes that there will be time for some things that I want.  And as I stand there I am cranky that they are complaining and taking so long to put on their shoes.  I'm cranky that they are begging little bags of Fritos from the woman who cares for them after school.  I'm cranky that I can't go home and sleep.

They get to the van, finally, and see the pumpkins covering the passenger seat.  A few are seatbelted into place, a couple more are stacked on the floor. Pumpkins! they yell.  Did you get these for us?  I tell them that I did, thinking about picking them out just over 24 hours earlier and an hour's drive away from home. 

on the side of highway one, I think near Moss Landing

SG and I stopped for pumpkins after swimming in the ocean and then sitting in the sunshine at a coffee shop.  After a weekend where I was going to learn how to surf, but instead was reminded how cold and how very, very big the Pacific is.  Even the baby waves are awesome to someone like me not used to walking right up to them, meeting them with the necessary mix of respect and bravery.  I wasn't cold, except for my feet for the first ten or fifteen minutes, because my wetsuit really did the job, but when it came time to swim out a little bit I wasn't able to convince my body to do it.  It was a little like stage fright, only it was a fear of disappearing forever instead of a fear of everyone watching me.   It was sort of a shock to find myself scared like that after days and days of feeling kind of brave.

But SG stood there in the water with me, his hands on me, making sure I was safe.  Every time a wave caught me in the face he looked at me to be sure I was okay.  I was talking to him and a wave came and broke right on my belly, making a really loud slap.  Don't ever turn your back on the ocean, baby, he said as he looked down at me.   And I wanted to say that my back wasn't turned, that I was actually facing it but just talked for a second too long.  But before that came out I realized that it's all the same difference. 

Lex turned twelve today.

I love him so much that if I stop to think about it it hurts my brain in the same way that thinking about how big the universe is hurts my brain. 

I made him a cake, bought his current favorite ice cream, and took all the kids out for dinner at a place he loves.

There are no photos from the restaurant, which is really too bad because it was full of cool little treasures from Mexico, but not surprising because he is now twelve.  He saw me start to bring my camera in and gave me the look.   All through dinner my finger was twitching, but I survived without photos of the plates and dioramas and 1970s bullfighting posters on the walls.  Just.

He loved his gift, even though it was not a cell phone.

(Note to self:  new curtains - now officially elevated to A Need rather than A Want)

Of course I thought a lot today about the fact that he's 2/3 through the part of his life where I'm responsible for him.  In another few years, he's going to be packing up and leaving.  Thinking about it makes my brain do that thing again, so I'll just set that aside for another time. 

Sometimes when I look at him, I can see his little chunky baby face in there looking back at me.  It's only ever for a second; a flash in a smile, or sometimes a frown.  Concentration.  Other times, especially if the light is low, I look at him and can see the man that he's growing into.  He's still so between those places.  Forgive the cliche, but it really is such a  bittersweet, wistful, tender, uncertain place.  For both of us.

I remember this night twelve years ago.  He was about twenty hours old and I wouldn't let them put him in the hospital nursery.  I just needed to hold him and smell him and look at him.  His impossibly perfectly small fingernails.  His big eyes, taking everything in.  His little fingers, curled around mine while he slept on my chest.  His frog legs and skinny backside and angel mouth.  My mom said after he was born that she had a crush on him, that she'd close her eyes at night and see his little face.

Sometimes I have dreams where he's a baby again.  I can smell his breath, like cream cheese frosting, feel his weight on my chest.  He's as big as me, or nearly.  Our hands are the same size and I wear his sweatshirts and shoes.  I am nothing but happy to watch him grow up, but damn if I don't sometimes miss the part of our lives where it was only the two of us, and I could spend an entire afternoon just looking at him, never needing anything else. 

His name is Michael.  Or Ben.  He is six, or seven, or five, depending on who asks and when.  He's small, and I think is closer to Willow's five than to Soph's seven.  All afternoon and into the dusk he is outside, riding his scooter up and down the street, helmetless, barefoot, runny-nosed. 

Where is your helmet?  I yelled after him once as he whipped past me on his bike.  I was standing on the sidewalk, watching Willow float leaves in a puddle at the foot of the driveway.  He looked back over his shoulder at me, I don't have one. I don't have to!

I think he lives with his grandmother, but I'm not sure.  Once I saw a young woman who could have maybe been his mother walking with him.  He's never called in for supper, he never has to check in before going to the junior high across the road to play tackle football with my older and much bigger boys.  He's skinny, evasive about other things besides his name and age.  Questions from the other kids about school and family aren't really answered.  Sometimes he says he lives with his mother, sometimes he says he's never met her.  Once I went out late at night to take out the trash and there was a man in shorts and a white tanktop undershirt pacing and smoking and talking on a cell phone in front of my house.  I am pretty sure that was his grandfather?  His father?   

Last night the kids wanted to talk to my brother, so we called and while they took turns talking to him, I picked up laundry off the floor and sorted through some school papers.  I caught part of Nate's conversation:

. . . his name is Michael.  He's little but he plays football with us and stuff.  Tackle football, yeah.  He gets kicked around a lot.  You know, like, he's abused?  Like, his dad?  Kicks him.  Or whatever. . .

I know that he was picked up and taken home by the police at least once.  He was at the grocery store around the corner, alone and barefoot, and someone called 911.  I stood there with a couple of my kids' mismatched socks in my hand, listening to Nate talk to my brother, thinking about conversations I've had with neighbors about how worried we are he'll be hit by a car while on his bike or scooter.  More than once he's pulled out in front of me on our street and I've sworn and been so relieved that I drive slowly. 

If I'd ever seen bruises on him, I'd have already put a call in to CPS, but, I need to find out much more about this kid before I do. 

I know a family that was falsely accused of abuse.  The children were taken out of their home for a long time and the damage done to the kids (and the grandparents who were raising them) was profound.  Undoable.  Placed upon them by a teacher trying to help a child.

This boy is obviously not supervised, but is that abuse?  When I was his age I played outside with the neighborhood kids for hours at a time.  We all did.  I've just started to let my kids play with the neighborhood kids without me being out front.  My kids, even Lex, check with me before going to the school or into someone's house, but I'm only loosely keeping tabs on them.

Last night I wanted to talk about this more with Nate, find out why he said what he did.  Whether or not he thinks bad things are happening to this kid at home.  But, instead, the kids started asking (right at bedtime, actually, after it) some difficult questions about our own family, and so I answered those as best I could and tucked them in. 

It could be that this little boy has a grandmother who loves him and feeds him, keeps him warm and clean, reads him bedtime stories.  It could be that he's never had it better.  As an adult in his life, however removed, I owe it to him to follow up on this bad feeling I have.   

This week is Bike or Walk to School Week at the elementary school.  Which, great! awesome! but also, shit! mornings are HARD and walking makes me late to the office and wah wah wah.  And of course Bike or Walk to School Week brings out both my competitive and my sensitive to the fact that I'm not as involved in my kids' lives as some of the other mothers are natures.  That means we WILL walk to school all week, and the other moms WILL see me do it and then they WILL know that just because I don't help out with clay projects anymore and my kids don't always show up with a lunch or completed homework it doesn't mean that I don't care.  I mean, I had to read a handout to know to walk today.  I'M INVOLOVED, okay.  I'm also a little testy, apparently.  Whatever.

Nathan has no patience for our chronic lateness (it doesn't seem to phase the girls), so he often gets ready and leaves for school while I'm still torturing his sisters with a hairbrush.  Which means that he already walks a few days a week, and so he wanted to step it up for this week's initiative and ride his scooter.  So it was that I walked just the girls the half mile to school in the fog.  The cold, cold, horrible fog.  Every few steps Sophie would stop and wail about being cold.  It was probably 55 or 60 degrees, but that was too cold on the parts of her little legs that her pants didn't cover.  We finally made it the half mile to school, and Sophie insisted that I come to class with her and walk her in.  So, I did.  She wanted to show me a drawing she'd made the day before, and her teacher said that it was on her desk.  While Soph was looking for it, the teacher said to me, She's going to sit with the rest of the kids today, because she says she's ready to not talk during class.

I didn't realize this, but she's been talking so much that she has to sit at a table alone, while all the other kids get to sit in groups.  The teacher said that she doesn't usually do that, make the kids sit alone, but that Soph said she didn't care and that it was impossible to not talk so she'd just sit at the table by herself, thanks. 

Then the teacher said, And, you know, I actually didn't go with her to the principal's office yesterday, but I think that all came out okay.  Willow was tugging on my hand, really wanting to get to daycare.  I mean, it's not that big of a deal, really, but she spit on another child.

Oh? I said, looking over at Soph.  Her head was bent over the desk, a few pieces of hair had slipped from her ponytail because she'd insisted on wearing the hood of her jacket up while we walked.  She was concentrating on a stack of papers on the desk, slowly fanning through them looking for her picture.  Actually that is a really huge deal to me, I said.  I am so, so sorry.

I went and dropped Willow off at daycare, and then walked back to my house, carrying my keys and my empty coffee cup and sending text messages with my left thumb, starting to wonder if I need to worry about her, really. 

It seems like every time the kids "act out" now, someone is telling me that it's because of Well, you know, the move and all.  It even gets whispered, like it's some secret, which is kind of funny given how much of a not-secret it is.  I mean, the kids actually did notice that he got his own apartment.  But, really, I don't think that the spitting (or cursing or hitting or backtalking or attitude) is really because of You Know The Move And All, I think that it predates all that stuff.  I think she's just a pistol, as my Poppa would say.

Obviously, she needs to realize that it's never a good idea to spit on other kids (and I should point out that she knows better), but at the same time, I admire how ferocious she can be.  I don't want to break that part of her, because I believe she will need it to keep her afloat later on.  I guess it's a matter of figuring out how to harness that punk rock energy and save it for the soccer field and the occasional big brother smackdown.  I'm not sure how to raise a strong girl to be a strong woman.  I want her to stick up for herself, but not be a bully.  I want her to hold that attitude, but only use it when she should.  I want her to be confident and strong, but she also has to be kind.   

Friday night I couldn't sleep.  I let nothing but the sound of the wind and rain fill my thoughts and when I opened my eyes again it was grey out, barely light, not raining.  I got up to coffee and the quiet of no kids in the house.  At the soccer field I watched Sophie play, all serious and grumpy about not scoring, and then reffed a U-12 boys' soccer game.  Partway through, the sky opened up and a whole summer's worth of rain fell on us in just a few minutes.  They didn't call the game right away, so I got to spend several happy minutes listening to the shouts of delighted boys running in the mud.  I was able to keep watch on the ball and on the players (I have to call offside) and still put my face up to the sky a little bit.  It was grey and cold and wet and muddy and I had so much fun running up and down the touchline with the kids that I was disappointed when we all made our way off the field.  I got under a big old drippy tree and watched everyone running to their cars, raising umbrellas and covering babies with their jackets as they went.

I wished I had my camera even though I knew it was a moment I could only keep by paying close attention to what was unfolding.  Photographing and writing about things doesn't make them any more real, but I'm still compelled to record these moments that maybe no one else sees, or that might otherwise float by like they never happened - the stuff you witness when you are the only still one in the crowd.      

All day I have been wanting to write about a perfect cup of coffee in a red mug.  About sitting around in boxer shorts and a teeshirt, working, with my computer on my lap and the window open to let the air in, opera coming from the other room.  About being able to really sleep soundly.  About taking a short ride on the back of a motorcycle, holding onto a brand new skateboard for Lex's birthday.  About polenta with oven roasted tomatoes, asparagus wrapped in proscuitto and baked perfectly, too hot to eat yet but totally irresistable.  About words and looks and questions and answers and the spaces between all those.  About holding hands. 

I know it seems very, very soon.  I know that writing about it will be hurtful.  But, I also know that this is my story, my choice of what to capture, my record.  I want to record the beauty in my life, the surprises, the joy.  I won't apologize for being determined to be happy.  And I can't not write about it.  It's what I do.

So I'll be at Kepler's in Menlo Park (CA) tomorrow night as part of the Sleep is for the Weak (click and buy - I'm on the royalty plan & I have no shame.  None.) book tour.  We had a signing in San Francisco during the BlogHer conference, and I got there realizing I had no clue what to write in people's books.  Because, honestly?  That's just not something I'm comfortable with.  I made a joke about signing yearbook cliches, and Liz signed something in mine about loving having me in Trig class with her, or maybe AP Calculus, which just shows that she didn't actually go to high school with me.  (My signed copy is at home and I'm at work, "working" (and now possibly busted for not, heh) so I can't check.)  Anyway, I don't remember (because Hello, Champagne) if she heard me or if she just felt the exact same way.  Whatever.  Come meet me at Kepler's and I will write a note in your book about that fun time we cut class to take sleeping pills, drink Diet Coke, smoke Benson&Hedges Deluxe Ultra-Light Menthols, and listen to Depeche Mode, The Smiths, and The Cure while we worked on our tans (OMG, totally topless!) in that one girl's backyard.  Or something.