A Dying Sun

Maybe predictably, my fourth daughter, the last of my babies, was a Mama’s Girl from birth. She had a fevered lust to run with the pack of her older sisters and so walked and talked at what I had thought, up to then, was an impossible age:  7½ months, on both counts. But still she never danced and pranced her way far from my reach, my little bundle of starshine who loved to bask ceaselessly in the light she put in my eyes.

I knew she was the last one. Don't misunderstand, all of my girls enthralled me equally — you can’t have more than one and not know that each is born constitutionally different from you, all their sibs, and everyone else in the world at large. You can’t not marvel at the way they are delivered to this life with a unique set of baseline traits that, really, have very little to do with you. You try to both respect their individuality and guide them to color just a little bit inside the lines. But on the occasion of closing the door on my childbearing years, I relaxed decidedly and let the last one be, to see what would happen if she was mostly left to her own devices, to test out her inborn gregariousness to the max.

Out of respect for her privacy, I will only say here that, just as I might have imagined, she has found a stage. The very biggest one available to her at this relatively young age — she has found it, taken it for her own, pressed a boot to its neck to the sound of rousing applause. In this way, I cannot imagine she is related to me in any way. I am clapping madly, too, but looking furtively from her, down to the belly that once housed her prenatal self, back to her, back to my belly ...  I am so her mother! I was there the day she was born!

Like most any parent, my dearest wish is that she love her life, passionately, always. I can’t help but hold my breath a little too, though, as she steps into a particular worldview I do not understand, with a unique set of baseline traits I do not understand. Beware Narcissus’ pool, I want to whisper. Today's trade in human capital changes at lightning speed in the matrix of our jet-fueled mass communications; the parameters of what can be bought and sold, from our bodies to the quarks expressing themselves deep within our minds, are so very hard to define now. (Daughter: know that virtual “stages” must be taken with extreme care.) That age-old mother-mantra — oh please don’t get hurt — sounds with every beat of my heart. Some other less definable body part echoes, don't hurt others.

I also am coming to accept a major change from our auspicious mother-daughter beginning. I, once the designated center of her universe, am a dying sun in my growing daughter’s eyes. No really — I've already been through the normal teenage rebellions with three other daughters, the temporary rejections of all that I stand for, the vitriolic I hate yous! that landed sure and straight as Artemis's arrows. Whomever a small child might imagine her mother to be always becomes someone more human, as that child matures. This is different. The script that my youngest is writing on the stage of her mind, about me, is gelling into something more permanent, I think. I am beginning to realize she probably won't outgrow it. I, being quite simply who I am, can't rise to the occasion of the life this brilliant young artist wants for herself. I will always fall short.

To be clear, her version of me is her truth, her reality. It would be quite wrong of me, to diminish that in any way. I am just taking some comfort in the memories of our perfect early years together, and the thought that there's only one way to go, from perfection in a baby's eyes. She will always, always be my little Star.

Wine Mothers

This is a post I wrote in May 2011 and pulled from a previous, now-shuttered blog, to go along with new writing I will post momentarily. For anyone who may not have seen it before, it may illustrate a progression of thoughts. Sorry about the funky spacing. I have no idea when it comes to some of Blogger's quirks.

* * *

Real mothers do not live on sitcoms and, moreover, we don't want to. My generation has fought being boxed in by governments, stereotypes, glass ceilings, the Martha Stewart phenomenon, and every manner of marketing trick designed to define who we are while simultaneously emptying our pockets in order for us to successfully be that person. Why on earth would we want to step out of June Cleaver's prison and into Clair Huxtable's or Jill Taylor's?

"Jill Taylor"
Wikimedia Commons.

I have been intensely aware of my children's television-expectations of motherhood ever since we let cable into our lives, when my oldest daughters were about 13. Immediately I had to begin explaining.


No no no, girls, that's not a middle-class family, that is a rich family coming into our living room and acting like a middle-class family.


OK, Dears:  I know she's 13 on the show, but she's 20 in real life and she looks like a total slut. Etc. etc. etc.


My personal favorite is when we, as parents, don't turn out to be the dopes in real life that all parents on The Disney Channel are. The universal formula for preteen television: The kids' schemes go badly awry. By pure force of luck they are not harmed, maimed, or killed. Their parents (teachers, principals, adult authority figures) almost find out, but because they are dopes, easily distracted with pretty, shiny things, the youngins get away with their misdeeds. Lesson learned, without the unwanted side effect of punishment or guilt associated with getting caught.

I am thinking about this again in terms of "legacy," as my daughters enter their adulthoods, and their opinions of who I am and my performance as a mother solidify. That is not to say my job is completely finished  --  my youngest is in high school and still at home. A year or two ago, she asked me, "Why can't you be a Wine Mother?"

Ah, the Wine Mother. For those who may not know, a Wine Mother is super cool. She spends her entire evenings still sharply dressed from her day working in upper level management. Sexy silk blouse and pearls. She directs the family from the kitchen island, with her glass of white wine nearby. She is extremely popular with her children's friends, because she is so funny after about the second glass. She still manages to get up for her 5 a.m. aerobics class, though, and she could still drive her brand-spanking new SUV to the movies at any second, if her children want to go.

Well. I do love white wine. And I think I'm hilarious after the second glass.



Put me down, put me down!

From a young age, I’ve been completely magnetized by others’ cultural experience, human ways of being that are very different from my own. Up to a certain point, my mother would have grabbed me up by the collar to save me from my curious self, me wriggling and stroking the air like a rabbit being held by its neck fur.

With a little teenage autonomy and a car, I started exploring in earnest. I look back on a night I sat amongst the members of a major South El Paso street gang — in a dark, abandoned adobe house, guns, knives, bottles and bongs getting passed around with equal enthusiasm — and wonder, what the hell was I thinking? Like a white-blond, goody-two-shoes, 17-year-old East Side girl in an Izod shirt and saddle oxfords is going to pass for a fly on the wall? “Don’t mind me, ese, I’ll just squat here in this especially dark corner and be silent as a gargoyle. Proceed, proceed, pass those automatic weapons right along.” Girls like I was wind up the subjects of various CSI television series — and not in the good way. My mother tended never to believe the "anthropologist in training" explanation if I got myself caught, true as it was — nor would the court system, I suspect, if I'd found myself in it. Police busts, like revolutions and mob mentalities, usually sweep everyone up, even if one person in the group doesn't "look" like she belongs.

Luckily, I found safer ways to get inside strangers’ homes and study their lives at will, take notes even — first as a reporter for a newspaper, and later, in the actual, bona fide study of anthropology. (Looking at real estate works, too:  just don’t correct your agent’s misconceptions about the house you really want, and he or she will have to unlock lots and lots of doors for you.)

And of course, there’s travel. I've not gotten spectacular amounts of it, mind you; my life's been mostly otherwise engaged up until now. But one of my very fondest memories from my marriage is of sitting with Doug on a street curb in Juarez, Mexico, under a blazing hot summer sun, bathed in the language, color, stench and beauty of a big, robust city in an entirely different world. We were drinking fruity sodas from glass bottles, way too sweet for American tastes; Doug was asking for translations of the various billboards around us, with their oh-so-familiar American logos but colloquial slogans that made us laugh out loud. Behind us, the hand-blown-glass factory workers plied their dangerous trade in lava on a 114-degree day. People unlike us in every way swept by like water, diesel fumes and honking horns filled the air, whatever rules of the road existed failed to make any sense to us. I felt a familiar electrical sparking in my brain. I looked over at him, and he smiled, a discovery burgeoning and catching fire within him. I knew he got it — why I call travel to another country “the intellectual orgasm” — and I was overcome with the confirmation of that moment, that ours would be a long and happy pairing.

I write this as I consider some of the shocked responses I’ve gotten on my new tattoo. It seems strange to me. My own 80-something parents won’t be shocked. Not thrilled, but not shocked. Doing something like this is just like me. Ordering lunch with purple hair, in a Pennsylvania city where every last house is painted the exact same shade of white, makes me belly-laugh, and feel alive. Same with hiking to the furthest Anasazi outpost in Chaco Canyon, alone. Trying to blend in in South America, even if I am 5’11 and a female traveling alone. (People threw their arms around me with grief-stricken looks on their faces when they found out my husband was not with me, as though I'd been widowed and cast out onto the streets.)

I got this tattoo, 100 percent, for the experience. For the chance to think through such a scarily permanent change, and execute, even though I was scared. To see what all the fuss is about. To see if I could pull it off, with some degree of grace for a woman of my age. Typically for me, because I am older and smarter, I hope, I did my homework fiendishly. I wasn’t really seeking danger — I was seeking experience.

That I got, in a nice little chunk that didn’t require 20 hours on a plane and thousands of dollars. It was a perfect, crisp fall morning, punching the gas pedal through the Jefferson National Forest, speeding toward something that both frightened and excited me, and that I’ve been thinking about for almost 20 years. And wow — it turned out A-OK. Today, my dubious best friend said it was the most beautiful tattoo she’d ever seen. (Note: we have very similar tastes.) After an initial 12 hours of a little freaked-out buyer’s remorse, I am happy with it, too. Really happy.

But hoo boy, I’ve still got more to say. Like everything else in life, it's been a most interesting filter through which to consider the universe, internal and external. At least, to me, and isn't that the whole point with something as self-centered and personal as a tattoo? 

Next up:  why I feel a person should be in at least her fourth decade before getting a tattoo, maybe toward the end of it, and why I didn’t memorialize my son. And then to some other topic — promise.

It Feels Like The First Time

On this, the first day of the tenth month of the year 2011, in my 47^th year, I got my first tattoo. Or more accurately, my first 2/3 of a tattoo — I’ve got to go back in about a month to get some touchup on the part done up to now, and have the remaining 1/3 inked in.

This will almost certainly be my last tattoo, too, though I couldn’t say for sure on that. This morning, after weeks of fiddling with the design and fretting over composition, I let go of all those worries on the hour-and-a-half drive, and focused instead for the first time on how much it would hurt. It seemed about time to think about that. I’d seen one photo online that was firmly in my mind, of a big burly guy screaming out as the needle hit his back. Another local tat shop (that I chose not to go to) distributes bumper stickers to clients that we see on the roads here all the time. Hell yeah it hurts, the stickers say, above the shop’s name. I suppose “bad ass” is supposed to be part of a tattoo wearer’s bragging rights.

Much to my surprise, it didn’t hurt at all. Almost not at all. I sat in the chair with my chosen artist working behind me, screwed up my mouth and wondered what I was missing? I kept asking how far along we were in the process, since for the first two hours I was convinced he must still be sketching. Not really into it yet, or something. I was always pleased to hear we were pretty far along. In the last short while, it did smart a little, as layering a third color in asked a bit much of nerves that were raw from the previous two. Even then, I only jumped a hair, once.

Am I happy with it?

I am neither happy nor unhappy. I’ll be asking for specific corrections when I return in a month, super-minimal things like, “increase the size of this shading by 1/8 of an inch, and round this out more by a degree or two.” Yes, it’s nutty — I chose this artist for his own attention to detail. I should have known I’d want to grab up the needles and start doing my own drawing. Luckily, the real expert between the two of us was working on my back, so that even I realized I could not take over, and so that he did not need to call in the law. “Yes, I need an officer here right away please — I’ve got a crazy lady on my hands who thinks she can do her own tattoo.”

The fact remains, we still need to finish this one. I am being harsh, because damn it, the fact that I would be was just oh-so-predictable.

Stay tuned. I've already got tips for anyone who's even more of a newbie than I am.

I won't show a photograph until it's finished. So here's me instead after the fact, in a tube top with my sweater off the shoulder where my brand-spanking new tattoo is, ponytail on the opposite side to keep my hair off of it. And, looking really wrung out after this day. No pain, but apparently a lot of psychological stress. I guess.

Two to Tango

Not too long ago, I had a hairstylist I loved very much, and he loved me. Man, he gave good hair-washings  --  I gladly paid him every nickel he asked for his pricey cuts and color, plus a big fat tip for the time he spent with me at the sink. This was despite the fact that whatever I said I did not want, was what I got. If I said, "No red in the color, Jack; red is no good with my skin tone," then it was settled. Red it would be, a metallic, candy-apple red, something akin to what you might expect to see on a Corvette. (Jack was crazy-good with shine.) Oh well, I would think to myself, I guess Doug and I won't need to wear blaze orange in the mountains this hunting season.

This tango could not go on without two of us obviously, my hairdresser and me. I was a willing partner in the game of Let's Dress Judy Up. Over the years I've begun to understand a little better why a group of friends long before this began calling me Barbie no matter how much I protested, no matter how much I cussed and spit and told them to knock it off.

Wash my hair? OK, call me whatever you want.

I am thinking of this now as time hurtles me toward the tattoo appointment I've had for two weeks. I have thought about it plenty over the years, and then really really thought about it over the last 14 days. I have worked and reworked the design. I have done my utmost to find the right professional and artist. I also know very well what it's like to stand in front of the mirror and wonder if I even speak English  --  I who always thought of herself as pretty good in the language department.

Why do we find most alluring precisely what terrifies us? Would I go to all this trouble and expense, drive the hour and a half, plus endure the pain, if it weren't permanent?

No, I would not.

* By the way, the appointment is still something like 42 hours away, and I still reserve the right to back out.

Chickens have little itty-bitty brains

Chickens are a barrel of monkeys. Really. Here, Bangkok II stands on a low wall near the newly washed car, trying to figure out if his reflection is a threat.

The only chicken story from Brumley Gap I like better? The time Doug informed me solemnly that he ran over one of our chickens. "Aw," I said. "Which one?"

"The dumb one," he answered.

McMansion of Cards

I used to suffer the delusion that I could do it all. At the very least, I could do it “all” for some defined period of time, if the results would be worth the effort. In case you don’t know it already, that’s a philosophy that, one way or another, spells trouble.

When I think about this, a time-lapse memory collage comes to mind, of a house that my now ex-husband and I built, acting as our own contractors. We hoped for a best-case scenario of nine months, but understood that a year or 18 months were more realistic.

That's haughty enough. But you have to add all this to the story, to understand it:

1) I was primary breadwinner at that time, always solely the one to carry the family health insurance, and the mother of three elementary-age children.

2) As a certain sadistic supervisor in my life began to understand the extent to which I needed my employment to complete our building project, my job went from “high-stress” to “possessed by Satan.” A slave to my dream and that damned “can-do” attitude, I often:  went to work at 4 a.m.; came home in time to dress and feed children before school; worked until about 4 or 5 p.m.; and returned to the office at about 9 p.m., after the children were in bed, until midnight or 1 a.m. or later. In hindsight, I am stunned by how little sleep I got. Weekends, I tried to work on the house that we were building.

3) About a year into the project, I got pregnant with my fourth daughter. Yes I know how that happens; I also now know how a body can get all wackadoo with stress, and surprise a person mightily. Wisely, I gave up my support-contractor duties when one day, as I was running the table saw, I looked down to see my 9-months-pregnant belly sweep awfully close to the running blade. Soon after that, I would have a baby on my hip almost constantly for a few years, trying to protect her from the dangers of an unfinished house.

I got tired. My recollection of exact dates is fuzzy now, but my ability to “do it all” ended somewhere around the 3-year mark. We were, by then, a family of six, living in an unfinished house that was open to the Four Winds and all the pestilence and critters they could carry into it. Plagues — great. One more thing to fight.

I also remember, with no small amount of guilt, how I got a man fired at Lowe’s during this time. I had picked up my three daughters from after-school care, after my own day at work, pregnant enough to make strangers wince on my behalf. It was dinnertime, but I still had to get the whole crew to our rental house and start cooking. The children were getting whiny and impatient, but I had to get several gallons of polyurethane right quick, or our entire project would grind to a halt,again. Trouble was, I couldn’t find “matte finish” on the shelf anywhere. I pounded the call-button that was supposed to bring help for what seemed like half an hour.

I’ve been treated like complete shit by male employees at home improvement centers so many times, I can’t really defend getting one fired over another. This particular guy finally showed up, stopped dead in his tracks, and rolled his eyes. He proceeded to baby-talk me about the differences between “gloss,” “semi-gloss” and “matte” finishes, no matter how many times I protested  --  “I understand that. I just need to know where the matte is.”

Finally, disgusted by my interruptions, he said, “Look, lady, your husband really ought to be here doing this.”

My daughters were watching.

“Get me a manager,” I said.

“What kind of manager?”

“A big manager. A general manager.”

* * *

Ultimately, my marriage flopped dead across the finish line, a marathoner in cardiac arrest with just enough sheer force of will to get to a certain point and not one single step further. (Don’t cry — this was one of several excellent developments in the whole nightmarish scenario. Another would be the big, fat equity checks that allowed us to divide our household in two, and set up our children comfortably for the next phases of their lives.) Whether a person would say we failed spectacularly, or succeeded, depends on your viewpoint. Interestingly, the very same goes for whether the fellow in Lowes should have been fired. I recall his face to this day, and realize I knew nothing about his viewpoint; the words “uneducated” or “unworldly” come to my mind when I think of it now. 

I wonder if I can find the same tenderness, for that younger woman who once thought she could do it all.