Writing Anyway

I happened to be enrolled in my very first Creative Writing class ever on September 11, 2001. It was the fourth class of the semester, a Tuesday, and my day off from work. I had dropped my kids off at school that morning - one at a Jewish Day school and the other at a Jewish preschool. In my car on the way home I had my radio on and the news alerted me to the fact that a plane had crashed into one of the Twin Towers in New York.

The day got worse and worse. By noon Arizona time it was obvious, to me at least, that there was the distinct possibility that terrorists were fanning out across the country, attacking various targets. Were the Jewish schools next? I did a U-turn in the road on my way somewhere to go pick up my kids as a precaution, just as my phone rang with the first of the two schools telling me they were closing for the day.

For a bunch of really stupid reasons I had waited until I was forty-one-years-old to ever take a writing class. So, even though as the day was unfolding, writing was looking like the most stupid occupation in the world, I asked my mother to watch my kids so I could go.

I walked into the class and, surprisingly enough, so did all my other classmates. By then, we knew the devastation that had taken place in New York. We all felt embarassed of our writing, of even thinking of writing ever in our entire lives. How could we have ever been involved in something so stupid and self-centered as writing, we asked our professor? People were dying, jumping out of buildings, planes were crashing, and we were sitting there writing.

And she said, don't ever believe that the work you do is unimportant. It's the writers who will define what happened today for generations to come. It's the writers who will write the books and the articles and explain what life was like on this day so historians can write the history of what this day was like. Without writers, we'd know nothing about the Vietnam War, nothing about the entire history of the human people. It's the writers in a society who put form to experience. Never feel bad about writing. Writing is an important job.

I've thought of those words of hers a lot in these quiet days in the blogosphere following the earthquake in Haiti. I've thought, none of us wants to be funny, or write about our kids, or about our exercise or weight loss efforts. None of us want to be trivial because we're worried about trivializing the lives that are, even now, being lost.

But then I think of her words and that creating relationships is no small task, and that making people laugh is not a job for the weak-willed. That writing about the world, even in a tiny corner of it, is a noble task, and carrying on in the untouched world while being touched by the tragedy is not a contradiction in terms.

So I'll keep blogging, and I'll write my humor, and you'll know that, even though I'm doing that, I'm thinking of Haiti.

Breaking News

It's a typical nighttime in our house. Husband and I are reading the newspaper together, the kids are both taking showers in different bathrooms, trying to race and see who will use up all the hot water first and deprive the other of an enjoyable shower. After all, any day you can cause misery to your sibling is a good day for either one of them.

Husband got to the paper before me so I'm reading each crinkled up, disheveled section after him, and I'm actually thinking he read each one thoroughly.

I ask my him, "Did you read that story about the real estate blogger who posts pictures of ugly houses on this blog?" 

He looks at me blankly.

I recap the story briefly to jog his memory. He's still blank. I give him a look.

"Did you read the paper?" I ask. He says yes, he just didn't read that one story.

Right. I look at him suspiciously. I know he's really only reading the comics and checking the weather for tomorrow. And we live in Arizona; it's not like there are any dramatic weather changes in store for us. 

Amazing. Here we are, sitting next to each other at the kitchen table, reading the same newspaper, married nearly seventeen years, yet so different that we stare at each other blankly when one of us wants to discuss a particular story with the other. Okay, it's always me who wants to discuss a story and it's always him looking at me blankly.

Nearly seventeen years of mismatched marital bliss.

Yet this time, one thing we agree on, one story we haven't missed - the plea for aid to Haiti. 

Sound the Alarm

Husband and I are different in so many ways. One of the most obvious? How we wake up.

We're sleeping. The room is dark - very dark. We made sure of this by putting up drapes over our wooden blinds. So we have no sense of what time it is by the amount of light.

But then the alarm goes off.

On Husband's side of the bed, things are starting to move. His is the organized side of the bed, which means he actually heard the alarm. The night before, he meticulously set the alarm for twenty minutes before he needs to get out of bed, so when it goes off, an arm claws its way out of the covers, reaches for the clock and he puts it on snooze. Then he snoozes. It goes off again. He puts it on snooze again, now watching it like an alligator, with one eye open beneath the covers. Then it goes off the final time - it is 6:58 AM, time to hop out of bed. And hop he does.

Over on my side of the bed, things are a little less organized. First of all, I don't hear the alarm clock at all, not the first time, nor snooze numbers one, two, or three. This is mainly because Husband has set the alarm to turn on with music, and very quietly, so, in my lazy dreamlike state, I just weave his Classic Rock station into the fabric of my dream.

But he's out of bed, opening the curtains, welcoming the day, waking up the kids, while now I'm staring at the clock in denial. I know I have six minutes till it goes off again and I know the latest time I can make it out of the house with a shower. Then, laying there half dead, I try to do the math to figure out how many snoozes I can have. 
Bar Mitzvahzilla and Daughter have cross-inherited our tendencies. If I'm waking up the kids, sometimes Daughter surprises me by being fully up and dressed yet laying under the covers in her room tricking me. Okay. That would make her like Husband.

No chance of that with Bar Mitzvahzilla. He can sleep through his light being turned on brightly, his radio blasting, his cover taken away. We can walk in there a half hour later and see his big feet and hairy legs sprawled out on the bed, all of him comatose. And that would mean he takes after me.

Yet, somehow, at 8:00 everyday, despite all the smashing of the alarm clocks, all the storming into Bar Mitzvahzilla's bedroom to make sure he's up, all the suspicious questioning about the brushing of the teeth, a car - one or the other - pulls out of the driveway on its way to school, in time for the school's alarm at 8:15.

Dream House

I've lived in my house for almost seventeen years. We built this house as newlyweds and I've been stuck here ever since. I need to just face the fact that I'm never getting out of this house.

I should have known when I met Husband that he wasn't the kind of guy who moved around a lot. He was pretty settled in his own nice little house back then. The fact that it was in a neighborhood that was crumbling around him, with dangerous youth gangs roaming the streets, never fazed him. He wasn't the kind of guy who just up and moved. He had to think about it first for a few decades. Also, he came from a family who didn't like change either, like they'd nail a picture up on the wall in 1946 and that's where it would stay for the next sixty years.

Meanwhile, in my family, my mother spent the sixties repainting, recarpeting, refurbishing. If she ran out of money, she just picked up our furniture and threw it down, like dice, into a new decorating configuration. She could never leave anything alone, except permanent fixtures, like light switches and staircases.

I'm not saying my house isn't great, on the inside. Somehow, in 1993 when we bought it, before we even had kids, we ended up with a house with enough space. Nowadays we use a lot more of that space, but still, we're not squished.

But this great house is plopped on a postage stamp piece of property, and the house takes up most of it. If I reach an arm out the window, I can almost touch my neighbor's house. Our front yards are gravel, like the alleys were back in Chicago. In Arizona this is called "landscaping." Since grass doesn't grow naturally here, our backyard has a combination of dirt and weeds that we like to call a lawn.

So I stalk houses with land. I stalk houses with big kids' bedrooms. I stalk houses with views. I stalk houses in neighborhoods that don't have HOAs. I stalk houses with gigantic laundryrooms that don't have doors to the garage at one end of them. I could settle for a house that had a laundryroom that could actually fit a laundry basket in it.

For right now, I think I'll go rearrange some furniture.

Do you always feel like everything would be perfect if you lived in a different place? Do you live in different circumstances than those you grew up in?

A Marriage Built for Three

First there was the way that she "just liked" our shower better than her own. We figured anything was okay as long as we could get her to take a shower by herself, right?

So suddenly there were Herbal Essence products lined up on the windowsill next to my Redken stuff and Husband's generic cheapo shampoo/conditioner combo product. And bathtoys lined up here and there, filling up the whole shower stall.

And then it was her shower too.

Then there was the way she set up a little pretend office in my office so she could work alongside me each night. A little makeshift desk, a tufted stool, some busy work that involved using reams and reams of all the printer paper in the house.

And then, suddenly, it was her office too.

Finally, she managed to finagle her way into our room each night she was sick - the coughing, the hacking, the miserable Daughter coming out of her room so many times she was a blur. Finally we'd succumb, make up a bed on the floor out of couch cushions, pillows and blankets. Trip over her all night. I catch her in a secret smile. She thinks it's now her bedroom too.

Tonight, the realization. The ten-year-old thinks she's part of this marriage. She has no intention of moving out of our room.

When the kids were little, Husband was firm about no kids in the marital bed. They had bassinets, then cribs in our room, and then one day Husband took the crib, moved it down the hall to the nursery and, just like that, they were out. Living independently. The worst roommates you could ever imagine, but still, they had rooms of their own.

But Daughter apparently doesn't like this living arrangement. She's ready to move back in. She'll use any tool in her arsenal - from hysteria to illness to nightmares - to get back in our room. And she has no interest in Husband. She will step on top of him and leave footprints on his head on her way to me. She wants to merge her soul with mine into a more perfect union. Or, at least, she wants to live on the floor next to me.

But Daughter got her marching papers from Husband a few days ago, when her antibiotic started working. She needs to stay in her room, even if she coughs, even if it takes a while to fall asleep.

Husband and I look at each other as she stalks down the hall, wondering if she'll stay in there. And I think about the more important thing: will I ever get my bathroom back?

How have your kids encroached on your turf? Do you remember doing this as a kid - trying desperately to sleep in your parents' room when you had a nightmare or were sick? What qualifies for a kid to get in there now?

The TV Looks Smashing

Okay, I went to the football game on Sunday. I went, I sat, I ate, I was enthused, I was crestfallen, I stayed till the bitter end.

And I thought, Whew, that wasn't so bad. I'm glad I got that out of the way. Now football is over.

But guess what? Football, apparently is never going to end. There is never enough football.

Before we left for the game, the TV was on in our house - a must-see game. Okay, fine. But certainly once we were done being at the actual game, that would be enough, right?

Well, apparently I don't read minds very well. We came home, on went the TV. There was a Bowl game on - the Soup Bowl, I think. The next day, another Bowl game. And every single day this week, Bowl after Bowl after Bowl. Today is Wednesday. There is a Bowl on TV. Who ever heard of football on a Wednesday?

Normally Husband is such a TV snob that, except for football, he can't stand to have the TV on. The last series we actually followed together and watched on an ongoing basis was Seinfeld. It was a long, long time ago. Because of his TV snobbery, I've missed every major TV show of the last ten years. But for football, he makes an exception.

"Football is real," he tells me. "It's not a bunch of actors spouting lines. This is real drama. You don't know the outcome. It's exciting, things change from minute to minute."

I look at the TV. I see a bunch of top-heavy guys crunching against each other to make their way across a big field of grass.

"Shakespeare is drama," I say. "Not football."

He says, "Anyway, the season's over."

I perk up. "Really?"

"Tomorrow night's the last Bowl game."

"Is that it, then, till the Superbowl?" I am chortling with glee.

"Well, that's it for college football."

Just as I'm about to do a little dance, he continues. "But there are NFL Playoff games every Saturday and Sunday starting this weekend till the SuperBowl."

"Oh."

I glare at him; go back to my office.

The Bearded Stranger

I was driving somewhere with Bar Mitzvahzilla the other day when I looked over at him and I saw not one, not two, but three long, white, meandering hairs growing out of his chin, gleaming in the sunlight.  I said, "What is that?" Then he covered up his chin, refusing to show me. How did those grow there, and grow that long, without me noticing?

We've had our awkward adolescent days. We had last summer when he refused to swim without a shirt on, and I had to wonder what was growing under the shirt. Was it a siamese twin growing out of the side of his body? There are the fangs growing in on both sides of his mouth. There's the routine humiliations of adolescence - the pimples, the braces - things the whole world can see. But a sparse, scraggly, hillbilly-looking blonde beard?

Clearly the fact that this thing exists can be blamed on Husband. Just like I'm always on the look out for Daughter's signs of adolescence ("Do you want a training bra yet? How about now? Now?") it's up to Husband to be on red alert with his responsibilites. He should've noticed scraggly hair number one before it began multiplying. And just because Bar Mitzvahzilla has somehow managed to pop out blonde facial hair in a family of swarthy Jews, that's no excuse for Husband not to notice it.

I grew up watching my dad shave with a double-edged razor and shaving soap in a cup. Because he had a cleft in his chin, each day he'd come away wounded with tiny pieces of toilet paper stuck to all the cuts on his face. Not only would he get wounded, but the minute he was done, right after he'd slapped on his Old Spice, his 5:00 shadow was growing back in, he was that hairy.

I can handle all the nitty gritty discussions with Bar Mitzvahzilla and Daughter about sex, all the generalities about how this works or that, but when it comes down to teaching the boy to shave, Husband's just going to have to take out the stropping blade and teach him. Before scraggly hair number four grows in.

A Dunce of a Mom

Daughter is in her fifth day of being sick and today had her second doctor appointment, at which I finally convinced the doctor to put Daughter on an antibiotic. Then I told my mom about it.

My mom loves nothing better than to search and search out a problem and find a solution. The solution to the problem of Daughter being sick was simple: it was because of my shoddy parenting. Everything can always be blamed on me.

She says, "You probably didn't dress her warm enough. That's how she got sick in the first place."

Thanks, mom.

Or, "You didn't feed her enough. She's too skinny. She wouldn't get sick if she weighed more." Okay, that's number two. But since she's starting to rile me up, I'm wondering if it's time to get off the phone yet. Have we talked long enough?

Then I get, "You never should have taken her to the football game yesterday."

Look, if it was up to me, you can bet I would have chosen a day at home with Sick Daughter to a day with eighty thousand screaming and yelling fans at a football stadium, but my mom knows Cheap Husband pretty well by now. There's no way he would willingly say goodbye to $200 on Daughter's unused seat at the game. This is actually outside the realm of possibility.

I'm not saying I'm not a complete dunce of a mother. There are some things that I'm so stupid about that it's scary. I can't put a meal together to save my life. I'm too lenient, constantly wanting to give my kids the childhood I never had by buying it for them. But I know my medical. With nearly lifelong asthma and eighteen years working for a Gigantic Insurance Company, I know my medical. I can diagnose, I can treat. I just can't prescribe or I would've had Daughter on an antibiotic already.

Now that I've been insulted enough, I'm ready to get off the phone, but my mom's not. Before our call ends, she squeezes one more in. One to ruin my week and give me guilt. She says, "You can't send her to school tomorrow. You better keep her home all week."

Thanks, mom. Glad I called.

Drama Queen

Daughter's been sick for a few days. But even though I know it's just a couple days, I'm sure there has to be a better unit of measurement out there - like Dog Years - because each day that Daughter is sick feels like a year. At least to me.

What is it about her and illness? She gets a stomachache and it's absolutely, positively the world's worst stomachache ever and she will not live through it. She lays around moaning and groaning half the day. If she hurts her arm, she gets out a sling; if it's her foot, she gets out a crutch. She's a Drama Queen.

This time her illness is real, not feigned. She has a pretty bad virus. When the doctor's office told me at our emergency Saturday appointment today that it wasn't strep, I was more shocked than Daughter was. But if you take Daughter, add one sore throat, one stuffed head and multiple rounds of sneezing, here's what you get:  a twenty-four-hour a day nag festival.  She can't sleep so I can't sleep. She's going to choke on her swollen tonsils and die if she falls asleep. For sure.

I was a sick little girl at from eleven on. I got asthma very suddenly and it really did end my life as I knew it. I missed half-years of school until we moved to Arizona, and when I did get to school I used to creep around the halfways slowly, my back hunched over like an old lady, no air in my lungs. My mom used to schlep me up to Gurnee, Illinois once a week to the only doctor near Chicago who had a nebulizer machine - the ancestor of the nebulizers people have now. This one took up an entire room. I sat there for an entire afternoon, breathing.

And through all of that I was uncomplaining. I figured everyone had something to bear. In the pediatric asthma offices where I was treated a lot of the kids had horrible, permanent illnesses. I knew, despite the fact that I couldn't breathe, that I had a lot to be grateful for. If I, my mom, and the neaderthal nebulizer could just get my asthma under control, a normal life awaited me. None of that would be true for all these other kids.

Apparently, Daughter does not have the ability to glean the same lesson, certainly not from a virus. Or maybe she's just not seeing sick enough kids in her pediatrician's office. She flomps down on me, miserable and miserably sad for herself. She coughs in my face. She finally goes to sleep.

No-Tell Hotel

                                                      

When we were away this past week, we had a problem with the first hotel we stayed in, necessitating an immediate switch. 

We didn't know this ahead of time so, in the interest of being comfortable, we got to the hotel and unpacked completely.  And I mean completely. We divided up the dresser drawers, then we filled up the drawers and emptied our suitcases. Daughter lined up her stuffed animals on her bed. I created a makeshift kitchen, even though there was only a refrigerator.

Then, suddenly, because of a heating unit that sounded like an airplane was taking off from our room and Sleep Number beds that left us sleeping in a large, concave hole, we wanted out. So we packed. And we forgot something. My hair shine spray.

I have problematic hair, a big ball of tangled Jewish hair. This hair requires a lot of products to actually look human each day. Since product purchasing or figuring out is actually beyond my capabilities, I've enlisted professionals to help me with this: my hair stylist and my six sisters.  So each day, to transform my hair from what it is - an Interesting Jewish Fur Ball into what I want it to be - Human Hair - I use about ten products, including my shine spray.

So, of course, I go back to the first hotel from the second hotel to see if they found my shine spray. The Interesting Jewish Fur Ball might have been tamed into looking like hair because I have the other nine products but, hey, it's still not shiny. The front desk clerk, who checked us in a few days before, and could best be described previously as possessing lank, dull hair, looks different. She has suspiciously shiny hair. The other front desk clerk also has shiny hair.  I see some Housekeeping staff wheeling a cart by. Shiny hair too.

She asks me for details and disappears for a long time, allegedly looking for my hair spray. Is she going to try to palm me off with some Aqua Net? She comes back empty handed, accompanied by a bustling manager with, of course, shiny hair.

I leave with nothing, the doors to the hotel full of shiny-haired employees swishing shut behind me.