Hah!

Oops. Hey, Check Out The Interview With Me

Hey, so the flip side of the Great Interview Experiment

It is interesting that Flutterby got assigned to be my interviewer. I'd run across her site once and found it great reading. Very fascinating, authentic. She's trying to do something hard with her blog, to be courageously honest, to put into words the elusive problem of how to live.

You can read the interview she did with me here.

In Defense of Mommy Dearest

I think I know what was wrong with Joan Crawford: She had a stressful job!

Being an actress. Nay, a movie star. It's a lot of pressure. 

Think about it for a minute: Wire hangers suck. They droop, they rust, they get all tangled up in things. The hangy thing is a like a little claw. Why, I've even been injured by a wire hanger.

The wire hangers got to her. The thing is, this screaming in the night thing about the wire hangers could happen to anyone. To me, to you.

OK, maybe just to me.

Introducing: modernemama

So Neil's Great Interview Project is underway.

And I got an amazing person to interview: modernemama!

This is kismet, fate, destiny because modernemama is doing something that I have absolutely dreamed of, which is taking a mid century modern home (BEACH HOUSE! HELLO?) and turning it into a paradise of mid century and more recent modern design. She's also doing some ambitious landscaping. She's living the good life people.

Her house is designed by Andrew Geller. I am agog at how cool the houses he designed are. (Andrew Geller houses) I'd never heard of him and now I'm obsessed.

I must confess that I was once even tempted to start a blog dedicated to my midcentury modern obsession. But, because that kind of stuff is worse than crystal meth for me, I could not go this route. Instead, I'll just live vicariously through Jane's life. (Also, she has the energy and the talent to do much that I could not.)

Seriously, this is the coolest blog y'all. I learned a little bit about architecture, art or design on every page.

Here's my interview with Jane, from modernemama.

What first got you interested in home architecture and design?

I grew up in a traditional-style home but there were two things in it I loved - the 50s wallpaper in the bathroom, lines and dots in black, red, yellow and blue, and the dining room chairs that were Danish modern in style. When I was five or so my parents redid the bathroom and got rid of the wallpaper. I was distraught. They consoled me by telling me my room would be re-wallpapered next and I'd imagined I'd be getting that same pattern. I was horrified to find they'd picked a very little-girl appropriate (and probably expensive) toile pattern. I think I nagged every night for five or six years until I was allowed to paint the walls sunshine yellow.

What inspired you to start your blog?

I started the blog, Beach House, to let family and friends all around the world know what we were doing to update the house and so we'd have some record of the changes. My regret is that I didn't take more before shots!

Your house inspires incredible (friendly and non-vicious) envy in me. My question is: Have you experienced house envy either in the blogosphere or in real life and how do you deal with that envy? Or, if not: Do you ever experience house envy? Is there a house that you are dying to live in?

I'm glad you like my house - I fell deeply in love the first time I saw it for sale online. I didn't know houses this unique came up for sale on Long Island - all I'd seen at that point were ranches, colonials and pseudo-Victorians. Once I'd found houseblogs.net I discovered other bloggers with gorgeous houses of all styles - real Federal homes, beach cottages, four-squares - my house envy has no boundaries. The ones that inspire the deepest feelings, though are the one-offs - other Andrew Geller houses, my neighbor's stable conversion and the 1968 concrete house built by Gwathmey-Henderson that's also in my neighborhood.

Your blog suggests some background in design/art/house construction, etc. How did you get to know as much as you do about aesthetics and construction and so on? Are you self-taught?

My father is a doer - he'll look at a wall, a room or even a piece of land and imagine how it can be improved and then he'll make it happen. I guess I inherited that trait. If I'd been better at maths I might have considered architecture as a career - if I'd been better at art I would have gone into design. I'm just an enthusiastic amateur, living vicariously.

What advice would you give to people who want to buy and fix up something about how to get the know-how and the follow-through? What pitfalls should they try to avoid? What kind of person do you think would be best for this?

There are some great resources now that weren't available even five years ago. Youtube is full of how-to videos, the Handguys have great step by step instructional podcasts and of course there's HGTV and DIY network for inspiration. I look at home renovation sites like houseblogs to see if anyone has had a similar problem. 

Here's some advice I wish I'd heed every time I move house or take on another project: Run the real numbers and add on at least 20%. Things are always more expensive and take twice as long as I imagine. Patience is a great quality and handiness makes projects easier but I think the most important thing is to have a sense of humor - especially if it's a long-term remodel.

What are some of the blogs and sites that inspire you?

There are so many blogs I admire:  Brooklyn Rowhouse, he's a pro at reno; DIY Diva, she does everything from fencing to bricklaying to kitchen installation - it's awe-inspiring, Baltimore Rowhouse, a modern aesthetic in a traditional home; Atomic Indy, mid-century modernism renovated right. Furnitude has put together a pretty comprehensive list of design blogs that's a great resource. I also read Dwell and Elle Decor/Metropolitan Home's online site PointClickHome.com . Other inspiration comes from traveling - the hotels, the museums and art galleries, the architecture and the landscapes.

How has blogging helped (or hindered) you in your own projects? Have you learned things from writing your blog?

Blogging has been a great way to (virtually) meet people who have advice, tips and skills to share or who are just very supportive. I've also discovered other wonderful blogs through comments left on my site and keeping what is really an online diary means I can check what was done when... and what hasn't been accomplished!

Now I'm Going To Try and ACCOMPLISH Something

Here are some posts I'm going to write

1. Just a bunch of my tweets, for posterity and all.

2. Explanation of why the most annoying crazy whiney depressed losers can't help but be that way.

3. A paean to all the people on the internet I love and do not really know. Except their souls, of course.

4. Another list of crazy plans. You know, I still want to move to Canada. BADLY. I know this probably annoys Canadians, the Americans who want to move to Canada. I'm sorry, Canadians. I'm a Canadian trapped in an American's body. That's how it seems to me, anyway.

I supposedly have a secure (and, I am told, extremely good) job for life in the United States. So the last list was a bust, as it was very tied up with moving to Canada. I did nothing on it. Still, I have crazy plans.

(It is very hard for me to give up my plan to apply for permanent residency in Canada, even though I cannot move there.)

5. A bunch of posts with little character vignettes for short stories I will never write. But I won't tell you that's what they are and you'll get all freaked out because most of these character vignettes will be really mean.

You know why I started blogging? Crazy thing! Well, there were two things about blogging that I love.

(1) I used to spend a lot of time alone as a child and sometimes I would get bored.

This sounds a little sad but I should mention one very odd thing about me: I don't like to be around people and I somehow still have (what seems to me) to be a lot of friends. It probably seems like a lot because any friends at all is often a strange burden.

I actually do love some of these people but I bizarrely prefer not to be around them. This was true even as a child. As long as I can remember, I would attempt to avoid being with people, even people that I liked. Somehow, there was usually a forceful person who was interested in me and fairly insistent that I spend time with them. Many of my memories of friendships and socializing involve memories of trying to avoid socializing. I even used to hide from my friends in college. Somehow, I had friends anyway. I can't figure out how. It usually involved making friends with one person who was very social (in college, this was my roommate) and then this very social person making a wide group of friends for me. The social person would advertise to other people that I was a person they should be friends with and for some reason, they would believe her.

I'm even friends with three of these people who still recall hunting me down in the library stacks, where I would go to try to avoid them. 

I was a dedicated letter writer, though. I wrote many letters to my friends. This also makes me sad. Letters have died and there's no way to revive them. Emails are not allowed to be long and crazy, the way letters are. When emailing first started, my emails were like my letters--long and crazy, with limericks or poems to my friends (but no artwork, like my letters). But these long nutty emails slowly became inappropriate, as email proliferated and became a burden to read.

I actually get extremely lonely when I spend too much time alone, even as I put in as much effort as possible to be alone. This is also funny.

It is some kind of lucky miracle I got married. Because this person wanted to marry me, and insistently overcame my extreme ambivalence about marriage, I will not spend as much time alone as I probably would otherwise. So I am not lonely. Instead, I am very happy when I am with my husband and child, whom I love. I am happy while often thinking about how I want to be alone. I want to be alone, where I can be less happy. And yet, that's not feasible so I'm kind of stuck being happy, as I am when I am spending lots of time not alone, with people that I love.

So, blogging: The strange thing is that, when I was alone as a child, avoiding my friends, I used to have this peculiar desire to talk to people. But I wanted to talk to strangers, people I didn't know. I think this might be because I was lonely. I craved human contact, and yet I craved some other, as yet uninvented, kind of human contact. It was much like the kind the internet eventually made possible.

Sometimes when I'd be alone all day as a kid, I would call time and temperature. Also, I would read the phone book and imagine things about the people in the phone book.  I would want to call people in the phone book. I would always imagine that, if you called enough people, eventually one of those people would talk to you. And, since the phone is pretty anonymous (or seemed so to me at the time), you would get to hear people's deep secrets and also their wisdom. Eventually, you would call someone on the phone who knew a great deal more than you about life and they would share this with you. You could ask them almost any question, unrestrained by the social niceties. They would answer honestly, because they had nothing to lose.

This led me to imagine a system where strangers could write letters to each other. I loved the whole idea of pen pals I'd never met. I even had a few pen pals I'd never met, whose address I think I got from some children's magazine at the doctor's office. What was disappointing about the actual pen pals is that they would would write very boring letters. I wanted brilliant pen pals, pen pals who had some dark secrets and would spill them.

When blogging started, this is how it seemed to me--like my anonymous phone conversation/pen pal dream come true.

The internet is a bad thing for me. It may be a terrible thing for me. I do not like the internet. But I clearly get so much out of it. It is something I've always wanted. But it's also probably something I would be better off without.

(2) The reason I started my first blog was that it seemed like an organized place to keep my thoughts. There was also a problem I wanted to solve: My relationship to time. I have all kinds of funny problems with time. For one thing, I waste huge amounts of time. I also get in a mode where it seems like life is so short, I'm going to die anyway and I can't figure out what the point of anything is. I focus on this very distant future and become unable to act in the present. Time doesn't seem quite real to me. I have trouble estimating how much time things will take. I'll have to go somewhere in an hour and I'll start a project that takes longer than an hour and I will get so caught up in it, I forget to go where I am supposed to go. I am late for everything. I take hours to do things that should take minutes. Bad time management doesn't even begin to describe my affliction.

I am now realizing that (1) makes me sound autistic and (2) makes me sound like I have some form of ADD. That could be it. Or maybe they just don't have a word for these afflictions of mine. What I have is not distraction but some kind of overconcentration problem where I forget where I am or what I'm doing I am so overly absorbed in my task.

The cure for both (1) and (2) is probably life in a monastery but that's kind of out at this point.

The thing about blogging is that I started my first blog to deal with this time issue and it is so odd but I made huge amounts of progress on it somehow, just by starting a blog to deal with it. I barely ever wrote about the problem and the blog had this beneficial effect anyway. 

Here, I was going to write about motherhood. But I didn't do that very often. Instead, I wrote a lot about my death wish and other assorted mental sufferings. And I discovered something so strange: When I would write about something that disturbed me, I would often find that thing would transform in some salutary way. I cannot figure this out because it does not seem to work if I simply write it on paper. It only seems to work if I blog about it.

Unfortunately, one person seems to have somehow made the link between my real life and my blog persona and this makes me think that I will have to ditch this blog at some point.  I was careful, but I got lax. This was really my fault. I always think that people won't care about breaking through my anonymity but surprisingly, they do. (This even happened on my last blog, which is why I am kicking myself even harder for not being as careful as I needed to be.)

I am sort of attached to my pen pals though. It is hard not to think I built something but it is the most ephemeral thing. It is vapor, this blog. It was meant to be blowing bubbles and watching them float away, and I do think of it this way. It's just that I am not so keen to pick up and move to another location.

Ding

A lightbulb just popped over my self-improving head.

Have you noticed something, those who have read this blog? When I am not actively full of despair or even when I am, I continue to seek self-improvement. I hypothesize that despair and the search for self-improvement go together like bagels and cream cheese. Do not ask me to explain that now. I probably don't have to: It's a bit obvious.

In any case, I had this phenomenal and impossible idea.

The gratitude project of Schmutzie's (I have to get back to work...can't link now for the two people who will read this, one of whom will be Schmutzie, prob.) has this great thing where you are grateful for this or that.

So what if I tried to be grateful for the whole structure of my life? Just: Nearly every aspect?

As mentioned, this is impossible.

I set aside all the drawbacks. It simply would require a fantastic amount of self-deception or self-transformation or something I am not capable of. But even entertaining this thought shines a bright light of some kind on how I live. And on the fact that my fear, dissatisfaction and sheer inability to appreciate things is totally unjustified. I do forget that sometimes.

Naturally, I can't set aside the drawbacks for more than that paragraph. Among them: What can draw us onward but dissatisfaction? Is there another thing that moves a life in a (totally imaginary) steady progress forward? 

Desire? Oh, desire. That never works.

And anyway, isn't desire the whole problem?

Are there people motivated by the hope of reward rather than the fear of pain? Rly? 

I mean, sure immediate reward. That's motivating. 

For example, I went off my wacky mental health diet and started eating all manner of awful things (right when mental health was going downhill, which is the paradox there--crazier you get, harder to take steps to prevent craziness). And I told myself: I'll just do this work for an hour then I will eat this unhealthy thing. Actually, it wasn't that unhealthy. It was an oat bran muffin with a side dish of candy.

I ate it right then. Right as I was forming the thought that I shall delay eating this thing as a motivation to do something I am supposed to do. I never tried this reward thing with food before. I tried it with massages. It works because it is hard not to delay a massage. Although I have discovered a way, at certain points. 

But for reals, no one is motivated by eventual pleasure, the glow of a job well done, entirely? 

My point here is that the drawback of being satisfied with my life would be that I would have nothing to pull me onward. Only terror and disgruntlement has ever done that.

Still, I can imagine being satisfied with absolutely every aspect of my life and, for a millisecond, see no reason not to be.

Another little imaginary thing that I did not read in a self help book but which clearly belongs in one is: To be entirely content with oneself. To wholly accept oneself for whom one is. 

Once after doing yoga, I lay down like they tell you to. Sometimes I go into this hypnotic state and hear voices, a little bit like the state immediately prior to sleep. I often hear voices when I'm falling asleep. (I've been hypnotized. That is pretty much what it is like: the state before sleep). I heard a voice. It said: There is nothing wrong with you. 

Naturally, there is much to rebut that claim. But it was an interesting idea to entertain. For me, of course, I would have to pretend there is nothing wrong with me.

The thing is that this inability to delay gratification, which was discussed in some New Yorker article and I'm sure is the new thing for overzealous future-projected parents (parents like me, in other words) to get all freaked out about, is not at all an artifact of my childhood. As a child, I was unfuckingbelievable. I used to wake up at dawn (I SWEAR ON A STACK OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE). I used to start my homework the minute I got home. And get this! I loved doing my homework! 

I was once driven forward by the desire to do a job well, a genuine zeal. Things didn't really start to fall apart until my freshman year of college. I shocked myself then. After that, I would go through little waves of inner conflict. Most of the time, though, I was driven forward by an inner desire to achieve excellence, the hope (almost a certainty) of something fabulous at the end of my labors.

 What drove me forward? Perhaps I thought I could be great. More on that later.

What wrecked things?  I am not sure. It was the way achievement was structured. The structure of education with its punishment/reward system, criticism that was either mean or that I could not handle, indifference from people I looked up to, trauma of various kinds...I was very much like a shiny ship slowly becoming more and more laden with barnacles. Now I heave and wheeze and can only be driven forward with beatings. 

OK, I was a ship that was a horse. A sentient horse-ship. It's too late and I'm too behind in my work to fix that metaphor.

I think what did me in, in the end, was the idea that other people were making me do the things I loved. This muddied my love. Then, I began to focus on the imaginary people administering the invisible beatings. They never thought what I did was any good. 

Now I'm sort of a sad, dried up little self-gratifying husk. But anyway: gratitude! Yeah! 

It's all good. Please imagine me smiling right now, full of vigor and satisfaction.

On Wasting A Life

I'm all about the mommyblogging lately. But y'all without kids, we are talking serious life issues here. Two words for those who think that talk about parenting involves a parochial set of concerns: KING LEAR. 

Or maybe Romeo and Juliet. OMG all of Shakespeare is about parenting. HAMLET? Parenting! 

Even Henry IV is about parenting. Henry V, not so much.

God, there's this conventional opening in mommyblogging that I cannot bring myself to repeat here where you start with the quote from your child. "Mommy, why did Grandpa die?"

OK, if I don't do that how do I start this post? 

Well, we've been having issues, my daughter and I. Last week we were best friends and this week, I had to neglect her, as I often do. Neglect=not pay attention to her every second. This is what children require and I'm not fucking kidding here.

We were with relatives and she was being spoiled rotten. But that is not the main issue, I think. The main thing was that I was stressed out and cranky and she is a responsive little sea anemone when it comes to every single emotion I have. And, you know me, most of my emotions are negative.

Also, I am screwing her up. More on that later perhaps. OK, I'll tell you: I crazily said I wanted to move away and get my own apartment. No, my own cave. To both her and my husband. Shit, I suck. Of course, I immediately reassured her that this was just mommy's craziness, with which she is well-acquainted. But why put that idea in her head?

So, riddled with guilt I asked her if there is anything in her life she wants changed. She says "No." Then she says: "Back up. What was that question again?" 

In short, the thing she wants changed is me. I worry too much. What do I worry about? "Money," she says. Then she says "You just waste your life with worrying. Worrying wastes your life." 

This is what I repeat to her when she worries. This is what I know, from experience, since I wasted some of my life worrying and apparently, I can't seem to stop. 

It is not realistic right now for me to not worry about money. But the primary thing I worry about, now that my ridiculous job situation is more secure, is her. 

Every single thing she does seems to worry me. If she is too aggressive with other children, that worries me. She seems insecure and can't handle it if people don't pay attention to her so she aggressively tries to get their attention. People love her friendliness, but that worries me. Will she get nabbed. She is abnormally trusting and friendly. (See? I can't stop.) Get this: She is five and I worry she is undisciplined. She hates to help around the house. She is resistant to any rules or structure. 

What the fuck? I can't even articulate it. 

This is profoundly pathological, in my view. It sounds like I am deeply dissatisfied with my own child but it is not that at all. I adore my child. I absolutely adore her. I worship her. She seems glorious, all too glorious. How could such an exceptional child be saddled with me as a mother?

I try not to actively criticize her, ever. At the same time, there is no way that any kid, particularly a kid as freakishly perceptive as mine, is not going to pick up on this general trend. 

In other words, it is my own parenting that is the issue. I think I am too permissive: I give her candy (obviously, only sometimes). I let her watch violent superhero cartoons (obviously, only occasionally), I put her to bed too late. I don't make her do chores. Am I helping her enough to learn things in school? Did I forget her homework? I already let her music lessons lapse. We are late for soccer sometimes! 

Her diet is not varied enough. She is not getting enough time outdoors because I am sometimes too busy/tired to take her to the park. 

The world is a terrifying, frightening place. We are all doomed. 

Every single thing is my fault. Global warming! What the hell am I doing about that?

Of course, I still worry constantly about my work. 

Money. It's so huge. Our money situation is so disastrous that I almost can't bring myself to worry about it. Thinking about that would be like opening a closet that one's been stuffing dirty laundry in for 20 years. But of course, it is always in the background of our lives. I try not to buy a bottle of water and then I do buy a bottle of water. And I say something under my breath. She hears it. We can't afford this or that but I'm such a hopelessly disorganized person that I can't get a handle on every little thing. 

And yet. 

And yet.

There's no fucking point to any of it. Worry is a waste, an utter waste. The only thing worth fearing is nearly impossible to prevent. 

What a thing worry is. What a metastasizing blob that destroys the only thing we have--this hour, this minute. 

It's all going away. But shit. Nothing can be done about that.

It probably doesn't help that I read the Alice Munro story, "Silence" about a mother whose daughter leaves her forever for the twentieth time last week.

I hate profound endings to blog posts or anything else. Neat little platitudes. I'm going for the zero ending but I can't help but say:

Jesus had it going on, always. But especially in Luke: "do not worry about your life, what you will eat; or about your body, what you will wear. Life is more than food, and the body more than clothes. Consider the ravens: They do not sow or reap, they have no storeroom or barn; yet God feeds them. And how much more valuable you are than birds! Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life? Since you cannot do this very little thing, why do you worry about the rest?"

Wow, ravens. I thought it was some other bird but I like it being ravens. Seems more bizarre and scary that way. The freaky ravens make it. Why can't you?

Worrying doesn't do shit, in other words.  I've got to fucking cut it out. 

But how?

Shoes On

I've been thinking about how much I hate shoes. My daughter hates shoes. Is this true for all kids?

I had a very difficult time keeping my shoes on when I had an office job.

In college, I used to go barefoot to class all the time. For one thing, this solved the problem of finding matching shoes. (Obviously, I went to college in California.)

In high school, every day I would walk home without my shoes. I carried my shoes in my hand. I went to Catholic school. Later, I found out that one of the nuns tried to keep me (unsuccessfully, because of the intervention of another nun) out of the school honor society. She had seen me walking without my shoes. I was not honor society material in her eyes, with my urchin feet and untucked shirttails.

The soles of my feet used to be black every night. I would rinse them in the bathtub before going to bed.

I once had an argument with some bourgeois on a mommy chat site. It was about one bourgeois mom's observation of a little child who was walking around barefoot and the parents' obvious neglectfulness. (In my mind, the subtext was that this child was not white. But I could have been imagining this.) I was like "I went barefoot everywhere as a child."  The person came in and asserted she saw the child cut its foot. Yes, sometimes I actually did cut my feet. My attitude about this was: Whatever. I was tough, at least about that.

Of course, in some ways I was a neglected child. Very  independent. I think that was the norm for the time and also maybe for the particular social strata I found myself in. And I have almost no life skills. So I tell myself that it is OK if I helicopter the hell out of my kid. I have taught the helicoptered children and they do rather well. They will go for a fancy ass internship like they'd been taught to bargain in the markets of Kandahar.

So much shit is happening right now. All these sick people, some really truly sick. We're losing people we love and pieces of our lives.  Chunks of what we love drifts away and we are powerless to stop it.

Is it like this here on out? Constant struggle?  The good times really are over? There isn't so much and many that we love and yet I anticipate that, if we are lucky, we will lose most of this until we go ourselves. What the fuck man?

Yet, I have it so easy in comparison to most. So very very very easy.  My feet are still tough but I'm a bit soft anyway. Is there some other way to be? Tough? Accepting? Wise? So should steel myself, man up or meditate and open my heart to the universe? What would Oprah do?

Instructions for Responding to Mommyblogpost

See mommyblogpost, below.

OK, hoards of people are supposed to say: Oh my God, they are bad. YOU ARE GOOD.

Then a few people are supposed to say: I'm sorry, you don't want to hear this but...and then snidely explain why I suck and am deluded and so forth.

Then other people are supposed to link to my blog and say what a bad, bad person I am.

Except that will not work here because 90% of the 2 people who read this blog are not parents.

Also, I want to know the real truth. Sweartagod, I actually like people to critique me. It's an academic thing. You wouldn't understand. (Also, I'm lying. Academics can never handle person criticism.)*

But how will I learn if no one tells me when I'm full of shit?  The problem is that the people who give you advice and critique you have to be wise and so forth. That's hard to come by. But here's the thing: Only WISE PEOPLE READ MY BLOG. Strange but true!

So: AM I WEIRD? Am I actually, truly a bad mother? Am I being paranoid? Are they going to take my kid away for putting candy in her underwear?

Also: How bad is it to co-sleep with a five year old?

Internet answer: Totally fine. Indians (from India) co-sleep with their kids until college.

But who knows, maybe crazy hippies wrote that.

Also, how do I get my kid to sleep on her own?

My kid is not secure, in a sense because she is intensely bonded with her parents and wants to be around us all the time. She kind of desperately needs constant interaction with us. But she is secure in a sense that adapts well to new situations. Like, she's usually fine with school and leaving us and stuff. It's just she clings to us like a little monkey when she sees us at the end of the day. Not all five year olds do that. It might not be insecurity. She's not upset. She's just like mommymommymommymommy. That's what I'm saying...It's how you read certain situations.

OK, I guess this is bad: She doesn't want to grow up. And she sometimes talks baby talk. Saying: "Hey, you are a big kid..." carries no water for her. It might be her fear of death though.

Oh God, she's weird. Shit. And I'm a horrible parent, right?

*Please don't get mad at me for writing this, mommybloggers. I swear I am just kidding.

Mommyblogging! Mommyblogging! Mao-myblogging!

I'm going to do some MOMMYBLOGGING.

I was going to all this time. I started this particular blog in 2005 after another blog from 2001-2004 (RIP).

I wanted to mommyblog but I failed miserably at that. The reasons are complex and also I cannot explain them.

But today I had a mommy INCIDENT that I must share.

Picture, if you will, a small playground. An afterschool program, the beauty of Fall, the innocence of children.

Young afterschool daycare person: Something happened today with Chiquita.

Me: Oh, what?

YADP: She had a piece of candy in her underpants. She was touching it in there and I asked her where it was. She said that daddy gave it to her last night for being a good girl and she was going to eat it when her mommy and daddy got there.

Me: Uh, well, yeah. Sometimes the things she says...Uh.

YADP: Daddy gave it to her for being a good girl. At night.

Me: Uh, right. Well, her stories usually require some digging around. I'll try to find out what happened.

YADP: I made her throw it away and wash her hands.

Me: What kind of candy was it again.

YADP: A tootsie roll.

Me: Um. We never give her tootsie rolls.

Is this not THE WEIRDEST CONVERSATION. I mean, implicity I felt like she was stating that my husband was some kind of freaky child molester giving his daughter candy and telling her to put it in her underwear.

I was really tired. REALLY, REALLY TIRED. I am not good at assessing complex ways of answering innuendo in conversation. Also, I tend to be intimidated by authority figures, even when they are way younger than me, etc.

Me to my daughter: So what's the deal with this piece of candy. Did daddy give you a piece of candy?

Her: No.

Me: Where did you get the candy?

Her: I found it in a desk drawer.

Me: Why'd you put it in your underwear?

Her: I didn't put it in my underwear. I put it in my tights. (Smiling to herself): I nibbled a bit of it before I threw it away.

I realized afterward I was very, very nervous. Partly my extreme fatigue, partly just the weirdness of the conversation. And my own response, which almost took it on board that my husband could be reasonably under some suspicion. And my fear that my accepting this wench's authority in that way implies something--like she is the right person to discover the awful truth that my husband is some kind of underwear-candy fetishist.

I called my husband:

Me: Honey, Chiquita has a piece of candy in her underwear and she said you gave it to her for being a good girl.

Husband: No. What? What kind of candy?

Me: A tootsie roll.

Husband: But we don't have any tootsie rolls? Where did she get it?

Me: A desk. But now I'm freaking out that the woman at the school thought that you are a horrible child molester who tells our daughter to put tootsie rolls in her underwear.

Husband: (Because I've previously warned him about this and we've laughed about it) Yeah, they'll pick me up and I'll have all these pairs of underwear in my pockets.

He sometimes has her underwear in her pockets. Because she sometimes pees her pants. It's funny, because this is very typical. He anticipates problems like this. I don't. But every once in a while, I'll be like: What if you were searched or something and the police found little girl's underwear in your pocket?

I mean, this sounds so bad, doesn't it: HE CARRIES LITTLE GIRL'S UNDERWEAR IN HIS POCKETS.

There's something so odd about this. I mean, I know kids get molested by parents. But the sort of collective suspicion. You feel it.

I hate this afterschool. It's a prison camp. They are constantly yelling at the kids. The kids will be playing and hot and they make them wear their coats. IT'S A RULE. They are not allowed to touch each other or hug. THERE'S A RULE AGAINST THAT. A kid will pull the crayon bucket toward himself and get yelled at. I've come in and they've had them lined up against the wall for a group lecture because, apparently, they did not do something--come when called.  They get angry at them for leaning across the table to talk to each other. LOCKDOWN.

It's public school as prison. I think this might be a common underlying theme in urban public schools. Of course we could not possibly treat your child as an individual. Or acknowledge that they are five. Because the point is to modify their behavior to sit down and shut up and accept control and boredom. 

I feel afraid, in some odd way. For example, we co-sleep! What might someone make of that?

And So

Darn, darn, darn.

I honestly cannot be funny.

I think that I am being darkly funny at times. On the internet, this doesn't work because there is no intonation on the internet. Also, I'm not that good at it. Also, what I say may be (a) too dark and (b) too true.

I can still laugh.I cannot produce the funny though.

The thing that gets me right now: There is no way in hell that things are as bad as they seem. No way. Also, I'm anticipating other people's deaths and similar tragedies and utterly failing to enjoy life at this moment, when the tragedies are not that bad yet.

I've always hated that. It used to annoy me so much that my life, which could have been reveled in, drunk to the dregs and all that--there were points where everything might have been just wonderful--was absurdly unappreciated. It was as if life was a chef, serving up this amazing delicious food and I was a person with no sense of smell and no tastebuds. I had to eat it. I mean, I could not pass it on to someone else. If I could have passed on my good health, my youth, my relative wealth, my great education, my assorted collection of people who love me (often crazy people) I would have. Not that I got nothing whatsoever from being so lucky. I do think someone else could have made more out of all that.

I even had good hair--thick, long, shiny hair.

Back then, my stomach was flat as a pancake, my boobs perky as hell. I had this period where I heard that bike riding would cure depression and I used to ride my crummy bike for miles and miles. I think my body fat was about 9%.  I remember one day--I'm not a crier, really--crying as I rode the bike. I don't know what it was. Just hopelessness.

The only thing I knew about at the time to help myself was bike riding and medicine. Medicine does not work, it eventually dawned on me. I used to take it because I was desperate and then my hope that it would work was a bit of a balm. It would slightly change my internal state in some way that gave me hope until the health issues it also causes made me take a step back and think about how little I'd gained, besides 50 pounds in 8 weeks. So that left exercise. Exercise also did not work that well. 

The thing that scares me: Now yoga isn't working. After the attempts at using aerobic exercise to manage my existence, I discovered yoga. Sometimes, yoga did do amazing things. I comforted myself thinking yoga was going to be IT. My cure.

I'm trying not to panic since I did fall off the yoga wagon for a bit. It might work later, when I get more consistent. But what else is there?  I tried vitamins, eating lots of spinach, an almost all fruit and vegetable diet. During normal seasons, when the sun shines and I can sometimes sleep 8 hours, the yoga and the all-vegetable diet is amazing. Now, it is not doing so much, and it is harder to 

I know that things are not as terrible as I think--as I am constantly ruminating and obsessing, that is.  How does one get that to sink into the brain? Isn't there some way to make the reality of what is really pretty phenomenal luck sink in?

So here is my question: What are the rest of you people doing that I'm not doing? It is quite amazing to look into other people's lives. I admit: I am drawn to the more melancholic sorts of people. There are these people who buy shiny things and make peach cobbler and I don't get it. What is it I do not know?