I've Got A Crush On: Diane Keaton

Seeing Diane Keaton in a T.V. ad, Lola said I love her! She's one of my favorite actresses. I love her joyfulness. She's quirky and smart and funny and sweet. She's so awesome!

{ Maybe I need to do a Crush On: Lola Moon }

Mrs. Keaton will always be Annie Hall from movies in parenthesis to many of us, but she is such a force of personality and character that nothing overshadows her. I love her with Woody, Steve Martin and Jack Nicholson, but by herself or with a cast of women she is no less charming, interesting and wonderful to observe.  I'd like to read her memoir to learn more about this marvelous creature.

The Gods Of Blogging Are Very Dissapointed With You

 

It has been brought to my attention

(which is extremely limited, like a small, harried housemouse)

that many of you are unable to, after many attempts of strange

word combinations that you fear ( OK, I fear ) might actually

be code for some government conspiracy to control our minds

like abbaisgoodmusic or eatnabiscoproducts

have still been completely and absolutely and abject failure

at commenting on Flux Capacitor.

So sorry for your bad fortune.

It is my delight and your great good fortune

that I can tell you

when FC gets a remodel in February

the Gods Of Blogging will be ensuring

that you are no longer a total failure at commenting!!

With this reassuring pat on your kind but inefficent shoulders,

you can now breathe a great sigh of relief,

in addition to telling your Mother you have finally

done something right.

Or almost. In February, you will.

One Night In November

Scenes From A Marriage: January Kill

All day is rains. The light on our town is blue and as limpid and secret filled as the down bed of a teenage girl. I remember twenty four. I remember young. I feel Mr. Curry's mouth over mine, the kissing penetrating the light, the day, the night, the lonely solonely childhood left hanging on our fingers and heads like cobwebs we walked through to find one another. I remember hours of alone together inside this light and this rain and the entire world shuddered on the top of choppy water and wewerenotalone and we were drunk and slow and in love.  These are our roots. The hours, days, months, even years before we had to pay dues, when we were still inside the rain. 

Lately I have moments where I miss that thing we were so impotently, so swiftly and so painfully that it arrives in a physical, chemical blow: in the second brain, they call it, in our guts, where our immune system and our hormones churn. Complications, the doctors say with their mouth so very still despite the words, we were almost there but there were complications. Baby complications. Hospitalization. Money. Moving. Teenagers. And now; January complications.

I want the bedroom to still. I want my sons to move quietly and my daughter to stop talking and asking and claiming and my baby to stop begging for breast every half hour and I want to lay on the mattress and feel adored and adoring.  I want the mean slow freeze of January to release my husband. January is hard for him. Which makes it hard for me. I watch his angry, frustrated face, tired of being exhausted and struggling against himself. Sometimes I want to throw something at him, at his arm, where it would hurt but not kill, hard enough to make him furious, to break the ice and bring the entire river to a boil and release us from winter.  During a quietly furious ten minute argument I am horrified to find myself thinking I hate you I hate you I hate you.   I want to run away. I want to say something so final and so hurtful we could never recover from it. I want to so badly my arms are trembling. I am resentful and furious and cannot stop the potent adjectives hammering my brain: stupid miserable fucked up   I think of how happy I have been alone, before. How easy it is to make your own happiness alone. It all feels so forever.

I trace my finger over our baby's face. It's been one month, I say in a whisper to myself. One month. I am confused. Why does one hard month feel completely unacceptable and undoable?  Then I am ashamed. Why can't I wait just a fucking MINUTE? Why do I have to be so demanding, so greedy with happiness? But pain and struggle and distance makes me feel like a failure.  Like our marriage is a failure.  If this is all true, then what about the other 11 months, before this one? What were they? Just pretend, just play acting, just rehearsing before the big reveal, the truth?

No. I think about the famous divorces now, crawling over the computer screen like a virus. The Katy Perry, Russel Brandt. Heidi Klum and Seal and their four children, like our four children. From celebrating their anniversary every year with a spectacular, blowout celebration of passionate love, to divorce. In between, four children, years of a life. I watch them implode on msn.com one by one and drink my coffee with a stern face. What do we expect when we get married?  I ask myself. That it fails us so soon. That we let go so quickly. When there is not abuse or chronic abject neglect, when the problems are so human, so late night dishes and dirty floors and crying babies and insecurities and relinquished dreams and mental illness and the messes and faults we collect along the way as we try to raise families: addictions, secrets, desires, impulses both repressed and explored. 

My husband sweeps the kitchen floor with a face so exhausted and shoulders so bent he could be Robert Parker's protagonist: world weary and eagle eyed and fighting demons inside. He reaches out and touches our daughter's head as she toddles by and I suddenly see him as he is so often: lit from within with his quiet way of loving, eyes connecting, shoulders straight and strong from manual labor, and I am suddenly gripped with a ferocious loyalty and panic that I could ever, even in my unasked for thoughts, consider hating or leaving this man who is only fighting his own demons along side me, a thing I agreed to do when we took hands on the beach in La Jolla nine years ago.  Without seeing I feel a collection of our years together take its place where my anger and frustration at his disease was just a moment ago and again I am simply a wife longing for her husband, instead of one bent on destruction.  It's just so hard sometimes. It's just so hard sometimes. Because it's not just about him and his demons- of course not. It's me. It's my own. And when he is struggling like this, I have to struggle too, because it is the nature of my faults and anxiety that I react to this with chronic anxiety, with a knotted stomach, with loss of appetite, with almost zero patience for how he is like this; he doesn't think the same. I want to talk to him, not this stupid disease. Can I have my husband back now?- a thought, a million times a day.

I have no illusions of perfection or forever. I know we could lose our marriage. In our best moments I am most afraid of the specter of divorce: when I am so in love and so enthralled that I cannot imagine life on this planet without him.  In our worst moments, like now, something wounded, angry and afraid inside of me wants to label us with every rotten branch down the tree. I want our marriage to be wonderful, and when it's not, I want our problems to be acceptable, things you can joke about over lunch at work Haha he's such an ass, he wouldn't watch the baby while I worked out, not Sometimes we get mentally fucked up and one of us can barely do family life and goes through the motions while the other one tries to wait it out. 

Patrick Swayze's wife just wrote a memoir of her marriage; she says they separated once, and had hard, rough patches in their long marriage. But he's still my fairy tale, she says.

I lean forward into silence. I lean into patience, humility, forgiveness, a life outside my marriage, my parenting, my writing. I wait quietly for him to come back to me. I work my resentments like tight muscles. I try to be better.

Downsized: A Photo-Memory of the First Week Move-In

Ever played with Lola and the new friends outside. She's yelling at the dogs here. Maybe she's yelling " Hey, don't poop there, we have a Homeowner's Association that will, within one week of us moving in, call and 'report' that we did not clean up our dog poop, even though we TOTALLY DID EVERY TIME, and Mom can prove it if you want to see the bags of crap!!! "

My baby.

What is cuter than a squatting one year old?

Lola is nine and more radiant every day. Also VERY SASSY. And talkative.

"What? I just learned how to walk."

Moving in a new, smaller place is really, really, really busy. Doing it with a sick baby is... laundry that desperately needs to be done but doesn't get done.

The dogs were surprisingly cool with it all. I read up on how to handle it with them and followed instructions and they've done really well.

Stuff. Everywhere.

More everywhere. More stuff.

Smile, Ever!

Ever ate it at my work. Her poor noggin.

Skinny jeaned baby bossing two oversized mutts.

People In Your Neighborhood: Sassafrass & PunditMom

take a seat and read!

Sassafrass- besides having an awesome name!- is run by Jessica, and it's full of shoe obsession, funny stories, and some touching revelations, like this post about her Grandmother's gifts left behind after her death.

PunditMom is a political site for women with easy to read political gab, opinion and facts. Pundit also has a book out called Mothers Of Intention , and is gathering a ' Mom Vote ' tutorial with all the information you need to know for the vote.

For Everything, A Place & Everything In Its Place: Downsized and Organized

Since we've moved, I'm happily obsessed with re-decorating our home into a beautiful machine of organizational aesthetic.  The kitchen wall shelving above is exactly what I hope to duplicate in my own ( all white! ) new kitchen.

We don't own this many cups or bowls!

Adding plants and photos all over

I"m using a lot of gold frames, stacks of books and magazines, and careful tabletop arranging

Ever Everything

Time is that it was not long ago I held you as an infant, but it feels so long ago to think of you without teeth, without words, without your strut. I am incoherently, passionately and devotedly yours, in love with you from the smallest particle of your body to the intangible of your soul. I sleep with your body next to mine, often pressed between my breasts, feet tucked in the hollow of my thighs. You breath quick little breaths randomly, in some dream. You nurse possessively, one hand milking the cow, the other across the unused breast. My chest is riddled with the chicken scratches of your pinching. You are at work with me, in the car with me, in bed with me, in the bath. You and I are still coming apart, a process began at your birth. I would chop off my arms and legs to save your life. I would clean the bathroom every weekend and fold laundry every day to make your home. I do my best and when it does not feel good enough, I fumble and cry and fight until I find a way to do better. I think you are the smartest, funniest, cutest, most interesting, sweetest and best baby there ever was. These are the things about you in  your 13th month of life:

You walk like George Jefferson, with your arms at your side, hands cocked backward, fingers curled up, and a strut in your legs. I often hum the Jefferson's theme song when you are toddling around. Sometimes we say Oh here comes Mr. Jefferson! when you peacock in a room. Man, you've got swagger.

You sign for 'more', for 'all done' and for tootsies (nursing). Your sign for tootsies is THE CUTEST THING EVER. You pat your little chest with both of your hands. That's it. But it breaks my heart in the best way.

You say these words: Momma, Dadda, Lola, Dakota, Ian (you try!),Ever, woof woof, tootsies (nursing), all done, and good girl.

You began saying 'good girl' every time we buckled you in your carseat, and I realized it was because you always hold up the buckle for us to pop the clasp into, and we always say 'good girl!' in a certain intonation, so you began telling yourself so. Now you say 'good girl' in that same intonation whenever you are doing something you think is good, or when you are doing something you know is bad. It cracks me up.

You eat avocado, tomato, veggie sticks, chicken, fish, soft carrots, yogurt and bananas. You prefer boobs.

You adore your sister like no other at the moment. You scored the big sister lottery with Lola. She is only a small notch below my devotion to you.  When we pick you up from school every day, you yell 'Looooola' the whole way there, and when you see her running down the hill, you laugh out loud in delight. You hug her with both arms around her neck and your face pressed into hers. You follow her everywhere, and she looks for  you to be following. She carries you and sits you on her lap. She shares everything with you, even things she swore she wasn't going to. She lets you drag her American Girl dolls by their hair out of there carefully made beds on the floor, and poke at their fake eyelashes. She calls you 'Kinny'. She is the one, the only one, who could get you over your fear of our new bathtub in the new condo. Finally one night you sat on her lap in the tub and laughed and let me wash you without crying. She now asks to bathe you every night. She asks to sleep next to you, and when a friend sat next to you in the car over the weekend, she almost had a little fit- VERY unlike Lola. She sings to you, she dresses you, she makes you laugh when you are crying, sometimes she makes you cry because you are happy playing and she picks you up. She feeds you, she shares every treat with you, she spends more time playing with you than her toys or her friends. 

You DO have two different color eyes, to answer the question we get everywhere we go, after they exclaim ' Oh what beautiful eyes! ' One eye is blue, like Momma, and one eye is hazel, like Daddy.

Lola and I have two songs we sing to you all the time. One is the song Oh Christmas Tree, but with the words Oh Everkins. We even do the high voice part. Every time. The other is the classic Asian tune that we sing ' kinny kin kin kin kin kin ' We also sing ' My kinny went over the ocean / my kinny went over the sea / my kinny went over the ocean / oh bring back my kinny to me ' ... you get the idea. We sing all of these daily. Very daily.

You just found your vagina today. Congratulations! As Sarah Silverman would say, ' your pussy is magic. ' And now you know your mother has a sailor mouth and a dirty sense of humor. 

Lola decided at age 3 that our vaginas are called 'niney' and our butts are called 'buttina' and a gross smelling fart is a 'sewer smoothie'. So yeah. 

Your ears smell DELICIOUS. Lola calls earwax ' wax sacks '.  You can see what you are up against in this family.

Your dirty feet smell DELICIOUS. You think it's hilarious when I sniff them and shriek 'ewwwww'

You boss our gigantic dogs around.  You aren't as tall as them, but you push them out of the way, or pet them, depending. It's really cute. They lick your face and sometimes accidentally knock you over with their big fat butts.

You just cried a little sobby cry in your sleep right now. Sniff.

In case you missed it, Momma loves you. Momma loves you. Momma loves you.

People In Your Neighborhood: The Happiest Mom & Mamapundit

pull up a chair and read

The Happiest Mom reads more like a magazine than a blog to me- I love the organization and options! This post on cleaning actually did motivate me to clean, which is a rare and fantastical quality, like unicorn bunions- AND it gave me a mundane but helpful tip from the comments: if you have a pan that is horribly hard to clean, fill it with water and bring to a boil. Whala!

Mamapundit is brimming with the hilarious exploits of Danger Baby as well as socially and politically charged essays from Kate Granju, the Babble blogger, mother and activist for drug addicted teens.