contributing

I like this jangly-nerve-endings, ready-to-work, time to Do Something feeling that has me in constant productive motion.

I am writing now, daily. It is a combination of paid work, grass-roots work, and unpaid release. It feels good, in every case, to get things out of my head and onto a screen. It feels great to produce, or to contribute something.

My sister always says the world is full of consumers and producers, and a life well-lived is a productive one. My grandmother, a woman of far fewer words and far less education, believed the same - though was too busy to comment on it.

I want to harness some of this energy for the mundane: clean the house, pack, tie up ends that have been loose for so long I have grown used to them in this state. Of course, that will only happen when there is no more avoiding it. We will have to leave for the trip, but precedent would suggest we will do so later than we want, with the house messier than I intended.

Between, among, and around summertime adventures and chores for the littles, I am job-hunting. To that end, I am actively networking for the first time ever - taking advantage of the interwoven threads of people I know and have known. I am savoring the intersections, loving the connections.

Looking for a job is forcing me to look back, to examine and evaluate 20 years in the workforce. (Go ahead. Gasp. I do.) I have to talk about it, think about it, offer it up as evidence. Doing so has me feeling, many days, surprisingly competent and reassured.

There is optimism to this thing I am doing now. There is a forward-looking sense that it will all be fine, and a retrospection I am capturing while in the middle of it: the threshold is all promise and possibility, and a thing worth savoring.

Then

Luis and I talked about it, in my work-issued convertible BMW, both 27, driving to the airport with the top down so he could fly to Cuba and cover a story for CNN. 

The discussion was that there should be in English, and probably is in German, a word for being jealous of yourself.  For looking at your perfect Now and realizing that it will be a memory one day, and you will be nostalgic for this moment. 

*** 

Seabass is part of a four-week study for the Memory Institute at Emory. They are studying how children develop autobiographical memories, and he is part of their research.

They gave Bass four disposable cameras, and with each he takes 3-5 pictures a day.  He mails one off at the end of each week and then opens the next.  At the end of the four weeks, the researchers do some memory exercises using the pictures he took.

I was explaining the study to my friend Brad (my friend-of-gasp-28-years friend Brad - a thing to tax the memory in itself), and we got talking about how memory works, and how he read another Emory study that posited that you cannot trust it. And I believe this.  

I don't know if it helps or hurts to have a constant narrative in your head, the voiceover I have that watches stuff and writes down notes - that laughs at things quietly in the very way back of my head far before they are funny in any socially acceptable way.  

Brad drove 14 hours to get to us.  And after dinner, and rest, had spent a day with us, our 3 kids, and their two cousins, in DC.  We were talking at the end of that day.

The next morning, I was running past fields and thinking about kid summers, and my kids’ summers.  Running for work, running for play.  Being a kid, being grown. How cornfields were featured in my past, and how I love to run past them now.  About memories forming – this second.  That this second?  Is gone.

I am aware of my selective memory, that events I recall with clarity may not have happened the way I remember at all – that dreams and intentions reshape personal histories. 

And I was thinking, as I ran, about the day that had just past.  About the work of the day, and about how a visit to a museum with five children under nine is a very different thing – for a humanities scholar that has been to many museums (which is what Brad is)- than touring those museums with a chance to really read the placards, take in the displays. 

In my reflection of the day, that one day, that very recent history, it had been pure chaos.  Children complained and children had to be contained, tracked, and hemmed in.  One child attempted to throttle his sister, another actually bit and removed a chunk out of his t-shirt in a rage and a third exhibited newly developed talents– along with an ability to turn tidy repeated cartwheels and backbends, a brand new insistent whine that could peel paint 

The cousins we feared (because their parents were elsewhere) were quiet, mature, polite, and at times, befuddled – and as we corralled and corrected the others, we felt watched and wondered how we were doing in the assessment.  

It was an hour drive into the city, and computer games bleeped and blipped on the way.  When we arrived, it was a rare 73 degrees.  Dylan ate his whole hamburger. We had our extra adult along to defend and protect our Littles. They all rubbed “chalk” (dirt, dust) on their limbs and ran around the Mall.  No one was lost, or hurt, and we all saw Abraham Lincoln’s top hat.

I don’t yet know what will be memorable about that day, now only two days past. But it likely won’t be the bickering

Eight people, one day.  Each will remember pieces and parts differently, some may forget it altogether. 

It was a good day, in a good week, in a good summer.  It is a good year, and a good life.  And as I ran, and memories were invisibly formed, I thought how lucky we all are.  To be in this place, with this back drop, making these yesterdays – right now.  And if I were German?  I might even have the word for this.

Us

I said once here, and oft in 'real life' that I love raising my children with a somewhat elastic notion of family.

Part of that is choice, and part is necessity.

In our family, there is one grandparent on one side, and four on the other.  There are two fully biological aunts and two such uncles.  There is the uncle that is the half-brother, and the uncle that is a step, the aunt that is a step - and all the spouses.  Four godparents are not biologically related. 

There are 12 cousins.  Two are mixed race. Two speak English as their second language.  One has no siblings and a lot of sports. Nine have only one sister.  Two have just one brother. Two have two brothers.  One is an actor. Two are adopted. Two are teenagers.  One attends boarding school. Four are five and younger.  Two are in middle school. Six live in-state.

Add 'em up and it's a lot more than 12.  Nobody can be just one thing.   And we have two sets of friends the children call "cousins"and we don't necessarily correct.  

  

An aunt, an uncle, a grandmother, and two godmothers have no children of their own- so ours get to be a novelty.  

We have one GED, so far. And we have some crazy number of advanced degrees, including three PhD's.   We go to different churches, those of us who go, and we live in different regions of the U.S.  For stretches of time, at least two relatives are in different countries altogether.  One is half Icelandic. We are many different shades of human.

We are a big, bizarre jumble - and our kids are truly excited when distant relatives emerge, and plans expand.  Fascinatingly, the question "how exactly are we related?" has really never come up.  Not even with Bass, who is 9, and questions everything.

Two degrees of separation- from us to others- bring together wholly implausible combinations of people.  

We are bi-coastal, bipartisan, biracial.  Biologically connected, and not.

A family should stretch.  It should embrace.  Children should be around adults from different places who do things differently than their parents.  They should know there are Special people, people for whom they should be willing to do anything.  The bonds to those people formed before many were even born.  

I love that we can look around our extended family and, making no excuses, see true and loving organic diversity.  I love the differentness and celebrating the sameness - common histories and common nows.  I love that people call, and drop in - and stay awhile.  

We are, even those among us who don't know what they believe about such things, truly blessed.  All of us.  

Here

Not enough can be said about old friends. Connecting with people, people with whom you have connected before or still - both versions providing a panacea from all the newness that is sometimes life - life in the David Byrne "this is not my beautiful house" way that being a grown up is all about.

A weekend of friends - various friends from various times - all from impossibly long ago (since, when I paused to realize I have known the newest friend of either group... for ten years..) came after a smidge of social panic, a year of avoiding hosting anything....

The weekend served to 'get my head right.' I feel alive and grown up and grateful and relieved to be the person I am with the experiences I have had in the place where I am right now - with a rich melange of friends. Fun, funny, interesting, compassionate, good people who didn't care that the cobwebs were still on the porch.

(I noticed them at Saturday's cook out. Then noticed them again at Sunday's. It's Monday night. Along with the folding chairs thrown out to seat folks on the cooler side of the house... they are there still.)

I like my littles to see us with other bigs, and I like to see them scrambling with other kids, both known and not - their own age and not, in and out of the house, toys strewn and loud noises up and down the street. I like nerf gun battles and scooter races, sidewalk chalk and competitive kick-the-can.

I like to imagine, when they see us laughing aloud with people they don't really know, that they are baffled a little by the 'real' us, by the normalcy we must've projected once - before we yelled and maintained and instructed (and, sometimes, ignored). Before we were -gasp - Parents.

After the weekend of magical guests, I got up my littles all went to day camp to give me two weeks of working peace. That seemed a small miracle in itself. A quiet house, and a to do list that got... done.

The house is clean again, and I am starting my own scramble, some - to put the rest of the summer into place, and to figure out how to get more adults in my world. So I can remember who I am - which seems to leave a whole lot more of me for my Littles.

Preparing

As a contractor, I work with/for essentially, one person.  She mentioned in an email today that she was leaving to get her daughter ready for 8th grade prom.

Prom?  

I thought about this. I got, in my head, a little haughty.  It seemed - forced.  Another sign of how we rush things now.  We had no such thing at early eighties Jefferson Davis Middle School.

(Yep.  In South Florida.  In a town that was still undiscovered jungle swamp during his "presidential" reign.. Jefferson. Davis. Middle. School.)

I was nursing on this nugget of self-righteousness when it hit me.

Wait a minute.

WE didn't, because we were rednecks and wannabe gang-bangers.  We were a dangerous South Florida suburban mess, with smoke-filled bathrooms, girl fights in the halls, and a kid that used to pin live lizards to his shirt, concealed under an overshirt.  Only just.  

WE were JD.

I went to JD because we moved to West Palm from a tiny, desperate town in Georgia, and when we arrived in July knowing no one,  we couldn't get into the Catholic school right away.  

By the time we did, I was invested in the neighborhood, and walking to school along the canal (past alligators.  And only once did we encounter a scary naked man, the infamous "Boogie Cain.") I begged to stay. 6th grade gave way to 7th, 8th.  I never transferred out.

Since I was not in Catholic school, I had CCD.  On Wednesday nights.  With Conniston kids, and the few JD kids that were not pre-criminal.  

Conniston Middle School was a few miles East, attended by the kids that lived closer to the Intercoastal.  The only way I knew kids from there at all was because of CCD.

At CCD, I met my First Date.  He, Tica, and I would spar during the break in class.  Chat, laugh.  I had crushes by that point, but "dating" him had not occurred to me.

Until he asked me to the 8th Grade Formal.  At Conniston.  

I wore a skirt and blouse.  Two blouses, layered.  Ombre-pastel-rainbow.  I wore 6 skinny silk cords braided into my hair that matched.  

Dressed, with time to kill, I proudly, giddily, went by Tica's house. Her sister, 7 years senior and impossibly stylish, assessed my attire and said, helpfully, "What the hell IS that in your hair? You better get it out before someone sees you!"  I left, a little deflated - but not defeated.

Back at home, my date arrived.  His dad stayed in the car and sent him to the door.  He met my dog.  He said hi to my Mom.  I noticed for the first time that he was shorter than me.  

His dad filled the silence on the way there.  Then dropped us off to... dance.

My prior dancing experience consisted exclusively of leaping up and down  on Tica's living room couch to REO Speedwagon and AC/DC albums while singing into a hairbrush.  And the slow stuff?  My palms sweatily draped across his slightly lower shoulders, our witty back-of-CCD reparte abandoned me. I felt conspicuous, and conspicuously awkward. 

I knew no one at the school, so I couldn't even escape to the bathroom to commiserate and share lipgloss.

What was his name?  This gnawed at me until I called Tica.  15+ moves, many miles, and years between there and here, and it is rare that we go more than three days without talking. While I feel certain we never talked about him, or that evening, again - she knew the answer.  Without a blink.

8th grade prom.  What a fantastic and ridiculous notion.  That I survived it is no surprise - however it felt at the time.  But that I still have the same comrade-in-arms with whom to recall it is nothing short of amazing.

My only memory of the dance itself is that cluster of emotions:  wanting someone I knew there, wanting to be comfortable, to dance, to date, to be grown up and OK with my own skin.  And I wanted to not have to go to high school, yet.  

All that preparation - and then looking back thirty years later.  WIth notsomuch to remember there in those middle two hours.

I only wish I coulda been part of today's pedicures and preparations, so I could, for a minute, imagine myself to be at all prepared for the day my own 8th grade girl tumbles out into that weird pre-dating, pop-music thumping, disco ball-spinning, crepe-paper dodging, sweaty palmed intersection of anticipation and nostalgia. 

When that day comes... I know I'll be calling Tica.

Lottery

My daughter's soccer game had just ended and she was hanging upside-down on some playground equipment when I checked my phone for email messages.  

When it buzzed that new messages were loaded, I looked, and laughed out loud at a message my friend had posted in reply to my Facebook status "off to the public school pre-k lottery, wish me luck."  The friend had replied "they're lotterying off pre-schoolers?  I'll take two!"  

The message was from Andy, one of my oldest friends, and someone I would have always said would be a natural dad.  Among many other things, Andy is gay.  He and his partner seriously consider adoption, but live in Florida - which presents new levels of stickiness to what is already not a simple proposition.

My daughter heard me laugh, stopped what she was doing, and came over.  She asked why I laughed.  

So I told her.  

Soon talking myself into something of a hole, I ended up explaining all of it - the comment, what it meant, why he would say it, who his partner is, what gay is. All of it. In about 6 minutes, to a six-year-old, while we walked.

I explained that 'gay' ("You may have heard of it, in regards to gay marriage?") is in your wiring - that it's part of who you eventually are, as a grown up - and not anything you control on your own.

While I endeavored to explain gay marriage and adoption, she was baffled at why any of this would be controversial. (Since I addressed that a little, too, in the six minutes, and since we have adopted children in our family.) I was impressed that she was nonplussed, and compassionate in her response over all.

But then she said, "My friend has a friend who is gay. She said her cousin calls him that because he likes girl things."

Wait. No. That isn't what I meant.

I launched a more complicated explanation about how it isn't your job to declare someone else anything, and that while it is a fine thing to be - or rather, to figure out you are - it is bad  to use In That Way, that while someone calling you, Annabeth, a "girl" would be  silly and obvious and not an insult, "gay" isn't like that, and it isn't ours to claim since we don't live in it. That sometimes, it is used meanly to say that a boy isn't being 'boy' enough, and that ultimately that's just an insult to girls - because - so what? Why would being like a girl ever be bad?

Which is a long-winded way to say that, after a number of twists and turns as we walked around a soccer field, I gave Annabeth the short, scaled down version of a Judith Warner essay I learned ran last week.

It has always been bizarre to me that the worst thing you can accuse a boy of being is anything feminine.  It is a completely fabricated cultural construct that, as Judith says much more eloquently in her essay, a boy existing anywhere outside the narrowly defined fraternity boy patriarchy myth is made somehow "less."  

There are still so many scary double-standards in how we view gender, and what our kids face on the playground away from their presumably more enlightened parents.

I want the world to be safe for my kids to be whoever they are.  It's that simple.  For sexual orientation to be an after-thought, and a pre-adolescent non-issue for all children (given the hyper-sexualization of girls, and the gender fault lines evident in a walk through Toys R Us, this is difficult in the best of circumstances.)  They should have the freedom to play, to develop skills in line with interests.  To have quiet crushes without pressure to "go with" someone as early as fourth grade.

Of course I like living in a world where my daughter's soccer game has all the merit of her brothers' lacrosse game, where she can imagine she can be anything at all she wants to be... and I cringe at the idea that my sons might be judged harshly any time one steps outside of a very specifically defined box.  

As Bethy said, "They're just being them - and if you're being you, why would you care?"

Exactly.   

 

Another article on the related topic; homophobia and bullying and tragically, another death.  Tolerance is an urgent message for our children.  This matters.  

Pop

Liz Lemon did it again.  

The first time was earlier this season.

With the reunion?  When she finds out she was mean in high school?  Snubbing-less-she-be-snubbed? Ha-ha.  Funny premise.

Weeks later...on Facebook and idly wondering what makes people friend some and not others...it hit me.  

Maybe, in high school, I was some version of that Liz Lemon?!

I had thought, back in the foggy mid-eighties, that those prettier, more together, working harder, honor role kids just didn't *get* me.  Because I just didn't want to play,  I thought, conveniently, that I should get by on my (under-appreciated) looks and (underexercised) raw intelligence.

Now.  Those same kids - the ones who tried? Who made it all so important when I, in my infinite wisdom (and 2.75 GPA) suspected it wasn't?  In a different city, in a different time - those kids have kids.  And their kids?  Are in private school.  With mine.  Who are woefully unprepared.

They are unprepared because Mom still doesn't want to play.

On last night's 30 Rock, we saw the return of Dr.Drew Baird. (mmm..Jon Hamm...) The premise was that he is so good-looking, so graced, that people expect little of him and fill him with lies.  

Jack Donaghy explains the Bubble, and the loss of the Bubble.  I laughed 'cuz it was funny.  A ridiculous premise?

I was driving home from my son's third grade play the next day, almost in tears.

Chief trigger was the set of Charlotte's Web. I had derided the moms that made a big deal of the stage, the props -( this is third grade, the play isn't blocked, each character is shared by six kids) But it looked great.  

Two of my props were rejected as inadequate (and I fancy myself crafty...), and my son's Zuckerman costume was Not Quite Right.  Even though we got the same Farmer Costume Memo as every other Zuckerman mom (and there were five of them!)

After my son performed the walk-up-to-the-mike rendition of a play, written for about 8 kids, along with 59 of his closest friends, perfect moms told me he was great - and I had no idea who they were.  I should know, but I could not access their names from my back brain.

In this dull, inglorious moment in the car feeling sorry for myself, it hit me.  I know the Bubble.

 Because while high school may not be kind to the I -think-I-might-be-prettier-and-smarter-than-you-so-I-flirt-too-much-and-laugh-too-hard-when-I-get-the-grown-up-jokes-of-the-AP-English-teacher-and-treat-everything-with-a-note-of-disdain-and-irony... your twenties?  Especially if you got to live them in the irony-loving nineties?  In your twenties, folks eat that shit up.

All of the sudden - for a minute, maybe, or for something like six or seven years - I lived like I was It.

Cool job, witty, accomplished friends, free German cars.  Professionally, personally - I felt untouchable.  I flirted as I breathed.  I got promoted. I worked way over my head and I gathered in large, chummy packs at the neighborhood bar in the tony neighborhood...that I walked to.

Because no one ever accused me of making things look easy, I assumed my aggressive wheel-spinning and frenetic pace meant I was working hard.

My eventual husband believed it, too. He would say later that his initial impression was that I was "out of his league."  He imagined that I had it together - because there was so much of it, and it looked confusing to the outsider.

I was in the Bubble.  

And inside, it actually WAS confusing. But it was contained, somewhat.

All that happened, besides growing up, and getting married, and having kids, and folding into private schools (quite by accident, but I digress) is that I outgrew the bubble.  And now, 40, with those intrepid kids in tow ... the bubble is gone.

The mess is no longer contained by the walls of the bubble, and I am exposed to the (god love him, still-with-me) husband.  I am invisible to those working harder, with better qualifications and a  more complete rule set.  My confusion confuses them.  They expect more of themselves... shouldn't I?

Inside the bubble...even if I invented it... was better.

So somehow?  Now, I guess?  It's time to grow up.  Or at least fake it a lot more convincingly.

Ergg.