Don't Hold In Your Grunties

Been having this weird fight with my boarder-girl who keeps her animals at our house. She's been here 2 years, she's been really great, and then one day I suddenly can't take it anymore, all the chaining up of the fences, she overprotects her goats, and then suddenly we're in this fight through texting and I'm telling her to find another barn where someone might actually like goats. So then I feel terrible for like a week because she decides okay, I'll leave. And I didn't want her to leave, really, I wanted her to stop chaining every door.

At the same time, for months (inside the house drama) I'm battling Lilly the 3 year old because she holds in her poop. I gave her every high fiber thing in the world, finally had to use Miralax which is definitely true to it's name. Had to like rebuild her poop psyche to get her to realize that letting go is a good thing. Things are flowing like, well, logs now. Lately. So far.

And after weeks I finally TALKED to the boarder girl, now that she's leaving in five days, and said, hey, I was only kidding. I just got frustrated. Sorry I took it out on you. Wish I was a better communicator. No one should hand me a texting thing again. At night. When I'm sick, and tired. I text anger. Apparently. I need an anger detexter.

Just kept thinking of Will, my dead ex husband. How he said as a kid his mom would tell him, in a singsong voice, "Don't hold in your grunties," when he didn't want to poop.

I coulda used that advice. And here the 3 year old is so good at it.

Down Under

An old friend of mine tracked me down from high school. She was the foreign exchange student from Australis, wild and fun. Haven't talked to her in 20 yrs. She said we saw each other in London last - ohhh yeah, god, did I see her there? She had just gotten off a cruise ship where she'd been a chef and I was in Europe with my tall lanky ex-boyfriend. We met at a bar/restaurant/cafe and when he went to the bathroom I told her I was in love with two other people, a boy and a girl. I was 25. She was more interested in the boy in the bathroom - what was wrong with this one, the one right under your nose? He was a beautiful boy. I never really wanted the one right under my nose.

So 20 yrs, I had to try and rethink - did she know me before my dead ex-husband? Where was I living, what was I doing? Why did I map my life by my love affairs? While she was trekking around Zimbabwe with no electricity and using words like bloke and safari, I was living in a tiny house on a huge river in Maryland. While she was having a baby in Perth, I was in LA working on horror movies and meeting my husband. Now she's in Canada teaching art and theater to kids at her kids' school, and I'll be teaching playwriting to kids at MY kids' school. Hmm.

I never really organized my life, I better do that, huh. I just sort of followed its crazy path. And now with three kids running around, I just look for moments in the day where I can breathe, and see an ocean of silence. I am lost in it, committed. These are the busy years. I guess up there in Canade, she's breathing in a breath of cold air and doing the same thing.

Chickens are the New Crack

Can't stop buying chickens. They cost like 2 bucks. They fit in your pocket. They're fluffy. If you could coat them in chocolate, I might marry them.

My hands are all torn up from building the chicken house. It was just an old shed out on the corner of the property, cobwebby, hidden by branches, ignored. Nathan and I went in and chop chopped, then Nathan wandered off and it was just me, for the last few weeks, just chopping, shredding my hands, making piles of mean thorny branches, adding sawdust and then, just like in The Secret Garden, my bit of land is so - tranquil. Clean. Serene.

Chickens were laying eggs in there while Moose and I sat on the diving board of the pool and let the sun soak into us for a second today - glorious sun in February, no small feat. And standing in that shed with her, watching the chickens, it's funny how a place that meant nothing is now a place that is someplace, had a purpose. Is full of life. You can stand in it and feel it's worth.

During the day after I serve people food and clean up and play and work, I head out there to just stand and look at the chickens and give them a handful of food or pick up a stray throny branch. Because it's quiet out there, and there's peeping.

Thoughts on Jane

I've been spending time with the Miss Dashwoods, reading Sense and Sensibility. The woman sat writing her stories in freezing England, well-read, well educated, loved by her family, hilarious, biting, and apparently not all that attractive. (Hence all the writing.) I know she was creating the world as she wanted to see it. Building relationships and dashing them, enjoying and wielding the power of the writer. Entertaining herself, because all the books she read were so boring. Depth, insight and power.

Anyway. Writing gives hope for other writing.

"Then we began to ride. My soul smoothed itself out,
a long-cramped scroll freshening and fluttering in the wind....
Sing, riding's a joy! For me, I ride."
Robert Browning

Craigslist is My Whore

First of all, it's been really hard to spend time writing on my blog because of the many hours I spend on craigslist looking for the perfect horse I can't afford. I don't think I actually WANT the horse, I mean yeah I want the horse, but mostly I want the Vegas action of the horse. I like talking to the people. I like seeing the pictures. I like trying to see if I can get the horse for free. I like feeling the drama of a horse coming in. Then it all falls apart, because ultimately I have no money and yes I love the heartbreak. It's keeping me alive. It's the saddest form of addiction I can muster.d.

The Everyday

Why have I stopped writing so much? Everything that happens is funny, if it wasn't happening to me. Like Lilly cleaning a bowl for me in the sink today, actually scrubbing it sparkling clean, and when she held it up I said wait, let me get the camera (because I never take pictures of her because I'm so tired) and so I got the camera and when she held it up, clean bowl and dirty chocolate face, funny - she dropped the bowl before I can get the picture, and it shatters in a million pieces in the sink.

I don't want to clean that up so much that it's silent, I can't even express my bummerness, but it's not her fault. I go to put the camera away, dejected. Lilly says, "sorry mom." Like she's 45 years old.

I have got to start carrying the camera around. She's so beautiful, really, and I'm sucking it all in but not preserving the moment for anyone else, namely her.

In her fairy dress on Halloween. Emma is the genie, freezing while trick or treating because she's basically wrapped in plastic wrap and it's like 14 degrees. Nathan winning the most original costume at the little park costume contest. He has never won anything. He was so proud, the aviator.

Everything is so small, the small things just overwhelm you, our little boat and these three big lives full of small huge every day events.

There's a horse in Idaho that I want. Why is there always a horse, and why am I always wanting it? I tried to tell Barry about it while we ate Japanese food at a strip mall in the hazing rain with the kids. Lilly would not eat anything. She hates Japan. I have to say the noodles were like snot covered worms. It's true.

I just need another focus, I need a project, I need something that brings me peace, that broadens me. I can't go to school, I mean I can, but what am I going for? What do I want? At least with a horse, I can still stay home, I can resell the horse, I can make money on the horse. It might be fun. Want the kids to learn to ride. Want safe. Want sweet, want a new dimension. Want time travel. Want prarie skirts. Want to write but don't want to do any of the actual WRITING. Want someone else to do it.

Then I looked at Nathan cause I had a few minutes of time not doing something else like worrying about how dirty the house is or something, and I thought about his rash that he's worried about and I thought as a MOM I could just disappear into these 3 kids. They have tremendous needs, they have huge lives, they need huge guidance, they need tumble, they need love, they need brains, they need heart, they need food, they need focus. They are a huge project.

And there's this horse.

Anyway. Love is a beautiful thing. It makes you so big, it's impossible, it's laughable. And you can't stop yourself from wanting more. More everything.

What I've Been Doing

Furry Language

I'm training this 2 year old filly at my horse job in Sylmar that I do twice a week. This is because I have totally given up writing at the moment. Writing is dumb. Horses are furry.

Anyway, this has been an insane little horse. No one had handled her much, so she was alot like our dog Owen. Scared of everything, hiding under a couch.

So this lady I ride for (I ride her stallion) she said, go ahead, work with the filly. The filly is palomino, had a matted mane, just looked ratty and wild. I've worked with lots of kinds of horses, in lots of disciplines, but not young horses at all. I looked up how to work with young horses and watched some videos on YouTube. Then I set to work.

I won't go into all the boring details (and also I won't reveal my magic secrets). Plus, I'll pretend that when I drive to work I go over green hills, and out into a wide open pasture, dressed like Jane Austen, with horses nickering at me. In my mind, it is so. In reality, it's a dirt lot. But there is a frosty Diet Coke in the garage fridge, waiting for me at the end of every session.

I worked first with the filly just getting used to me approaching her. This is a strange thing to do, have to alter your normal human behavior in accordance to the body language of the horse, but it's amazing and makes you a better rider. More in tune with the horse, even on the ground. The key is not rushing up to the horse, but training the horse to stand still while you approach her. You want the front end of the horse facing you at all times. You don't want the butt end with the kicking hooves aimed at you ever.

So I would approach the filly and only go as far as I could while she stood her ground. If she started to move off, I would move her off faster by waving my arms around, making scary motions. She'd run around and circle me a few times, and I'd step backwards, giving her more room. When you step backwards, the horse feels less threatened and slows down. When she slows down to a stop, you step backwards, and slightly behind her so she has to turn her head backwards to see what you're doing. Eventually, the horse will move their whole body around to see what you're doing. You have succeeded in making the horse keep her safe face-end of her body toward you. It's a real lesson in when you FEEL like rushing forward is when you don't. You stop, and even step backwards. Then everything, somehow, pulls toward YOU.

Once she was facing me and still, slowly I would take steps forward until I finally got up to her nose. I would just stand there, make no movements. I would walk away. Then approach again. Once she got used to me walking up and back, up and back, with no movement of my arms, she relaxed. She learned, oh. This person is just walking up to me. Then I could pet her on her head.

Then you do the whole thing with a rope in your hand. Then you pet her with a rope in your hand. Then she runs off again and you start all over.

This horse was always nervous, though. Took forever. Pulling away, head up, scared of what I was going to do.

Then, last week. The miracle.

We're out in the big arena, and instead of running away from me, she has lots of room to run, she starts running in circles around me. I couldn't figure out what she was doing. She never stays near me. Then I saw - she's got her ear turned in, listening for me to talk to her. So I talk to her. She stays nearby me. She finally stops, and lets me approach her. She lets me hook her rope on. She lets me brush and pet her. She is scared, but she is 10% scared. She lets me stick my finger in her mouth where a bit will eventually go. She lowers her head so I can scratch her ears. I brush her neck. I untangle her mane, slowly, carefully.

Then she does it. She leans her whole giant dinosaur head on my stomach. She just leans there.

She trusts me.

She wants love. Having me dote on her - she decided. It felt good.

It's this amazing thing. I didn't even do anything. All I did was recognize her way of speaking and moving, and tailor my approach to what she needed and understood, as a horse. I spoke her language, and then she spoke mine. She surrendered to me.

I came home and thought, wow, that was a fluke. I'm sure it was just a really good day. It will probably start all over again when I get back the next time, she'll be nuts, I'll be nuts for trying to be a horse trainer with as much education as I've had and so many good teeth.

But I went back the next time, and there she was. I stood in her paddock, climbed through the fence and then leaned back against it and just waited, far away, to see what she would do. I decided it wasn't up to me. It took her about 5 whole minutes. She stood with her back to me. I called to her and said come on over, girl. She stood there, looking sideways, then glancing at me, but not coming. I waited. Then she shifted her feet. Then she smelled a giant pile of poo like this was waaaay more interesting than me. I still waited. Talked to her. Then I could see it in her, she was curious. She HAD to know why I was standing ALL the way over there. That's that person that is nice, she thinks. So she came over. Right over to me.

I've been back about three times since then, and this horse wants to learn. She wants to be affectionate. She wants to see what we're going to do next. She doesn't always understand what I'm trying to show her, but she isn't trying to get away or kill me. She wants to be in my club.

Love, patience, trust. These have got to be universal truths, because there they are, silent and spoken in other languages. Furry languages.

So maybe I am still writing after all. Manipulating language, in a whole other, tactile sphere.

Hitting the Trail

So at dusk we went riding with our boarder Karen. Karen has been on a horse maybe a dozen times, and now she owns Charlie, the huge Thoroughbred ex racehorse. Charlie needs a forklift just to get on his back. Charlie is what they call Death on Spindley Legs.

I didn't used to be this safety conscious. Until a dumpy pony dumped me off and broke my hand last year. Now... the tall Charlies of the world hold no interest to me. Love horses. Obsess about horses. But I don't want to ride nutty horses anymore.

So I packed all the kids on bikes. Lilly had her fake camera, a chicken sandwich and a granola bar. Emma had her new short haircut and Nathan had just recovered from 103 temperature. Ron, the tall asian dude that Karen hangs with, joined us on another bike. And Karen climbed aboard the massive Charlie.

So riding down the street with huge Charlie, I am now Worried Instructor. My kids are riding bikes in the street, but all I'm thinking is Don't Kill the Boarder. We need the income. Plus she's nice and I don't like emergency rooms.

I kept hammering it into her head to be firm. Be Woman of Steel. You must LEAD Charlie. Charlie has ADD. He must be constantly told to pay attention. He wants to try everything. If we passed a water slide, he would want to get on. If he could fit in a gopher hole, he would gopher it. heh.

We did ride up the trail without incident, and the kids and I ditched our bikes to walk up the dirt path to the new house they're building up there. Big Armenian arches. The kids ran through the house, picking their rooms, finding their closets. Lilly wanted to be in Emma's room, and even though it was just make believe, Lilly kept looking up at Emma in her "closet," saying "You share with me, Emma? I be here too?" That kind of heartbreaking loyalty, that little blonde face. Ay, killer.

Then it isn't all about the killer horse, where no one died, but instead about the killer mom, who gets to go on adventures, and gets to be there with these explorers, who find joy in everything.

I keep thinking the horse, the horse will keep me sane, just watching him, the way he moves, the silence of the horse...because my life is so loud and so not mine, and it's hard to grab onto, everyone growing up up and away... I don't want any of it to go, so if I just look the other way...find a distraction...

There is so much peace right underfoot. It's obnoxious, huh.

Car Trip Babble

Brain is fried from car trip with the family. The little people I can handle and understand, for the most part. When you're gone you realize how much food you eat and passes through your life. We ate, like, all the time. And none of it was really satisfying and yet I continued to eat and then sit in hot tubs.

Also passed lots of farm land which made me nostalgic for farmland except my mind is this vast green field and I am the shephard and I'm really bad at managing the dogs and the wolves have eaten almost all my sheep. I have no idea what is next, or where I'm going, and then there's my mom and she has no idea where she is is where she's going, and everything feels very unsteady. I do think it is all slowly spiraling downward and this coupled with all the pie I have eaten lately is unsettling.

And then we're back from vacation and the house looks bigger and the kids ate KFC and I thought relief, we're back, and then sad, oh, we're back. There's the same view. I'm stuck, how do you get unstuck? Life speeding by at 80 mph makes you want life to speed by at 80 mph, and a nice clean hotel room at the end of the journey. Life here in my real life is hard.

Family is wonderful, though. Loud, lovely and wonderful. Got to see my brother, and had all my parents together and this was good. A guy whittling sticks in the park gave me some religion, he had sticks and feathers on his hat, sitting in this rainy, bright green field by a stream and he told me to look at stuff. Love the stuff you're looking at. He whittled a magic wand, gave us wild blackberries just picked and even Nathan knew that this guy was the best part of our trip.

I guess I feel like whem you're yelling at your mom to get up and stop having a breakdown because you're scared she's going to die, and you just want her to get up and start acting like your mother again, and then you see her through all these other relatives eyes and the reflection is scary, you see how she looks, she looks terrible, selfish, mean, angry, annoying, self-serving, uninteresting - but then to me she is all those things, but underneath it all she brought me soup when I was sick. She held my hair when I threw up. She stayed with me.

When I was having an argument with her because she didn't want to sleep on a fold out couch at the hotel because when we opened it up there was an old tissue inside it, and then Barry was flipping out because we drove for hours and now my mom wants to sleep in the car... I just thought, wow, we're fighting so much. Wow, I have to break up with my mother.

She's saying she's leaving, moving really far away to the house where she wants to live, where she'll have her own washer/dryer (way better than having a daughter), my best friend says "hang on, my friend, you're about to be liberated" and I see that. But I also see from this long drive, staring at the back of my mom's neck, that she's old and that kills me, that she's been sick and it messed her up, and I've had to watch it all. I don't get to just glide along with these unresolved things from some woman who raised me long ago and I never see anymore - she's right here, and I watch it all, we are always evolving. Or devolving in most cases. No wonder I had a yeast infection and couldn't stop eating sugar and kept wanting to buy horses. It's this need to cover the wound with something that used to feel good.

More than that, it's having deep feelings, feeling it all, seeing all these people and being rich in people, and feeling like I had a family. I just don't get life, on the most basic level. I don't get how to be successful, or fruitful.

I know how to love people. I ate a really good tomato out of my garden, that I grew from watering and watching it, slowly, slowly turn red. It took FOREVER.

I know how to do that. Watch, love, wait. I guess I should be honest. This is all I know how to do.

Earth Mother

Gotta figure out a way to unite moms around the planet. A small goal. Also, I'd like to go Amish. Not full blown religious, just the farming and the pies. Momish.

Pee Serious

We were at the store and Nathan saw a jug of stuff that takes the smell of dog pee out fo the rug. I told him you pour it on the rug and it takes the dog pee smell out. He looked at the bottle, then he said, "What takes the smell of this stuff out?"

Count Your Bessings

Lilly turned 3 today. I remember when Emma turned 3. We were in Tahoe. I remember when Nathan turned 3. He loved fire trucks. Now Lilly Bess's turn.

I should have videotaped her walk home from school this morning after we dropped the kids off. She slid down dirt piles. She peeked into holes in fences. She squatted down and told the ants in the anthill we pass "Ants, did you know it's my birthday?" When we got closer to home, she took a bow. I thought this was a nice life. An entire life lived to the fullest from school to home. All you really need is a baby in your life to see that everything is going to be allright. It already is allright. It's bursting, in fact, just on a regular dirt road, hanging out with someone who can't read or drive. She just follows along, and everywhere - adventure.

We played with her little friend Luke. They played fishing while I tried not to fall asleep in the chair at their house. Ate a really good salad. Went home and she wouldn't take a nap (I missed the nap window, hate that). So I made her feel bad until she came out looking for me saying "I sad. I want Mommy."

We played with kitties, went swimming. Then we went to get a microwave for 8 dollars from a guy name Slav from Bulgaria. He was moving to DC. Moose played with Lilly in the backseat, so she didn't mind sitting in there for an hour on her birthday. "Where we goin, Mom?" she asks.

When we came in from the microwave adventure, Moose and I pushed her high on the swing. We don't usually stop to do the swing, because we're rushing here or there. But today is her birthday. Right after we got off the swing, the sprinklers went off. Can you believe that?? She took off all her clothes and ran around in them. The sun going down, the air hot, the sprinklers misting a rainbow. Emma came home from baseball practice and ran around with her in her baseball hat. When sprinklers go on, you pretty much have to run in them.

Lilly Bess, the littlest shipmate on our wayward vessel. She loves bandaids, and mermaids. Swordfighting. Peter Pan. Baseball. I Peen (ice cream). She loves to wrap kittens in rope. She loves Emma and Nathan, like the sun rising right in front of her, each day. She knows she is a wonder.

I came into the bathroom tonight and Emma had forgotten to put the tub drain up to keep the water in. Lilly was laying in the empty bathtub and said "Mommy! The bathtub melted!"

Count your (Lilly) Bessings.

Like Chicken, Like Chris

I know people like to get Oscars, but once you've had a chicken named after you, your life has been truly recognized.

My friend Chris who lives across the country is now embodied by a black and white chick at our house. The chick was born on her birthday, so of course, it's Chris. This chick used to be tiny and nervous, and now it's more ballsy and nervous, which is sort of how Chris is herself. She's almost 2 months old, and a 2 month old chick is like a man-chick, with a little peeping voice, also like Chris.

The chick at this age really doesn't know what it is - too small for a fryer, too big for the baby Lilly to carry around in one hand. All I know is, the chicks love the horse. Chris Chick and her friend Gigi Chick (named after a dead beloved chicken eaten by racoons) follow the horse around. The giant, dinosaur horse with huge fat hooves who could stomp them. They think it's their mother. Peep peep. Run after him. Gather at his feet. Peep. Take a dust bath. Peep peep. Whoa, there's some corn. Run over to it. The other huge chickens peck them away. They circle away, bummer. No corn when you're the little guy. Wait, there's a piece.

Chris runs and gets it.

Against all odds.

Animal House

We figured out yesterday that we have 33 animals at our house. Even to me, that sounds like some of these animals need to be made into meals. Here's the breakdown.

1 horse
5 goats
3 sheep
3 bunnies
1 cat
7 kittens
4 dogs
4 fish
6 chickens

Wait, that's 34. I think. Technically, the horse/sheep/goats are paying customers. 7 kittens will be gone in two more months. 1 dog belongs to my mom. 1 bunny is a foster bunny, looking for a home. (Are you available?) So that takes us down to: 16

That's still too many.

Carpe Diem

Lilly fell on her head off the coffee table. I was right there, too, I saw her tipping and in the second it took her to fall I had a million thoughts, like I can get her, she's right there, she can't be falling, she never falls, wait, why aren't my arms working fast enough, why am I still sitting here like I don't care, it's happening.

Then there she is, scooped up in my arms, crying, that thump her head made sounding fake, echoing in my mind. Then there's the big purple lump, like a hunk of meat, rising off her forehead. Ice, Tylenol, she's healing, but how come I can't be The Flash, how come I can't make things Not Happen?

Ever since I fell off the horse, or watched the marble egg get dropped into the pool line, I have realized that things are going along SO well when nothing bad is happening. You don't realize how well things are going, right at this minute. You aren't on fire? You aren't chasing someone who stole your wallet? You aren't en route to the emergency room? Things are fucking great, man. This is your day.

Disclaimer

I perhaps shouldn't blog about people I'm working with. This is how I got fired from "Pensacola: Rings of Mold," the last tv job I had. Even though everyone in the office loved the manuscript that preceeded my prompt firing (okay not EVERYONE, it was slightly brutal to some), it seems when you have possibly ongoing relationships with new people, you perhaps shouldn't insult them in blog form. Assuming they may read this.

So I apologize in advance, and will take out a secret blog where I may write freely, and later make it into a television show. Or maybe I'll just keep writing here since I think I know the only two people who read me regularly. What Would Ricky Gervais Do? I look forward to your suggestions.

Work Horses

The new PTA is so badly organized, it's like a beautiful yet tragic ballet. I go to help out with the book fair and the lady who's supposed to be running it just never shows up. So it's me and the brain-fried PTA president (the fireman), who actually is alot of help. We do all the work, and the lady finally shows up later, and has one of those personalities like she's really efficient while in effect getting no actual work done whatsoever. Like, she looks clean and clear and yet her hands are not moving to set anything up. And she has no remorse. Like, wow, maybe I should've been here to help. It's more like we're an interesting movie going on that has nothing to do with her. In fact, she's going to leave now.

So anyway, me and Firestarter set everything up yesterday. Spent the whole morning in there while the baby wandered around taking down books and opening packages and destroying what we were doing. The In Charge Chick stopped by and wavered by the door, although seemed to take no interest in coming in and helping out with the project she was CHAIRING. Then just left. We stood staring. Then we laughed. Since the baby was tuckered out, I decided I wouldn't come back for the afternoon, but would instead leave a list of things they could do, like put up posters and make price labels and stuff.

I go this morning and we have Donuts for Dads morning where kids come in with their dad and have a donut and buy books. We sold 500 dollars worth of stuff in an hour. Me and the other PTA chief, the ex-cop. These guys are the most unlikely guys. They both look like they might have been recently run over by cars. These guys are actually wonderful. They should have their own stuffed animal likeness. Ex-cop is shaped sort of like my older brother, short, squat, comes in smelling of stale cigarettes and apologizing for being late, looking showered and asleep. He's like the way your gramma's house feels. Used, smoked, bright and dim at the same time,nothing challenging is going to happen here. He's an early in the week newspaper crossword.

So turns out Coppy can't read up close, so he keeps holding the books out at arms length to read them, so we take over the cash register, me reading the book prices, he punching the numbers into the register. Taking money. We work together like we've been touring the country for years.

After the Fair closes for the morning, I manage to see the In Charge Chick again and tell her the books I'm going to re-order. I also notice that no one put any of the posters up. Again, she seems interested, but takes no action. I see the pile of posters and say I'll do it. (The piece of me that is my dad, just nicely shove everyone out of the way and do it yourself. Make a joke while you're doing it, too. Then cross it off your list and have a donut.) Also there was supposed to be a poster for the 4th and 5th graders to sign up to volunteer at the Fair. Where is that, I ask In Charge Chick. Big Boobed girl-mom says "Oh, I made the poster." "Great!" I say. Then she says: "But it looked bad so I threw it away."

Hmmm. "Wow," I say. It's like I'm running a company with a handful of assistants that don't actually do ANYTHING. And they don't see the irony.

So I reach a new level of humor. Nothing, in effect, will get done.

Fireman and Coppy and I go outside to hang up posters. They trail me as I go from place to place, holding up the tape, playing with the baby, joking about stuff, and I realize this is the greatest experience of my morning. I belong here to these limping, haphazard fellows. These guys, these are the President and the Vice-President, dude. And they are mellow, slow, and they actually DO stuff. Best of all, they show up, with a sense of irony. Diluted, of course, by the sucking hole where education should be. Peppered with redneck, but still, they freaking show up and enjoy the work. Work horses. Like the carriage horses at my other job - huge, friendly, lethargic, but they're not quitters. They'll stay with you all day, and crack a beer with you when the work is done.

There's something to that.

Carnival Boobs I mean Booths

I ran back to the school because I had left something behind at the PTA meeting. The only people left inside the empty auditorium were the two dudes running the PTA (a firefighter with skin intact but most of his brain burned away) and an ex-cop who kept calling me "Cathy," and a new-ish mom with giant boobs sitting across the long table from them.

I picked up my water jug I had left and then couldn't resist going over to check out this newly formed threesome. One side of the table I knew was into firearms and women, and the other side of the table, more than ample woman. It was an adult movie set up.

The ex-cop asked me how my broken hand was healing after being dumped off of a mean pony a few months back. Then he launched into his story about breaking his foot by falling into a hole. The cast had hurt so much he sawed it off when he got home, stuck his deformed foot into the door and wrenched his foot back into place himself. Home medic - cost of surgery? Priceless.

I talked to large boobed mom, who looked about 14. She was a single mom who had three kids under seven, and none of them were in sight. Under the boobs maybe? I saw why she was sitting at the table with the two gentlemen in the long, empty wake after the PTA meeting. Better than going home to needy kids. And man, that shirt did not cover much. Her boobs looked like a giant boob swimming pool.

"Anyway, just here to get my water," I said, backing out as the conversation turned from broken bones to stun guns.

Can't wait to start those carnival planning meetings. I hope to man the stun gun booth.

Facebook Has Stolen My Friend

My friend from far away came to visit. He stayed three weeks. He's the ideal houseguest, quietly he rolls along, gentle to the kids, great at Legos, very smart, using interesting language, amazing artist, likes to study people. He can usually pinpoint the most interesting thing going on, and talk about it. Or sometimes we just watch "Extreme Loggers."

But something has changed in the 4 years since I saw him last. He's grown up maybe. We don't have the luxury of the daily or weekly friendship, where you hang out, grow up with the person. We have the accelerated version, so we have to injest our friendship in loaves. Starve until we meet again.

I guess the last time we knew each other he was more mine. Like, secretly. We were closer, we threw ourselves on each other. This time, 3 kids climbing on me. He has Russian girlfriend. We were more Jane Austen polite. So I missed that stir-fried love, take-out style that we once had. Although I'll take somewhat stiff parlor-room. I'll take anything, he's that worth it.

Since he's been gone (Nathan cried when he left), I've heard two sentences from him on Facebook. Facebook has become the dropped handkerchief that one catches and returns to the lady. Hoping for a connection.

I guess I'm old fashioned. Miss the gloves, the glint in the eye, the hope.

The Root of the Problem

I put off having a root canal for 2 years. Then, just like a miracle, yesterday was my lucky day. I could put it off no longer.

I put myself into the hands of some able Russians in Studio City. The dude gave me the first shot in the side of my face with, I'm pretty sure, a machete. Then he decided I needed a second shot, right in the roof of my mouth. You know, the spot where there's no skin. It's mostly bone. Needles LOVE to go into this area without pain. He pulled out a shot the size of his leg. You get the picture.

Okay so now he's numbed an area the size of Madagascar. All the natives are sleeping. Except for me, the one in my head. My mind is zinging, and he's assembling a whole mini-trampoline in my mouth. Some rings here, a stretched tarpolin there, it's all very complicated and that half a Vicodin I took from my recent hand surgery doesn't appear to be easing my nerves.

Then I have to keep my mouth open for one and a half hours. It's not so bad for the first hour, but then I unclench my feet and hands and start waiting for him to tell me I'm a good girl, it's almost done, but I get nothing. And the little sucker thing keeps sucking my breath away, I'm battling that thing to keep myself alive. My mom told me to picture my best vacation ever, to try and block out the whole experience of drills and noise and tooth packing material, and I can't think of one vacation I've ever had. Then I remember three things. Nathan born. Emma born. Lilly born. Those were some great vacations. Staying in my pajamas. People bringing me food. Little tiny babies that were mine. I see those moments, and I would smile, if things weren't hanging from my lips.

When my jaw has reached pain level 1000, they tag team and the other dentist comes in to finish the job. They sit me up. She tells me to tap tap tap my teeth. Easy for her to say. My jaw has the flexibility of a haunted house, boarded up for 30 years. I manage to look like I'm still coherent but life has a swirly look, with the white walls and the metal poles and alien lights hanging down. Then I slowly realize I AM done. It's done.

I stand up to go to the bathroom. "Thank you," I say kind of warbled to the tall Russian man-child who did my tooth. "My pleasure," he says with a kind of bow. I stare at him crazily then head to the bathroom. "My PLEASURE???" I mutter under my breath. "You have got some serious issues."

I then pay for what would have been a nice trip to Hawaii, and head out into the sunshine with my sunshiney 2 year old and Barry, who had spent a lovely two hours in the park with a dozen nannies and their charges.

I can eat and drink without cringing. It is a kind of miracle.

Tweak it, Baby

Do something different. This is what I learned from my friend Victor. Each day try to do something a little bit different. So you don't get rusty.

Don't Poke the One Eyed Pony

Don’t Poke the One Eyed Pony on the Side that She Can’t See

The day is blooming
The pony is moving
Grass is on our path
Fur is thick, riding a blanket
It’s okay that she can’t see

Who needs to see everything
One side fits all
I can see for us both
I can’t see ahead
Where she leaves me for dead
My finger bent wrong from the fall

All I wanted was to go faster
A little bit faster
She’s only the size of a dwarf
Retarded kids ride her
Kids with no leg muscles ride her
She’s safe, she’s a thousand years old

I kick the pony and she doesn’t go
Then she goes
Then I make a mistake
I poke her back there
Through the fat and the hair
And she doesn’t like poking
I think

The pony goes up
My brain starts to swirl
What’s happening
Why is this carnival Under me today
Time slows down
I can see there’s no way out
I’m up up and then down down down

The ground is hard
Not like in the movies
My air is scattered all on the ground
I can’t reach it , I can’t breathe
I’m dead but still breathing no breath
My lungs are pounded, stalled from the shock


The pony ambles nearby
Without me on top
Naked of me
I have to get up
Naked of me too
No more ponies I think as I walk

I look down at my hand
My fingers stuck together
That looks like it’s gonna hurt later
I get the pony back
Her eye still sealed shut
Something has sealed me apart
from myself

I lay in my bed my hand swelling
I made a mistake not just laying here
With my sleeping baby
Getting a pony, the safest pony
And now a fresh order of hand surgery

I go get an xray, I go to a doctor,
I spend bent handfuls and handfuls of cash
This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be
I know how everything works out
I make sure everything works out
I’m the mom, can’t you see?

I’m on a gurney, the kids are up til 11
Coloring at the abandoned clinic
Cars rush by, the black doctor sticks pins in my hand
For 5000 dollars, I’m cured, he says

Heavy cast on my arm
For thanksgiving turkey and Christmas
I heave it around
I’m lucky I’m here
I’m lucky I’m HERE
I think as my hand starts to heal

Cast off amongst poor people
I go to County
The doctors are better, they’re 12
My hand is stuck in it’s cast curl
It can’t stop remembering
How to hurt and not to heal

I can’t make a fist, I can’t grab a tissue
I can’t clap or scratch or carry
I bend my hand, I have to bend where it hurts
I have to bend and stretch where I least want to

Don’t poke the one-eyed pony on the side that she can’t see
She has reasons she’s blind
A pirate battle, on a ship
Defending her honor, got a sword in the eye
Or in her corral she ran into a stick

I’m imperfect
I’m broken
I’m healing
I’m not
I’m bent
And I’m angry
I’m broke
Wait I’m loved

I hate you
I love you
You hurt me
I failed
I get up
I’m angry
You broke me
I’m here

I didn’t leave
I didn’t lose
I cracked just by accident
Can anyone see
That I’m fragile
More broken than whole

The picture
Is perfect
I’m standing up tall
I walk talk and laugh
The layers all mesh
My brain works
My heart works
Pretend you don’t see the mess

Uhh

So before I was doing everything around the house, and couldn't keep up. Now I do it all one-handed. For 6 to 8 weeks.

Can I Have a Pony?

So instead of buying a Ferrari, I buy farm animals. Nice midlife crisis I'm having.

The Breakdown World Tour

My mom scheduled her psychotic break for this weekend. Not her usual psychotic breaks, you know the casual ones. This is a real one. I noticed it on Saturday, I woke up with a few sick kids, and realized I was getting sick too. Heavy chest. Runny nose. Still, we decided to hang out over at Moose's house. I could sew some Halloween costumes (I scored at the thrift store, a king outfit and a princess outfit, and a bunny outfit) I just needed to add a few homemade touches to make it feel more substantial.

I noticed my mom would not stop talking. Not in her normal way. She seemed, um, nuts. I felt that annoying mom feeling coming on and just let it fill me up like usual. But by the end of the day, I noticed she was not sleeping. She was slurring her speech a little bit. Did she have a stroke? She was taking these hardcore antibiotics to fight a bad chest cold, maybe pneumonia. A father at our school had died of pneumonia/swine flu a few weeks ago. So the antibiotics were good.

But they were not good. She was completely confused. Speaking but not stringing her sentences together, stumbling for words. Like my gramma after her stroke. I kept calling the doctor. Finally got to him Sunday night. Speakerphone. He tells me he thinks my mom need a psych evaluation.

My mom has needed a psych evaluation for decades. But no, this is a real, scary, possibly manic depressive psychotic break. The doctor says calmly. In his thin, gentle way. Like she's twisted a pinky finger. Except much worse.

So we get her some medicine so she can sleep, but we don't tell her it's antipsychotic. The word itself freaks me out. You don't want your mom and psychotic to be in the same sentence. I feed her the little pill every half hour like he says. I put the baby to bed and go over to her room and she's half on the bed, legs hanging off, asleep. I put her in bed. She wakes up and I make her eat some chicken and drink some lemonade. She talks with her eyes closed, or open but she's not really seeing me. If she saw me, she'd see I was crying. She talks about alcoholism. About her mother. About the kids. About how much she loves me.

I don't understand why we get involved with people, with love, like this. Why do people have to care about other people? It's a trap, you're stuck, you love people, it hurts. To see your mom lost, fragile, vulnerable, it's awful. There's no words.

I see why I'm home with the kids. A mother matters more than anyone in the whole world. I'm old, and my mother matters to me. Her being well, and functioning, and being back the way she was, ordering stuff off of QVC and being annoying, I want it all back.

I am lucky enough, depressingly enough, to have been there for all of her breakdowns. We're on the world tour. It's been a long time between stops. This poor woman - and yet I see all the things I love about her. Things only I would care about. The shape of her face. Her fingers in my hair, scratching my head. Her crazy laugh. The way she has kept going in spite of feeling crippling loss inside. She is my mother. These are things that can't be replaced by anyone else.

We're going to the doctor in the morning. I whispered to him on the phone, "Do people come back from this?" afraid of his answer. "They do," he said.

She's laying over there, frail as broken crackers. Her brain all in tatters. I hope there's a chance.

Got Goats?

Yes, I'm crazy. No, I did not videotape the goats coming to our house. Because on the last boat ride we took (the first and last for now), I stood up and dropped the video camera into a few drops of water enjoying the bottom of the boat. That baptism which the camera decided was a good enough reason to give up on living.

A lady, a nice lady, who looked more like a girl, but 40 means lady, she came and brought us the goats. She's renting out a stall in the barn. We stood in the driveway while the big truck backed up and then the big white door - we could see shapes through the crack in the door, but the suspense was tremendous. Then after an eternity the door was whooshed open, and there was the smallest herd of goats and sheep, standing silently inside. Looking cornfused. The kids breathed in a collective oohhhh.

The goats figured out to walk out, and as we stood aside a lady named Wendy who looked more like let's call her haggard, not a friend to sunscreen or its benefits, anyway, she was a goat expert, and sort of waved them the right direction, which worked for them. They managed to trot up the driveway and into the kingdom of the barn, which they have now dominated with large amounts of tiny poops. Spread around so you can't gather them very well. By the way.

We hang on the fence and watch the goats. The sheep hang in a set of three - white, brown and black. (I identify with the black sheep.) (heh heh). They look more intelligent than their country goat brothers and sisters who look like hicks. Something about the skinny goat faces, tiny teeth and beards. They look like they spend alot of time laid off work in bars in Alabama low country. The sheep look like concert pianists.

Goats and sheep don't do a helluva lot. Chickens are working for you. They squeeze you out something you can eat, once a day. The goats and sheep - they're furry. They have the weird slanted eyeball pupils that is a little like satan. You can see why the devil likes goats.

Anyway, it's nice to have something living in the barn. The bunnies are fun but they don't say baaa. They're so busy with their typing. (Bunnies look like stenographers.)

Hank the big sheepherding dog thinks God has answered his call. His own herd of sheep. He just sits there loveglazed, looking at them with the adoration of a betrothed on his wedding day. Hank is a lumberjack.

Owen, our scared dog, is a priest. Maisie, our old dog, is a former showgirl.

The Ice Cream Man Scares Me

The ice cream man started coming by the house everyday. It was cute at first but after awhile, give it a rest man. We don't have that much money for ice cream, already.

I made the mistake of befriending the guy. Chris. His ice cream truck looks like typical ice cream trucks. A slightly beaten up white van with peeling ice cream stickers on the side. It looks seedy, like maybe he sleeps on the floor next to the Blow Pops.

Chris is from Armenia which I think is an actual country, not just in Glendale. My mom thinks he's Italian, which is more romantic, so I haven't broken it to her. The first time we chatted it was exciting, the kids had their dollars clutched in their hands, every ice cream looked so good, no one could decide anything. Chris told me he was thinking of getting an incubator, to raise baby chickens. We spent about 3000 dollars on ice cream and the visit ended.

The next time we saw him (the very next day), I struggled out there with three wet kids from the pool. (The kids go into a frenzy when they hear the truck's warbled music. 'I peen puck' Lilly says.) As the kids pick their ice creams, and I say hi to Chris, he reaches out to shake my hand. I shake it gratefully, and then pull my hand back at the appropriate time. He does not let go of my hand. There is the moment of ick. He is holding my hand because he wants to hold my hand because he wants - what does he want? How bout Awkward? I wonder how much awkward costs, and here I am getting it for free. I finally get my hand back, but now I can no longer look Chris in the eye. Why did he do that? Why couldn't we be friends with a regular handshake? Did he have to ruin ice cream??

The last time I saw Chris (I believe it was the next day after that), he wanted me to make a phone call for him. Something about wanting a dozen eggs delivered to a liquor store at 7 pm. I had been watching too much true crime on tv - was he negotiating a drug deal? Why did I have to call for him? Couldn't he call on his ice cream phone? Of course I said I would call, although I went inside with knit brows, and made the half-hearted call to some guy named Kevin who had no idea what I was talking about: "um, my ice cream man wants some eggs or something?"

I don't go out when the ice cream man comes anymore. Since the weird egg phone call and the handshake, I send someone else out with the kids - husband, visiting mom friend, aunt. Anyone but me. The ice cream truck music sounds like a horror movie in general, but now it really gets me.

Summer is almost over. I promise to venture forth and visit Chris in one last brave act before the last day winds down. I will wave from a respectful distance. If he tries to get me to engage in some kind of strange other conversation, I will wave and pretend I've undergone a lobotomy. It's not that I don't want to be friends, or to help people get their eggs or drugs, for god's sake. I didn't want to cross over the line with the guy in the white van with the music. I just wanted to float.

The root beer float. I just wanted the ice cream.

Following the Leader

I can't stop watching the Dog Whisperer. I think I'm in love with Cesar Millan. He has such dark brown eyes. Big, soft dog eyes. I want to go to his dog camp and live in the herd. He'd mix my food with his own hands. I would learn to work in a pack. I would submit.
Seriously, the guy is a genius. He just whips into these people's lives and points out that they have the problem, not the dog. They have to be leaders. The dog is content to follow a strong leader.
I think I have always confused leading with Knowing Everything. Even the writing I'm doing on Ehow, it contributes to this I Know Everything problem. I KNOW I will get in trouble for stealing stuff from the thrift store, and yet I do it. Sometimes.
I think I need a leader, and all these years, I keep looking for that outside leader. I think Cesar is saying TO ME - YOU ARE THE LEADER. But Cesar, can't I come live in your dog camp? Even though you're from Mexico can I still follow you? Wait, he's saying. YOU can do it. YOU are the leader. Not the one who knows everything. But the one who can lead.
I've been really good at being haphazard my whole life. I've perfected it. But I think this is a whole new level I can reach. Staying haphazard (which means never filing anything on my desk) and at the same time, finding diamond-like clarity within my heart. Tight, pure, beautiful silence. Acceptance. Love.
Like the stretched out Hank by the front door, on the cool tile, sleeping. Expecting nothing, happy for everything. Happy just to see your face.
Being the leader doesn't mean you know what you're doing. It just means you are at peace with your own power, and that your weaknesses are what make you shiny, and loveable.

Bad Dog Update

My mom's dog and our dog have been kept separated. Turns out they only bust out of the house and go crazy when they're together. So far Hank is acting like he's never even thought of eating small rabbit-like dogs. He even puts himself into the kitchen when we head for the front door, like he knows it's time to go behind the babygate. He must've heard me calling all the rescue people and saying they could come take him.

He's on probation. We'll see.

Hank Eats Neighbor's Dog

When is it time to give up a bad dog?

I'm not sure it's the dog that's bad, although running out the door and over to a tiny dog and grabbing it by the neck is pretty bad. But the circumstances of the household are bad. Doors get left open by kids (especially babies) who have just learned how to use doors, dogs run out - unless the dog is tied to me, I can't watch him 24 hours a day. And aren't the kids more important?

The hell that insued because I took twenty minutes to sit out back with the chickens and talk to Chris long distance on the telephone while the kids watched Sponge Bob. The front door got opened, the dogs ran out. The dogs when they are together, decide sometimes to pick on other small animals. It's freaky. Then I had to deal with Barry yelling at the kid who left the door open, the 8 year old who stands dejected on one foot, then the neighbor who looks like a walking, two hundred pound, once-hearty tumor that has sagged and gathered all around her waistline. I had to take her and her tiny dog who was completely fine to the vet, and listen to her rail at me about my terrible kids, my terrible parenting and my terrible dog, and I took it all because I knew she was scared. I tried to let it just wash past me, even though it hurt, because I know it's awful to have your dog attacked. But I couldn't help feeling angry that the insults she hurled weren't more intelligent, instead everything was base because she is an uneducated racist, anti-gay, child-hating white woman. But I felt terrible about the trauma, and her dog. She was right about that.

The vet pronounced the dog in excellent health, and gave me a bill for a hundred dollars, which I paid quietly. I held the door open for the lady. I helped her into the van. I apologized and agreed with everything she said. I petted the dog.

At her house, she told me she was sorry for all the mean things she said. I told her it was okay. I got home and locked the dogs out back. The dogs may never get out of the house again. I wrote emails to people about adopting out my big dog Hank.

The next day, the whole day I had a crippling headache.

A woman I talked to last year said she could foster Hank until we found him a home. Nathan wants to keep Hank. Keeping Hank would mean every time the door is opened, I have to panic. Every time the door is opened for the next four to six years. It means gates up all the time. I have three kids. Climbing in and out, over and around gates.

I hate what he did, but I still love Hank. That's the sad part. I'm sure we'll figure it out, and do what's right. We're still thinking about it.

I feel like I'm not enjoying my life enough. I noticed this after my second hour in the PTA closet with Kathy.

I know, it sounds more interesting than it was. It was actually just a closet with a bunch of junk in it, and me ignoring the baby who was wandering the auditorium, folding all the wooden seats up.

I can't seem to have fun unless I'm over-responsible. Lots of chickens, lots of dogs, lots of kids, lots of work, lots of laundry, lots of yard work. Then I wonder why I don't know how to relax. I think if I relaxed, I might just fall over. No wonder I can't stop watching TLC. All the shows appeal to my zoned out, underused laugh section. The Lady with Giant Legs. That was an actual show. People with Obsessive disorders. Midget couples. Am I actually creating this channel out of my innermost brain desires? Families with 18 children. Fat people. Alcoholics. What's with the religion? Religion is everywhere, and people who are religious dress really badly.


I think the raising of these kids and the worry and the pressure and the love and the cooking just makes me into a giant wad of wad by 11 at night. I sit there sucking in the shows about real people who kill each other. I know why they kill each other. It's the cooking.

Anyway. You wonder why I haven't been writing. I did spend time with Nathan today buying carnival stuff at Smart and Final. And the baby is waiting for me to come snuggle with her, way late at night, even though she's asleep. And Emma in her blue gymnastics outfit, crying because her back hurt, and she's got a new tooth coming in. These kids just keep going. I better get to bed. They're already ahead of me.

Hope in a Messy World

My brother is having surgery to have a large tumor removed, along with his kidney. This is the brother I haven't spoken to in years, the one I was closest to growing up, and the one who seemed to be headed down the most troubled road. Dealing with his emergency, and my mom flying back there to deal with his emergency, and my parents trying to talk and get along after all these years...

And then the dog keeps eating the chickens we got to lay eggs, so every night I'd hear that squawking and run out usually too late to save the chicken. Then I'd be picking up chicken pieces and see that the insides of something alive isn't really all that complicated. A few chunky pieces here, connected with some string. We really are all little earth machines, fully functioned, designed to keep going. Until a dog takes us out.

My connections to the people in my family, even the connections that are dusty and look like they are not functioning - are intense. After dealing with my brother for the first time in years, I went home and chopped some bushes out back. I was making a home for the chickens, trying to chop away a huge bush that had overgrown and then died, leaving a wall of dead sticks that needed a chainsaw. All I had was a pair of hand choppers. I found out that you can chop down almost an entire bush by slowly chopping the pieces you can reach until you get to the deep parts, the core. I kept thinking about my brother's guts, and how some doctor was going to be doing the same thing with smaller instruments. I thought about my mom's eye having a bleed, and all those little veins and branches that make up the blood supply to the eye. I chopped while the chickens watched me, poking around, and the dog sat nearby, watching the chickens. A comedic circle of life. Interior and exterior hacking.

All those sticks, the hacking seemed impossible. No way little old me could chop down an entire country of a bush. It would take hours. Days. Lots of scratches. But there was no one else to do it. So I had to keep going.

The kids and I had been trying to make a place for these chickens, even though they hadn't laid us one egg. Apparently I had the loser chickens, the ones that couldn't figure out what they were good for, and yet here I am hacking, just in case. We kept checking, every few hours, every day for that egg.

Today, not in the nest boxes we built, or on the hay we piled neatly, but in the pile of chopped bush, I accidentally saw the egg the new chicken laid for us. In the middle of the haphazard briars and branches. That perfect, huge brown egg. I left it there for the kids to see when we got home from school. By the time the kids got out there, the egg had a white egg next to - our other chicken had laid one right next to it.

There is hope in a messy world.

Anyone Got the Time?

I should save up money and go on trips more. Going to the snow with the kids and Barry had us out someplace new, white and exhausted. Felt so good to see woods, to breathe air without chunks in it. To enjoy playing. Flinging ourselves into the snow.

These kids are the greatest things. The only bad thing is that they keep growing. There is this terrible feeling that everything is temporary, and I know it because I see the marks on the wall getting higher and higher when we measure them. I need a magic potion to keep everything just as it is. Except keep the good, new parts that I like. I guess I just don't want to be left behind. I like me, I just like this family so much. The family feeling is so much bigger than I anticipated. When you have something great, you tend to want to duplicate it. Look at the guy who invented toilets. Now everyone has one, and it's true, they are great. I'm glad he shared.

I guess we only have this minute, speeding by. I have these three comets, trying grab a few shards of their dusty tails. I don't want much. I only want to stop time. I can see that these three tiny people are the greatest things that ever happened to me.

So There's This Horse

I am a rational person. Except I don't pay the bills right now, Barry does it, which frees me up to thinking and believing that we are rich, buoyant, soaring ahead and above any woes. Not paying the bills is maybe the only thing keeping me sane.

So I ride all these horses for people right now. Riding horses just makes me want to be Amish. I would like to drive a cart to school to drop off the kids. I would like to wear prairie dresses. I would like to sit outside all day and look for Indians.

This is what living in Los Angeles in 2009 is doing to me.

Perhaps I need to start my own living museum. We do have Barry's dad, who is 93. He is a living museum. But I mean more of an interactive one, where you could ride on stuff. Watch candles being made and actual cows give actual milk.

There's a horse this guy is giving away nearby that is maybe the slowest horse I have ever ridden. He is not interested in going anywhere. I don't have time to ride, I have three little kids whom I mostly ignore. But this guy keeps coming back to me. The kids are growing up too fast. Maybe if I get on a very slow horse I can stop time. I think this is my dilemma. My kid life crisis.

Anyway that's all love Jule

BiblioFiles - New Ezine Publication

Hey, I'm published again. Check out my story "The Big K" in Bibliofiles. It's not bible-y, if that's what you're thinking. Far from it, man.

Full Speed, Iceberg Dead Ahead

I spent part of Christmas Eve in a McDonald's with Greg. Our kids played in the tubey plaything that looped above our heads, and I listened to Greg talk while occasionally berating him, and this is the extent of our relationship. In the past, I would have been sleeping with both Greg AND his lovely wife, but now this is it, Happy Meals and I'll have an order of We Don't Talk About That, please.

I'm not sure where my life went. Well, I mean, I see it, running around in fresh new bodies that I constantly pump full of food, some of the food coming directly fresh from my own body. Okay, so there's where my life went. But my life also kept happening, like an ongoing process, a book flipping past while I was tied up in the corner unable to move or participate, and every other part of me began to rust and break off. I used to be creative. I used to write and get fired for writing about people at my jobs. Now I troll Craig's List for horses. I think I'm looking for a fast ride out of here. The furrier the better. I think I don't want to go very far. But I definitely want to go out cowboy style.

I live in this horse neighborhood (neigh borhood, get it?) and it's like being in a candy store with no money. These people with horses are just RIDING them, right in my face. Where do they get their money? Most of these people can't even conjugate a verb, and yet they're THRIVING in the horse ownership.

And there's this script I started ten years ago about past lives, also tied to my tremendous need to be Amish without the religion, to move back to a simpler time, to drive a living animal not an engine. I'm kind of dying to write it again, to solve it. It's still there waiting for me to finish with all these kids and get back to it. Maybe I have to wait until Barry and I move to some rural town in Tennessee where we can actually afford to live, and then he and I can actually work out a story beginning to end. Oh, and also have a conversation. Just in time for our tragic deaths of old age.

I guess these are New Year's Resolutions. Simplified as this:

Horse
Write
Talk to Husband
of course love those kids

It's all love. Just getting to all these things takes some kind of genius.

"Out of the Fire," short story

Out of the Fire


Leaving is the word that hung most in the curtains. I'm leaving - he said it, he felt it. He was going off to occupy space someplace where I was not. Because I was not.
The couch groaned for no reason. I hadn't moved. Like a deer, if I froze maybe the world would freeze with me. Maybe for one second that frightening ripping sound reality makes when it's moving in - maybe the room will melt into a pocket of milk. Maybe.
His jean jacket had the heart pinned on the front from when he was helping my brother fix his truck. I had found it in the dirt and pinned it on him. It was tiny like an ant's brain.
He could take that shirt. It filled me with sadness and empathy for the next girl, lone¬some on the bus bench who lent him a quarter for a phone call. Now I just need to know your number, he'd cock his head, hair falling in his easy chair eyes.
That shirt stained his body. It was tattered like something a fireman rescued out of the fire only to realize in the light that it wasn't really worth it.
"I'm not taking anything," were his words.
What happened to the sleigh rides like on the backs of magazines and snowy nights and friends we could've met and lost together, communal defeat at opening up to other similarly wretched human beings, leaving parties alone, but together alone.
Ache, then, is the salad wilting on the wooden bowl, against the silent onion. Sighing, the dinner in fragments of finished, and me there mixed in with some flies and him in motion, leaving.
I erased him from where he stood in the doorway, or maybe he did that. My heart dripped to chalk dust all around my feet.
I sat at the table for years. My sister came to help clean up the mess. I hadn't seen the part where all the things I liked in him would go off packed in a denim jacket and one pair of jeans and the wallet with the picture of Wayne Newton on it. How could he carry so much of me in there, so much of me willingly went along with him.
Don't go.
My sister murmured and touched my shoulder and I smelled the dishsoap and saw the sparkly wooden bowls and silverware clean in her eyes.
What about that little orange kitten, and Christmas, and our voices in small town supermarkets, and the idiocy of it all, the void void that wasn't as deep as it is now, cracked leather and the hay we fed the horses, your smell when you passed me running and those two cowboys hitchhiking in the sunset and our babies with their gurgling promising spittle.
You said you weren't taking anything.

Fun Takes Too Long

Yes, I've stopped having fun. I just don't have time for it. I have to only do things that make money, and do them all in the two hours the baby sleeps at naptime. I used to nap WITH the babies. Things have devolved.

Craig's List, my mistress, has set me up with some cool things, though. I write articles for a company I found on CL, I've gotten countless family bunnies off the site, and now I'm exercising horses from people I've met on the site. I can't believe people are paying me to ride, it's the greatest thing. It's almost as good as getting paid to travel, and this is the closest to traveling I can do in two hours at naptime.

I sneak out when Lilly is asleep in old, dirty pants and boots and meet a big old stallion called Art, who is out of shape and needs someone to ride him. I hadn't ridden regularly since I had the kids, and my confidence was pretty low, but the lady was PAYING me to ride. Luckily he's been nice to me. We sweat and I haven't fallen off even though I'm old and would probably break a hip or something. Horse people are strange, horses are always better than their people. People usually have horses to try and get away from something - to ride off. To kick off the modern dust that collects and causes anxiety.

This week I start riding with a lady up some trails nearby. Should be fun, if I can manage to jam all my relaxation into an hour. I love it all, the juggling is difficult. But horses are taking me somewhere, maybe like writing, I don't know where, but I just can't stop.

Leftovers

I decided to try and figure out my relationship with my dad, after thirty years of awkwardness. Awkwardness on my part. He's always been great to me, but there's been this overhanging shadow, yeah he's great, but he left, man. Don't trust him.

I guess now that my life is crowded with kids, I have huge bills, and a husband I couldn't pay to leave me, I felt comfortable enough to tentatively poke at this long relationship with a very long stick. I had nothing to lose.

When your dad leaves when you're nine years old, you spend alot of time wondering how your dad could leave someone as great as you. You figure you must not be that great. You figure you weren't trying hard enough, you weren't grateful enough, you weren't smart enough. There was something you were not doing. The mind at nine years old is pretty straightforward. There's no adult romantic life to take into consideration. You could give a rat's ass about what he actually was doing, what his actual adult reasons were for leaving one relationship for another. All you figure is that, for whatever reason, you weren't good enough. Something else was better.

And the truth is, you weren't good enough. Cause a nine year old doesn't have any power over a thirty year old, even if it is your dad. He loves you, but not like you love him. You love him like he is the only man in the universe. Cause he IS, the only one that belongs to you. My dad was still shopping. In the cruelest sense, he had already bought everything, but he was a grown up and he was still shopping for a better fit. I happened to be one of the packages from the first shopping trip. So he could move on, but to me, he was the whole store. There wasn't the possibility of any other situation. I didn't want anything else. Why would I? I was just living in the wilds of my childhood, expecting everything to stay cozy, predictable, warm.

They say you have nothing to do with the relationship between your parents, but you are a product of the relationship. You are a vital piece of that puzzle. So when one parent decides to leave, even if they are responsible (visits, overnights, financial support), there's still a huge hole. The hole is their familiar face who isn't there anymore, who belongs to you and your house. Who stays and gets your pajamas out, and tells you to brush your teeth. It's not the same in a new house, in His house. He belongs to you, the everyday you. Your parents are the cement of your young life. When my mom became the only one left, things were suddenly shaky. I had to fiercely protect her, because what if she decided to leave?

So, back to 1976. My dad started a new family and had my sister. My brothers and I felt like the loser first family, dumped by the wayside. My mom was devastated, and her sadness leaked all over us. She had no ability to shield us from her emotional upheaval. Even though her sadness hurt us, we learned that love was powerful, and that loving someone totally meant being a mess when they left. Because you feel the loss. That people, and connections, have meaning. It gave me a sense that love was completely scary, and that being vulnerable was worthwhile if you were willing to risk losing everything.

Tragedy, but beautiful from an adult perspective. Of course I spent most of my twenties trashing every relationship I got in. No way would anyone get that close to me. Yet I longed for connection. Barry was the only person who said, "Hey, what the hell are you doing." He thought my heart was all scarred over, but that underneath was a clean, pure, loving person. He talked to me until that person would slide inches out into the light. I'm two inches out so far. It's been seventeen years since I met Barry.

I sort of came at my dad sideways, a few weeks ago, to talk about everything. I wasn't sure how we would even talk about it. But he said some pretty wonderful stuff. He said he needed to apologize to the nine year old, and to the adult me. He said he probably couldn't make it up to the nine year old. He said a bunch of stuff that made me cry, but mostly he said he wanted to keep talking. It's hard to not feel pathetic, because it's like the dog that's been kicked, going back avidly to the dangerous person that kicked him, looking for love. Not stupidly, just vulnerably.

I'm not sure how much I want to know about those times, I don't actually want to know much about why my parents split up, or how they felt. I just want to not feel bad about it anymore. I want to help the little kid who got hurt, and I want to move forward. I'm tired of carrying around that person who is scared of everyone and of every conflict. I have so much joy in my real, true life that I want to blaze forward and drop the garageful of leftovers I don't need.

The scariest part, though, is feeling all the pain of being nine years old, and having my heart cracked. What I'm trying to learn is that it WAS worth it to love my dad, then and now. It was worth it to be broken, because my heart is still big. Somewhere in me, buried, I knew that I was worth every minute of my dad's time. So I sort through the wreckage and find his hand.

I have my mom's, and I can have his too.

From "Open Wider," my short story collection "The Big K"

The Big K

I rushed there late, some shirt thrown on, a jacket he had given me. A girl I didn't know was making blue¬berry blintzes on the stove wearing only a long Japanese pajama top.
I thought of the party at this place months back where he had stood on the balcony with his new girlfriend, and I left because I couldn't imagine him fucking her while I was still alive. And he had grown a moustache and he hadn't let me know.
The mystery girl said: "You know the only other person who brought fruit salad was--" My heart squirmed shut like a baby's screaming eyelid.
He appeared with that harmless look. Not the true him. The truce him. He smiled and suddenly there was a Cape Cod house with a wooden swing and Campbell's soup steam coating the windows.
"You look beautiful," he said casually. I know he could see the blood, pouring out of my face. He stood close to my leg. "I see the moustache," I mentioned. " - you like it?"
I paused. "You look like Jackie Gleason." "I think I look like a young Howard Hughes." "Smokey and The Bandit. 1976."
He picked at my fruit salad, pulling out a coconut-covered strawberry. He pushed between my knees and nuzzled my cheek with his nose.
He kissed me, deep, and I bit him and he pulled away and said "Jesus" admirably, and we drifted apart. After many beers, we ended up fighting like convicts at a prison riot. I didn't see him for awhile after that. Once briefly when I was dating that guy he referred to as "The Cuban Crisis." And then again when his grandmother died, and he told me he was rich. Two years dribbled by and I heard he was living ten minutes from me, serving a sentence with some girl named Nina he met at a U2 concert. I called and hung up on their machine enough to cause a disturbance in their relationship. Then he called me. "They're putting the big 'K' up." "So?" "I thought there'd be some sort of ritual you'd want to start." We met in the K-Mart parking lot equal distance from both of our houses. I got in his car. We watched human-size men lift a superhuman-sized red letter. The old, parched-orange "K" lay shattered and emaciated against the building, begging for change.
"You can't just call me," I said finally. "I dumped Nina. She's gone." He picked his shoes. I felt like my bobbed hair matched my bobbed teeth. "Let's move away." "Nobody moves away." "Let's move someplace that has plant sales at the church parking lot on Saturdays. Lots of cheap baked goods, maybe a girl scout for extra zest." He picked a flake off his tarnished tennis shoe. Placed it on my leg. “I don't want that." "I don't either."
I moved away to a place featuring seasons. I started writing a book I titled "I Reached Paradise But My Emotional Luggage Was Forwarded to The Nether World." I drove around in what I considered my pajamas, seeing trees and deer signs. Nothing in Spanish spray painted on the back of a van. No train tracks splitting angry cement. I called him. "The world here bursts with light and life." "I'll have what you're having, with a twist." "Life here is unreal. In Los Angeles, life was unreal in the crack addict way. Wake up in the backseat of an abandoned car under a bridge you don't know with your cracked teeth in your hand way. All those sirens blaring, no one could hear a word I was saying, not even me."
"I gotta go," he said.
"But you're not really living," I said.
"Some of us open whole new K-marts," he said wisely, "Some of us only replace the Big K on the outside."
I could hear his latest conquest giggling at cartoons in the background.
"She's of legal age," he added, reassuringly.
I wondered how much his hair had changed in my absence.

I moved back. I saw him at a tennis club, months later. He had on little green socks. He twirled the racket around on its string.
"Where's your girlfriend?" I asked.
"Daycare."
He toted a phony tan.
"I don't really miss you," he added.

He sent me pictures of his wedding. She wore a great big puffed veil, globbed like frosting on top of bad cupcakes.
"That's to hide the scar," he scrawled on the back.

A few years later they were thinking of having a baby. It was a Saturday and he was walking down Fairfax and caught sight of their reflections in a black bank window near Farmer's Market.
"I knew by the end of the block," he told me on the phone from Tahoe. "I couldn't have a baby with her, she was an IDIOT."

He paid for my train trip to Tahoe, where we spent six days hurling ice cubes from the third floor balcony onto tourists below.

“I could never marry you," he said after three days without a shower and killing a bottle of tequila in the hotel bar. "You're not serious enough."
"And besides you're married," I added.
"She was a phase."

I moved to Prague. He called from his car phone.
"You can't stay there," he whined.
"I certainly can."
"No one's in Prague anymore."
I looked out the window at people on the street.
"Are you working with orphans?" He interrogated. His voice via satellite.
"Maybe."
"I bought a Porsche."

When I got back from Prague he called me every day. I ran into him at a discount department store in Studio City. I was buying wood. He was buying a huge can of beans.

He cried.
We moved in together. He cried quite a bit as I took over drawers previously assigned to me the last time.
"I don't think it'll work," he cried nervously.
I rubbed his arm, consolingly. "I don't care what you think."

Years later we watched the Big "K" come down because of earthquake damage. We drank champagne out of Dixie cups on the hood of my car.
"That's never gonna happen to us," he said, and watched a woman pass us in spandex.
"Not ever."

"A Guy Named Red Doesn't Like Me" (Published in Connections Magazine!)

A Guy Named Red Doesn't Like Me

“My husband left me,” she spoke breathlessly. “I’m free to be with you now.”
Sally looked at him with blond ambition.
Red paused, hovering over the ’69 Pinto engine he was fixing as ardently as a succulent picnic. Red twisted a greasy fingernail.
“…I wasn’t waiting for you.”
Sally Swift stared at him. She was pretty, and safe, and almost fifty. Red’s shop continued on in the background like it had since he started there in the fourth grade.
She didn’t feel too Swift. She was stripped. Standing there next to the car like a giant question mark. There were no words. The words about her had fled and she was a hanging sentence of abandoned punctuation.
A guy they called Monkey was getting a huge tool off the rack in the background, and paused to pull the jumpsuit out of the crack in his ass.
The noise of the shop engulfed her.
“Christ, Sally,” Red looked at her, frazzled. He had a freckled face and freckled eyes. His mom said he got them in his eyes from staring in the sun too long. His brother Philip said the spots indicated the rot in Red’s brain seeping through. Philip was a doctor.
Sally stammered. “Well. What did you think I’d be doing in Elkton? Nobody comes to Elkton. Why else did you think I’d be here?”
Red looked hopefully strained. He shrugged.
“That’s it?” Her voice rose.
“I thought maybe you got sick of Miami. Came home.”
“Miami is home. Fourteen years does that to a person.”
“You lived here more ‘n fourteen years.” He adjusted a nut.
“Not fourteen adult years.”
“Where’d you buy those,” he muttered.
She was experiencing feeling returning to her face, and it was all angry.
“What happened to Whitney,” he looked at her steadily, holding a dripping oil funnel.
The image of Whitney flashed in both their heads. A dyed-blond five foot Cuban who owned several successful car washes. Sally had married him for the drugs. He was Cuban. It was Miami. It was the ‘70’s.
“He goes by the name Swifty now,” she said. He had changed his name from Jerry Whitney to Whitney Swift when he married her. He said it was a Cuban tradition. Turned out it was a Jerry Whitney tradition. God knows how many wives he’d had before her that he ended up with the name Jerry Whitney by the time they hooked up.
“He changed his name to Whitney Swift for tax reasons,” Sally said to the carburetor. Red looked at her sorrowfully. It didn’t matter that he had recently gone by Swift, she thought. What mattered was that he had recently gone.
“Why’d he leave?” Red was wiping his hands on the filthy front of his bib apron. Underneath the grime was “Kiss the Cook” but only the “ook” was visible.
For tax reasons, she felt like saying.

Sally wandered downtown Elkton. The streets were small and cramped, like Napoleon’s corpse. Nothing looked familiar.
A Korean man sprayed off the sidewalk in front of his overpriced fruit stand and deli.
She looked at the sun and thought of Red. She never considered Red wouldn’t want her. How could he not be waiting for her? Everyone was waiting for her. Herself included. Hanging in the balance until she decided to pick them up again.
She bought a loaf of bread and a small container of real orange juice. The Korean complained about breaking a fifty at nine o’clock in the morning. She focused on his five hundred-dollar shoes.
She sat on the bus bench and ate the heel of the bread. It’s all I’m worth, she thought.
The Korean resumed hosing and the fallout from the water was misting around her head.
Her mother would say this was an opportunity, not a crisis. Whenever you don’t know what you’re doing, something miraculous is about to happen, she’d said.
Her mother’s miracle turned out to be renal failure, and she had died like a lawn dart falling to Earth.
Sally dug to the bottom of the bread and got the other heel. She ate it without the aid of the orange juice. It was stale and mealy. Now I only have the good part left, she thought, drunk on starch.
She washed down the last of it. The orange juice tasted baptismal. As she sat looking at traffic, this feeling passed. She was surrounded by exhaust and the sound of skinny city trees trying to grow fenced in in cement. Real life background music.
There’s nothing here for me, she thought. My life is bleak.
She thought about Red and what a stupid name that was. No wonder he worked in a garage. What other job could he get. When Philip was six and Red was three, Philip’s teeth were so bucked he couldn’t say “Fred” so he called his brother “’Red” and it stayed that way. Now Philip was a doctor in the East Indies and Red fixed cars two miles from where he had first jerked off. Names could entrap people. This is what my life has come to – a guy named Red doesn’t like me? I’ve gotta be destined for more, she thought.
Sally tossed the empty o.j. container in the wire trash basket. At the moment, her trash was on top.
Lots of people had sat on this bus bench, she thought. Unhappy with where they were, or they wouldn’t be waiting to pay someone to drive them someplace else. Being desperate is how it felt right now. Being driven is how it would seem from the future, looking back.

She sat on the bus bench with her whole loaf of good bread and waited for a miracle.

Angels Among Us

Being broke, we made baskets for the teachers filled with cookies.

My Right Breast is a Lesbian

I keep having trouble with my right boob. I'm nursing, and all throughout all my nursinghoods, all three babies, this boob is the one who works the hardest. It's also the one that has been the quitter. Loves to get things like mastitis, clogged ducts, milk blisters, you name it, this boob will take it on.

I was reading this "Eat, Pray, Love" book about finding true self and being responsible for the things and paths in your life. One of those books you want to throw through the wall and can't stop reading cause you hope it has all the answers. Once I was done with it, I was thinking (during the witch doctor section and voo doo reasons for things) that my right boob must represent all the things I've stuffed down since having kids. Things that have broken down. Things I don't get to use. You know, like bad words, relationships with other adults, going to the movies, being a lesbian. I was never full-fledged, there was no pinning ceremony or committee decision, but I teetered on the brink. So I think my boob clings barbarically to those lifestyle choices left behind. Here's a little blister to remind you of what you're not. Don't forget, chickie. There's so much more out there.

I try to nurse the boob back to health. Heh heh. Get it. There's so much more in the actual life that I'm actually having that it's hard to get a moment to mourn the life and pieces that aren't getting used. I appear to really be using the mothering section. When you're a mom, you're still all the other things (wife, lover, daughter, sister, friend, reader, writer, rider). But the balance is out of whack, and everything is clinging to the sides of the ship in the storm. Some things blow across the decks occasionally.

So my boob reminds me of that. I am a great forest of overgrown trees. Nurture every section, or the whole ship goes down. So I hear you, enough already. I accept all the pieces of who I am. I'm currently loose in the family wilderness. Let me be able to nurse freely and get to all that later. The first sections I will visit upon reaching Free Time will be getting a good night's sleep, and having an intelligent conversation.

Kind of a Public Place for a Breakdown

Driving home from the pharmacy I noticed a guy halfway into the intersection, fixing a flat tire. I had the baby in the carseat, and I was looking at this guy just sitting there in the intersection in a place no one normally sits, right there where everything usually rushes by. Kind of a public place for a breakdown, I thought.

Weird how we usually choose a quieter, more off-road place for our personal breakdowns, and how life (or cars) blow a hole right through that nice, neat theory. Sometimes a breakdown is waiting to happen, out of our control, right there, for everyone to see.

To ease the horror of that thought, the guy looked pretty relaxed in the middle of the road. I think once you get over the fear of being run down, of almost crashing, and being stared at, that you just get down on the ground and deal with the problem at hand, the flat tire. You hope someone comes along to help, and before you know it it's all over. Maybe the view from the cement, in the middle of the road, cars rushing by, your tire a shriveled mess - maybe the view isn't so bad from there. Maybe, in fact, it's more interesting than regular life.

It'd be nice to realize that that natural resistance we have to having anything go wrong is futile. I thought of that when watching a squirrel crawl off into our roses as he was breathing his last breaths in our yard the other day. (I think he was a smoker.) He was moving so slowly, it was sad, he wasn't trying to get away so badly, as much as trying to just be someplace safe. I tried to encourage him off to the side. He crawled right into the pink and white rose bush, roses in bright, vibrant bloom, rose petals on the ground around him everywhere. With no dogs trying to eat him, and his days balancing on phone wires coming to an end, I felt like saying to him, "Look up. Look up and see where you got yourself. You're surrounded by roses."

Peace in the breakdown.

The Hapless Parent

I had to talk to Australia to interview for my new book. Very weird to talk to a country that's floating somewhere on the other side of the planet. I'm pretty sure the guy was faking his accent. To do the interview while hoping the baby doesn't wake up is another thing. Let's talk about Lilly. Lilly is so busy, especially getting bumps and scrapes as she figures out how to stand and sit back down again. Her favorite toy is the screen door. She loves to open and shut the door. Don't even try to take her away from it, she'll scream like she's covered in leeches. I think that she loves that there is something she can move that is huge.

She gets her head bumped so much 'cause we're always on the run, that she's started holding in her crying which scares me. It's an adult thing to do, to "suck it up," as they say, and she's only TEN MONTHS OLD. She shouldn't be sucking anything up except breastmilk. She'll bonk her head on the door frame, her face will screw up to cry, she'll choke out a few cries, and then I see her iron will kicking in. She starts to refuse to let it get her. Is this a future Olympic athelete? Running with a broken leg? A woman who will land a plane using her feet and her underwear as a parachute? Or will she grow up so repressed that she can't open a door without counting to a hundred and turning in three circles? Ahh, the crapshoot of psychosis you might be contributing to as the hapless parent. I know she will already have nightmares or be strangely comforted by the sound of a keyboard clicking, since she takes all her naps on my chest as I type around her. Comforted by a Smith-Corona. Lulled by Dell. Sleep by Microsoft.

As I type she has trashed the office by flinging around a stack of a hundred blue plastic cups. Now she's moved on to remove all the magnets off the fridge while simultaneously filling her diaper. I think it's time to refill her from the top. Lunch.

This is all after the morning I had to stay in Emma's class 'cause she was crying, so I volunteered and had the kids read books to me (Emma read EIGHT, she's up to a hundred and eight books in kindergarten!). Emma recovered, and then I checked on Nathan in the room next door, who has two big teeth with a gap in between them and all he wants to do is see his friend Daniel. They are indeed, in love. I supply the food, and all the love goes to Daniel. Ahh well. Daniel is really cute, like an elf.

This blogsite was supposed to be about Things Not Mom. But I'm too afraid to step over and blather about that untapped area of my life. I'd need a shotgun and I will only enter at night, with commando gear. Luckily I'll be asleep at that time. Someday I'll become fully human again. Until then, it's time to eat.