Room of Doom

In an act that I can only blame on menopausal hormones, about two years ago I got rid of my cleaning people. Sure, I had my reasons. It was a husband/wife team and the husband used to creepily follow me around while I got ready for my exercise class in the morning. Then I'd get home after they were gone, lift up the ottoman in the family room, and find out that they'd shoved a bunch of junk under there. Was it them or was it hormones?

Either way, they were gone. I was sure I could handle it myself. I have two big strapping children and a  helpful husband, right?

Now, looking back, I want to kick myself with this insane thinking. Husband was once in the mindset that a cleaning crew was necessary our existence. I mean, he had one before I met him! Before I fired them Husband had no idea that wives actually could clean houses. Now? No longer.

So that leads me to this week and the Hannukah party I'm having here on Sunday. And the absolute ruin I live in.

Since I can't really handle all the mess in all the rooms at once, I've worked out a method over these last two years of being the housecleaner. I call it Room by Room, similar to Anne LaMott's Bird by Bird. I only tackle one room at a time. I don't get sidetracked. And one caveat: once I'm done with that particular room,  Bar Mitzvahzilla and Daughter aren't allowed to walk into it again until the party is over. Even if it's, like, their bathroom and there are three days till the party. Go to the neighbor's house.

Now I know I've got five days still but right now our house is basically a tear down and I need to use my time wisely. So I plan to start with the rooms no one uses at all, like the dining room, my art room (haven't used that in awhile), the den (where I can easily clean around Bar Mitzvahzilla sitting frozen staring at the TV screen with only his thumbs moving on his Xbox controller), and my office (thank goodness for my months-long writer's block!)

The rooms we really live in - the family room and kitchen - I have to treat carefully. I can't completely move the kids out, right? And once they're cleaned I don't want to be chasing the kids around and watching each cookie crumb fall to the floor with a wild-eyed look in my eye. So I'll hold off on that and use the kids wisely. Have them do their own rooms. I'll assign chores to them that will be done badly, all in a mad, crazed dash to get to whatever's been promised them in return for those chores.

Then, in one last herculean effort, I'll unclutter the rest of the house and move every last piece of remaining junk, by putting it all into my bedroom - the Room of Doom. Then I'll blockade the door so no one can get in there.

When I greet my guests on Sunday night, our house will look like a house that actual human beings live in. I'll  demur when the few people who've never seen the house before ask for a tour that includes my bedroom (Sorry! It's kind of messy right now!) and then wait for the inevitable outcome of the Hannukah party: a destroyed house. Wrapping paper everywhere, food sloshed and dropped, ground into the floors, babies running and drooling.

And then I'll clean it again. Maybe in time for next Hannukah.

Do you clean just to let things get messed up again or leave them messy and clean afterwards? Do you have a method for cleaning? Do you have cleaning people or do it yourself? Ever have one "Room of Doom" where everything bad is hidden?

A Pilgrim's Potluck

Being one of seven sisters means a lot of things. It means that I grew up in a crowded house and found it downright eerie to be alone. It meant never eating out, wearing hand-me-downs; it meant having relatives look at me and always needing to guess "which sister" I was and always get my name wrong. For ease they reverted to numbering us. I am still known as number six.

It also means this: I've never once made a Thanksgiving meal. I'm not happy about this because I kind of like making a big, nightmarish, complicated meal (see Passover blog entries from last spring), but I don't get to. See, I'm not the sister in charge of Thanksgiving. I'm the sister in charge of Hanukkah, so to speak, and since Hanukkah bounces around the calendar, one year at the end of December and the next at the beginning - like this year - I can't do both.

So for Thanksgiving we drive off from our house in whatever direction the party's at - this time it was at sister number seven's new house. I'm assigned a dish to bring, always something suspiciously simple because there seems to be an impression in our family that I can't cook. One small mistake - a charred, inedible brisket - in all these years and my reputation was ruined forever. So this year I was assigned a very traditional Thanksgiving dish, one everyone fantasizes whenever they think about Thanksgiving, right after they think about turkey, stuffing and pecan pie. I was assigned the veggie tray. 

We have a veggie tray at our party for a couple reasons. First of all, in a family with seven sisters and many grown nieces and nephews, everyone's always dieting so vegetables are welcome. Second of all, there are so many people coming (just add up for a moment seven sisters, husbands, seventeen nieces and nephews,  significant others, and five great-nieces) that we run out of food assignments. Hence, the veggie tray. Maybe it's not just my incompetence or my reputation as a bad cook; maybe it's that: there's nothing left to assign. I take solace in the idea that the pilgrims probably had a lot of vegetables at their first Thanksgiving.

Luckily I didn't screw it up. Maybe I can parlay this success into something more significant next year, like soda pop.

Do you cook Thanksgiving or go somewhere? In your family are you assigned food to bring? Ever get assigned something that didn't quite fit the holiday or something really easy?

Synagogue Shopping Season

I was at my synagogue the other day with Daughter and since Daughter is now five feet one (I think she grew twelve inches in the last two years) one of the older ladies I know there asked me, "Have you booked her Bat Mitzvah date yet?"

I looked chagrined. Every good Jewish mother knows she's supposed to book the date with the synagogue at two years out and I'm at one year and nine months. What's the problem?

Is it that I'm afraid that instead of having a Bar Mitzvahzilla, like my son started morphing into around the time period of his Bar Mitzvah, I'll have quite the Bat Mitzvahzilla on my hands? Am I afraid I'll have to change the name of the blog? Or maybe that I'll have to start a new blog just to keep track of her varying demands (a kids' table shaped like an 'R'? Really? Her name in lights?)

Here's the real problem: I'm not sure my synagogue is going to exist in September of 2012.

There's this strange thing that happens in the Jewish community in Phoenix and, for all I know, in the Jewish communities all over this country: Sometime each summer the Jewish community goes synagogue shopping. Since synagogue dues are traditionally due before the high holidays which tend to fall in September and October, around August a synagogue fair is held to showcase new synagogues, old synagogues, and changed synagogues. 

In a community like Phoenix, where there are now fifty-five synagogues and many people who don't affilitate at all, sometimes it feels like, well, synagogue shopping season. Like there just might be a newer, more exciting place elsewhere, a younger, more exciting Rabbi, or lower dues. And, of course, there are valid reasons to leave a place of worship, like fees, like the Rabbi, like for spiritual fulfillment.

But what happened during this past summer was that a lot of people left the place that we belong to, threatening its existence.

Husband and I are a little dull-witted about this kind of stuff. It's not that we're massively spiritually fulfilled by our congregation, it's just that we have a relationship with them that, after thirteen years, feels right. It feels like home. And when we're there - even if we don't understand a word of the Hebrew - it reminds us of the services we grew up with and the Judaism of our parents.

I still live with this one nightmare from soon after our move to Arizona, when I was fourteen. My dad died suddenly at age 48 of a massive heart attack and we were unconnected to the Jewish community. We had no community to lean on for support nor a Rabbi to help us or to eulogize our father. The rabbi who showed up at his funeral - was he on a rotation list for the unaffiliated? - came and went swiftly, almost forgetting my dad's name in the middle of the service. That will never happen to my children and what happened to my father will never happen to my mother. The child of fourteen is now fifty and has changed all of that.

So I guess I'd better just have a little faith and book the Bat Mitzvah date. And get ready for Bat Mitzvahzilla.

Do you tend to change your house of worship frequently, if you go to one? Do you have any clear motivating reason why you do or don't belong to one? In your religion do you have a choice about where you worship? Ever had a kid grow this quickly?

Crashing Through

I've spent a lot of time at my mother's house over the last two-plus weeks, since she and Stepfather were involved in a car accident. I'm kind of their own personal adjuster since my old job, when I had a real job, was handling bodily injury claims for a really big insurance company for eighteen years.

There are things you discover when you putter around an old person's house with them each day. In the case of my mother I discover that, although she apparently has a inbred aversion to taking any prescription medication at all, instead taking horse-size vitamins impossible for me to sort into a pill container, she still somehow has saved every medication she's ever come across.

I open her medicine cabinet the night of her accident looking for Tylenol since one of the things I found out right away is that when you're eighty-five and eighty-years-old and involved in an accident, it might just be impossible to have someone really listen to you who's not related to you. Not the police officers and not the emergency room staff. No one. They'll take a look at your Medicare card, they'll make sure you're not dying, and then you'll be set on your way, even if you can't remember any one of your seven daughters' phone numbers. So neither of them had gotten a prescription at the emergency room.

In her medicine cabinet, however, were pill bottles dating back at least twenty-five years. There was one with my old name on it, from my ex-marriage, and I got divorced in 1989. It was like a pharmacy museum in there: old time pill bottles, typed up labels before computers were used, various treacherous caps that my mom would never be able to open now.

Then I spent some time with Stepfather. I found him outside a few days after the accident hanging up my mother's laundry on the clothes line with the radio blasting. Because we have a bantering relationship I said, "You guys must be very popular with the neighbors, what with the blasting radio and the makeshift clothesline," just a series of strings he had strung all over the patio from chair to chair. He laughed and explained the problem he was having with my mother overfilling her laundry basket and cracking the handles. He'd devised a fix, however, and took me to the garage to show me it. He'd glued the handles back together on both ends with some epoxy and was holding them in place with vise grips. Like twenty vise grips. I said, "Or you could buy a new laundry basket at the dollar store for a dollar, right?" Again, he laughed.

There have been a lot of frustrations over the last two weeks, a lot of doing something and then doing it again and again because of various problems in the process. But there are also several images that will always stay with me. There's the image of my stepfather sitting down silently next to my mother, in pain on the couch, and holding her hand. The image of them getting out of the car together when I took them to physical therapy, again walking hand in hand. And one I'd like to forget: that of my mother, whose Alzheimer's has worsened because of this, sitting beside me on the couch, but being nowhere near.

What strange things have you discovered in your parents' homes? Any strange collectibles, like prescription bottles? Witnessed any touching moments? Any heartbreaking ones?

Battle Over the Halloween Candy

Halloween should be fun, right? Like since I have a son who is about to age out of Halloween - okay, he really did age out but went out anyway - and a daughter who's still young enough to enjoy it, I should be having fun, right?

But no, at our house there's the Battle of the Halloween Candy. And it starts before Halloween, quiets down to a lull on the day of Halloween (kids out hunting for more candy to fill up our coffers) and then continues after Halloween.

First problem: we buy a gigantic bag of candy from Costco ahead of time that contains only the good stuff - M&Ms (peanut and regular), Kit Kats, Baby Ruths, Reece's Peanut Butter Cups. The good stuff.

Then there's the second problem: the family wants to eat it all. I mean, they don't want to eat it all and end up pretending we're not home on Halloween, they want us to keep buying those bags over and over again for the next nine days.

The third problem: the children are distrustful of my husband, believing he'll devour all the best stuff and my husband is distrustful of the children since he, of course, both wants the best stuff and doesn't want them to eat anything. He might talk sanctimoniously about cavities but really he just doesn't want to share. Or buy another bag for fourteen bucks.

And that's only before Halloween.

Then the kids trick or treat and bring home more candy. And it turns out we don't run out of candy because I - the neurotic mother - did buy an extra bag. And then we pool it all and there's like a mountain of candy. And then they're off and fighting again.

So, each year, I get pulled into the fray. Mainly because I don't eat candy or chocolate or, really, anything fun at all, I'm as neutral as Switzerland, as placid as Lake Geneva. So both sides trust me with the candy. I'm the human form of an Armistice. I'm told to hide the candy - how does one hide a gigantic bowl of candy? -and then I have to parcel it out to each of them at three pieces per day.

Eventually they'll forget it, of course. (Except Husband. He'll remember it no matter what.) And then months will go by; I'll throw it out when it's down to Red Hots, black Licorice and Nerds. And then, suddenly, it will be September again, a little Fall in the air, gigantic bags of candy at Costco and I will buy a bag ahead of time. Again.

Do you save the treats for Halloween or indulge ahead of time? Does anyone special have to be in charge of "hiding" the candy in your house? Do you buy what you like or what you don't like? Any non-celebrators of Halloween out there? 

R.I.P. BlackBerry

On Sunday my BlackBerry died.

It's not like I had time to think about it right then. I had just walked in my mother's house with her and my stepfather, having gotten them from the emergency room where they'd been transported after a car accident. So right then I had time to think only about this: my injured eighty-year-old mother teetering down the hallway, making her way to her bedroom to undress and somehow climb into bed with lacerations and bruises all over her body. So, even though I'm a slave to the blinking red light of my phone, hypnotized by its allure, unable to resist its blinking call, I ignored it and took care of my mother.

You know how you always hear these phone horror stories, like about people losing all their lists of contacts and phone numbers and why didn't they just back it up before that happened, before disaster hit? Well, of course, that's what happened to me. I didn't back anything up, mostly because I didn't understand the back up technology. Like, copy it to what? Online or a memory chip in the phone? Ack. Here was my backup plan: one day I was planning to sit down with my phone and handwrite all those contacts into an actual paper phonebook. With all the time I've spent procrastinating over the last few months, you'd think at least I could have done that one thing, which would have been useful.

Instead? Dead BlackBerry flatlining in my palm. Injured mother on the couch. Tow yards, body shops and insurance companies calling nonstop, doctor appointments to be made, all of these places wanting to fax something, email something, text something. Phone needed.

Providentially this happens to be four days before our plotted defection from Verizon to AT&T and, perhaps, an iPhone 4. So what to do for a phone in the interim? My husband gives me this thing he has laying around the house. A  flip phone. To text I have to go through the entire alphabet for each letter. No emails, no internet. I'm completely unwired in the daytime, like it's 1990 or something. It's like he handed me a chisel and a tablet and told me to scratch out messages.

But somewhere in my brain it's dawning on me that this thing I'm using is actually just what it's supposed to be: a phone. I now also know an incredible reason to have children, beyond the cute baby stage, beyond the make-me-proud stage. It's so when you're eighty and can't handle the small details of your life anymore and can't quite talk to strangers about how they're talking too fast and you don't understand them, it's a good thing to have your adult children standing like a fortress around you.

Do you back up your phone? Do you remember when you were really excited just to have a phone and now have to have a high tech gadget? Any preference between BlackBerrys or iPhones?  Have you had to become the "parent" in any circumstances to your parent?

The On Again Off Again Romance

The first hint that Husband and I might actually be able to get away together - for one whole day and a half - was when I got a memo from Daughter's school about her upcoming fifth grade trip. Daughter, who won't sleep out ever, no matter what, will also not miss a class trip, no matter how much she can't stand letting me out of her sight.

So, being a shameless opportunist, I thought, Maybe we can go out of town while she's gone! But then I thought, But what will we do with Bar Mitzvahzilla?

The next four weeks were a wild, rocky roller coaster, not knowing from one day to the next if our trip was on or off.

We couldn't go. After all, Bar Mitzvahzilla had to go to school each day. And football practice. And Hebrew High.

We could go. Bar Mitzvahzilla, it turned out, was on Fall Break the very same week as Daughter's trip. No school and we'd wiggle out of football practice and one session of Hebrew High.

We couldn't go. Who would keep him overnight?

We could go. My sister.

We couldn't go. My sister was moving and, just our luck, had moved forty miles from our house the day before we were leaving.

We could go. She'd meet us half way to get Bar Mitzvahzilla.

We couldn't go. Daughter started worrying about the trip. Her stomach started acting up.

We could go. Psychosomatic illness.

We couldn't go. Daughter, now crazed with separation anxiety, kept herself up half the night before her trip worrying about missing me. (Somehow she never worries about missing Husband.)

We could go. Planted her on a bunch of pillows on the floor next to my bed and let her watch me all night.

And we did go. We both saw her off at school, carefully, like delicate china, since by then we had non-refundable reservations at a hotel. Then Husband drove Bar Mitzvahzilla to the drop off point, dropped him off, and we took off like a flash.

The next day, rejuvenated, newly back in love, back in our halcyon days of honeymoon and romance, we drove back into town and met Daughter after her return from her trip. Within seconds our romance fled out the windows of the car. We became The Parents once again. Then we picked up Bar Mitzvahzilla so the two of them could bicker at each other. And then we were complete: one bickering couple in the front seat and another bickering in the back.

But there's still that memory. I can live on that for awhile.

Do you ever get away without kids? Do you have to plot and sneak to do it? Does getting away rejuvenate your relationship? What do you do about fighting kids? Any nervious children?  

Time Management

I sit down to write.

This takes a while. I wander throughout the house. I clean, I fuss, I do laundry, I make phone calls. I wander and wander, give myself imaginary tasks and then, when I absolutely can't avoid it any longer, I get in my office. Since I'm pretty good at avoidance, some days I don't make it in there at all.

Then I land in front of my computer. The blank screen. Well, I can't be expected to just jump into writing, can I? I need to relax into it. Mosey into it. Maybe flow into it, right?

So I check the news of the day on MSN, my homepage. Watch some video news, fume at the commercial spots as I watch the seconds count down. Ready to write now for sure. Oh, but I really need to check Facebook. And look, someone's posted some new photos. Then I look at a video they posted. Then I remember I'm supposed to be writing. Then I notice that there's a window I left up from another day of procrastination with some editor jobs in Phoenix. I look at those. Then I mull over whether I should I get a real job, like with pay? One is quite prestigious. What are the requirements? Wow, I'd barely have to lie to get it. Maybe this is what I'm meant to do with my life, not this interminable writing. Maybe I should put in for it. But I need my resume updated with my editor experience. So I pull up my last resume and I start sprucing it up to reflect the editor job I've been working for nearly two years.

I almost finish before doubt assails me. Do I want this job? What if I actually got this job? Could I handle a full-time job with my husband working 60 hours a week at our store? How would I go to exercise and my meetings? Who would pick up my kids? And take them to their myriad appointments? How would both kids participate in sports? And why did I quit my job six years ago where I made $35,000 for 18 hours of work only to sit here applying for a job that pays $40,000 for 40 hours of work? I'd better think about this. So I think about this for awhile. And then I think, look what time it is! I'd better hurry up and write. I have to pick up Daughter in ten minutes.

Pick up Daughter.

Get home with Daughter. Feed Daughter. Read mail. Clean kitchen. Help with homework. Get back in office. Whoa, I am really behind on blogging. Should I write a blog? Maybe I should read all my friend's blogs. Maybe I need to comment on my commenters? Wait a minute. I'm supposed to be writing. I pull up my book. I am now going to write for sure. The phone rings. Bar Mitzvahzilla's football practice is done. Done writing.

Pick up Bar Mitzvahzilla. Feed him. Feed Daughter again. Drive Bar Mitzvahzilla somewhere. I walk back in the house. I look right - my bed looms with comfy pillows on it and the remote controls for the TV set nearby. I look left, towards the long stark hallway to my office and the book I've forgotten how to write.

I turn right.

And the clock just keeps ticking.

Have any problems with procrastination? Is the Internet a big distraction? Does anyone else have this problem with not knowing what to do first? How hard is it to stick to a schedule when you're in charge of it?

A Commercial Break

I'm not proud of the amount of time I've spent watching TV lately. Well, not just lately. I can pinpoint exactly when it started: it was late June, when we went on our first summer vacation to Flagstaff. Our hotel room didn't have HGTV, my favorite TV narcotic at the time, and so I started watching Daughter's favorite, Food Network. And that was it. Cupcake Wars. Iron Chef. Throwdown with Bobby Flay. Chopped.

I'm not going to discuss why I suddenly became fascinated with wasting my time and wasting my life away at that exact moment in time. Let's just say that it was right then that I had gotten very depressed about my writing. Coincidence? Probably not. I'll leave that issue to professionals, or to psychogenic drugs, or to the straitjacket that I'm destined for once the masking tape I've stuck myself together with comes undone.

But here's the idea that's dawned on me in this 3-4 month time period that I've been watching television with my kids: they watch commercials and I don't. And I don't mean just that. I mean, they really watch commercials, like they are rapt with attention for the commercials, paying more attention to them than to the actual show we're watching. And I, the polar opposite, do the exact opposite. I really don't watch commercials. I'm hostile to commercials. Commercials are my break time from television. I read, I run out of the room, I change loads of laundry. 

Is it because I was raised in the 60s and 70s, when commercials consisted of Mr. Clean staring at himself in a see-through floor? Or station identification breaks? Or is it a combination of that and the fact that my kids have been raised in a world of Superbowl Sunday commercials, commercials as art forms, commercials with ongoing plots?

I thought I'd beat them at their own game so one day during the commercials I muted the sound, sure that the kids would join me in talking, mulling things over, or even in getting three minutes of chores done. Instead here's what I had: two zombies staring at the soundless TV and trying to read the lips of the actors. Turns out it wasn't really a problem anyway. They'd memorized the scripts long ago.

Been avoiding anything by vegging out lately? Do you watch commercials? Do your kids? Any Food Network aficionados?

Essential Yiddish: Part II

 

                                                    "Yiddish" in Yiddish 

I've been meaning to write a follow up to my post, Essential Yiddish: Part I, for quite some time. Not that I'm some kind of Yiddish expert. It's just that, having grown up with Yiddish swirling around my suburban Skokie house, listening to my mother give colorful commentary on everyone who walked in and out of our lives, I can't imagine life without it. Yiddish, to use a Yiddish word, is poonkt - a Yiddish word for getting something just right, perfectly, even if we're talking about my house, which is never actually just right or perfect.

                                                   The Yiddish Hoarder

The other day I was watching "Hoarders: Buried Alive." When the show was over I suddenly noticed that I hadn't seen my master bathtub in quite a while because of all the chazerai [haz-er-eye] (junk) I had piled in it. This was because I had taken that chazerai out of my closet and needed somewhere to put it. It's a constantly shifting pile of drek (see Post #1) around here, basically.

Since I was watching Hoarders with Daughter, a true nudnik [nood-nick] (precocious child), she noticed the resemblance between the house on the TV set and my bathroom. She said, "Mom, you're a hoarder!"

I took a deep breath. Instead of shraying [shrie-ing] (yelling) about it, moaning about it, wailing about it, I looked around and I thought, I need all that chazerai like a loch in kopp (hole in my head). But I wasn't sure I'd have the coyach [koy-ach] (energy) to do all the cleaning myself. So I asked the kleina [klayna] (little one) nudnik to help and Bar Mitzvahzilla, who, with all his football training, has become quite the shtarker (heavy lifter, tough guy).

And soon, though I was farmisht (exhausted); though I thought I might plotz (collapse) - the tub? Gornisht [gor-neesh-ed] (nothing). Empty.

Do you have things laying around that you need like a hole in your head? Do you find yourself using one of your kids for heavy lifting and that they have to help you now instead of vice versa? Do you have a secondary language that adds some color to your speech?