More to the point, in my thirty-sixth year, tormented by my hound-dog eye bags, one day I just…whipped out that VISA and lazed them home. It was so guiltless, drive-thru quick, and (what with the Valium) enjoyable. Good Lord—why had I even waited? All those wasted years, why had I creamed, and lotioned, and—and angsted…? Indeed, when the haze wore off, I stood right here before this bathroom counter…That busy, self-important cityscape of Clinique and Lancôme and Nivea, all those moisturizers, revitalizers, exfoliators, scrubs, washes, serums…And I suddenly saw it for what it was—an utter sham! With one sweep of my arm, I razed that drab, dusty shantytown down—I threw those jars and bottles and tubes into the trash, every single one!
Further, how good am I supposed to look at forty-two, anyway? Yes, I may look a bit wilted for the inner twenty-eight-year-old I always magically envision myself to be. Then again, do the math, you think: For almost fifty, hey, I look pretty good!
And anyway, who knows what sort of fantastical procedure the boomers will have pushed surgeons to invent by the year 2025? (Meg Ryan alone! She won’t go so quietly!) Maybe I’ll just sit this self-creaming rat race out for twenty years, take a “moisturizer and toner” sabbatical. Pick the baton up again when I’m sixty-five, when modern science will have invented some kind of zapper or peeler or stunner that can spray on an entirely new face, perhaps that of the young Cher! Or even Sonny! I got YOU, babe!
And the madness of owning a bathroom scale…Heavens to Pete, what was that all about? I can’t believe it took me thirty years of stepping on scales before it dawned on me that even if I tried stepping on them for another thirty years, I was never going to get a good number. No matter how gingerly I approach scales—how gently I try to waft over them, like a hummingbird, how much I, essentially, try not to wake these irritable digital beasts from their troubled slumbers—they always wake up and scream, “OW!”
And then at age thirty-seven, after a life of gingerly balancing, I became pregnant. I started gobbling Carl’s Jr. burgers and orange-glazed pound cake. In my second trimester, intriguingly enough, I began channeling a squat Bavarian person (while I’m Chinese on my father’s side, I’m German on my mother’s) and hence was forced to consume ropes of knackwursts washed down by oom-pah-pah foods like Havarti and liverwurst on pumpernickel with cornichon pickles. You’d think I might try to start AVOIDING the scale, shielding the eyes, but no, a slave of habit, I kept mounting the scale like a breathless sailor ever higher atop a crow’s nest, and thus began glimpsing exotic, never-before-seen lands in the already sensational world of Sandra Poundage, with amazing, surreal new numbers like 174, 186, 191! What was I doing? Where was this all heading? I would literally start JUMPING on the scale, like the fat lady in a sideshow, sort of CANNONBALLING onto it!
And people would STILL say, “Wow! You look great! So radiant!”
And the fact is, what with the forty-watt dimmers, the lazed-out eye bags, and the sensational poundage…and then a HoneyBaked Ham’s worth of weight dropping off with the placenta (I ask you, in passing, what was THAT?)—
Well, I realize I have no idea what I look like anymore. And what does it matter? I’m no longer a nervous Young Ingenue in my twenties, or thirties (or even forties—we have forty-something ingenues nowadays, we do). No, I’m a Mother of Small Children, which is a great thing to be in this day and age. We M.O.S.C.’s are waved to the front of airport lines; we’re pardoned from jury duty; we will boldly wear anything while we muscularly gas up our minivans at Shell. Wrinkled old T-shirts, our husband’s sweatpants, flip-flops, scrunchies, a yellow Dora Band-Aid across our nose…sometimes all at the same time.
And society…condones this. It basically does. Look at this pair of black drawstring pants I’m wearing. Ten dollars. Target. These are ten-dollar black Target pants that balance perilously on culture’s very mother-who-works-from-home fulcrum. Are they running pants? Exercise pants? Pajama pants? How could they be when, look, what is this here up the side? It’s a racing stripe. A stripe that suggests at any moment I might burst into a jog! I haven’t in years, but who knows?
And who is to blame for these ten-dollar Target drawstring pants? I believe that it is no less than Isaac Mizrahi. Yea, I’ll have you know I yanked these ten-dollar black drawstring pants off a shiny red-and-silver Target rack underneath a giant poster of Isaac Mizrahi throwing back his head in a literal SHOUT of laughter. Isaac Mizrahi seemed tickled that some of us are chubby within, some of us are chubby without, and some of us mix and match our inner and outer chubbiness in cheery, colorful stripe-and-polka-dot combinations! I love Target!
Anyway! Thoroughly refreshed now, I’m ready to lie back in bed on TOP of the comforter (because even though the AC is cranked down to seventy-two, I’m schvitzing)…
And now that it is 2:42 A.M.—
I am now ready to do my relaxing, lull-myself-back-to-sleep visualization. Not the one my therapist, Ruth, always suggests, making slow circles with her large, turquoise-beringed hands, where you picture an orb with gentle waves of light pulsing off it—red, orange, yellow, gold, white—then the white deepens into sapphire and emerald and periwinkle, and just thinking about it, I get a throbbing headache. Or the one of sheep jumping over the fence Mike favors. No, the thing that has helped most was when Mike used to pat my hand and say, “Relax—you don’t control the universe”—and I found that notion so UN-relaxing…I reversed it! Far easier to imagine I do control the universe, to imagine every night it is I and I alone who’s responsible for tucking the world in. Because if I myself do it, I know the job will get done.
And watch how, using this calming visualization, I easily fall back asleep.
Which is to say, still lying on the comforter, I imagine myself now lifting the TV remote and aiming it not at our dusty television but toward THE CENTER OF THE HOUSE—which by weird feng shui ends up being a cramped little hallway. I squeeze Play, and out of the wooden floor a trapdoor drops open. Shoom! Stairs click, click, click open down to a cool, echoing, underground James Bond–style bunker, where we find…
My War Room.
Picture a vast circular U.N.-style table ringed by twenty leather swivel chairs, squeaking slightly in the breeze of the central air that is constantly humming to keep all the computer banks at their ideal cool temperatures. Each chair faces its own pitcher of water, yellow tablet, and neat row of black Razor Point pens.
Just beyond is the Big Grid, a map of the entire world, topped by clocks showing what time it is in all the different time zones.
And on the one hand, yes, some might feel it IS this utter marvel—madness even—that CONTROL OF THE ENTIRE WORLD has been placed into the hands of me, a forty-two-year-old teacher/mother/midlist book writer/public radio commentator/one-woman show purveyor/essentially literary jill-of-all-trades who can barely lift the two-inch-thick binder that supposedly describes our family’s twelve-part PPO health insurance plan. But the truth is, at forty-two, I am old and clever and crafty. I have delegated quite a bit of this…Running of the World.
That’s my secret: crafty delegation.
You see all those various foreign lands, whose signs on the wall perplexingly read “Kabul,” “Malawi,” “British Guinea”? Or is it “British Ghiana.” “British Ghanea”? Damn. I saw some country with some name like that in the opening ceremony of the Athens Olympics and it has haunted me since. Fudge! It was a tiny land with just three ninety-pound athletes, in gold MC Hammer pants and toreador hats. Leaping over a javelin. Or curling. Closely followed by “Virgin Ghiana.” Or is that an airline? A cocktail? I get so lost in this detail. Some mornings I’m so overwhelmed with detail, I can’t even start the car. “British Guineah.” (I’m still upset over the whole brand-new-pronunciation-of Beijing thing. “Bay jhingg…Bay jhingg…” Why?)
Anyway, regarding that whole sweep of foreign lands, knowing I’m bad with detail and geography, I’ve delegated all the foreign lands to NPR. In particular, to a raft of NPR correspondents who crisscross the globe with
their constant murmurings. Somehow, in their inscrutable NPR way, they are getting the “foreign land” business done, or at least “maintaining” the chaos, because let’s face it, the continent of Africa is never going to BE done.
I call them “my NPR contingent.” I have Sylvia Pojole on it—she runs the meetings of NPR and its subsidiaries, which include the Peace Corps. And also the Gates Foundation. Gates money is involved. And Maria Shriver also has a mysterious hand in it. Via the United Way, Maria Shriver is always flying around the globe, fomenting a web of corporate/community partnership–type…thingies. It’s a very bipartisan…watchamadoodle.
Next we have America, which is clearly chock-full o’ problems, and…
I know it’s an odd choice. But for the moment, I’ve delegated the worrying about America exclusively…to my ex-boyfriend-who-after-seven-years-was-still-not-quite-ready-to-commit-to-a-long-term-relationship, Bruce.
Which is to say Bruce has lots of free time to agonize over the horrible state of America because he’s single. A child of the sixties, Bruce never wanted to encumber himself—to chain himself down to “The Grid”—by committing such conventional acts as actually owning, say, a bed. Of course, then one morning you wake up and realize YOU’RE FIFTY AND YOU DON’T HAVE AN ACTUAL BED. And who wants to sleep with you? No one. Not even crazy, divorced fifty-seven-year-old hippie chicks with four methamphetamine-lab-employee teenaged sons want to sleep with Bruce anymore. There was fish in a barrel, there was the bottom of the barrel, now there is no barrel.
And where does one go when there is no barrel? Where Bruce told me he went last week. To his monthly meeting, in Culver City, of Vegetarian Singles. (I mean, Vegetarian Singles. The whole idea. Where is the romance? “Listen, I hear that you…don’t eat meat. How intriguing. What else don’t you eat?” What kind of pickup lines does this suggest? “Meat has NOT been inside your body since WHO was president?”)
With such exacting standards, Bruce is able to stay the way he says he wants to be: Free, Free, Free!
Well! Bruce may think he’s single, but he does have a tortured, passionate, unrequited, lifelong relationship with…the Republicans. Bruce is obsessed with their evil, tracking it tirelessly, 24/7. Amateurs merely watch Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Keith Olbermann while continually monitoring all the blogs—Arianna Huffington, the Daily Kos, truthdig.com. But Bruce has been at it for decades. Do you know how far back his files stretch? The man has one hundred hours of old Iran Contra hearings…on Beta! That’s how free he is!
Never mind that—like some unnamed prom queen of yore—the Republican Party seems completely unaware of Bruce’s very existence. I don’t believe a day goes by when Dick Cheney thinks about Bruce at all. But the rest of us have Bruce on our minds continually. How could we not, given his relentless Unabomber-like mass e-mails raving about how Bush stole ALL the elections—via the Electoral College…from Nader. (“Have you figured out how to unsubscribe?” “I can’t—I try to hit Unsubscribe and then I get RE-subscribed three more times!”) Still Bruce’s e-mails come, as though it is we who yearn for them, thinking: “What I find frustrating about my quality of life is a worrisome lack of rabid political punditry. Thank heavens I got another five e-mails today from BRUCE!”
Or alternatively, “Never mind all the experts—let’s see what BRUCE has to say! Normally I’m not that interested in gerrymandering—except when my unemployed friend BRUCE, with absolutely no training in the law WHATSOEVER, e-mails me about it!”
GERRYMANDERING!
Oh no!
Now I have a crow.
If my Zen mind is a smooth white bluff, a Worry…a nagging Worry…That is what I think of as a black crow.
It’s 2:59—dammit—and…
Well, I can’t help it. Now I have a crow.
There is nothing for it but to slip the rubber off this particular FOLDER of worry, angst through it, get the worry DONE, slip the rubber band back around the folder…and I can probably still make it back to sleep by 3:30…3:40 at the latest, 3:50—
Which is to say:
I am now flashing back to dinner earlier this evening with my old Caltech dormmate—and current JPL engineer—Jonathan Lindberg. Jonathan and his rarely seen wife, Aimee. Half-Japanese. Pharmaceutical executive. Who is always away at a conference. Or, on the rare occasion that she is actually among you, is always listening to a remote conversation on an earpiece and tapping away on her BlackBerry.
First, let me say that I have long been aware that we appear to be living in a time of a modern epidemic. An epidemic…of frighteningly gifted children.
Everywhere I go, there is always some parent complaining that their four-year-old is gifted. Scary gifted. So gifted that, at his small Montessori preschool, the entire community has built an enormous two-hundred-foot flaming pyre for him, in the belief that his moods determine the weather (as mysteriously related to electrical systems and barometric pressure in the upper thermosphere).
All right. So no surprise that Jonathan and Aimee were confessing to us that while they love parenting, they find it exhausting. The problem is not their long work hours (due to a precisely choreographed fleet of terrific babysitters), but the fact that their two sons, Seth and Ben, are gifted. Highly gifted. Seth and Ben were reading by two, multiplying by four…In regular classrooms, among children of average IQ, there was chafing, twisting—at one point Jonathan feared it might become biting. The third child psychologist Aimee took Seth to tested him in the top .5 percent of the population. Dr. Viswanathan felt Seth’s true score might even be higher (possibly even closer to .1 percent), except that Seth, like many extremely gifted children, is moody, and the test does not account for moodiness. Meanwhile, Ben has such musical talent, the violin practically explodes into flames in his arms. Aimee has to drive the kid practically to Ventura to study with the one teacher who will even dare see him—
(Thank God we were meeting at a restaurant. How much I loathe going to the Lindberg residence, and having to sit frozen for seemingly hours at a time in front of Ben and his Mozart violin scrapings, his ceaseless virtuosic scrapery.)
Look, I’m not saying my own two daughters aren’t gifted. It’s just that many of us do not demonstrate our gifts through manipulation of blocks and cubes, standardized IQ tests, or even knowing remotely what we want to do with our lives come graduation time. I myself didn’t get my big career “break” until the age of thirty-four. (And I had been plotting my fame since the age of eleven.)
And anyway, Jonathan and Aimee have clearly long stoked and fueled their own gifted nightmare. In college, Jonathan and Aimee were endearingly geeky, but since spawning, they have disappeared into this vanilla-hued gated community of the mind, an enigmatic Townsville that houses a whirlwind of food allergies and pediatric orthodontia and much frantic driving. (Most recently, they have discovered that Ben has a talent for fencing. His private fencing coach says that with proper training three days a week, come adolescence Ben will be ready to try out for the Olympics. Anything less than that and Ben will lose that Olympic chance. Still, one wonders, how MANY American children actually fence? Or have that kind of time? Or that level of personal transportation? You just pray Ben doesn’t one day accidentally trip over a luge.)
You know, Jonathan and Aimee are those insane types of parents who played Mozart in the womb, festooned their baby cribs with black and white mobiles, and forced their sons from the age of six months into strange yuppie art forms like Shakespearobics and Kindertanz and—and—and…tumbling jazzerbastics.
I suppose I am grateful that, unlike the Lindbergs, ours is probably not a dangerously gifted family.
And then Jonathan asked us if we had started thinking about schools.
I had not, as…School is Mike’s department. Another linchpin of our Marital New Deal, aside from trying to use the night for actually sleeping, is that of improved…Delegation. Delegation…and Trust.
As we discovered in therapy, during that first parental Year of Hell…My
notes indicate that Sandra often does not Trust Mike, as a Co-Parent, to Successfully Complete Certain Parental Tasks. Whereas in fact, as Mike and his (mysteriously sympathetic/consistently partisan!) witnesses Ruth and Kaitlin would point out, the problem is not that Mike Is Not Completing His Half of the Parenting but that he is Not Doing So in the Exact Same Way That Sandra Herself Would Do It. Okay! While seeing it there on the page, I admit it doesn’t ring a bell for me, but that’s what my notes say.
So far in our great parenting Voyage in Los Angeles, I have located the pediatrician, the day care, and the preschool. Kindergarten, we agreed, would fall to Mike. A project he reports he has been making great strides on. I’m vaguely aware that Mike has a manila folder titled “SCHOOL” on his volcanic computer pile. A folder which, by the terms of our agreement, I would never look into. Because of the Delegation…and the Trust.
So when Jonathan asked us at dinner if we had “started thinking about schools”…
Well, in that first instant, I felt no worry at all. I felt only, if you will, a sudden lift, at the thought of my little Hannah going off to kindergarten.
Not to blow our own horn, but Hannah is clever with a pencil and looks fetching in a jumper. Her favorite game, aside from bathing her stuffed unicorns and “rescuing” wounded insects, IS school, which she actually plays with her little sister, at twin toy desks, in a highly and charmingly theatrical manner.
But what would be the perfect school for Hannah? One that matched her perfect happy heart. I saw, I don’t know…
Green lawns, white picket fence, a clanging old school bell. Beyond, dappled maple trees, Montessori-type…yarn making. I guess I was basically picturing a small village in Vermont where there is much cheese making.
For the chaotic years of middle school—and this goes for both girls—appropriate, I think, would be a literal ivory tower, nuns paddling boats around in a moat, patrolling, with more nuns standing watch up above in gun towers. That’s the ticket—nuns with guns.
Mother on Fire: A True Motherf%#$@ Story About Parenting! Page 2